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Mental Accounting: Joy

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When message board posters wondered about how much money Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak might have if he hadn’t sold his stock he told them.

But in his accounting:

“I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.”

https://m.slashdot.org/story/445414

Health is a verb

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“I don’t know why we made health a noun. Think about it. When it’s a noun, it’s an object to be obtained.

It’s something tangible. It’s a destination. Health should be a verb.

How many of us have been in the best shape of our life? If we stopped doing what got us there, we would fall backwards. So we, it’s an action.

Health needs to be an action you do every single day of your life. If you are, if we keep setting it up, like I’m going on a diet, I’m gonna lose 30 pounds. What happens once you lose the 30 pounds?

What’s your next move? This is the ozempic. What’s your next move”

From The Rich Roll Podcast: Dr. Mindy Pelz On Women’s Hormonal Health, Cyclical Fasting, Health As A Verb, Reclaiming Your Body’s Intelligence & Transforming Menopause Into Empowerment, Jul 31, 2025

Don’t hire a noun to do a verb’s job.

Aldi Why

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Around here we live good design. Like paths thru the woods, the more familiar and less onerous the path, the more likely we are to use it.

This is the new Aldi parking lot near my house. It’s a former Winn-Dixie grocery store. The parking lot is huge and further from the store than typical for an Aldi store.

It shows the contrast between an original design and not.

And contrast highlights choices and trade offs.

Most of the time we plug along.

Most of the time we see life as it is.

But sometimes we notice contrast and ask, why is it that way?

Happy Monday.

JTBD at Whoop

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Will Ahmed is the founder of Whoop, the fitness tracker. In July 2025, he told Rich Roll:

“So maybe there’s a focus group on a band and the focus group sort of leans one way versus another on which direction the band should go. And I feel an incredibly strong pull towards the other direction.

I might just do the other direction. That, though, is a very sort of trivial example, I think. What’s been more interesting for me in my life is these moments where I’ve felt a deep sense of knowing something, and a lot of people have disagreed with it.”

Ahmed was obsessed with the progress (this is Moesta’s JTBD language) a subgroup (elite athlete) wanted to make. It’s such a clear example of Jobs Theory – though Ahmed never explicitly says that.

Focus groups don’t work for many reasons: people don’t actually know what they want, people are obsessed with status, people only think in the existing solution space. JTBD (jobs to be done) theory gets around that by focusing on the progress individuals want.

Ahmed discover that HRV matters a lot for rest and recovery. That led him to discover HRV needs constant monitoring. That led to this breakthrough:

“You needed to be able to measure it (HRV) continuously. And that was another breakthrough in hindsight of the whole idea for WOOP, was this idea of continuous data. Continuous data is the reason that this doesn’t have a screen.

It’s the reason we invented a modular battery pack. It’s the reason that the bands have all sorts of different looks and feels and colors. It’s the reason we’re not a watch, because we don’t want to compete with other watches.”

Framing “Life Energy”

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From Your Money or Your Life

“Money is something you trade your life energy for. You sell your time for money. It doesn’t matter that Ned over there sells his time for a hundred dollars and you sell yours for twenty dollars an hour. Ned’s money is irrelevant to you. The only real asset you have is your time.”

Money is important and how someone thinks about money should be how you communicate about money.

  1. Money is something you trade your life energy for.
  2. Money makes progress in JTBD. How to talk with your rich friends about money.
  3. I live in the tribe, the tribe keeps me safe. Our tribe has a leader.
  4. Money is part of the system. ERE and Wheaton Scales.
  5. Money is about doing good things with good people and not too much friction. Should you buy a ski chalet?
  6. Money has external roles (saving, investing, spending, etc.) and internal roles (goals, FOMO, Jones’s, Always Buy Two New Cars). The Psychology of Money.

It’s wild the resources spent on money.

Did the internet need another post about money? Yet here we are.

But maybe what we’re really talking about is spirit. It’s philosophy. It’s spiritual. What am I supposed to do? What is a life well lived? Posing the easier question shifts the topic to money.

