Welcome, my friends, to the first Friday of 2024. I hope you had a good week. I’m here to make it even better by sending you into the weekend with some great stories about money — and more! Take a look.
How will you measure your life? [Harvard Business Review] — “Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.”
The long shadow of checks. [Bits about Money] — “And thus we come to an important fact about the U.S. payments ecosystem: every way of moving money between banks was designed in relation to the capabilities necessary to facilitate nationwide clearing of paper checks. The most common method of interbank payments in the U.S. wears this history in its name: ACH stands for Automated Clearing House.'” [Long but fascinating.]
The Munger Operating System: How to live a life that really works. [Farnam Street] — “Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology…I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say ‘I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it. I think that only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.'”
Lastly, here’s a a 23-minute video that really opened my eyes to the hidden power of my iPhone.
I knew it was possible to automate common actions, but I thought it was overly complicated. It’s not. Watching this video (and learning how to use the iPhone “focus” modes) has been enlightening. Did you know you can map actions to double-tapping the back of your phone? To triple-tapping it? To triple-clicking the side button?
Mixing all of these things together — alternate inputs, focus modes, shortcuts, automations — can let you do some really cool stuff. Now I have my phone set up to automatically play Taylor Swift whenever it connects to my car stereo! Life is good. 😉