There are two types of people

There are two types of people: Those who want to know more and those who want to defend what they already know.

Morgan Housel

The meaning of the quote

Charles Darwin kept an odd habit. The moment he ran into a fact, an observation or a stray thought that worked against his own theory, he stopped and wrote it down immediately, before it had a chance to slip his mind or get quietly waved away. He explained why in his autobiography.

“I had, also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from memory than favorable ones.”

Most people do the opposite. When new information threatens a belief they already hold, they argue with it, forget it or decide the source wasn’t credible in the first place. Psychologists call this pattern confirmation bias, and it explains why two people can read the same news story and each walk away more certain they were right all along.

Housel spends most of his own writing on investors who got this wrong: people who made a public bet, then bent every new headline to fit whatever they’d already said out loud. The market never cared how confident they sounded once they were wrong.

Charlie Munger built an entire discipline out of resisting that pull. For decades, Warren Buffett’s business partner refused to hold an opinion until he could argue the other side of it as well as anyone who actually believed it:

“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.”

If you can’t make the other side’s case as well as they can, you don’t actually understand your own position. You’re just defending a team.

Before your next disagreement gets heated, run Munger’s test on yourself. Ask what would actually change your mind. If you can’t answer that, you already know which type of person you are.

About the author

In 2007, an economics undergraduate named Morgan Housel talked his way into a column at The Motley Fool, a year before he’d even finished his degree at the University of Southern California.

He stayed for close to a decade, working up to senior analyst on the company’s investing team and picking up a stint at The Wall Street Journal along the way. In 2016 he left to become a partner at Collaborative Fund, a venture firm, where he still writes and invests today. Five years later he joined the board of Markel, an insurance and investment company sometimes nicknamed “baby Berkshire” for how closely it studies Warren Buffett’s playbook.

Housel is best known for The Psychology of Money, a 2020 book about how ordinary people actually behave with money rather than how a spreadsheet says they should. It has sold more than 13 million copies in more than 60 languages and turned him from a financial columnist into one of the most read writers in personal finance. He followed it with Same as Ever in 2023 and The Art of Spending Money in 2025.

The line at the top of this piece comes from Some Things I Think, a running post on the Collaborative Fund blog where Housel drops a list of short, unconnected observations instead of building one long argument. This particular version ran in April 2023.

There’s something fitting about a man who preaches patience and slow compounding sitting on the board of an insurance company that runs on exactly that.

Resources

• Some Things I Think (Article)
• The Psychology of Money (Book)
• Same as Ever (Book)
• How to overcome confirmation bias in daily life (Article)
• The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (Book)