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- [00:01]
A
This is going to be an extremely busy month. I have to watch 104 soccer games, follow the pre game, the post game, yell useless opinions at the tv.
- [00:09]
B
It's a lot.
- [00:10]
A
So I knew that when it comes to screening for colon cancer, the choice was clear. The Cologuard plus test. It can be used at home and can only take 15 minutes, so I can do it during halftime and not miss any action. If you are 45 or older and at average risk, ask your healthcare provider about screening for colon cancer with the Cologuard test. You can also request a prescription@cologuard.com.
- [00:37]
B
I heard this idea years ago. I don't really know where it came from. I haven't been able to track down the source. But it was this idea that people don't remember books, they remember sentences. And that appealed to me not just as an author, but as a reader of how true that was, that if you loved a book, loved a magazine article, loved a conversation, whatever it might be, there's probably one or two sentences that stuck out that summarized everything and that were memorable that you can actually take with you and contribute to your long term learning. A lot of that is this idea that if an idea is really good and if the author is really good, you should be able to summarize it in a sentence. And that's true. Even if you think of things like the US Constitution, that is, I don't know how many thousands of words long. People remember one or two sentences from it. From movie lines, they remember one or two sentences from it. So I've tried to save as many good sentences as I could over the years. I think the count that I have that I've saved over the years is approaching 20,000 now. And I love going through it. It's David Senra, podcaster, referred to his list of quotes as his smart Twitter feed that he can scroll through. And rather than AI slop and political rage, it's smart quotes that he's discovered over time. And so what I want to do with you now in this first segment, before I get into your questions, I share with you six or seven quotes that I felt like really had a big impact on me. And I've collected these from many, many different sources over the years. Quotes that just kind of stopped me in my tracks and said, yes, that one line summarized a very complicated and important area of my life. I want to share those with you now. All right, this first one comes from Christina Buttons, and she says a lot of depression is just choosing instant gratification to relieve the discomfort of not having chosen delayed gratification and getting stuck in a vicious cycle. That one is heavy. I think about that a lot of how much of modern life is instant gratification, social media, video shorts, that kind of things. And the reason that you are so attracted to it is because you haven't found delayed gratification a deeper purpose to dedicate your life to. One takeaway from that for me, is that you have to be very careful where you get your dopamine from in life. And you have to be very cognizant when you are getting dopamine. And just remember that cheap dopamine from those short term sources can be a big source of frustration over the long term. All right, the second one is from Charles Bukowski, who says, people are strange. They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice. That's one of the things that I think has always been true, and it's probably more true today. And it's related to the first quote about you have so many sources of short term entertainment with our phones and social media that the much bigger issues of your health, your career, your family, your friends can easily take a backseat. All right, next one. This is from Alain Debotton, who says so much misery is just an unfair judging of the statistics. I think what he meant by that is it is so common in your sadness, anger, depression, whatever it might be, anxiety to have a statement along the lines of, I'm the only one miserable in my career. Everyone else is happy, I'm the only one dissatisfied with my life. Everyone else is happy. I'm the only one struggling as a parent. Everyone else is doing a good job. And as he says, that is an unfair judging of the statistics, that if you actually got inside other people's heads, you would realize that the vast majority of people have nearly identical problems to what you do. And maybe that's a soft source of comfort. But the idea that you are not alone in these struggles I think can go pretty far in terms of empathizing with others and for yourself. All right, next one. This one's from Kevin Kelly. He says greatness is overrated. It's a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in. This one's pretty counterintuitive because so much life advice, career advice and money advice is like, swing for the fences, shoot for the stars, be the best that you can be. And that's not bad advice. That can be wonderful. But I think it leaves the idea that a simple life can be a wonderful life. It leaves that out. It excludes that. And I love the line from the Foo Fighter song, there goes my hero. He's ordinary. Not there goes my hero. He's the best in the world. He's the richest in the world. He's the top of what he does. He's ordinary. And so I think the idea of being a simple person with a simple life who enjoys time with their family and doesn't have extreme maximization of certain money goals, health goals, whatever it might be, can actually be a wonderful life. And it's easy to overlook. All right, next one is from Montesquieu. He said if you only wish to be happy, this could be easily accomplished. But we wish to be happier than other people. And this is always difficult for we believe others to be happier than they are. He said that like hundreds of years ago. It's more true today than I think even was back then, that if you live in, like, a humble bubble inside your own head and you're not comparing yourself to other people, most of us could be very happy and content today. Food, shelter, friends, like the. The big boxes to be checked, tend to be checked. And how much of our misery is comparing ourselves to other people and assuming that they are happier than we are, even if they're not? The other point that's important here is the idea that success is always relative. And whatever your goal is today, particularly for, like, a financial goal, if you were to hit it and achieve it, you would probably just move the gaze of your aspirations up a notch and anchor to somebody else who's doing better than you, and then assume that's the level of happiness and success you need to achieve. All right, next one's from Daniel Kahneman. He says nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it. That's a heavy one, too. And maybe in today's social media bubbles that