Mike's notes.
Reframing metrics is catnip. In book form this is Moneyball, but there are many posts about framing and metrics.
How might we frame a meaningful life? And what metrics?
“Ultimately, the number of things you did can’t be definition of a. meaningful life. It’s got to be what you did and whether you did it in the spirit of showing up for it.”
That’s Oliver Burkeman’s advice to Rich Roll (November 2025). Burkeman’s book, 4000 Weeks, was one of my favorites last year. Happy New Year.
Orthogonal thinking and alchemy means solving problems with nonintuitive variables.
A lot of great finance book use orthogonal thinking. Rather than ask: how to shop for Christmas on a budget, orthogonal thinking moves past money and asks something closer to: how to create meaningful Christmas moments.
That reframing changes the variable from dollars/gifts to moments/meaning. To get in that spirit, Blake Scholl told Tyler Cowen how to make air travel better (no indentation).
The other thing that we need to do, and this is part of why it’s not a solved problem, is we need to fix checked baggage. Because baggage check is unreliable and slow, we have people carrying onto airplanes things they absolutely do not want to carry.
If we fix airports such that baggage check is fast and reliable, then we can stop having carry-ons, and we can get on and off airplanes much, much faster than we can today. That would actually be the biggest win. Imagine an experience where you take your Uber to the airport. The bag that today you would carry on is in your trunk. You step out of the car, someone, maybe even a robot, grabs your bag from the trunk. You don’t see it again.
After you land, you get a push notification on your phone that says your Uber’s in slot seven A, and by the time you get to your Uber, your bag is back in the trunk. The customer experience is your bag teleports from the trunk of your Uber at your origin to the trunk of your Uber at your destination. That’s how they should work. Then you don’t carry on all this stuff and it’s much faster to get on and off airplanes.
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?
“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.
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.
Kris is buying a house. This is how he and his wife think about it:
Personal thinking: whether we rent or own, we ask ourselves “At what level do we want to consume housing at?”. Even if we can afford more, we try to be ruthless about what is a must-have vs nice-to-have and not let the nice-to-have creep out like a wolf spider hatching. Neither of us wants to find ourselves servicing interest payments to some mimetic trend. The cost is not just denominated in dollars but in utils of resilience and optionality which are key to peace of mind and lower stress.
At what level do we consume housing?
Great line.
Good framing asks a different question. It’s the same information, but a new view changes the image.
This frames views versus vacations, countertops versus career changes, and intentions and time.
All dogs wanted to be good dogs, no matter how unpromising they seemed. You just had to help them find a way. – The Old Man
There were frustrations when I returned to the classroom. Pesky persistent complainers. Foot draggers. Sleepers. Phone concealers. Make up concealers. C’mon, we’re in this together.
But then, after threatened and assigned detentions. After exhausted days. After hallway gripes. I realized, they’re just puppies.
People are just like puppies. Both have basic states of operation given their genetics, rules of physics, body chemistry and so on. Then, they both learn rules.
Puppies are taught not to pee in the house. Puppies are taught to walk on a leash. Puppies are taught to socialize. We don’t get mad at puppies for being puppies – we once had a puppy that only chewed up the right shoe. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Everything my students did was learned – successfully!
Complaining got results. Procrastination worked. Sleep was fine.
Life got a lot better when I thought about students as puppies.
Don’t Shoot the Dog! It takes time, persistence, and work to train puppies. Oh, and it’s fun. Puppies are happy to learn things and it feels good to teach them. Just like students. Just like all of us.
They’re just puppies.
Growing up, my dad took my brother and I duck hunting. The worst the weather for humans, goes the rule of thumb, the better the conditions for ducks. So, we grew up, sitting in cold, windy, wet marshes around northern Ohio and southern Michigan. It was miserable.
It was miserable, for me. My brother actually liked it a lot, and we think it’s because of the clothes.
When I was young and out with my dad, it was a lot of cotton and some wool. When my brother started there was Gore-Tex, Under Armour, dry fit, and a whole list of synthetic fabrics that repelled water, retained warmth, and didn’t cost too much.
We came to joke in our family, it’s not bad weather, it’s the wrong clothes.
Now I’m the parent, not duck hunting, but travel volleyball, and we spend a lot of time in the car. Car time can be a little aggravating.
But isn’t it a little like the weather?
The problem isn’t the traffic and other drivers the problem is me. Both weather and traffic are out of my control, and both have solutions in my control.
And unlike my youth, driving is nice. There are podcasts and audiobooks. They are comfortable chairs with heated lumbar supports. There’s adaptive cruise control. A lot to be grateful for!
Pause more. Be grateful. Don’t focus on the uncontrollable, be creative, and find things you can do. It’s not the bad __________, it’s the wrong ________.
In 2010, Paul Wheaton created the Wheaton Eco Scale. He begins by noting our perceptions of other people. Those one or two steps ahead in a similar FESPE (financial, ecologic, spiritual, personal, etc.) journey look “pretty cool”. Those four or five steps “downright crazy”. While, “one level back are ignorant and two levels back are assholes”.
We’re all on our own journeys, coming across shamans, oracles, and gurus at different times. Part of this is why there are no bad books.
The importance of Wheaton Scales hit home during two successive days. First, reading the philosophy/finance forum of Early Retirement Extreme. Commenters noted how communicating about FIRE is such a challenge. Part (maybe most!) of the burden comes down to talking to someone in their language. It’s not about all the things I know so much as it’s about all the things they’ll understand.
Second, sitting in church and listening to the pastor talk about debates, agreements, and conversations among theologians. I know who he’s not talking to – me! He’s talking to the two guys who fact check, give feedback, and have studied the Bible for years.
Wheaton Scales snuggle up nicely in our mental models, like a pet on a cold afternoon, because they match JTBD. The aim of Jobs is moving from supplier language (how I see the world) to demand language (how other people see it). Wheaton gives a model for thinking through that.
And scales like this are nice. And helpful. It’s better to be mostly right than precisely wrong.
Practical engineering presented this video about the Hawaiian islands power grid. Like a lot of questions of the form: Why can’t we just… the answer is, it’s complicated.
Host Grady Hillhouse offers a new definition that helps to frame the issue (Words matter!).
Instead of talking about reliable power, talk about redundant power. If we frame things this way it sounds a lot better, and things that sound good are perceived as more true. Redundant power needs a rebranding. Rather than think about waste, the people of Hawaii can think of it as reliable.
This is Jared Dillian taking a brief detour in a post about Resentment.
I want to take a brief detour here and talk about how unproductive it is to try to control the entire universe with our minds. We worry about bad things happening, thinking that if we worry hard enough, that if we pray for a bad outcome, then it won’t happen. We resent other people, thinking that if we resent them hard enough, they’ll change and we will get what we want. Virtually all forms of non-heritable mental illness come from a desire to control other people and our surroundings. Virtually all forms of non-heritable mental illness come from an inability to accept other people and the world as they are. You can’t control your kid dropping out of college. You can’t control your husband letting out a loud fart when he gets out of bed in the morning. You can’t control the county when they hand you a property tax increase. You can’t control the airport that just rerouted flight patterns over your house. You can’t control who becomes president. The number of things you actually can control is shockingly small. You take the action, and you leave the results up to somebody else. That’s how this game works. Read this paragraph a few times. If you understand it and internalize it, you will never need a therapist again
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Mike again, I just love that framing, control the entire universe with our minds. Right out of Maxims for Thinking Analytically.
The Waiter's Pad 