Sidebar 9 - Books as Companions (pt.3)

A Brief Intro

I stumbled upon Morgan Housel several years ago now via a Tim Ferriss Show episode. If you haven’t heard of Housel, two things in particular will show you the kind of thinker and creator he is:

• He challenges any assertions about whether or not people would have been complicit in the Nazi regime in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. He simply says that without being there, you can’t possibly know what you would have done. And it can’t possibly be that everyone would have opposed the regime because… the Third Reich did rise to power and human beings did commit horrible atrocities against other human beings.

• He claims to write for an audience of one. He writes what he finds interesting, and nothing else. And challenges the creator to think of something interesting enough to carry on. He says that if you’re blocked, or you can’t stay motivated, or if you can’t stay interested, then maybe the idea just isn’t that good and you should come up with another one.¹

I enjoyed Housel from the start and, though I feel his books are needlessly repetitive, I’m still a huge fan. A couple key principles from The Art of Spending Money spurred this post.

Housel’s Thinking in The Art of Spending Money

1. There’s a “right net income for everyone.” This value can, and should, change over the course of a life.

2. There are only two reasons that we ever spend money: we’re either buying something (including time, freedom, independence, and optionality) to move our material world closer to our desires or we’re actively attempting to manipulate how others perceive us.

How Housel’s Thinking Is Manifesting In My World

1. I’m taking the idea that “there’s a right amount of money for me to have right now” and extending it to “there’s a right amount of influence and power I should have at work right now.” I’m convincing myself that it’s okay to be Steve Kerr instead of Michael Jordan (as shown in The Last Dance), or Johnson instead of Phil Knight (in Shoe Dog), or the business analyst/computer geek instead of Billy Bean (in Moneyball, the feature film).

   It’s working for me. I show up to my job, help my CEO accomplish his goals, and then move on with my family life. Despite the apparent simplicity of the arrangement, I’ve failed to achieve it in each of my first dozen jobs.

2. I’m extending this concept of financial spending to include all the energy and attention we spend. Thinking, specifically, about why I show up to work each day and what I’m hoping to accomplish. Am I deploying energy to improve my own material world? Am I showing up so that others will think about me differently? Why do I say what I say in meetings? Why do I delegate some tasks and tackle others myself? Why are some messages made in public chat channels and others in direct messages, by default? Am I an active participant in those choices, or am I being hijacked by stimuli I don’t fully understand or control?

   It sure feels to me like my money and my energy, attention, and time are subject to the same principles. And in both cases, it’s worth minding both how much and why my outputs are where they are.

A Brief Outro

Housel recently released The Art of Spending Money, his third book. I listened to it, thought about it, and captured some of that thinking above (mostly so that I can reference it again later). Now I’m hyper-fixated on Designing Your Life and the early documents those authors suggest for building a compass to measure the true heading of one’s life against what one claims to want.

So, I’m off to revisit and update What’s Work?.

Onwards, team.