we get into where one topic is just repeated ad nauseam over and over again. And it's done that in social media because the algorithm knows that you like that topic and you're interested in that topic. Things that are issues in the world, they are issues that deserve attention, are magnified in your mind a thousand fold. And I think people realize this when they get stuck on social media, but then they go out into the real world and they're like, man, everyone is so angry online. And in the real world, they are comparatively more empathetic, more caring. More understanding because you're not just focused on these little issues all day long. All right, the next one. I don't know who said this. I don't have the source of it. I tried to look it up. I think many people have said this. No one knows who said it the first time. The best math you can learn is how to calculate the future cost of current decisions. You could apply that to money, careers, relationships, friendship. Go on down the line. The best math you can learn is how to calculate the future cost of current decisions. That's a good one. All right, last one. This is another. I have no idea where I got this from. I should probably do a better job trying to log the sources of when I get these quotes, but it's a great one. And that is the idea that just before you die, you meet all the versions of yourself that you could have been. The definition of a good life is that in that process you are pleased with how you turned out. That's maybe the heaviest of the bunch. That there's a million different directions that my life, your life, could have gone. If we made different decisions in the past, if we had different levels of luck or fate in the past, you could have turned out much better, much worse. Various aspect of your life could have been better, worse. And then at the end of your life, if hypothetically you were to meet the different versions of yourself, some of them better, some of them worse. You say the real one that I ended up with was pretty good. And I think that's. That's an important thing in life, that nothing's ever going to be perfect, but you're pretty pleased with how it turned out overall. All right, let me get into your questions again. Please send more of your questions to podongtermwords.com that's P O dongtermwords.com your questions have been phenomenal, and it almost makes me a little bit sad because I can maybe respond to 1% of them in these episodes, and probably 95% of them are worthy of responses. So thank you for sending them in. Please send more. And I'm sorry I can't get to all of them, but the first question comes from Jack, who writes, in a society with so many advantages and opportunities, how can we instill in ourselves and our clients a sense of gratitude such that we might equip them to step off the hedonic treadmill, shake off their money dysmorphia, and embrace a full and meaningful life with money? Jack, wonderful question. Thanks for sending it in for me. If there's anything that's instilled a little sense of gratitude. And I say little for a reason. I'll explain in a second. But what's helped me is becoming an amateur student of history and realizing that if I had a time machine and I could choose to live in any era throughout world history, I would in dispute, absolutely without question or hesitation, say I would want to live right now. I've used this example before, that John D. Rockefeller, who was by far the richest man in the world about 100 years ago, never had, go on down the list, penicillin, sunscreen. For most of his life, he didn't have electricity, never flew on a jet airplane, never had Tylenol or Advil or all these things that are basic necessities today that the richest man in the world did not have 100 years ago. And when you study more history and you realize that what people live through and experience, people who were chipper and happy and thought that they had great lives, would be lives that would be completely unacceptable today. And if that doesn't instill a sense of gratitude in you, I'm not sure what will. There is an irony here that I want to discuss, which is that I want to live in a world in which most people live, look at their lives, and wake up in the morning and say, I'm not pleased enough. This is not enough. And we need better, because that is the root of all progress in the world. And so there is an irony in that in which I can easily imagine my kids and my grandkids living in a world where we have cured cancer, let's say we've cured most of heart disease. And like all of those ills that have been such an issue from now and in all the past, that we've cured them, or at least largely cured them. And they're no happier for it because they just come to expect it. In the same way that so many vaccines and infectious diseases have been eradicated or largely eradicated today, that would have seemed indistinguishable from magic if you explained that to someone 100 years ago. Antibiotics, those kind of things. And so that's the irony of progress, is that when people wake up in the morning without a sense of gratitude for how great life is today, they stop pushing for more progress. And so I want people to wake up without a sense of gratitude. Isn't that, like. It's a weird thing to say, because that's what's going to push people forward. We need better, we need more. I think for a lot of People too. It's not just becoming a student of other people's history, it's becoming a student of your own history and reflecting how far that you have come in life. And for the majority of people, not everyone, in every circumstance, of course, but if you were to, say, look and take stock of your own life today, compared to where you were or where you thought you would be at some distant point in your past, you'd be pretty satisfied with where you are. That tends to be the case. The last thing I would say about this is, as the saying goes, go touch grass, go outside. Online, the Internet and social media is comparative and performative and it leads to a sense of not gratitude for what you have, but comparing yourself to others and being envious of what you don't have. And that's obviously the worst kind of thing you could do for your own mental health. Real life in person, face to face, is much more empathetic and understanding. And the more that you do that and break away from the ills that we have of modern media, I think the better you'll be. All right, next question. This one comes from Smuggless, who says, what is your opinion about my personal theory that you should never make money your identity, but enough money is the only way to express your identity? To elaborate, they say, I believe savings are the backbone of living your own life without being burdened by the stress of financial emergencies. Of