Welcome to Tuesday, everyone. Somehow, someway, I lost all of the links I’d collated for this week already. I must have accidentally closed the file I was using to compose these daily updates, so now I have to recollect everything from scratch haha. Oh well.
There’s no difference to you, obviously, but here I am on Monday night when I ought to be going to bed. Instead, I’m trying to remember which articles I’d found to share.
Let’s try these on for size:
Retirement budgeting 101: Tips for pre-retirees. [Ask the Money Coach] — “As you approach retirement, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your future expenses. By knowing what to expect, you can effectively budget and plan for a comfortable retirement. Let’s take a closer look at some common retirement expenses to help you get started.”
Why luck isn’t real. [Of Dollars and Data] — “We know luck is real. We know luck impacts our investments, our careers, and our lives. And we’ve all been on the receiving end of some form of good or bad luck at some point in our past. But, believing in luck does very little to help us…After all, if you believe in luck, what lesson do you learn after facing a setback?”
“When I stopped trying to self-optimize, I got better.” [The New York Times gift article] — “The tactic of subtraction goes against the grain of the so-called mind-set revolution, in which it seems everyone is adding this or that quality to their mental approach. The growth mind-set. The abundance mind-set. The gratitude mind-set. But in this genre of self-optimization, if it can be called that, we are adding more and more duct tape to something that isn’t broken — our mind — until it is so covered we lose sight of the beautifully designed machine underneath it all and it thus becomes, in fact, broken.”
I read that last article two weeks ago, and it’s really stuck with me. I was just thinking about it on today’s dog walk, in fact.
More and more, I find that I’m trying to remove optimization from my life too. When I optimize, I become overly focused on metrics. Metrics are only side effects. They’re outcomes. When I pay too much attention to these outcomes, I become unhappy. But if I focus instead on the underlying processes that produce these outcomes, my life gets better.
Okay, that’s it for today. Back with more tomorrow, folks!