This post is coming a little late this week than my regular Monday or Tuesday timing due to the significant logistical challenges I face with the back to school schedule. I also struggled with what topic to write about.
There’s the funny way the market interpreted lower monthly inflation numbers this week, the details of the $3.5 trillion spending plan that the Democrats have proposed and how this could change our daily routines, gifts to children and taxes. Even ETF’s could take a significant hit in their tax treatment if the current proposed package is approved as is.
However, I don’t want to write about something without devoting the time to research the topic to make something informed and insightful for people to read. That becomes difficult in weeks like this where I face significant change both in my life and my daily routine.
Every time I make a new post my goal is to educate, inform or inspire others. In corporate speak I want to “add value”. It’s nice to be able to share my thoughts and opinions but I’m interested in helping more than myself just cope with my feelings at any one time. This is why I try to avoid just relaying my feelings on something or pontificating on broad partisan political topics. I try to focus on those topics that have more of a financial and personal decision element to them, even if some may come off to some as political.
It’s for this reason that sometimes my posts touch on my own struggles and my own issues with pushing myself. I’m a world, especially for millennials and Gen-Z, where all your peers hide behind a guise of a perfect life online, hearing how others struggle with things and how they sometimes try, and fail to overcome them can add value in its own way. This was reinforced recently when an internal Facebook study was leaked recently which found that 13% of British female teens traced their suicidal thoughts back to Instagram and 6% of American female teens did as well.
Even many seemingly pure financial decisions however, can carry an element of emotion. Due to my training in financial topics, I have long been able to separate cold financial decisions from emotional ones, but engaging with others on financial topics has made me realize how much emotion is tied to financial decisions for so many people and the logic portion plays little to no role at all.
Trying and Failing Matters
None of us can learn the resiliency we need to overcome difficult hurdles if we shy away from our struggles. When I restarted writing this blog 2 and a half years ago, I was extremely motivated to at least start something that had the potential to take me on a long winding path towards something new. Embracing the potential for failure, I changed my frame of mind towards writing. Even if I didn’t earn anything monetarily from blogging, there were qualitative benefits from it in both my daily life and down the road I could take away.
On a day to day basis, it forces me to go in-depth on particular financial topics which I have noticed sometimes have relevance in my personal decisions and work life. In the longer term it can act as a teaching resource, record of reflection for myself, kind of like a journal, or an experience for my children to take in some time in the future.
At that time of starting to write again and feeling inspired a few years ago, I was waking up at 4am. I was researching, writing, posting news on social media and exercising all before taking my son to daycare and then going to work for my day job. I would then take the train back to daycare and take the bus back to my second apartment, which I rented near my ex-wife to be close to my son. All this was so that I would not lose custody of my son, which I was eventually able to secure jointly with my ex-wife.
At times it was overwhelming, but I had a larger goal in mind: time with my son and not letting someone who was trying to sabotage my efforts, win. This struggle super charged my routine. It forced me to get out of my head with repeated “whoa is me” thoughts and forced me to focus on what I needed to get done because my time was very limited. Ironically, it seems I was able to achieve even more with my back against the wall then when I had much more time and energy at my disposal. The struggle and the discipline it required made me better.
Falling Back and Coming Back
Once I was able to finalize my divorce, refinance some of my properties, and live in one place at a time, things started to stabilize for me, and I got comfortable. I stopped waking up at 4am. My workout wasn’t as consistent and I wasn’t as focused at work.
I could have blamed the pandemic or work from home or having my son attend school at home but the real fact of the matter was that I didn’t have the challenge in front of me that I once did and I got a little comfortable from not having that around.
Recently though, I have started to get back into a routine of getting up early (5am this time not 4am) exercising regularly and pushing myself in all areas of life. I have come to realize that having discipline and committing to things day in and day out has taken that time I used to let my mind wander and distract me, away. Suddenly half an hour or an hour free with my girlfriend, my children, or just being able to study for the CFA exam, becomes precious and I use it more efficiently. The irony of the discipline is that although it allows me less time for other activities, I spend more time on those things I want to get done.
I remarked this to my girlfriend recently when she was lamenting the fact that I have to get up earlier and seemingly make a Herculean commute in order to get my son to school on the other side of NYC. Yet no matter what solution we tried to come up with, there wasn’t a single one that didn’t involve struggle for at least one of us. What helps for me personally and may help many others, is to accept that there will always be struggle.
Embrace Struggle
That embracing struggle and the self control it requires to confront it would make us happier, sounds counterintuitive. Despite this, there is even clinical research that backs this hypothesis up.
Wilhelm Hofman and a team of researchers at the University of Chicago conducted a study in 2013 which attempted to look at how self control and a general sense of happiness may be related. The results of their study were featured in The Atlantic.
The researchers used online surveys where people agreed or disagreed with statements such as “I do certain things that are bad for me, if they are fun” and then combined the results with another study that tracked smart phone users throughout the day and prompted them to input their emotions at certain times during the week.
Hofmann found that not only were the more disciplined people happier in the long term (i.e. achieving long term goals is known to give people a strong sense of satisfaction) but they were also happier in the short term. The magazine summarized the implications of this:
As they go about their daily lives, people with a lot of self-control appear to generally be in higher spirits; in the long run, they’re happier with their lives. To explain why this would be so, the researchers conducted another online survey. What they figured out is that instead of constantly denying themselves, people high in self-control are simply less likely to find themselves in situations where that’s even an issue. They don’t waste time fighting inner battles over whether or not to eat a second piece of cake. They’re above such petty temptations. And that, it would seem, makes them happier … if still just a little bit sad.
In essence, disciplined people tend to avoid the tempting counterproductive situations altogether. This makes sense for my own personal analogy where having a compressed schedule doesn’t allow me the time to wage that difficult internal battle as to whether or not to do something now or whether it will turn out bad if I do it.
It also forces me to pivot my frame of mind. Rather than complain that I have such a long commute, I can utilize the fact that I have an extended time with my son to talk and interact with him. Something that many parents miss in the hustle of their daily lives and often regret not taking more time for later in life. If I take public transportation, it could allow me more uninterrupted time to study since I won’t always have a signal from my work phone to bother me.
In a society where we often idolize the rich and the beautiful, it’s worth remembering that being rich or being beautiful have their own struggles as well. A beautiful woman may become accustomed to having everything given to her by men while she is young. Yet this can destroy one’s work ethic and hits hard late in life if they haven’t set themselves up with someone else. They may have to actually put in work or acquire a skill to get the same things they once got based on their looks. The realization of how hard the rest of us have to work to earn a living is a sobering realization and leaves many embittered in their later years.
Someone wealthy as well may have to deal with their less ambitious friends and relatives who feel entitled to their money, constantly begging and offering sob stories of why they need more. It’s one reason some people say money tears people apart. I have had more than a few friends even tell me seeing the burden that those who have money have to bear in their own families has led them to be less ambitious and even self sabotage their own well being to not have to deal with the “struggle” of having money.
Better to realize now that there is no utopia, whether you are rich and good looking or poor and homely, there will always be struggle. Better then to embrace it and embrace the discipline that can give you the tools to face any struggle and achieve your own happiness.
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