Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

One of my closest friends is a badass runner.

The kind of runner that can get up and run 8-10 miles without worrying about it.

The kind of runner that messages you they might be 10-20 minutes late because they have to go run 10 miles in a rainstorm.

Recently, my friend had a bit of an epiphany.

He asked himself a difficult question.

"What do I really want from running?"

He had noticed that the amount of time required for him to train for marathons was taking away from some of the parts of his life he truly loved.

My friend finally started to realize what he really wanted from his weekly lifestyle.

And that is the theme of this week's newsletter: The importance of knowing what you want. Exactly what you want.

Because this concept applies across wisdom, health, and wealth I am going to keep it to one section.

Let's get into it.

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

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🧠 Wisdom Tip(s) of The Week: Do You Even Know What You Want?

One of the most fascinating trends I have noticed during the last year and a half of this pandemic is how many people were wanting to move away from where they lived.

For many of these people, their work went 100% remote and they were no longer bound by geography. For some, the geographic freedom became immediately apparent and they immediately moved away. My old roommate was one of these people. He realized right away that he could move back to Dallas to spend more time with his elderly grandparents while still keeping his job.

All of this was strange to me because it made me realize that there were TONS of people living in cities they didn't truly want to live in, just because their job was located there.

🤯🤯 This concept blew my mind.

It then got me thinking about what else are people doing that is a massive waste of time and energy because they don't actually know what they want.

A few things came to mind:

• Dating
• Random pursuits of wealth
• Lifestyle design
• Place of employment
• Hobbies

Now don't get me wrong, self-awareness is incredibly difficult to cultivate and maintain, but as a society, we really need to get better about this.

What do you want?

"Life is easier when you know what you want—but most people don't take the time to figure out what they want.

It's not that we are completely lost, but our efforts are often slightly misdirected. People will work for years and ultimately achieve a lifestyle that isn't quite what they were hoping for—often, simply, because they never clearly defined what they wanted.

An hour of thinking can save you a decade of work." - James Clear

So how do you figure out what you want?

As trite as this answer is going to sound, it's true; You think about it.

Make lists, ask tough questions.

For example:

What kind of life partner do you want? Do you even want a single life partner? Do you want marriage, really? Do you want children? What traits are you looking for in a partner? Do you have the traits your ideal partner would be interested in?

If you don't know the answers to those questions, dating might be an even more painful prospect than it already is.

Another example:

While I consider retirement to be sort of a scam, building investments around achieving financial freedom is extremely important. But to do so, you have to know a lot about your own relationship with money.

• What is your ideal lifestyle?
• How much money would you have to spend each month to maintain that preferred lifestyle?
• How close is your current lifestyle to your ideal one?
• Are you spending too much in areas that don't contribute to that ideal lifestyle?

If you can't even answer the first question, the rest don't matter.

You have to know what you want.

💰 Crypto/Ethereum News: A Chinese MegaCorporation causes the markets to crash

So crypto crashed over the last few days again, and again, it had nothing to do with the value of the crypto assets.

This time it had to do with a global equities sell-off that seems to have been caused by some real-estate industry troubles in China. Namely, a mega-corporation called Evergrande borrowed a ton of money and now part of their corporation is defaulting on hundreds of billions of dollars.

Anytime something dramatic like this happens, most of the world had no idea it was going to happen, so most of the banking/investing world freaks out and sells off their holdings.

Why? I don't really know. What is even stranger is how it affected the crypto market.

Ethereum, smart contracts, open ledgers, an immutable blockchain, etc. are tools that can prevent mega corporations from lying, hiding, and stealing around their finances.

This was just another scenario where the Crypto markets suffered because they are still tightly linked with the traditional global financial system.

The fun part is that we all got a little discount on Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. and are already seeing the prices start to slowly creep back up.

Ethereum Stats:

Total ETH burned - 345,000 ETH (or $1+ billion!!)

ETH burned in the last week - 48,500 ETH !!!! 😱

Avg ETH burn per minute (all-time) - 5.00 ETH/min

My favorite website for watching the ETH 🔥 is ultrasound.money.

Quote/Meme of the week:

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% interest on BTC, 4% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8% 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.