"Your personal experiences with money make up 0.0000001% of what's happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works." - Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
That quote is painfully true.
I was born in Y2K and grew up middle-class in a suburb of Chicago with an older brother and younger sister. Pretty standard suburban upbringing—good schools, sports, a life that felt pretty structured and predictable. We all went to the same high school, played sports, did the usual honors classes, and I spent an unreasonable amount of time playing golf. So much golf, in fact, that I eventually earned the opportunity to play on the golf team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Golf took me all over the country—Hawaii, Canada, Europe, the Caribbean—competing in tournaments and seeing places most people don't get to see. I also worked as a caddie in the summers, where $300 a day in cash was pretty normal.
But looking back, it wasn't really those things that shaped how I think about money. It was more the timing of everything. Growing up right after 9/11, going through the 2008 financial crisis, and then being in college during COVID, shaped my default view that the world is more fragile and unpredictable than it looks. Same with other smaller stuff-losing money trading options in college (Reed Mallek, if you're reading this, you were right), and hearing my dad talk about buying Apple at $20 and selling it at $30 #FOMO. None of that was "formal education," but it probably shaped my thinking on risk, regret, and behavior more than anything I learned in school. Now I work as a financial advisor, sitting across from people whose net worths are many multiples of my own, helping them think through taxes and wealth preservation, and make better financial decisions.
Now compare that to someone who grew up in Mullen, Nebraska, in 1970- a town of 500 people with more cows than residents. They grew up during the Vietnam War, the inflation and oil shocks of the 1970s, and then the brutal 1980s farm crisis that hit a lot of rural America pretty hard. Eventually, after that, they lived through decades of falling interest rates, rising farmland values, and an overall environment where owning assets and being patient tended to work out pretty well.Their world wasn’t really Wall Street or tech- it was more weather, harvests, input costs, and whether the year would work out or not.
And the difference is important but often overlooked, because it creates totally different instincts around money. One person becomes very sensitive to inflation, the media, and instability. The other becomes more sensitive to cycles, inventory, and physical scarcity. Neither is wrong- they’re just reacting to different environments.
The bigger point is that people tend to mistake those instincts for objective truth. But most financial beliefs aren’t really “thought through” in a vacuum- they’re just reflections of what someone lived through. So when someone is really confident that gold (or anything else) is a good or bad investment, it’s worth asking where that belief actually comes from. Is it based on stories about inflation and distrust in government? Did their family make a fortune off a meme coin? Or just growing up in an era where stocks went up, rates went down, and the financial system mostly worked?
Or maybe it’s something newer- social media feeding you constant world-is-ending narratives, or a world where gambling is more accessible than drinking water might train you to be more pessimistic and seek instant gratification rather than long-term investing.
All of that shapes how you see the world. And over time, it becomes your version of “normal.”
That’s why two smart people can look at the same investment and come to completely different conclusions. Not because one of them is irrational, but because they were trained by different environments to fear different things- and overvalue others.
And realizing that doesn’t just make you a better investor. It makes you a little better at understanding people, too.
Inspired by Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money.