Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

Good morning, good evening, and to some of you on the other side of the world, good night!

This past week I've spent a lot of time thinking about base principles. I live in the world of software development, and in that world, you can solve most team-related problems by thinking about the core principles that surround agile software development.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Whenever I am faced with a problem at work that I haven't solved before, I come back to these four core principles.

Base principles allow you to problem-solve life in a consistent and predictable way.

So today I am going to review some base principles. I've done this before, but it's been at least a year since the last time I did so, and in that time I've encountered quite a few more principles that are worth sharing.

Principles are also how you get healthy and wealthy, so I'll break the principles down into our favorite categories.

Enjoy the read and let's get into it.

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

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🧠 Wisdom Focus Tip(s) of The Week: Common and Powerful Principles

A few basic principles to kick start the thinking:

• Systems over Goals
• Discipline over Motivation
• Writing over Reading
• Trends over News
• Questions over Answers (Always be learning)
• People over Projects/Process

ABL - Always Be Learning

This principle should be self-evident, but it is not. We all have friends and family that go through their lives without purposefully seeking to learn and improve.

The most basic equation for wisdom is:

Wisdom = Knowledge * Experience

The knowledge you gain paired with personal experiences will, over time, become wisdom.

It's more complicated than that, but we aren't getting complicated today. So, the more you learn, the more you learn, and on and on forever.

We live in a world where all the information of the world is available at our fingertips if you just have the desire to look for it.

One final bit of advice on this - focus on retention, not total consumption. I don't care if you've read 100 books this year. I care if you can retain what you've read. Quality over quantity in this case.

Only Focus On What You Can Control

How often do you feel overwhelmed and out of control? If that is happening, the chances are you're trying to focus on too much at once.

If you can't control it, don't focus on it.

If you can control it, then focus on it.

When life gets bad, use "Only focus on what you can control" as a mantra and things will get better. Let it be your light in the darkness.

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood"

This is the 5th Habit of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" and it has wide-ranging applications.

This wisdom is especially potent in the following areas (in my experience):

• Relationships
• Projects at work
• Friendships
• Literally any social function

This pairs well with "always be learning" and overlaps with it in a few ways, but the key difference here is that this principle involves the prioritization of communication with other people.

Writing is Overpowered

There is a reason I write a newsletter instead of just tweeting or making videos.

Writing helps me:

1. Organize my thoughts
2. Increase the retention of what I've learned
3. Create connections between concepts (this is a superpower)
4. Share these ideas forever (via this newsletter)

You create value in life by doing high-leverage activities, and writing is a high-leverage activity all of you are capable of doing.

You don't need to write for others to benefit from writing. You can easily create a journal where you pour out all your thoughts, emotions, hopes, dreams, and ideas.

It can be extremely cleansing to clear your mental desk by writing about what is cluttering it.

🥑 Health Thoughts of The Week: Calories In/Calories Out

Calories in vs Calories out:

Regardless of your thoughts on diets, weight loss, etc. the following will always be true:

• Over time, if you bring in more calories than you use - weight is gained
• Over time, if you use more calories than you bring in - weight is lost

This is a consistent rule of life, and the challenge a westernized world faces is that it is too easy to bring in more calories than are burned.

This is your challenge if you are trying to lose weight. Can you consistently consume fewer calories than you burn each day? If you can, you will lose weight.

As with everything else, it is the consistency of being able to do this that matters.

Get stronger every day:

Getting older is weird. Before age thirty, the older you get, the stronger you get, on average. After thirty, the older you get, the weaker you become, on average.

Unless you seek to get stronger. Every. Day.

This graph is my favorite reminder of how powerful tiny gains are.

If you can get 1% stronger every day, or every week, then eventually you will be one of the strongest people you know.

Sure, human strength hits diminishing returns at some point, but how many of us will hit that point?

I challenge you to do something to get stronger today, tomorrow, next week, next month.

Fight against time and maintain a strong body.

Everything else in life will be far more fun.

💲 Wealth/Crypto Thoughts of The Week: Principles on Wealth

There are only four ways to build wealth. Long-term readers should be able to call them out by heart at this point.

1. Spend Less
2. Earn More
3. Reduce/Eliminate Debt
4. Invest

Spend Less than you Earn:

Hey, guess what? If you spend less money than you earn each month, you will have money left over to build wealth! Even better, all money that you save is tax-free if you're employed.

The larger the gap between how much money you earn versus how much you spend directly determines your own Gap of Opportunity.

That extra money is how you change your life.

Decrease the number of people that can negatively impact your life with a single decision.

This is advice for all parts of life, but it is especially true regarding your finances. You could be at risk for financial hardship if...

• You have one income paired to one boss that could end it all
• There is one person managing your finances

If you can, create more than one income stream. That way if one of your income streams ends, you aren't left without income.

Avoid debt

Debt is a weird thing in the modern world. It is so incredibly available now, that it has become the default way of buying things.

Seriously. Accumulating debt has become a westernized standard with regards to buying things.

I can count on one hand the number of people I know that own their homes outright.

Most of my friends and family have car payments.

I use credit cards quite a bit, but I pay them off at least three times a month. Yes. I log in to my credit card accounts and pay them off completely multiple times a month to insure I do not accumulate a balance I can't afford.

"You ain't rich if you owe" - Lil Duval

Success requires consistent effort

This principle is applicable to everything in life, but I am putting it here in the wealth section because one of the most frustrating aspects of wealth building is fighting against the desire for instant gratification.

Scammers and the ignorant pray on our desire for instant gratification.

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Never believe someone when they tell you that you can get wealthy quickly.

Always be learning. If you want to win at Crypto, then learn about Crypto. If you want to understand the badass economic protocol of Ethereum, then go learn about it!

Success requires consistent effort. No exceptions.

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 6% interest on BTC, 5.25% 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.