How It All Works (A Few Short Stories)
How It All Works (A Few Short Stories) MH
FEB 22, 2023 by Morgan Housel@morganhousel
Afew short stories whose lessons apply to many things:
Author R.L. Stine is one of the bestselling authors of all time. His Goosebumps series of scary kids books have sold over 400 million copies. But horror wasn’t his first act. Stine spent the first two decades of his career writing kids’ joke books. Scaring people, he discovered, is easier than making them laugh.
“Everyone has a different sense of humor, but we all have the same fears,” he said. “Kids are all afraid of the dark, afraid of being lost, afraid of being in a new place. Those fears never change.”
Everyone has different tastes, but emotions – especially fear and greed – tend to be universal.
Physical attractiveness is something everybody intuitively understands but struggles to put into words. What makes an attractive face? It’s hard to describe. You just know one when you see one.
Several studies have tried to crack the code, the most fascinating of which I think is the idea that average faces tend to be the most appealing.
Take 1,000 people and have a software program generate the average of their faces – an artificial face with the average cheekbone height, average distance between eyes, average lip fullness, etc. That image, across cultures, tends to be the one people are most likely to judge as the most attractive.
One evolutionary explanation is that non-average characteristics have the potential to be above-average risks to reproduction. They may or may not actually impact reproductive fitness, but it’s almost like nature says, “Why take a chance? Go for the average.”
People love familiarity. That’s true not just for faces but products, careers, and styles. It’s almost like nature’s risk-management system.
William Vanderbilt was one the richest heirs to ever live. But hold your envy – his life was hardly a joy.
Just before he died in 1920, Vanderbilt told the New York Times, “My life was never destined to be quite happy. Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”
The interesting thing is that the other end of the spectrum – an overdose of ambition – may be just as miserable.
A half-century before, Mark Twain wrote to William Vanderbilt’s grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt:
How I pity you, and this is honest. You are an old man, and ought to have some rest, and yet you have to struggle, and deny yourself, and rob yourself restful sleep and peace of mind, because you need money so badly. I always feel for a man who is so poverty ridden as you.
Don’t misunderstand me, Vanderbilt, I know you have $70 million. But then you know and I know, that it isn’t what a man has that constitutes wealth. No – it is to be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth.
To continue reading, please go to the original article here: