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Happy Thursday folks!

Here is my favorite passage of the week, two quotes and book of the week with two important lessons to ponder on:

Passage of the Week:

Computer Scientist, Essayist and Entrepreneur Paul Graham on how to do great work:

Two Quotes:

Book of the Week with 2 Important Lessons:

The book of the week is Money Together: How to find fairness in your relationship and become an unstoppable financial team by Heather Boneparth and Douglas Boneparth.

A must-read book that guides couples through sensitive financial issues with authentic, humorous stories fostering success in money and relationships. Beyond basic money management, it emphasizes mutual investment for lifelong growth, offering wise tools to grasp personal and joint finances and dodge pitfalls.

Money isn’t a team game you win once. You have to play it forever. Navigating the major insights explored in this book, it is a practice, not a solution. You should always be trying to: explore where you’re from, move on from your mistakes, honor each other’s contributions, identify the powers that serve you and don’t, and approach uncertainty as a team.

This book will help couples in every era of their lives approach money with greater fairness, sustainability, respect, and love. With help from leading financial experts, couples therapists, psychologists, and more, they offer a fresh, human perspective on a taboo topic where too much is often left unsaid.

Here are two important lessons from the book:

1) The Places We Belong:

We all come from somewhere. The local culture where we have lived becomes a piece of who we are, no matter where we go. No matter who we love. We begin to absorb our sense of cultural community from a young age. We learned through our grandmother’s cooking and our parents’ stories and the way we lived amongst our neighbors and friends. These aren’t just memories to reminisce over and seek comfort in. They’re the foundation for how we develop our priorities and values.

In other words, we lean on our culture for more than a sense of belonging. The community that raised us taught us our earliest lessons about how to approach the world. They were the people we first trusted. Whether we realized it or not, we were looking to them for guidance. They were how we knew what to do. When we find a partner outside of our own culture, we have a lot of learning to do. Probably some unlearning too.

Cultural differences also show up in our actual money behaviors: how we spend, save, invest, and prioritize the dollars that we have. But there are helpful and harmful ways our culture can color our money beliefs. Some of them are so engrained in us that it’s hard to separate our behavior from our identity, even when the former doesn’t server us anymore. This is why we struggle with bringing two cultures together in love.

So, how can you honor our roots but still grow together? First, start with your roots. Examine why you think the way you do about money. Where did those thoughts come from? Who taught you those lessons? What are the beliefs you hold dearest to your heart? Look inward before you look out. Then, inspect those beliefs together. Do they server your lives today as adults? The hardest part is to change. Remember that you’re not letting go of your identity. Finding that place to coexist might require traveling a distance from where you started. One of you might have farther to go. That’s okay. But neither of you should start that journey before learning about where the other is coming from. This is a matter of respect that goes far deeper than money. Ask questions. Be curious. Learn to love her grandmother’s cooking; and if you don’t, at least you’ll learn how the sauce got made.

2) Our time has equal value:

When you’re delegating household responsibilities, fairness has everything to do with how you think about time. Our time has equal value. How you handle time together is no different than how you handle money together.

When you view time as a level playing field, you can start to see how the money you earn is just one component of how you contribute. Earning money is labor. So is holding your child’s hand in the drop-off line at school. Your contributions can be physical, mental, and financial. Seeing through this more holistic lens sheds light on all the ways we care for each other. You can only determine what is fair when you’re considering all the visible and invisible tasks that consume your time.

Fair is too fluid to ever be even. You don’t achieve fairness in your home just once. You have to rebalance the scale all the time, because your lives and needs are constantly evolving. You may have to experiment and readjust until you find the right thing, and only you two will know what that is. Division of labor comes down to personal values. Fair is the breakdown of responsibilities that you both believe you can handle; you both feel good about; and that allows you to preserve your individual sense to self. Your time has value, and if you don’t have enough of it, shuffle the deck.

Books I am currently reading:

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin. With 1929, Sorkin delivers an immersive, electrifying account of the most pivotal market collapse of all time with lessons that remain as urgent as ever. More than just a history, 1929 is a crucial blueprint for understanding the cycles of speculation, the forces that drive financial upheaval, and the warning signs we ignore at our peril.

The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life by Paul Millerd. This book is an ideal companion for people considering leaving their jobs, embarking on a new path, dealing with the uncertainty of an unconventional path, or searching for better models for thinking about work in a fast-changing world.