Merry Christmas Eve, Eve. Today is December 23rd, the Eve of Christmas Eve.

We are kicking off Greatest Hits Week, a five-day series in which we're sharing five episodes across five days, all of which we produced at the beginning of 2024.

It's our way of looking back over the year and highlighting some of the best episodes that you may have missed.

Today's episode is a conversation with Morgan Housel.

It originally aired on Valentine's Day of this past year.

It's all about making big decisions, trusting your gut instincts, and insulating your portfolio from fads and trends, which is an even more relevant conversation now than it was a short 10 months ago.

So enjoy the first to five days of Greatest Hitsweek.

Have you ever made a flippant, seemingly minor decision that radically changed the course of your life?

Morgan Housel has experienced this.

At age 17, he made a snap judgment that ended up saving his life.

And sadly, two of his friends were less fortunate.

He's going to share that story in today's

episode. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything

but not everything. Every choice carries a trade-off, and that applies not just to your money,

but to any limited resource that you need to manage, like your time, your focus, your energy.

So, what matters

most and how do you make decisions accordingly? Those are the questions that this show is

dedicated to exploring. My name is Paula Pan. I am the host of the podcast. And today's guest,

Morgan Housel, was named by MarketWatch as one of the 50 most influential people in the market, which is

shocking to me that they think that there are 49 other peers within his cohort, because

it is hard to imagine anyone who is consistently as original in his thinking when it comes to

his analysis of investments of the markets of risk as

...