Author: Jim Wang

Today, I want to share one story, which is not money related but life-related, and three powerful ideas I took away from that story:

Meet Virginia Apgar, the unlikely anesthesiologist who saved newborn babies [Massive Science] – “The newborn’s skin was blue and he wasn’t breathing. A few years earlier, the doctors would have documented the baby as stillborn, not believing there was anything they could do to help. If this were the mid-1950s though, a recent development in the field of obstetrics would have given them hope – the Apgar score. The newborn’s 1-minute Apgar score indicated that the newborn was in poor condition, but they treated him with oxygen. Sure enough, his 5-minute Apgar score showed improvement. Maybe he had a chance after all. Virginia Apgar’s invention helps saves newborns.”

1. There are tens of millions of human beings who owe their lives to Virginia Apgar. Probably more like hundreds of millions. How wild is that?

2. She began medical training in 1929 and, as in many fields, women were “drastically underrepresented.” She would become a surgeon but pivoted to anesthesiology because her mentor thought she’d have a hard time attracting patients. As a result, she was present for a lot of births and it’s shocking that 1 in 30 died at birth – in part because obstetricians abandoned babies that looked “too sick to survive.”

Gender discrimination is bad. And after reading this story, you might be tempted to think that gender discrimination is good. It steered her to precisely where she needed to be to devise the Apgar score. In reality, you should think of it as – “gender discrimination created a world in which this level of coincidence was necessary.”

If there were no discrimination, it’s likely someone else, far earlier, could’ve come up with this score. The more brains we have working on a problem, the better, especially on problems that society doesn’t realize are problems!

3. She never retired.

I remember a conversation I had with my dad (when I was a kid) about working.

He asked me who I thought was “happier” – the CEO of a large company or the janitor at that company?

I, predictably, said the CEO. He was in charge, was more powerful, and made waaaaaay more money.

My dad said the janitor had a clear cut job, was in control of his work, and didn’t have to stress about it once he was done. He may not have made more money but he wasn’t getting calls over the weekend about handling a crisis. The point of the conversation wasn’t who was happier but that you need to think a little more about a question before answering. Surface level is often not the whole story.

For some, becoming a CEO might be a dream job only because you don’t know all that comes with it. It’s like social media – you see all of the good and none of the bad. With a CEO, there’s a tremendous amount of responsibility and stress because a lot of people depend on you. One misstep and you could cost many people their jobs. You may be well compensated but that all depends on how well you handle that stress. 🙂

The Dream Job That Wasn’t [The New Republic] – “The concept of the dream job still persists, likely because so many of us are working in what the late David Graeber called “bullshit jobs,” or are simply not employed at all. Finding your dream job is a seductive idea: the do-gooder, Protestant version of the FIRE movement—rather than trying to escape work, why not try loving it instead? It’s a relatable impulse, but I imagine most dream jobs are more like running a lighthouse bed-and-breakfast for 40 paying guests than a paid vacation.” (did you know that cookbook recipe tester was even a job???)

Advice for Giving Advice [The Irrelevant Investor] – “I’m doubling down on my own advice. Lessons cannot be taught in the stock market. They can only be learned through experience.”

Lock It In [The Belle Curve] – “When I read about investors making millions on Tesla in the Wall Street Journal, I get nervous. I am also insanely happy for their good fortune. There is no greater luck than winning the lottery. It is not supposed to be this easy to make money in the stock market. Preserve and grow capital yes, but outright make a fortune? No. Money made this easily can be lost in the blink of an eye.” When a football team has won the game, they kneel on the ball to run out the clock. They don’t try to get more points. The game has been won and risking the win to pad the score is foolishness no matter what the game.

The Magical Art of Selling Soap [Laphram’s Quarterly] – “But American advertising—and cosmetic advertising in particular—traces its origins to the decidedly less-than-rational hodgepodge of science, magic, and faith that formed the culture of medicine and “wellness” in the late nineteenth century. The first efforts at national advertising were launched by patent-medicine manufacturers, whose elixirs, pills, drops, and ointments promised customers miraculous physical and mental transformations. For all of its purported down-to-earth rationality, the advertising industry had deep roots in magical thinking. This was a past it would never completely leave behind: that was, in fact, integral to its cultural success.”

One of the benefits of the pandemic is that we’ve spent a lot of time with our kids. It’s certainly been challenging and there have been many difficult times, but on the whole we’re thankful to have this “bonus” time with them. (yes, this is a bit of reflective silver lining thinking going on here!)

