Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

Texas is once again struggling to stay connected to the power grid, and the ERCOT (Energy Reliability Center of Texas) is asking us to reduce our electricity use.

I am once again supremely grateful that I have solar panels and am not reliant on this nonsense.

How does this relate to the newsletter this week?

It doesn't, but I found it interesting that ERCOT struggled during the freezing snowpocalypse and is now struggling during a mild 90-degree summer?

Not a good look.

This week I talk about:

• Too Many Meetings and how to avoid them
• How walks after meals can lower blood sugar
• The Tax Benefits of Saving

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: Too Many Meetings

Thinking back on this newsletter I don't think I have often written about concepts that can apply directly to the workplace.

Time is the most valuable resource in anyone's life, and in the modern-day and age of working remote work, unnecessary meetings is a plague.

This problem of "too many meetings" has been affecting my teams at my full-time job, so I've been doing some digging on how to thoughtfully reduce meetings for both my teams and myself.

Hope these thoughts can help you get some much-deserved time back in your day.

Just remember friends, busyness does not equal importance or productiveness. This section is an extension of that concept.

Think of meetings in terms of Opportunity Cost, not ROI (return on time invested)

Meetings are expensive. How?

Well, think about how long the meeting will last, now think about the average salary or hourly wage of everyone involved in the meeting.

Avg salary - $70,000

Meeting length - 1 hour

Number of people in meeting - 7

Total cost of meeting - $490,000 (70k * 7)!!!!!

So audit your calendar and look at each of your meetings. Ask yourself a few questions.

• What is the purpose of this meeting?
• Does this meeting improve the outcomes of my role or my team?
• Does this meeting align with a company goal?
• Do I need to be here?

If the answer to the last three isn't all a "yes" then you might be able to drop it.

If a meeting isn't the best possible use of your time, then maybe don't go.

Improve Meeting Quality/Efficiency

There are a few questions you can ask yourself when preparing a meeting. These questions will help you create your agenda.

1. Who do you need in the meeting and what role do they play?
2. How much time do we need to accomplish the desired outcome?
3. What is that desired outcome?
4. What preparation is required?

The point of a meeting should be to discuss things that lead to decisive action and build trust.

Forcing yourself to write an agenda is a great way to litmus test the validity of the meeting. I've had numerous meetings never manifest because I tried to write an agenda, and realized I just wanted to share information. Sharing information can be done in Slack or an email, as cliche as that it.

You can also empower meetings by making them more efficient. Many people like to "shoot the shit" in the beginning of a meeting. By itself, this is actually a good thing, as it reconnects people and humanizes everyone to each other.

This can dramatically delay the start time of a meeting, and in a way disrespects the time of people that may need to leave the meeting right when it ends.

I prefer to push to start the meeting as soon as possible, keeping the group focused on the agenda, and leave the small talk to after the core objectives of the meeting are completed. This allows those that need to drop off the call to do so while everyone else can relax and hang out if they want to.

Reduce Meeting Frequency

As you start to create effective and efficient meetings, you might realize that you don't need meetings as often. This is the goal.

Recurring meetings that don't serve a very specific purpose are complete wastes of time.

If you are a meeting owner, focus on determining what you are most concerned about and design the meeting agenda to focus on that area. Over time you should be able to reduce the frequency of meetings or at least make meetings much shorter.

If you are a meeting attendee, focus on providing consistent value and giving the meeting owner exactly what they want as quickly as possible. Eventually, you will earn more of your time back.

One little hack I have found for saving yourself time in larger meetings is to request to talk earlier in the meeting and claim a "conflict" that will force you to leave early.

I've never been denied a request to speak sooner. Ever. When I give clear and concise information that the meeting owner needs, I rarely ever have any problems leaving the meeting immediately after.

🥑 Health Hack of The Week: Go For A Walk After Meals

Your muscles are gluttons for energy.

If you strain your muscles even just a little, they will gobble up carbs, sugar, etc to refuel.

If your muscles are taking in that energy, it means your body is not going to store it as body fat.

There have been numerous studies on this, and there was a really cool image of data points proving what I am about to say, but I didn't save it and now I can't find it.

So just take my word for it 😂.

If you go for a walk after you eat, you will dramatically lower your blood sugar, limit your insulin response, and reduce the likelihood that the calories you consumed get turned into body fat.

In fact, apparently, the walk doesn't need to be a long one either. Just 10-15 minutes of walking after a meal are enough to make this happen.

Double Duty - Shock your muscles before you eat, too

This trick I've mentioned before and can be found in Tim Ferriss' "The 4-Hour Body."

If you do 20 wall pushups and 20 or so squats, your muscles will be activated enough to want to refuel.

So if you do this before you eat, your muscles will already start gobbling up those calories. Pair this with a short walk afterwards, and you have a massive advantage in reducing your bodies response to the food.

This will reduce the amount of brain fog that occurs after a meal and can assist with fat loss if you are consistent.

🤑 Wealth Thought of The Week: The Tax benefits of savings

I live in Texas which froze over back in February.

Because of this rare freeze, Texans were given until June 15th to file their taxes.

So I filed my taxes yesterday because I waited until the last second.

That got me thinking about some personal finance truths that have to do with taxes. They are worth thinking about as you go through life acquiring wealth.

You are taxed on what you earn, not on what you save

This is one of the reasons why I always advocate for reducing expenses as the first step on anyone's personal finance journey. The less you spend, the more you can save. The more you save, the wealthier you become.

The more you earn, the more you pay in taxes. In theory.

One reason some uber-wealthy people pay much less in taxes is that they own corporations. These people earn very little "income" each year individually, instead letting their corporations keep that revenue to spend on expenses. Expenses that can then reduce the taxable income the corporation made.

Anyway, every paycheck you get has already had federal income tax withheld from it. This means the money you get in your bank accounts is now tax-free. If you spend less of it on stuff, you get to save more of it.

How this pertains to crypto

If you were to...buy a lot of a certain cryptocurrency and never sell it, that would be an investment and not taxable.

Then, if you were to stake that crypto, that by itself is also not taxable as it is just a transfer of crypto from one address to a smart contract.

And then, if that staking contract were to pay you every week into a crypto wallet you couldn't access for a year due to pending software upgrades, well that is also not taxable.

Only when you gain access to that wallet and that ETH (yes I am talking about ETH) will the staking returns be considered taxable income.

Also - if the value of that crypto has decreased at all from the value it had when it was paid out to you, then that is technically considered an investment loss, which would reduce your taxable income.

An Example:

Hypothetically, if you spent $10k on ETH when it was at $100 a coin you would have 100 ETH.

If the value of ETH rose to $10,000 an ETH, you would then have a cool million dollar's worth of ETH.

If you had staked that 100 ETH you would earn 0.5 ETH per month, which at a price of $10,000/ETH would earn you $5,000 a month.

You would not be taxed on the appreciation of your $10,000 investment. You would only be taxed on the 0.5 ETH you earned each month.

You would only be taxed on that $1,000,000 in ETH if you pulled it out of the staking contract and sold it, and even then you would be taxed at the long-term capital gains rate.

If this was confusing, I am sorry 😟, but this is exciting stuff.

This is one of the reasons why I am so bullish on ETH.

When ETH increases in value, it is increasing the amount of monthly income I will be earning in the future.

At some point, it will be enough to completely cover my monthly expenses.

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 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.