Category: Money
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Greed or chaos?
The easy answer to the question “What keeps people from living contented lives?” is “They are greedy.” But often what presents as greed is actually just a by-product of chaos and the feeling of being time-constrained. When chaos reins and the calendar is over-scheduled, then we begin to make decisions…
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800-pound Gorillas
There’s this great quote, in a recent profile of former Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin: “In finance, there are gorillas, there are apes, and there are chimps….Chimps want to be apes, and apes want to be gorillas.” And even the gorillas want to know who’s on top! The pursuit of power…
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Fire lanes
No amount of money–neither income nor assets–can keep you from living on the edge. Wealth as it’s typically defined cannot and will not keep you from engaging in patterns of behavior which push you to the limit of what is sustainable, whether financially, physically, emotionally, spiritually, or often as not,…
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Money pockets
Money is fungible: a dollar in your right pocket is the same as a dollar in your left pocket. But of course it’s not that simple: The money you receive from your job feels different–it IS different–than money you receive as an inheritance from your mom. Money you give away…
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“I Don’t Think of Myself as Rich”
Such is the headline of this Wall Street Journal article, and the content of a number of quotes inside it. This is not just a function of the people interviewed in the article who make more than than $400k as a household annually. Indeed, almost no one thinks of themselves…
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“No one teaches you how to die”
I heard Thierry Henry say on a podcast that “as an athlete, you die when you stop playing…and no one teaches you how to die.” When your entire life is wrapped up in a thing and that thing goes away, then necessarily some meaningful part of your life will follow…
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Healthy anonymity
As a charity gets to a certain scale, you will inevitably find some person or persons there whose work consists entirely of “donor relations” or some such moniker. And these people will reach out to the donors who write the biggest checks (in absolute dollar terms) and generally wine and…
Meaningful Returns 