Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

This week I choose to write about perspective.

Newborn babies and toddlers have a strange way of viewing the world.

To them, everything they think and feel is the same thing everyone else thinks and feels. To them, their pain is your pain, their wants are your wants, and everything they know about the world is what you also know about the world.

Young children don't realize that they are unique people with their own experiences. It's different for every child, but at some point around the age of four years old, they realize that everyone sees the world differently.

As we grow up into teenagers and then adults, we sometimes carry some of those early and flawed world views into our later years. I can't tell you how many times I will absolutely love a book or a movie, and am stunned that others hate it.

We are all living life from a different perspective, colored by different thoughts, powered by different knowledge, and shaped by different experiences.

This week I share a few different perspectives that have made me think about life a bit differently.

Let's get into it.

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

_____________________________________

Was this email forwarded to you? 

Click here to subscribe

_____________________________________

🧠 Wisdom Thought(s) of The Week:

In life, the specific solution doesn't matter

When is the last time you played with legos because you wanted to play with legos? It's been two decades for me, at the very least.

But legos are a good tool for showcasing how different perspectives, given the same problem or task, can create different versions of the same solution.

For example:

If you gave ten people the same set of basic legos and asked them to build you a duck, you would get ten different versions of a lego duck.

Every person will correctly deliver you a lego duck, but not a single duck will be exactly the same.

This is a basic but powerful reminder that you don't need the "perfect" solution to a problem. You just need to get to a solution.

Life gets harder the easier you try to make it

When I say easier, I don't mean simpler.

Simplifying something is powerful and helpful.

Making something easy means you've made it comfortable.

You can't grow when you're comfortable.

Some examples:

• Consistent exercise is hard, but never working out makes life harder.
• Mastering a skill is hard, but having no skills makes life much harder.
• Spending less than you earn is hard, but being in debt is harder.
• Tough conversations are hard, but avoiding the conflict makes life harder.
• Honesty can be hard, but remembering all the lies is much, much harder.

Sometimes you have to embrace the suck to put yourself in a position to grow and improve.

What can you do on your worst days?

There is a great quote I read in "Atomic Habits" that goes:

"We do not rise to the level of our goals, but instead fall to the level of our habits." - James Clear

There is a deeper truth to this quote than initially meets the eye. At first glance, it is saying that if you can develop healthy habits, then that is the baseline for how productive you can be.

This is true, but there is more to this. We can't rely on having good days or our best days frequently enough to build these habits. So, when you think about what kind of habit you want to form, you have to think about what you're able to do on your worst day.

This is why simplifying a habit and building on it over time is powerful. You need a simple version that you can always do on your worst days.

This is a powerful way of thinking through starting a new habit that will keep you from overwhelming yourself.

So the real question becomes:

"What can I stick to and do, even on the worst of days?"

How you view yourself determines how you act

Each and every one of you has an internal opinion of yourself.

That opinion might change from day to day, but I guarantee there is an overall theme.

I have a very strong internal belief that I perform better under pressure. This internal belief acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy sometimes when things get hard.

When I know that I am better under pressure, then I can focus more easily when that pressure hits. I can ignore the noise around me and find a flow state.

On the other hand, I also have been fighting an internal self-belief that I am not a long-distance runner. "That's just not who I am."

This internal view has made the act of running much harder than it needs to be.

Because of this weird belief, I have avoided things like:

• 5k runs
• Charity runs
• Running with my friends

The point here is that you can dramatically change your perspective on almost anything if you can change the way you think about yourself in that environment.

I used to be nervous and anxious about playing live poker. Then I changed how I perceive myself at a live poker table.

"You can play four online poker tables at the same time! A live poker table is quite literally 4-8x slower than that. Which means you have 4-8x more time to think and analyze the table!"

And thus the "You are a good poker player, especially at live poker." self-view is born.

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.

— Henry Ford

Judge your life by value-added, not value-earned

I don't consider myself to be wealthy, but I am well on my way.

While I have a basic understanding of the stock market, that way of making money has always felt strange to me.

What has always felt better is the basic "Provide a good or service that people want, and they will pay you for it."

This really woke me up when I realized how powerful information is when paired with the internet. The internet allows all of us to provide value at scale.

Something like this newsletter allows me to write something I find valuable one time, and hundreds of you can gain from it. That is scale.

When I receive emails from readers of this newsletter it feels amazing. Adding value feels better than earning value. By a large margin.

🤑 Quick Crypto Update: EIP-1559 goes live in early August

In a previous newsletter, I mentioned that EIP-1559, the upgrade that will create deflationary pressure on ETH, would go live in July. That was the correct timeline at the time, but Blockchain upgrades never have a guaranteed date because they have to be upgraded via blocks.

However, at this point, the London software upgrade (which includes EIP-155) has been live on the Ethereum Test-net for all of July and will be deployed to the Ethereum Mainnet before August 5th, likely on August 4th.

It would be irresponsible of me to guarantee any short-term price changes in ETH, but I can guarantee that EIP-1559 will reduce the overall supply of Ethereum in the short, mid, and long term.

The longer EIP-1559 is live, the more ETH will be burned and removed from the supply. This will cause the price to increase.

If you are buying and holding ETH, you are doing what I believe is the best thing, and will eventually reap the rewards.

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 5% interest on BTC, 4.5% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.6% 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.