Playing Tennis

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Alan Waxman told Patrick O’Shaughnessy they want to hire a certain kind of person:

“So people that are over themselves, no politics, no egos, no BS, just so we can all talk to each other. So those are the values. We always said we wanted to be the largest startup in the industry.

That’s literally day one. We want people that can play tennis so they can debate, not that my baby is the prettiest type people.”

Throughout the episode Waxman references “playing tennis”.

It’s so common, it’s probably an internal figure of speech too.

And it’s a great example of how to argue well. Not to hard, not too soft. Engage in an enriching way. Aim for improvement, not defeat.

It’s a good organization if someone can play some tennis.

Summer frictions

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Anna Lembke told Andrew Huberman:

“So we’re all forced to make stuff up, whether it’s being a scientist or being a doctor or being an Olympic athlete or climbing Mount Everest. And people really vary in their need for friction. And some people need a lot more than others.

And if they don’t have it, they’re really, really unhappy. And I do think that a lot of the people that I see with addiction and other forms of mental illness are people who need more friction.”

I (finally) bought Thinking in Systems: A Primer in June 2025. It was an early summer read and focused a lot of summer thinking (before back to school gears up) on systems thinking.

Friction is an accessible dial.

Find a verb/noun combo and make it easier/harder. Don’t put your phone on the desk (like really, don’t).

But maybe it plays a more central role in the system.

Maybe friction is akin to vanilla in baked goods: Gotta have it, but just the right amount.

A fellow teacher told me she’s ready for her students. Summer break (we get seven weeks) is too long. We had a similar feeling. One night everyone at cereal the kitchen was a mess. This is what degenerates look like, I explained. The current patterns of summer don’t have enough frictions. It’s what people crave with schedules. It’s why people run races. Competition is friction. Constraints are frictions.

We’ll end in the spirit of Tyler Cowen: Friction is underrated.

Zero Cost, Pure Upside

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One of the (few) calculations for my Business and Entrepreneurship class is customer acquisition cost. I’m a fan.

Rewriting the text for the upcoming year forced me to reemphasize and reiterate the value of a low CAC. Especially in the world of social media marketing and influencer marketing where CAC is sometimes zero. It’s an incredibly powerful idea.

But anything zero or low coast can be. Especially when part of an equation that divides (zero by many) or one that multiples many by a low cost (such as almost zero).

Talking with Chicago Fed Chair, Tyler Cowen asked about this very thing.

COWEN: What would be an example of something with a marginal cost of zero?

GOOLSBEE: [laughs] Well, I don’t want to reveal anything about our operations and get myself in trouble about the Federal Reserve operations. If you look at marginal cost of zero things, opening meetings to include others and having folks work together, sharing of information can often have very low cost — if not literally zero — and strong benefits.

Maybe this is the engine of alchemy. Find something that costs nothing (or very very very little) and do more of that. If it’s valuable (or very very very valuable) do a lot more of that.

Related: Free Things.

Quantitative Parenting

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Parenting two teenagers is difficult. Most of it comes down to remembering two things.

The first, my wife said this too shall pass. From the very beginning that has been good advice.

The second, when I was a boy of 14 my father was so stupid I could barely stand him. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned. That’s from Mark Twain. Maybe.

There might be a third to the list.

“Quantitative stuff can survive doing some horrifically stupid things in isolation. If 53 percent of the time increasing is a good word, then 47 percent of the time you were stupid. Turns out natural language processing or NLP, if we want to sound like the cool kids, that is taking that same data and training a ML model to say what predicts and what doesn’t predict.”

From Money Stuff: The Podcast: Cliff Asness, Jun 20, 2025

And parenting is kind of like that! Everyday Asness makes bets and everyday we get to be with our kids. If we can just be mostly right, things work out just fine. Or at least they have for Cliff.

Michael’s Monday Motivation

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“You exist at home and everything is nice and comfortable, and stress has come in, but they’re in the form of emails and deadlines and things just get predictable. Go out into a place that is totally unfamiliar, do something that’s going to be challenging to you, go with the wind, you will find things that will really enhance your life, that will make you feel, as Joseph Campbell put it, the rapture of being alive”

The rapture of being alive.

From Huberman Lab: How to Grow From Doing Hard Things | Michael Easter, Jun 16, 2025