Concept
Nobody is crazy
Nobody is crazy is Morgan Housel's principle that every person's money decisions make sense given what they have personally seen: someone who lived through high inflation or watched a family business fail holds beliefs that look irrational to others and logical from the inside.
Housel's point is not tolerance for its own sake but self-knowledge. Your relationship with money was formed by a small sample of experiences, mostly before you were twenty, and those experiences installed rules you have never said out loud: that money in a bank disappears, that debt is shameful, that property is the only safe thing, that spending now is the only sure pleasure. Those rules run your account. A budget built on top of them without examining them lasts about as long as a diet, because the plan is fighting a belief that feels like common sense. The practical use of the principle is to write your money story, three sentences about money in the house you grew up in and the rule you took from it, and then decide, for the first time, whether the rule still fits the world you live in.
A real-life example
Deniz, an engineer in Izmir, earns well and has saved nothing in four years. Her father lost a shop in the 2001 crisis and the family lived on her mother's salary for two years. Writing her money story she finds the rule in one line: money in a bank is money waiting to disappear, so spend it on things you can hold. It explains the wardrobe, the two phones and the empty account, and why every budget felt like a threat.
How to use it
- 1Write three sentences about money in the house you grew up in, and the one rule you took from it.
- 2When a money decision feels obvious, ask which experience made it obvious; obvious is often just familiar.
- 3Before making a plan, name the belief that will fight it, so the plan can answer it.