The Freedom to Buy Anything includes Shackles

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From Jakob Lund Fisher, author of my favorite personal finance / philosophy book:

The freedom to buy anything you want is actually really limited because it’s proscribed by things that are for sale.

It’s a well kept secret that there is actually a lot more to life than what one can buy. 

For example, $10M gives you the freedom to buy seasonal tickets to any seat (including boxes) in the stadium. It might even buy a handshake from the players or a backstage pass. However, it does not buy the freedom to actually play a useful role in a game or as part of the coaching, even at amateur level. It does not buy the feeling of playing—deking an opposing player or dunking a basketball after jumping 2ft in the air—or the game knowledge to appreciate all the nuances of the game. Or even having an interesting conversation with a professional player. These are not bought with money but with (sometimes lots of) time and practice.

Alcoholic Design

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“Catherine (a former alcoholic) put the kettle on and, while waiting, scrubbed at a stain on the kitchen counter. There was always something. Not long ago, she’d imagined herself out of Slough House for good, and the life she’s led during those few months had been serviceable enough: evenings had followed afternoons had followed mornings, and during none of them had she drunk. But they weighed heavy. There are worse things an alcoholic can have on her hands than time, but not many.”

From London Rules by Mick Herron.

This is my favorite current series (even more than Reacher). The Apple TV show is great.

Even though London is foreign and there are many references I don’t get, Herron’s created wonderful characters including Catherine. If you’ve found a recent favorite, let me know!

Shiny Prizes

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The girl, the guy. The spot on the varsity team. The vacation. The elite college, program, or club. The job (and of course the salary). The membership. The friend group. The invitation. 

My daughters are in their sophomore and senior years. There are a lot of shiny prizes on their radar. I want them to chase the prizes – it reflects on me. My ego demands it.

But why?

Years ago a friend offered us tickets to a University of Florida football game. They were playing a good team. It would have been fun. But we didn’t really want to go.

The tickets were valuable to someone, just not us.

I think about this often when I get stuck on shiny prizes. One person’s prize is another persons meh. What one person wants so badly another person asks so what. And these prizes lose their appeal.

Step 1: Want a thing.

Step 2: Get a thing.

Step 3: Ask why we wanted the thing so badly in the first place.

All parents want for their kids. But do we want the right thing? The shiny prizes or valuable ones?

Related: How will you measure your life?

The Art of Frugal Hedonism (Book Review)

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This is a fun book. Besides the charming Australian narrator, this book about personal finance was full of whimsy and fun. The chapters are short. The tips are good. The point is the same.

When I taught personal finance in school this year it was heavy on Morgan Housel’s ideas: there’s internal finance and external. The internal stuff is about how you view money. The external stuff is about what to do with money.

There are simple and straightforward answers to both these areas. The Art of Frugal Hedonism provides many ideas for both.

The book reminded me a lot of the joys of college. A thirty dollar paycheck was enough for a full weekend of fun: bars, pizza, games, being outside. It was all there. And the book wants us to get back to that point.

We can always shift our framing of the world and the authors of this book want us to think of that time. You don’t need money to have fun – we already know that – we lived that!

The Art of Frugal Hedonism is reminder of that. Find fun. Be around people. Embrace weirdness. Eat basic and delicious food.

Though a totally different financial scale, the suggestions in Frugal Hedonism align with the answer to: Should you buy a ski chalet?

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.