course, I completely agree with that, that here's how I've always framed it. The only formula that I want to use in any of my books is that a definition of a pretty good life. A formula for a pretty good life is independence plus purpose. You need independence plus purpose. And a lot of people in this field focus only on the first side of that equation, which is independence. Mainly talking about financial independence. And they make a knee jerk assumption. I think that can be pretty dangerous, which is that if I had financial independence, a lot of my worries would go away. And it's not wholly wrong. It's just easy to abuse that assumption. It is too easy to assume that if you wake up in the morning with a sense of emptiness or sadness or anxiety or just unhappiness with your life. Easy to assume that if you threw more money at that problem and filled money with that hole, the hole would be filled and it would go away. And it's not that that's always wrong. It's again, it's just easy to abuse that idea. And so for a lot of people, the allure of wanting more money beyond what is necessary to keep them content and beyond what is necessary to fulfill what they want to do in terms of hanging out with their friends and pursuing their hobbies and whatnot. The allure of more money beyond that point is an accounting hobby. Like, you want more money for purposes that are not going to bring you necessarily more joy and contentment. And for some people, the accounting hobby is a real thing. Some people love compounding. They love investing. It's not always bad. I fall for a lot of this as well. And so at the same time, I love money. I want more money. I want to grow my net worth, of course. But I want to use money as a tool to live a better life, not as something that's going to define me, a tool to become the best version of myself without defining who I am. And so the very simple example that I've used of this before, which is that asking a question, will a bigger house make you happier? And the answer might be yes. If that bigger house makes it a nicer house, makes it easier to have your friends and family over to spend quality time with them, then it totally might make you happier. But you have to realize what's actually making you happy. It's not necessarily the house. It's what you're using that house to do and to become is what's actually making you happy. All right, last question comes from Juan. He says, what are the things a person can do to be better at communication? How do I get the stories I tell to be better? One, I've. This is what I've tried to do my entire career. And so maybe it's too specific to what I do, which is kind of financial, behavioral writing. But I think you can apply these concepts and ideas to many other things. The purpose of a story, I think, is to convey information in a way that lets the reader contextualize it in their own life. It's not just to have a data dump of numbers and facts. It's to allow someone to read numbers and facts and information and say, I know what that would feel like. I can feel that in my own life. You're like, you're not just conveying data, you're conveying emotion to somebody. How that works in practice is always very different. It's different if you're writing an email than writing a book, of course. But I think there are some common denominators of what really works here. I've always thought that you can explain the majority of good writing with the concept of brevity, that the person who says the Most in the fewest words wins. And so much of what you consider bad writing is a good idea stuffed around endless, endless words and complexity that doesn't need to be there. And so I hear this idea many years ago that when you're writing, you should assume that every word costs you $100. And when you're writing, even if it's just writing an email to someone, you should stop and say, does this word need to be here? Not does this sentence make sense? Not, is this word grammatically correct? But just, is it absolutely necessary? If this word cost me $100, would I leave it or not? And so many times the answer is no. And you strip your communication down to what is really essential. That's a big part of it. Mark Twain, I think, was the one who said, when writing, leave out the parts that readers tend to skip. And, you know, when everything that you read that you skip certain parts of it, leave those parts out. One thing that I found very helpful for me as a writer is the idea of writing for myself. I think most people are very good writers. If they were writing, like, in a diary where they didn't think anyone else was going to read it, it was for themselves. Or if they're not taking, they're very good at just jotting down the important information without a lot of fluff. They become bad writers when they start realizing that there might be an audience out there that other people are reading this. And then they either get nervous or they start to pander to other people. And so when I write, I'm glad the audience is there, the readers are there. I'm glad you're here right now, but you're never the most important thing. Whether it's this podcast or things that I write in books and whatnot, the only audience that I think about is myself. It's a very selfish way to write, but I think that has been what's most important. And when you have that frame of mind, you are willing to say things and take risks and have little rhetorical flourishes that you might be too scared to do otherwise. And so I think that's always been what's most important to me as a writer, is that when I write anything, I want to take a step back and say, do I like this? Not will the audience appreciate this or enjoy this, but do I like it? And so that's been the strongest filter for me over time as a writer. Last, I always want to recommend something for you on this. And this is not a book or a podcast or a documentary. As I've recommended before, now that we're in the middle of the summer, with all seriousness, the most helpful for thing that I've had in my career, and it's not even close, I think is walking outside. And it sounds so trivial and petty, but it is astounding how many people can solve their problems and clear their mind by going for a walk. It's. It's crazy. And it's not just like a physical thing. Your brain works completely differently when you're walking, that when you're walking, you're more alert and more active than you are when you're sitting at your desk. And the number of problems that you can solve in your life, in your career that can be solved by going for a walk are off the charts. So not only good for your physical health, go for a walk. It'll solve a lot of the other issues you're having in your life. And that's it for this episode. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.