The Nikkei, which is the Japanese stock market equivalent of the Dow Jones industrial average, recently closed at its highest level since 1990. Returns over the last 33 years were terrible. They were 0% over an entire generation. But returns from 1965 to 1990 were extraordinary. The past three decades of misery has just been repaying that excess.
The knee-jerk way to set expectations is to anchor to what everyone else has right now. But imagine the tragedy of there being unbelievable progress throughout your life and you enjoy none of it because you expected all of it.
This episode is all about expectations, and how the key to happiness in so many things in life is to aim low.