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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:

Author and Professor Adam Grant on becoming a creature of discomfort:

Two Quotes:

Book of the Week with 2 Important Lessons:

The book of the week is The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life by Morgan Housel.

A brilliant continuation of The Psychology of Money, offering powerful storytelling and deep insight into why we spend and how to do it wisely. With wit and clarity, Morgan Housel helps us rethink our relationship with money and discover how to use it for genuine happiness.

While The Psychology of Money focused on how we grow wealth and how to earn freedom, The Art of Spending Money focuses on how we use it and make the most of it. Neither book tells us what to do with our money, because everyone’s different. But both seek to understand what happens in our heads while using money. This book is about how spending money has little to do with spreadsheets and numbers and a lot to do with psychology, envy, social aspirations, identity, insecurity, and other topics that are too often ignored in finance.

Money is less about numbers and more about stories-stories we tell ourselves about what matters, what makes us happy, and how we measure success. Spending money is more art than science.

Here are two important lessons from the book:

1) The Happiest People Are The Most Content:

True happiness is when you stop asking what else you need to be happy. When you think of it like that, you become eager to spend less time asking what’s missing and more time enjoying what you already have – regardless of how much or how little that might be. You realize that the key to happiness is being content with what you have, and its antidote is focusing on what you don’t.

The happiest people are the most content. Not necessarily the richest, the healthiest, the most beautiful, or the most successful. Just whoever gets a point of saying, “I’m good, I’m satisfied with what I have and who I am.” That’s Nirvana. That’s who takes the happiness crown.

Psychological wealth is such an important concept, and with money it comes from proper expectations. Happiness is contentment. Contentment is what we have relative to what we want. All happiness is in life is just the gap between expectations and circumstances. The person who has everything but wants even more feels poorer than the person who has little but wants nothing else. The key is realizing that happiness is the state when nothing is missing, regardless of the lifestyle you’re living.

Desire is a hidden form of debt that must be repaid before you get to feel any happiness. There is a Stoic saying: “Not needing wealth is more valuable than wealth itself.” To be content with what you have is the deepest way to enjoy the house you’ve purchased, the clothes you wear, and the vacations you take.

2) Independence is a Spectrum:

Money you haven’t spent buys something intangible but valuable: freedom, independence, and being able to spend time in your own way. Every dollar of saving buys a claim check on the future. (And every dollar of debt you hold is a piece of your future that someone else controls.)

Independence is a spectrum. Independence is not something you either have or don’t have, it’s not binary like that. Every little bit of savings, and every little bit of lower expense, pushes you higher on the independence spectrum.

Now, some people value independence more than others. Some people want to be higher on the spectrum than others. There’s no right answers on how much you should want. But too many people don’t bother chasing independence because it seems out of reach, when in fact they could easily – at any income level – be improving their independence spectrum, and in turn improve their lives.

The trick is viewing every bit of savings as having actively purchased something, even if it doesn’t come with a receipt: You have purchased the ability to do what you want, when you want, with whom you want, for as long as you want. And it is priceless.

Book I am currently reading:

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain. Great read so far!