Meaningful Returns

At the recommendation of a friend I’m reading Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons, which is a wonderful little book distilling some of the legendary golfer’s most fundamental thoughts about the game with laymen like me.

Well, within about five minutes of starting the book I came across one of those thoughts that made me stand up and grab a pen immediately:

Once you are on the right track in golf, doing things the right way takes a lot less effort than the wrong way does.

That hits hard, no? It’s not just golf, but money, where this is true. The point of doing money things “the right way” isn’t just so you can go to bed knowing you’re doing them the right way, but so you remove as much of the friction and discomfort that suboptimal money decisions can cause us in life, and so that those decisions begin to actively add value to our lives.