Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

I have a confession - I am a huge nerd. Not only am I a huge nerd, I am a massive fan of a fantasy fiction series called "Cradle." The book series is basically magical self-improvement, and I am somewhat obsessed.

Why am I bringing this up, do you ask? Well, this series is cool because the more you reread it, the better the entire series becomes. Throw away sentences and settings in the first book don't hold deeper meaning until the fourth book. Places they visit in book two don't hold true relevance on a global scale until book seven! You have to "read it twice, to fully appreciate it once."

This phenomenon got me thinking about how the humans often need to think, listen, or consume ideas or concepts more than once to fully appreciate them.

• The best writers, read.
• The best musicians listen to other music
• The wisest philosophers must first learn, listen, and meditate on life before any true insights reach them
• The best poker players fold eight hands out of ten. They spend the hands they don't play observing their many opponents, learning patterns and tendencies they can exploit later.

Then I started thinking how this "do 2 of this before doing 1 of this" idea can be applied across the board to self-improvement.

And that is what this week is about.

"Listen twice, speak once." - Tupac

Let's get into it.

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Wisdom Tip of The Week: Don't become human spam

This section was inspired by few pages in the book "Show Your Work" by Austin Kleon.

Human Spam are people that think their ideas, work, etc are more important than everyone else's. They like to tell you all of their ideas but don't want to listen to any of yours.

Their music should be listened to, their book recommendations should be read, and how dare you try to recommend music or books back at them. They are value spammers, not value consumers.

What these people don't realize is that you cannot truly provide value to the world until you've consumed value. In other words, until you've truly listened enough, you never have anything of value to say.

"When people realize they're being listened to, they tell you things." - Richard Ford

It's pretty simple in a way:

• Give a damn about someone twice before expecting them to give a damn about you once
• Read two articles for every one article you write and publish
• Better yet, engage with two articles for every one article you publish
• Cook a meal twice before expecting someone else to enjoy it once (I don't know why this is so funny to me. I am so bad at cooking 😂)

Health Tip of The Week: Be healthy twice, unhealthy once

Okay, okay, this one is a bit of a stretch, but hear me out. If you make healthy choices twice as often as you make unhealthy ones, you are much better off than the alternative.

Some examples:

• Exercise two days, and take one day off. Rinse and repeat.
• Eat two healthy meals for each unhealthy meal you eat (assuming you can keep the calories of the unhealthy meal under control)
• Get a full nights sleep twice for every night you stay up too late.
• Wash two dishes for every one dish you use!

You get the idea. You can get ahead of anything if you make the right choice twice as often as the wrong one.

Wealth Tip of The Week: Save twice, Spend once

This is a powerful concept, and if you can pull it off for any extended period of time you will very quickly accumulate a large amount of savings that give you a concept called "f*ck you money."

If you spend $20 put $40 into savings.

If you spend $2,000 every month, try to put $4,000 into savings every month.

Every month you do this, you create two-months worth of emergency money in case you ever are unemployed.

Here is another example - If you did this for a full year, you could live without any income for another two years. If you did it for five years, you could retire for a full decade.

It's really tough to get to a place where this is possible, but the concept is powerful.

The first step of achieving "save twice, spend once" is "earn twice, spend once" which is an easier benchmark to reach.

Earn twice, spend once just means that you only spend half of what you earn. So if you earn $3,000 each month you keep your expenses to $1,500.

For my thoughts on cutting expenses or designing your less-expensive lifestyle, see my article on the topic.

Quote 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 recieve, 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.

More Resources

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

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