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It’s much easier to pay attention to the things we buy with our money—especially the symbols of status that fill our houses, garages, and social media—than the actual money that we traded for those things. Much less the things we could have bought but didn’t, or the opportunities we passed up, or whether we are
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If you want custom kitchen cabinets you don’t go hire someone who’s says they’ll replace the plumbing and do the cabinets. That wouldn’t make any sense. The plumbing is important! More important arguably than custom cabinets. But someone advertising they do both equally well is likely to do both with, at best, mediocrity. We all
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There are no leaps and bounds, not really. The leaps and bounds we see in technology or medicine or design are not actually leaps and bounds at all, but an accumulation of small steps that reach some tipping point of general consciousness after the fact. When you think about your money–whether your investments, your ability
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When asked about whether he approaches his endurance exploits with a typical “You can do it, you can do it” sort of self-talk, Lazarus Lake had this to say: For myself, when I’m involved in something like this, there’s not really time to give myself a pep talk. I’m totally absorbed with doing what I’m
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It now appears that Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents engaged in the same sort of fraudulent activity as their son, which is perhaps as unsurprising as the fraud itself turned out to be. Maybe you and I won’t raise the next Sam Bankman-Fried. I hope not. But children and adolescents and young adults observe a great deal
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There are many dangerous cognitive/statistical cocktails, but surely one of the worst is made when we combine recency bias (the cognitive tendency to believe that the way things have recently been is the way they will continue indefinitely) with mean reversion (the statistical tendency for some price or performance measure to converge toward an average
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The point of planning is not to tell the future, but to use the future as a reverence point that helps us wake up to the present. Waking up means: self-awareness and other-awareness, doing the next thing and then the next, breathing in the joy of being alive right now, hoping that the hardness of
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There is no trick to solving the tension between your present self and your future self. Researchers have found that asking a person to consider an AI-aged photo of themselves as elderly prior to making some decision will the slightly move the needle in favor of the future self, but of course this is real
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I suppose these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but I wonder what would happen if we stopped framing “splurging on our family” so much in terms of extravagant trips and more in terms of “I took a pay cut so I could be less harried and more present.”
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Comparison is the thief of joy, and a tyrant to boot. But comparison is not “out there.” Comparison doesn’t exist without the person looking at us in the mirror. So let’s own the fact that we are the robbing and thieving despots of our own lives when we engage in this destructive practice. What if,
Meaningful Returns 