As we age, the data shows that we spend an increasingly greater amount of time by ourselves. We spend less of it with our family, which reminds me of this great Wait But Why post titled The Tail End, more of it with a partner, but increasingly more of it with just ourselves:

Who do we spend time with across our lifetime? [Our World in Data] – “Who we spend time with evolves across our lifetimes. In adolescence we spend the most time with our parents, siblings, and friends; as we enter adulthood we spend more time with our co-workers, partners, and children; and in our later years we spend an increasing amount of time alone. But this doesn’t necessarily mean we are lonely; rather, it helps reveal the complex nature of social connections and their impact on our well-being.”

A Brief History of Consumer Culture [The MIT Press Reader] – “Over the course of the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff.” Eye opening.

A long time ago, I used to be a software engineer. One of the things you learn in computer science is that computers can’t be 100% random when they generate numbers. You can simulate something that closely approximates randomness to a human being but it’s never truly random and that’s bad for security.

What computers use is a “seed” to generate these numbers and the key is using a seed that is random. In less rigorous environments, programmers may use a digit in the time or something similar. But even that is not “safe” enough — so this company is using something different – lava lamps:

So cool!

Working for yourself has benefits and drawbacks – one of the big drawbacks is that there isn’t much of a playbook for what you should be doing.

You learn by making mistakes and a lot of new business owners make the same mistakes over and over again.

First post of the day is by Piggy of Bitches Get Riches and it covers 11 mistakes she made and how you can avoid them:

11 Awful Mistakes I Made as a Self-Employed Freelancer, and How YOU Can Avoid Them [Bitches Get Riches] – “In order to get work as a freelancer, you need to prove that you can do it. And in many fields, that means having a lengthy list of former clients you can use as references, or a nice thicc portfolio.

When I started freelancing I… did not have those things. Instead, I bumbled around like a drunk baby panda until I fell into success entirely by happy accident.”

How Owning Assets is Better than a Job. [The Frugal Expat] – “As we get closer and closer to our retirement ages, people want to make sure their assets can cover them as they age. The problem is that if you have not acquired enough assets you will have to continue to work.” A good reminder though easier said than done!

Fun tongue in cheek syllabus for making new friends! 🙂

Course Syllabus for Making New Friends as an Adult [The New Yorker] – “Making new friends as an adult is difficult, especially for students who have just turned thirty and are approaching the precipice of death. This class will teach you how to navigate this emotionally demanding field, so that you can finally make new friends who will never find out about that one time you ate mulch for seven dollars.”

Who else is currently watching Schitt’s Creek for the first time?

It’s hard to avoid the turmoil of the last few weeks, especially as we get closer and closer to Inauguration Day this Wednesday.

It can be really easy to fall into the trap of doomscrolling social media or constantly hitting refresh on news sites.

I implore you to do something else – check in on a loved one. See how they’re doing. If you feel like you’re constantly bombarded by negativity, do something positive for you and someone you care about.

Why You Should Monitor Your Parents’ Finances – And How To Do It [Cameron Huddleston] – “I started getting involved with my mom’s finances after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 65. It was a role I never expected I would have to take on. I had no choice, though, but to help her.

My mom was living on her own at the time of her diagnosis. So, I couldn’t sit by and let her declining memory lead her to financial ruin. In fact, it took a lot of oversight and careful planning to ensure she had enough money to cover the cost of her care as Alzheimer’s disease left her unable to care for herself.

Truth be told, I should have been paying more attention to my mom’s finances before her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. As I learned, waiting for an emergency to get involved can be a mistake. And new research backs that up.”

The worst financial decisions I’ve made [The Twenty Percent] – “A lot of the time money bloggers seem to have all the answers and get it right all the time. But, that’s simply not true. We’re all human and we all make mistakes. To boost transparency and show we really are all in this together, I’ve decided to share some of the worst financial decisions I’ve made.” I made the list with my whoopsie!

Ivy Bells: A Spyhunter Series Story [Truly Adventurous] – “After plans for the most expensive covert operation in U.S. history are stolen, the future of the free world rests in the hands of two teens and a professional spy hunter.”

The first article today is about Brian Kelly, founder of The Points Guy, and talks about the wide world of travel “hacking” and travel loyalty points. It’s interesting on its own but the biggest piece in all this is that these programs create two side effects (quotes are from the article):

• Airlines make a fortune off these points – “A major reason points-and-miles trips exist is because airlines turn a more stable profit by minting their own currencies than by selling actual airline seats.”
• And people who use cash are subsidizing people who use rewards cards – “According to a 2010 policy paper by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the average cash-using household paid $149 over the course of a year to card-using households, while each card-using household received $1,133 from cash users, partially in the form of rewards. It remains a regressive transfer to this day.”

Users of cash are paying more because of these programs – they, in effect, are subsidizing the programs. And people who use cash are often poorer than those who have better credit and can get these more valuable cards.

