Greetings!
August’s Pre-Order Incentive for my new book, Real Wealth is in full swing!
Pre-order today at tylergardner.com/book, let me know you did, and receive a bonus chapter from the second book that I am already working on (hint: it’s focused 100% on the art of retirement). Not even my editor at Norton has seen this one yet, and I’m excited to share it with you first and get some early feedback. It will be delivered to you digitally in early September.
And remember, once you pre-order, you are eligible for every monthly incentive between now and the book’s release on December 1st. As always, appreciate your support, and hope the book proves useful.
Here Are the 4 Things I Wish I Knew in My 20s but Appreciate Knowing in my 40s:
Time is Not Your Greatest Asset. Knowing What to do With it is. The dominant message in modern personal finance is that time is the ultimate asset and our goal should be to free up as much of it as possible. But “free” time (whatever the heck that means, as we all choose what to do with our minutes as they pass), in and of itself, is a completely neutral (if not somewhat terrifying) concept: we can either fill the minutes with activities that fulfill us and leave us satisfied, or we can fill the minutes with activities that leave us empty and more depressed than we were when we woke up. A quick confession: Saturday is my least favorite day of the week. Not in a tragic way, but in a “what am I supposed to do with this” way. The absence of structure leaves me feeling a low-grade anxiety that I haven’t figured out what time is supposed to be for. When I left teaching, my father told me the thing I would miss most is the rhythm and structure to the academic year (I probably nodded politely and as is true of most things fathers say to sons, didn’t really hear it until about ten years later). The time itself is the raw material, the blank canvas. Enormously valuable in the abstract and almost entirely worthless in practice unless you have figured out what to do with it. So before you organize your financial goals around “buy back my time,” just make sure you know what you’re going to do with that time once it’s truly yours.
Work is not the enemy. Working on the wrong projects with the wrong people is the enemy. Yep, I’ll die on this metaphorical hill: humans are not designed to be idle, nor are we designed to resist challenging projects. I don’t buy it. We just don’t like being told what to do, when to do it, and who to do it with (surprise). The problem, as I’ve noted in previous letters, is that we continue to conflate the word “work” with the worst version of the 9-5 grind imaginable: no escape, no choice, endless (useless) meetings, endless (meaningless) careers. Again, I don’t buy it. You have a choice. You might not like the risk that comes along with that choice, and that’s a fair pushback, but at least call it what it is. The happiest retirees I know, without fail, are the ones who never “retired” because they found projects to work on that were interesting to them and useful to others.
There will never be a heroic week. There will only be a thousand unheroic mornings. When I first started creating content, I made four videos a day for six months. They were terrible. I’m not being modest; they’re still all up on my profiles if you want the hard proof. My wife would, on occasion, walk by me in the kitchen and smile with the patient love of someone who has decided to support her partner’s mid-career experiment regardless of how it winds up. And after six months, my first video went viral. What I learned is the opposite of what most folks assume. By the time that first video went viral, I had spent six months learning, usually without even noticing, what worked and what didn’t work. That viral moment wasn’t an innate understanding of how to reach a mass audience on social channels; it was the visible peak of an iceberg or unheroic weekday work that nobody had seen. It took Samuel Johnson over nine years to write the first English dictionary. That’s 3,285 mornings in which he woke up and mumbled to himself some version of, “So what comes after aardvark?” And after what must have seemed like endless unheroic weekday mornings, he reached zootomy.
Money can buy happiness. You just need to know what makes you happy. You have surely heard the standard formulation that money can’t buy happiness, and I’ll suggest that’s not only incomplete but also dangerous. The research from Killingsworth (where he updated Kahneman’s finding) suggests that happiness continues to rise with income for many people well past the levels we had originally thought. The problem has never been that money can’t buy happiness; the problem is that most of us have spent our lives buying the wrong things. We spend the first half of our lives buying what others have told us to buy; and we spend the second half of our lives wondering why money never bought us happiness. I would encourage us to shift this latter half of our lives towards an experimental mindset (what I call the Path Dividend) in which we’re always keeping track of how we use money and how we feel about those purchases. My list, as I’ve shared before, involves writing, teaching, nature, dogs (big, big dogs who slobber frequently) and the occasional fast car or big truck. Your list will be entirely different, and it’s your job to figure out what’s on it.
