On the fifth Tuesday of each quarter of the year, I share a book I’ve read recently. I highlighted “mustard seeds,” which impressed me. I hope you find one or two that will be helpful to you.
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Here are the “mustard seeds” I highlighted:
The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people (page 6, Kindle Edition).
Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know (page 8, Kindle Edition).
Physics isn’t controversial. It’s guided by laws. Finance is different. It’s guided by people’s behaviors. And how I behave might make sense to me but look crazy to you (page 11, Kindle Edition).
The challenge for us is that no amount of studying or open-mindedness can genuinelly recreate the power of fear and uncertainty (page 15, Kindle Edition).
There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need 1. The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy. Perhaps they go hand in hand; wanting to surpass your peers can be the fuel of hard work. But life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations (page 41, Kindle Edition).
“Enough is realizing that the opposite—an insatiable appetite for more—will push you to the point of regret (page 42, Kindle Edition).
If I had to summarize money success in a single word it would be “survival” (page 55, Kindle Edition).
2. Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan (page 60, Kindle Edition).
Money has many ironies. Here’s an important one: Wealth is what you don’t see. We tend to judge wealth by what we see, because that’s the information we have in front of us. We can’t see people’s bank accounts or brokerage statements. So we rely on outward appearances to gauge financial success. Cars. Homes. Instsagram photos. Modern capitalism makes helping people fake it until they make it a cherished industry. But the truth is that wealth is what you don’t see (page 89, Kindle Edition).
But spending beyond a pretty low level of materialism is mostly a reflection of ego approching income, a way to spend money to show people that you have (or had) money. Think of it like this, and one of the most powerful ways to increse your savings isn’t to raise your income. It’s to raise your humility (page 97, Kindle Edition).
Consider that 85% of active mutual funds underperformed their benchmark over the 10 years ending 2018. That figure has been fairly stable for generations (page 174, Kindle Edition).
Independence, to me, doesn’t mean you’ll stop working. It means you only do the work you like with people you like at the times you want for as long as you want (page 191, Kindle Edition).
The statistics show 85% of large-cap active managers didn’t beat the S&P 500 over the decade ending 2019 (page 194, Kindle Edition).
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Servant of Jesus, husband to Gail, father to Jerrie Wayne Barber, II and Christi Parsons, grandfather, great-grandfather, Interim Preacher, Shepherd coach, Ventriloquist, barefoot runner, ride a cruiser bicycle
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