The Man Who Turned Credit-Card Points Into an Empire [New York Times] – “Brian Kelly, The Points Guy, has created an empire dedicated to maximizing credit-card rewards and airline miles. What are they worth in a global pandemic — and why are they worth anything at all?”

My Cost of Mindlessness: A $500 Insurance Deductible [Budget Life List] – “As I am speedily exiting our driveway, I am jolted from my mindless reverie as I smash into my neighbor’s parked pickup. I feel blood drain from my face as I hear the backup camera screaming at me.

What a way to meet my new neighbors.” The importance, and practice, of being present cannot be overstated.

Money Laundering Via Author Impersonation on Amazon? [Krebs on Security] – “Patrick Reames had no idea why Amazon.com sent him a 1099 form saying he’d made almost $24,000 selling books via Createspace, the company’s on-demand publishing arm. That is, until he searched the site for his name and discovered someone has been using it to peddle a $555 book that’s full of nothing but gibberish.”

This next story is one I’ve read before, it follows Michael Larson and his epic run (he won over $110k) on Press Your Luck, but it also includes what happened after he left the show. Be warned, and you probably expect this, it’s sad.

Who Wants To Be a Thousandaire? [Damn Interesting] – “Larson was not allowed to return as champion since he had surpassed CBS’s $25k winnings limit. As all of the perplexed parties parted ways, CBS executives were called to a meeting to dissect the episode frame-by-frame. In spite of their efforts they could find no evidence of wrongdoing or rule-breaking, so after a few weeks they grudgingly mailed Larson his check. Some people at CBS didn’t want the over-extended episode to be released to the public at all, but it was ultimately decided to air it in June as an awkwardly edited two-parter.”

I’ve known Stefanie O’Connell Rodriguez for several years and I found her latest post on setting goals for 2021 to be especially valuable given her 2020. She lived in New York City last year and her business was shut down for 7 months. Her husband was out of work for 10 months (he’s a stagehand on Broadway).

Oh, and this was right after they got back from their honeymoon in New Zealand.

So if there’s anyone who is at the intersection of “smart with money” and “severely impacted by the pandemic,” it’s Stefanie.

How to Set Money Goals for 2021 [Stefanie O’Connell] – “While I may not know when my husband will return to work, or whether my business will continue it’s post-lockdown recovery, or when we’ll be able to return to our life in Manhattan, I’m setting resolutions for 2021 as a practice of financial optimism.

Research shows that optimism pays – literally. Optimists are more likely to have an emergency fund, to enjoy greater career gains and higher incomes, and to experience less financial stress.”

How Billionaires See Themselves [Current Affairs] – “… if there is a central recurring theme to billionaire literature, it is this: an insistence that what has made the billionaire rich is helping other people rather than helping themselves. The billionaire wants to explain to us that what might look like the steady hoarding of wealth and a feudalistic imbalance of power is, in fact, the product of defensible moral choices and a fair system.” So many good nuggets in this one – even if it is a wee bit cynical (and long). 🙂

A Massive Fraud Operation Stole Millions From Online Bank Accounts [Wired] – “Researches from IBM Trusteer say they’ve uncovered a massive fraud operation that used a network of mobile device emulators to drain millions of dollars from online bank accounts in a matter of days.”

This one has nothing to do with money but I found it so fascinating I had to share it with you:

How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus [WHYY] – “Viruses such as HIV have been infecting vertebrates for probably a couple hundred million years, according to Chuong. So, according to evolutionary biologists, once upon a time some retrovirus infected an egg-laying vertebrate. And by chance, that virus settled into that animal’s egg cells. And it just so happened that that particular infected egg met a nice sperm and got fertilized. The baby that was hatched — whatever kind of protomammal it was — now had copies of that virus’ DNA in all its cells. This virus didn’t kill the baby — if it had, we wouldn’t be sitting here as humans telling this story. What it did was give this offspring a premium feature.”

Reading that was like reading about how there were once 9 different species of “human beings” – homo sapiens, homo neanderthalensis, Denisovans, etc.

When it comes to goals, I don’t set them. I know folks who set concrete goals (SMART!) and that works very well for them.

Personally, I like to set directional “sign posts.” These are things I hope to accomplish sometime in the next few years. They’re not necessarily goals, in the traditional sense (they fail the T in SMART), and they can move as I see fit. The way I think of them in my head is that “I want to go in this direction at a relatively quick speed.”

