Something to Keep
“Be frugal in all things except in your passions. Select a few interests that you gleefully splurge on. In fact, be all-around thrifty so that you can splurge on your passions.”
Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living
A Second Look
When I first started reading about self-development, one of the topics that interested me the most was money. It was fascinating to see that a lot of so-called “financial experts” gave the impression that liking money was evil. I think there’s nothing wrong with money, and if you secretly hate it, it will elude you somehow. At the same time, I don’t think money should be the most important value that informs every decision you make. That’s the perfect recipe to end up miserable and alone.
So, how exactly do you develop a healthy relationship with money? Well, I like what Kevin Kelly said in his book of aphorisms, Excellent Advice for Living. You don’t have to live a life of excess to be happy. You just need to figure out what you like and spend as much as you can afford on that. Likewise, don’t spend more than you have to on everything else.
Money can buy you happiness, but only to a certain extent. Past a certain point, money will get you diminishing returns and become a trap of sorts. Yet most “financial experts” never say that. I think this is the case because it’s not sexy. After all, taking the time to figure out what you love is not as easy as it sounds. You can easily get distracted by other things that you think you love, but you don’t. Money-related advice should be concise and easy. Carrying it out, on the other hand, is anything but easy because emotions get in the way.
Something I Liked
As soon as I finished The Book of Elon, I started looking for more information about some of the technologies he works on. Luckily, I found the Wait But Why series on Musk. Of course, anyone reading this already knows if reading a long-form series of blog posts that show Elon Musk in a good light is for them or not. He’s a controversial figure, to put it mildly. In my case, I just wanted to learn about the industries he’s working on, even if I don’t agree with a lot of things he’s done or said.
Since reading long-form articles on a computer isn’t really my thing, I highly recommend The Elon Musk Blog Series. The 500-page book compiles all the blog posts, and you can easily read them on a Kindle, which is exactly what I’m doing.