What’s that? You’re interested in exploring these topics further but you’d rather have me read this to you than read it yourself? Check out this week’s episode of the podcast Your Money Guide on the Side, and if it proves useful, please consider leaving a review, as it helps new listeners find the show and helps me know that this endeavor in free financial literacy for all remains relevant.
Listen to Your Money Guide on the Side
Two Things I’m Currently Thinking About:
The Art of Creating Memories. I spent this past weekend in upstate New York with a cohort of friends from my college days. We reunited last year for the first time in twenty years and decided that, fortunately, we still enjoy one another’s company even if a few of us now have artificial joints. After partying too hard on Friday night and pretending that we could somehow still keep up with the 21-year-old versions of ourselves, we spent the morning on Saturday playing Disc Golf (we’re UVM alums, did you expect anything different?). The sun was hot, the bugs were real, and the poison ivy was far more prevalent than I would have appreciated. And as should come as no surprise, when you are trying to figure out what eight grown men want to do on any given day, there will be competing interests, temperaments, and comfort levels. Needless to say, after a few holes, a few of us would have preferred being by a pool with something that rhymes with meenya molada.
But here’s what all of us seemed to understand at 43 that we might not have understood at 21: the discomfort, the heckling, the jeering, the mild temper tantrums…those were all going to part of the ultimate story that we would share with one another when we do the same dang uncomfortable thing next summer. As Robert California (James Spader) observes in one of the final episodes of The Office when he’s reflecting on how the best stories seem to be made when we’re wondering why we’re not happier in the moment:
Bear witness…while I’ve been mourning the nights that never were, one of them has been unfolding here before me. This is no get-together. This is a party.
And remembering California’s words in that moment helped me appreciate that life is always what we experience in the moment while we’re busy planning for the future.
Our Search for Order in a World of Chaos. I don’t want to end this week’s letter on a sad or deflating note, but I will share that for the first time in about a decade, I cried while reading the ending of a book: Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. A great English professor once told me that you should read books three times in your life: once when you’re young just to see what the book is about, once when you’re middle-aged, so you can appreciate the details you missed, and once when you’re older, so you can read and reflect on things you have now experienced yourself. This was my second reading of Stegner’s final novel, and I guess once you’ve lost someone or some thing, irrevocably, seeing death or reading death becomes that much more shared. And in the closing lines, Stegner’s narrator, Larry Morgan, a writer and university English instructor, reflects not only on the loss of a friend, but on how difficult it is to accept that any of us won’t ultimately become the version of ourselves we trusted we would one day become:
The vision of her floundering in the wake of the concentrated helpers and their feeble charge turned my distress into outrage. Not at any of the helpers…No, at it, at fate, at the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man: at what living had done to the woman my life was fused with, what her life had been and was. What she had missed, how much had been kept from her, how little her potential had been realized…
To end with hope, and to tie this week’s letter together: the unheroic weekday mornings, those micro-moments, are what ultimately reflect our life’s work. What Morgan missed in the above is that the character in question, Charity, had more than lived into her potential as she clearly had a deep impact on our narrator, enough of an impact to be crystalized in prose for others to see and feel. And that, to me, is more than enough.
And Before You Go…
This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Gelt.
If you’re reading this newsletter, odds are, you have a CPA. And I have no doubt, you are consistently thinking about how to optimize your tax game.
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In my first year running my own business, I left a lot of money on the table (read: gave it to the IRS) because I simply didn’t know what I didn’t know, and my accountant’s only contact that year was an email in late April: “Your taxes have been filed.”
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As always, hope this gives you something to think about throughout the week ahead.
-Tyler
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