Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

It's October 13th and I once again find myself baffled by how quickly 2021 is progressing.

I'm not going to lie, I've been struggling a bit with my mental health. Which is always odd when other parts of your life are crushing it. From a financial perspective, I am doing amazing.

Even from a growth and improvement perspective, I am doing well by most standards.

And yet, it is becoming more and more apparent to me that despite eating better, despite taking all my vitamins, despite starting to workout more, despite getting quality sleep, my mental health is still not great.

The last two years have kind of felt like we are all running from an invisible boogeyman. This boogeyman keeps changing and no one seems to be able to agree on how to deal with it. That constant pressure of the unknown has done a number on us, and I'm not sure we quite realize it yet.

Humans require companionship, friendship, and a tribe of people we can count on. COVID took that from us, isolated us, and confused us.

I should have been meditating this entire time to help clean, strengthen, and restructure my mind.

I haven't been though, and the constant mental fatigue of a post-pandemic world is catching up to me.

So this morning before I started writing to you all, I took the time to meditate. Tomorrow morning I will intentionally take the time to meditate.

I hope you do the same if you don't already.

Let's get into it.

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🧠 Wisdom Tip(s) of The Week: The Power of Daily Effort

The focus of this week is on mental health and using meditation to help your mind heal, get stronger, and restructure itself.

I am going to focus on meditation in the next section, and in this section, I am going to spend a small number of words reminding all of us of the power of consistent daily effort.

If you can do the same healthy thing every day it builds up. Habits matter, even if it takes a long time to realize it.

I love this graph because it shows what a difference small steps can make.

Of course, this graph shows us the linear progress of staying consistent, but there is also an exponential component to improving ourselves a small bit every day.

The following image I have shared before, but it is by far my favorite illustration of the power of compounding.

Improving yourself by 1% every day can lead to a 37x improvement after one year.

Small changes are manageable, and small changes made daily can create an entirely new world over time.

🧘🏼‍♂️ Health Thought of The Week: My Favorite Meditation Apps

I've tried getting into mediation hundreds of times throughout the last decade. I've meditated for a streak of 29 days in a row multiple times, somehow always failing to knock that elusive 30-day streak.

As I said in the section above, daily practice is hard but is 3,778% worth it after 365 days. Go back and look at that exponential graph if you're confused about where I got this number.

I've used all the most popular apps, as well as some apps that are only popular in Europe.

So now I share them with you and give you my brief thoughts on each so that you can decide for yourself which you will try out. Or you can just skip this section entirely if you already take care of your mental health.

Why Meditate?

There are a lot of analogies that can help explain the power of meditation.

One is that meditation is like weight training for your mind. The more you meditate, the more strength your mind will have to deal with the crap life throws at you.

This analogy is okay, but it's incomplete, and your brain is not like the rest of the muscles in your body in that it will take a lot longer on average for you to notice the increase in strength.

Here's another angle for how I like to think about meditation. Make a fist with one of your hands. This fist needs to be a relaxed fist at first. Now imagine the daily stresses of life. Clench your fist a little harder.

Now imagine getting into a fight with a friend or loved one. Clench the fist a little harder. Now imagine your boss or coworker saying something rude. Clench your fist tight. You cannot go through life with a fist clenched this tight at all times.

Meditation helps you slowly relax that clenched fist.

Meditation gives your brain an intentional break so it doesn't burn out.

Meditation can also become a telescope into the inner workings of your mind, allowing you to discover more about who you are and what internal obstacles are getting in your way from becoming the person you know you can be.

✊🏼Meditation Apps:

Headspace - Arguably the most popular meditation app out there. This is a good one and covers a wide range of different meditation styles and techniques. The app will track your progress and give you stats to benchmark yourself. You can even pair with friends and track each other's progress.

Calm - This is an interesting one, in that they are not marketing themselves as a meditation app per se but endeavor to be an app of all-around tranquility. If you go to their website and idle for a minute or two, the whole website disappears and a tranquil lake in a mountain range appears.

Calm has sleep aid music, relaxation music, meditation music, and guided meditation.

Primed Mind - This is the app I am currently testing. It was founded by Fedor Holz and Elliot Roe. The story begins in 2015 when Fedor Holz, a 22-year-old poker player started working with Elliot Roe, an up-and-coming performance coach. Fedor, over the next year and a half, went on one of the wildest poker-winning streaks in the history of poker. He earned over $21 million crushing his competition in tournament after tournament.

Elliot's clientele now includes Olympians, UFC champions, Hollywood actors, Wall Street traders, etc.

Waking Up with Sam Harris App - Sam Harris is arguably one of the smartest and most brilliant minds in the world when it comes to meditation and modern-day philosophy. This app is his "guide to understanding the mind."

In Sam's own words:

"There are hundreds of meditation apps on the market, and several do a fine job of teaching the basic principles of mindfulness. But most present the practice as though it were an ancient version of an executive stress ball—whereas it’s more like the Hubble Space Telescope.

The purpose of meditation isn’t merely to reduce stress or to make you feel better in the moment—it’s to make fundamental discoveries in the laboratory of your own mind."

10% Happier with Dan Harris - oddly enough, Dan and Sam are not related at all, and yet they have names that people confuse since they sound so similar. Dan Harris discovered meditation after experiencing a panic attack on live TV as an ABC news anchor. He went from a hardcore skeptic to a force in the world of meditation.

This is his app that aims to make all of its members 10% happier.

Ethereum Stats:

Total ETH burned - 520,000 ETH (or $1.75 + billion!!)

ETH burned in the last week - 67,000 ETH !!!! 😱

Avg ETH burn per minute (all-time) - 5.23 ETH/min

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

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. Coinbase now offers staking for ETH
• 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, 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 cryptos 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.