February 6th, 2022
4 minute read
This weeks post is a little different, a start of a new book review series where I highlight the main points of the books I’m reading. Todays book is called the Psychology of Money, the author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life's most important topics.
One of my favourite takes from the book is the idea that gaining more money has no direct correlation to ones overall contentment and happiness. Rather, it is a means to make your life easier and there is a limit to this. Morgan argues that in order to achieve a level of contentment and positive wellbeing, we should know when we’ve had our fill.
“The idea of having “enough” might look like conservatism, leaving opportunity and potential on the table. I don’t think that’s right. “Enough” is realising that the opposite—an insatiable appetite for more—will push you to the point of regret.”
The only way to know how much food you can eat is to eat until you’re sick. Few try this because vomiting hurts more than any meal is good. For some reason, the same logic doesn’t translate to business and investing, and many will only stop reaching for more when they break or are forced to (burnout).
Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy. Perhaps they go hand in hand; wanting to surpass your peers can be the fuel of hard work. But life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.
In the 1950’s most jobs were manual so once you completed your shift, you’ll leave the tools in the factory and go home. However, in todays world, a lot of jobs are thought based. If you’re a marketing manager, your tool is your head, which never leaves you. You’ll be thinking about your project during your commute, dinner time and even before bed. You might be on the clock for fewer hours than you would in 1950. But it feels like you’re working 24/7. I think this applies the most in todays WFH culture where we don’t even leave the office since the office is also our home..
“Compared to generations prior, control over your time has diminished. And since controlling your time is such a key happiness influencer, we shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t feel much happier even though we are, on average, richer than ever.”
Happiness is a complicated subject because everyone’s different. But if there’s a common denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to control their lives. With that being said, its not easy to attain but how many of us really put control over our time top in our list of priorities? more often than not, its’ the materialistic things that occupy our minds. Because of this, we are forced to work more, and so the cycle repeats itself. There are, however, a small group of people in the world who set themselves free of this trap, they realised that by spending less and keeping more disciplined, they become happier, healthier and wealthier. They call themselves Minimalists. I wrote about this topic before here.
Gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they learned from decades of life experience. He found that not a single person out of a thousand said that to be happy you should:
a) Work as hard as hard as you can to make money to spend on things you want
b) Its important to be at least wealthy as the people around you
c) choose you work based on your future earning power
What they did value were things like quality friendships, being part of something bigger than themselves, and spending quality, unstructured time with their children. “Your kids don’t want your money (or what your money buys) anywhere near as much as they want you. Specifically, they want you with them,” Pillemer writes.
Take it from those who have lived through everything, controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.
Thats all for today folks, as always thank you for reading and goodnight
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