Happy Wednesday and Happy New Year, Wise Owl Nation!

We're back for the first week of 2022, the first week of your resolutions and goals, and the first week you start to doubt yourself.

So of course it's high time I bring up a topic I traditionally always sought to avoid; responsibility.

Responsibility is a strange concept, and the more I think about it, the more I realize how poorly most people understand responsibility.

So much of our stress and anxiety stems from, in some small part, our false senses of responsibility to shit that doesn't really matter. Or we spread our imagined responsibility across such a wide area that we immediately become overwhelmed.

So today I want you to read my thoughts on responsibility, think on it, then take a deep dark look at yourself to see where you can focus on caring about the stuff that actually matters.

Let's get into it.

You can find all past issues (including this one) here. 

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🦉 Wise Owl Tip(s) of The Week: The Role of Responsibility in Success

I read a quote yesterday that inspired this week's topic, and will lead us nicely into my first few points.

"Life rarely changes in a positive way without an increase in responsibility." - James Clear

This is an absolutely true statement even if I am somewhat loathe to admit it. I wish I had the time to write about the many phases of my life where all I wanted to do was abandon all responsibility and just coast.

I kid you not in my early twenties, my primary motivation for trying to build wealth was so that I could build myself a money wall to hide myself from any and all obligations.

This fear of responsibility gave me initial motivation to start building up my own war chest in hopes to achieve "f*ck you money."

Of course, I was a misguided idiot that knew nothing about the world or my insignificant place within it.

Fortunately for me, in an attempt to combat my growing anxiety, I discovered stoic philosophy and started only focusing on the areas of my life I could control, which drastically reduced my worldview and made taking responsibility for myself, my actions, and my commitments much easier.

The odd thing that occurred when I started doing this was that I realized how little responsibility I actually had. A bright metaphorical light was shined on my glaring lack of ownership over my own life.

I started taking ownership one area at a time, and very quickly my life started to trend in a better direction. By focusing on what I could control, I discovered what I should take responsibility for, and the many things I did not have any responsibility for.

So that is where I ask you to start with a little exercise.

What areas of life are you focusing on that are completely outside of your control?

Take some time to think about this.

Who are you giving time to that isn't serving you?

What are you spending your time worrying about that you can't change?

I call this kind of wasted energy "toxic responsibility."

Examples of stuff you have no control over

• What other people think
• What your ex is up to
• The price of bitcoin

It is so important to remember that you have no responsibility to live up to someone else's expectations for you.

Spend as little time as possible chasing other people's ideas of who you should be instead of chasing your own ideas about who you should be.

👆🏼 read that last line again. Internalize it. Live by it.

Areas of life you should be responsible for

Once you give yourself permission to stop giving a f*ck about stuff that you can't control, you'll realize you probably have a lot more capacity to take on more responsibility in the areas of your life that actually matter.

For example - If you increase your responsibility for:

The quality of your health - your mind and body are connected so improving the health of your body will improve the health of your mind and vice versa. Taking responsibility for this means getting off your ass and cooking your own food, exercising, sleeping enough, etc.

The love and attention you're giving to your partner(s) or children - You can't control what your loved ones do, but you can control how much love and attention you give them.

One of my core principles for life is "Love is a verb." Practice treating love as a verb and go do that.

Your own failures - Humans have the wonderful benefit of being imperfect. We all make mistakes, but not all of us choose to learn from those mistakes. Our failures can be the best teachers if we can be humble enough to learn from them. Increase your responsibility for owning your failures so you don't repeat them.

Your morning and evening routines - Not many people can control every aspect of their days. Life is too random and serendipitous for that. There are two parts to each day that we all have full control over, though. The beginning and end of each day. Take responsibility for your days by designing and sticking to healthy morning and evening routines.

The quality of your living space - I wrote an article many years ago about how if you don't control your environment, your environment will control you. This is always true. So take ownership over the quality and cleanliness of your home. Keep it clean. Remove food, objects, etc that aren't benefiting you.

My mission for 2022, as I wrote last week, is to "Focus on What You Truly Care About."

You should too.

Focus on taking greater responsibility in the areas that matter to you, that you have control over, and ruthlessly cutting out areas of focus that you have no control over.

Quote/Meme of the week:

I love this quote because of how much of a wake-up call it always is when I read it.

Keeping with our theme this week, you are responsible for focusing on what you can control, and your own perceptions of yourself are definitely under your control.

Happy New Year and have a great week!

This concludes our issue this week, I hope it gave you some perspective or injected a little motivation into your life!

If it helped, let me know! I read every newsletter response I receive, and I absolutely love hearing from all of you. This newsletter is for you, so I need your help to make it as great as possible.

If you'd like to show me some love for writing all this free stuff, you can always buy me a coffee.

More Resources

I will be adding to this section over time as we find resources that will help you all.

• Check out the Wise Owl Store
• All Wise Healthy Wealthy Articles on Medium
• Start your own Sendfox Newsletter
• Free products to help you level up

Crypto Resources

The Bankless Podcast: This is a link to the bankless podcast on Spotify. Start from the very beginning and learn why I am so positive about the power of Crypto and Ethereum in particular. You can find the podcast easily on the internet, but I am linking to episode 1 on Spotify for your convenience.

Buy your first ETH or BTC:

• On Coinbase - this is the easiest starting place for the newest beginners
• On Gemini - Another great option founded by the Winklevoss brothers. They are based out of New York.
• On Kraken - Kraken has a bit of a harder user interface, but they already have ETH staking enabled with the push of a single button.

Earn interest on your crypto

• BlockFi - Currently, you can earn 4.5% interest on BTC, 5% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.25% on stable coins like USDC. Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter.

Other tools:

• Argent Wallet - This is the best mobile wallet for Ethereum, Defi, and all things on the Ethereum network, including staking. They even have plans to implement Layer 2 to remove network fees.
• Ethhub - this is a weekly newsletter that lists out all the interesting news, articles, and tweets that have happened in Crypto that week. It's free and awesome.
• Ethdashboard - A simple dashboard to look at various metrics in the ethereum space. I mainly use this as a quick tool to check ETH gas fees.
• Cointracker - this is one of the better tools for tracking all of your various crypto across all of the various wallets, exchanges, etc. You can also use them to do your crypto taxes each year.
• Metamask - this is a crypto wallet that you can access from your browser and allows you to easily interact with blockchain apps online.