Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

We did it! We've finally reached 100 weeks in a row of publishing this newsletter!

This week is a milestone for me and a rather large milestone at that. I've found a lot of success in my life, but that success was earned on the back of much more failure.

I write about consistency a lot, mainly because it has been a struggle of mine over the years to stay consistent with various projects. It is one thing to know how to find success, but it is a completely different thing to go out and take the appropriate action to achieve that success.

Knowledge is wasted without the action to back it up. Knowledge has to be paired with experience before it can grow into wisdom. So, it is a big deal for me to have written this newsletter for 100 straight weeks in a row.

Thank you for being a part of this journey with me.

Next week I plan to write about goals, OKRs, and share what my plans are for 2022. I also plan on reflecting on the year and celebrating wins.

But this week I want to write about rest.

In some parts of America rest is still considered a dirty word, and I hate that.

Rest matters, so that is why this week's newsletter is dedicated to rest.

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: Learn How To Rest Properly

Many of us are heading into the holidays of some sort, and that means that many of us are just heading into a different phase of working.

For whatever reason, we continue to let ourselves get stressed out when we are supposed to be relaxing!

This is because most of us, especially in the western world, do not know how to rest properly. We take rest for granted, and it takes many of us far too long to realize the importance of taking a damn break.

In this first section I will write some basics around rest and why it is important, followed up with a few tips to avoid stressing around your family.

Understand that Rest is Important - To put this simply, as soon as you wake up each day, you have a gas tank of energy that you start to burn through. The size of the gas tank will vary on how healthy you are, but the amount of gas in the gas tank will also vary depending on how much rest you've had lately.

For most of human history, we understood the importance of rest. There are entire books written about the napping habits of the most successful people in history.

Take Rest Seriously and Prioritize it in Your Life - This will involve carving out time from your already established day to let your brain shut off.

Treat resting as a skill and take the time to get better at it. Set boundaries for yourself where you are not doing any work-related activities during rest time. There should be tasks or activities that are off-limits for you while you rest, just like there are activities off-limits for you while you work.

You can create multiple points in each day where you intentionally stop working to take a bit to recharge.

I do this regularly throughout the day to ensure that my energy levels stay relatively constant for as much of the day as possible.

Never Neglect Sleep or Naps - The best way to recharge your metaphorical gas tank is to get enough sleep. In fact, the more consistently you get proper sleep, the larger your gas tank will be.

I've written many times that sleep is the number one determinant of health, and this is just another example of how valuable it can be.

Spend time Having Fun - It feels odd writing this part out, but during longer resting periods like the weekend, you should be having fun. Go out and play. Adults need to play just as much as children do. Find a demanding hobby that you love doing, and then go do that!

Poker is one such hobby for me. It is demanding, challenging, and sometimes heart-wrenching. But it is always a ton of fun, and it gives me such a needed break from my normal weekday job.

Experiment and find what works best for you - For me, I find that reading fiction is an extremely powerful way for me to relax and rest my mind. So, I reward myself throughout each workday by taking periodic breaks to read fiction. The change in context lets my brain relax and recover.

Definitely take a short rest when you close out your workday, otherwise, you risk carrying some of that with you into your evenings. Taking half an hour to rest before switching to evening activities has been a game-changer for me.

If you work from home with your family, communicate the importance of this "post-work break" and why it will benefit everyone if you are left alone to mentally shut off work in your mind.

Avoid The Holiday Stress

1. Set Boundaries! This is a theme in all areas of creating a life that suits you. Set boundaries during the holidays! You get to choose where you go, who you say, how long you stay, and how much money you spend. YOU GET TO MAKE THAT CHOICE. Not anyone else.
2. Remember, as I just alluded to in #1, only focus on what you can control. You cannot control what your angry Uncle Mike has to say about his worldview. You cannot control what others do, but you can control how you respond. Don't let the tension of others get to you. Their problems do not have to be your problems.
3. It's okay to say No to things during the holidays. Does your family have a weird tradition that you despise? You can No to that. Tell them I gave you permission 😜
4. Allow yourself to have some fun. You have my permission already, so give yourself permission to have fun. I don't care what your family thinks about you enjoying yourself, so neither should you.

Ethereum Stats:

Total ETH burned - 1.2 Million ETH (or $4.8+ billion!!)

ETH burned in the last week - 47,000 ETH !!!! 😱

Avg ETH burn per minute (all-time) - 6.20 ETH/min

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

Quote/Meme of the week:

Happy Holidays 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.