Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

We are in the deep heat of summer here in Texas, and with deep heat comes a deep hatred for getting out into the world.

I also over-fatigued myself this past weekend by allowing myself to be far, far too busy. This inspired me to remind myself not to do that, and became the foundation for this week's newsletter!

This week we cover:

• Why not being busy is a competitive advantage
• How doing the minimum can break your negative headspace
• an update on a major Ethereum software update

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: Not being busy is a competitive advantage

This is a fun topic that has been seeping into my soul over the past few years.

Hustle culture burned me out long ago, and I found that hustle culture made me less productive. A lot less productive.

Even outside of hustle culture, in the normal working world, people fill up their calendars with random shit they feel is absolutely important to them. They create a world of "busy" that slowly starts to imprison them.

Most people are so "busy" and strapped for time that they can't take advantage of lucky opportunities, spend time doing deep work, or quickly resolve unexpected problems.

Side note - by deep work I mean focusing on a problem, task, or project for several hours without any distractions. The busier you let yourself be, the more distractions you allow into your life.

The point of this section is to remind you that you don't need to pack your life with "stuff."

The true key to success is consistency over time. In all things, if you can be consistent, you will find success.

Busy is the antithesis of consistent. Life is messy and issues pop up. The busier you are, the more likely you will push off more important habits or tasks to find time to fix the "urgent" problem.

Busy leads to burnout.

Create a bias towards taking action, but leave room for the unexpected.

💪🏻 Health Thought of The Week: Do the minimum to see how you feel

I can't tell you how often I will be approaching something difficult in my day and my brain starts to freak out about it. Then, after I do the difficult thing, I realize it was so much easier in reality than it was in my mind.

This weird negative hyping I do in my mind used to lead me to skip a lot of things in life, such as workouts, social events, cooking (seriously), etc.

When I realized that everything was worse in my imagination, I started doing the minimum required of me just to get me enough momentum to decide if I should keep going or move on.

"I don't feel like doing kettlebell swings today. Eh, I'll just do one set and see how I feel."

Sometimes that one set stays one set, but most of the time I break the illusion in my mind and realize that this is not so bad, and I do the workout.

This trick applies to everything that you think will really suck.

Just start, do a little, and see what happens.

You'll often surprise yourself.

🤑 Wealth Thought of The Week: EIP-1559 coming August 4th

You might have noticed an upswing in the price of Ethereum lately.

That was caused by a few things, such as the EthCC event, as well as remarks by Elon Musk (🙄).

Neither of these events has anything on what is coming on August 4th. I've explained all of this before, but I will once again give a quick primer.

EIP-1559 stands for "Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559" and is basically a major software upgrade to the entire Ethereum blockchain.

It is packaged into what is called the "London Hard Fork." When you upgrade an entire blockchain, you are basically replacing the old blockchain with the new one, and leaving the old one behind.

Anyway, the benefits of EIP-1559 are pretty big. Starting after the upgrade, a small portion of every transaction fee will be permanently "burned" from existence.

There are millions of transactions on Ethereum, and the network runs 24/7 365 days a year, forever. That means that little by little, more and more ETH will be removed from the supply available to be bought.

When supply lowers, and demand increases, that causes prices to go up.

I expect this to be a gradual process, but we might see some really large jumps in the price of ETH over the next few weeks as people realize this and rush to buy more ETH.

If you are operating under the Wise Owl model, then you don't need to do anything different.

• Continue buying the crypto you like every week.
• Stake the crypto you can stake
• Lend the crypto you can lend (via BlockFi)
• Hold

That is all folks.

Quote/Meme of the week:

Both Seneca and Epictetus are ancient stoics, and both of them came to the realization that everything is worse inside our heads.

Remember that. Don't let your brain cheat you out of living a better life.

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.