2022 in books: #2, The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
Hello! Feel free to skip this italicised section if you’ve read any of my other 2022 wrap up blogs!
A little bit of background: since the 6th grade (14 years ago!) I have had a personal mission I call “The Million Page Project.” This has taken the shape of paper logs, excel sheets, blogs, websites and most recently — an increasingly active twitter handle that talks sporadically about books and incessantly about all my other random thoughts.
The goal is to read a million pages before I die. Why? Because my 6th grade teacher set a challenge to the school to collectively read a million pages in a year and I — knowing nothing about scale — was like hmm, I could probably do that alone?
The number I’ve gotten to so far is 163,480 pages or 454 books (as of Dec 22) for anyone who’s wondering. But to be honest, it’s not about the number — it’s just a way for me to do something I love and catalogue it. As I read, I try to review the books in my own sprawling way to capture how it made me feel, and that’s what I’ll be sharing here. It’ll have spoilers, no coherent summary of plot and often the character names will be missing. But what it will have is a whole lot of heart!
My second recommendation, in no particular order: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, which I read in May of this year.
The first nonfiction book I read in a long long time, recommended to me by Abhik uncle (Tara’s dad). I absolutely loved it — the tone is super easy, conversational and the philosophy is one I really valued — he comes in with the premise that money matters are often more emotional than logical — and that’s fine? And that managing money is not about one objective best way but rather figuring out your goals — financial and emotional and building an infrastructure that helps you make the best choices to get there!
And that you don’t have to have this crazy dieting type of mindset towards money — that the first thing you do should actually be picking what your “enough” point is. I really enjoyed this and highly recommend — I feel like it’s an essential read. I got Groww and started investing after this! And I feel so much CALMER about money post this read, which I think is honestly priceless. I think unlike other investing advice I’ve seen, it doesn’t over index on optimising for results but rather says optimise for peace of mind — which in my opinion is a much better strategy.
