Conscious Culture 50: How Money Works
Nov 25, 2021 4:27 am
How Money Works
Welcome to Conscious Culture, a weekly newsletter full of interesting reads for curious, intelligent people who want to sharpen their minds
Hi everyone,
I hope all is well.
In celebration of Thanksgiving in America, I want to express my gratitude to you for being here.
Thanksgiving is on the 25th. I'm really excited because my mom and sister are in New York visiting me for the first time! So it will be fun to spend time with family for the next couple of days.
Let's talk about the newsletter for this week.
Here's what we're learning in this week's newsletter:
- How money works
- Pushing and pulling goals
- Why you have no time
- How to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist
- How to start being more charismatic
- Indigenous territories
Feel free to hit reply and let me know what you think.
Interesting Reads
"The biggest benefit of money is in expanding the trade between people, and hence rewarding specialization. Increasing specialization creates prosperity as now you don’t just have shoes, you have sports shoes, party shoes, formal shoes, and so on. So, multiple types of shoes can exist because consumer desire for everything can now be measured in money."
"A pulling goal is when you want to achieve something, so you come up with a plan and a structure. For example, you want to cure cancer, so you become a biologist and set up a lab and do cancer research. Or you want to get rich, so you go to business school and send out your resume."
Three Theories for Why You Have No Time
"One of the truisms of modern life is that nobody has any time. Everybody is busy, burned out, swamped, overwhelmed."
Save Like A Pessimist, Invest Like An Optimist
"Save like a pessimist means you acknowledge the cold statistics of how common bad news is. It’s common at the global, national, local, business, and personal level. Save heavily, knowing with certainty that you’ll need a cushion to deal with the next banana peel. Be a little bit paranoid, knowing the assumptions you hold today could break tomorrow, and you’ll need enough room for error to make it to the next round."
"To be criticized is never pleasant...And the degree to which we buckle in the wake of negative comments reflects how we, deep down, feel about ourselves. When we carry within us a sufficient ballast of love, criticism need never be very much more than niggling."
Learning
"Charisma is not all innate; it’s a learnable skill or, rather, a set of skills that have been practiced since antiquity. Our research with managers in the laboratory and in the field indicates that anyone trained in what we call “charismatic leadership tactics” (CLTs) can become more influential, trustworthy, and “leaderlike” in the eyes of others."
Tools and Resources
"An Online Writing Sample Content and Readability Analyzer: analyze your writing and get statistics on words you use most frequently, word and sentence length, readability, punctuation usage, and more."
"Discover headings, topics & entities to ensure you don't leave anything important out of your content. Or to get over writer's block."
Fun Stuff
"Native Land is a resource to learn more about Indigenous territories, languages, lands, and ways of life."
Quote of the Week
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
— Albert Einstein
🎉End
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With gratitude,
Will