When I read this article by Darius Foroux, I was struck how I basically create his version of a 5-year plan, except I don’t think of it as a five year plan. I also don’t focus on the sign posts themselves and focus more on my output towards that sign post:

The Life Plan: How To Plan Your Days, Months, and Years [Darius Foroux] – “We have so many opportunities and shiny things that grab our attention that we’re likely to get paralyzed by indecision. So many of us just wander around without a clear purpose. With planning, you can avoid that type of time-wasting and aimlessness.”

Inside the Surprisingly Big Business of Spotify’s Secretive White-Noise Spammers [OneZero] – “Primarily through a shell label called Peak Records, Ameritz fuels hundreds of generically named Spotify artist pages, such as White Noise Baby Sleep and Relaxing Music Therapy, with literal static. There appears to be a real appetite on the platform for music to play while you fall asleep, with some of these artist pages reaching hundreds of thousands to millions of streams every day, according to data viewed by OneZero via Spotify for Artists. With Spotify paying around a third of a penny per stream, revenue from few of these top accounts can be comfortably estimated at upwards of $1 million per year, each.” Only a matter of time before Spotify cracks down and removes these – not sure why these people are agreed to get interviewed though!

10 Best Money Tips for 2021 From the Experts [Smart Money Mamas] – “When it comes to running a profitable business, most people think that if you make more things, you make more money. Not so. The million dollar business owners do one thing really well.” (that tip comes from Dana Malstaff of Boss-Mom and I love it.

Incidentally, “directionally correct” refers to a business consultant term that means “let’s not quibble over the details, this is roughly correct.”

A fun, and accurate, list that’s quick to go through and worth the time.

100 Tips For A Better Life [ideopunk] – “4. “Where is the good knife?” If you’re looking for your good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out.” Lots of good gems in this one.

We all make mistakes but we don’t all recognize them and this is an honest introspection that everyone should be doing:

A Reflection on my 2020 Financial Mistakes [Thrifty Hustler] – “2020 is a rollercoaster ride for me as I have mentioned in my 2020 Year End Blog Post. The first quarter was awesome and then it went downhill from there and then it sort of picked itself up before the year ended. Even though my perspective of 2020 is on the optimistic side, mainly because of the growth of this blog that I’m really really surprised to see, my financials were not doing that great.”

A little look back, now a little look forward:

My Top Money Moves For 2021 [Banker on FIRE] – “Thus, as boring as it may sound, my biggest focus area for 2021 by far is to continue doing well at work.” Not something you see often from folks writing about early retirement, focusing on doing more at work today.

Anti-New Year’s Resolution: 21 Things You Need to Try in 2021 [Money Life Wax] – ” No doubt, 2021 will be the year you finally stick to your New Year Resolutions. You are going to make it happen. There will be no turning back and you will finally hit all of your goals!

The last 15 years are behind you… you mean business! But then, something happens… in what seems like in instant, February 1st rolls around and you have already resorted to looking towards 2021!

So what if instead of adopting a million goals for 2021, you joined the “Anti-New’s Year Resolution” movement and focused on things to try in 2021?”

I love the idea of Anti-resolution. 🙂

Hello, 2021!

I have a fantastic track record when it comes to New Year’s Resolutions – I can’t remember the last time I’ve broken one.

Before you get too impressed, it’s because I don’t set New Year’s Resolutions. 🙂

That’s not meant to be cheeky, I don’t think a resolution would work for me and so I’ve never done them. For some, they’re great and work well. It’s the start of new habits (or at least the exploration of a new habit), new behaviors, and new starts.

For others, perhaps like me, they’re less helpful. So do what works for you, that’s probably one of the keys in life!

I do, however, enjoy fresh starts and flipping the calendar over to 2021 represents a big fresh start.

The Magic of a Fresh Start [zen habits] – “When we miss a few days of meditation, or eat junk for a week because of various celebrations, or fall off from writing our book … instead of making that to mean that this whole thing is a waste of time or that we somehow suck … we can look at it as a Fresh Start.”

This next one is an interview with Financial Imagineer, who plans goals in five-year spans:

New Year Goals: From a Swiss Multi-Million Banker [2021] [The Millennial Money Woman] – “My wife and I started imagineering our lives in 5-year steps starting in 2006. The year 2021 marks the end of our third planning cycle. So far, we have had a 100% success rate.”

And this last one can help put a lot of things into perspective:

Michael J Fox: ‘Every step now is a frigging math problem, so I take it slow’ [The Guardian] – “Parkinson’s, he said, had made him quit drinking, which in turn had probably saved his marriage. Being diagnosed at the heartbreakingly young age of 29 had also knocked the ego out of his career ambitions, so he could do smaller things he was proud of – Stuart Little, the TV sitcom Spin City – as opposed to the big 90s comedies, such as Doc Hollywood, that were too often a waste of his talents.”