What Can We Learn From Billionaires (and Trillionaires)?

In Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money, he writes:

“Studying a specific person can be dangerous because we tend to study extreme examples—the billionaires, the CEOs, or the massive failures that dominate the news—and extreme examples are often the least applicable to other situations...The more extreme the outcome, the less likely you can apply its lessons to your own life, because the more likely the outcome was influenced by extreme ends of luck or risk.”

This is a very good point. We tend to hear about the extreme cases—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and so forth—because they’re the most interesting. But it’s of little use to draw conclusions from those outliers. To be sure, it’s far less interesting to study the habits of ‘ordinary’ millionaires, but it may be much more instructive as we look to build wealth.