Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

We are reaching the end of September already!

2020 felt like it lasted forever, and 2021 feels like it is speeding by.

The Pandemic has created one of the weirdest environments for tracking time.

How many times have you said "last year" when referring to the world before Covid? I still do it all the time.

And yet, there are always silver linings to the weird, tough, and challenging aspects of life. Adversity creates the space for growth. It puts us outside of our comfort zones and pushes us to improve.

My Covid silver linings list is pretty long, but here are a few:

• Rediscovered a passion for playing Poker
• The pandemic gave me tons of content ideas for this newsletter (Which started right before the pandemic hit)
• I found a permanent "work from home" job that lets me work with awesome people and solve challenging problems
• Gave me a perfect reason to say NO to stuff 😂

Silver linings are the theme of this week's newsletter. We live in a weird world where it can be easy to embrace negativity, but with a little shift in perspective, we can instead embrace gratitude for the many opportunities the world gives us to step up and improve.

Let's get into it.

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

_____________________________________

Was this email forwarded to you? 

Click here to subscribe

_____________________________________

🧠 Wisdom Tip(s) of The Week: Everything Can Have a Silver Lining

This newsletter is really about gratitude. That is what silver linings really are. Showing gratitude for the "bad" things that happen to you in life. Forcing yourself to find the good that came from a rough situation.

When I was in college (ages 18-22) I got to experience the dread of being completely broke, without food, and almost homeless more than once. My freshman year of college was 2008-2009, the time frame where the great recession hit. During my first semester of college, my entire college fund died a glorious death.

This meant that from the time I was 18, my education and financial future were in my own hands. There are a LOT of silver linings that came from that experience.

• I learned how to live absurdly frugally
• I learned how to manage the nauseating fear of destitution
• I was forced to grow up quickly and learned that my life and my future are up to me, and I could never expect help from anyone. Help from others is a blessing, not an expectation.
• No one is entitled to anything
• This was the time in my life that I had a paradigm shift in the way I viewed money, life, and taking risks.

When I was 23 I was convinced to join a Multi-Level Marketing company. These are the companies that are pyramid schemes. They promise "passive" or "residual" income with little to no work. I even drove 20 hours across the U.S. to go to a conference to "get motivated." Disgusting. There are a lot of silver linings from this as well:

• Scams come in many varieties
• There is no such thing as getting rich quick
• People will use urgency to get you to make irrational decisions
• I realized how much I don't like selling things to people I don't deeply believe in
• Your network is valuable, and greed can quickly poison that network. Treat your people with care and empathy.

When I was 26 I lost $12,000 to the stock market because I let myself listen to a charlatan (AGAIN). That experience was another expensive education in what not to do, which prepared me for the world of Crypto, and all the people that tried to scam me over the years.

When I was 27 my fiance suffered a catastrophic brain injury. What silver linings could possibly come from THAT? More than I could ever imagine, as it turns out.

1. Gave me the opportunity to live out the vows I will eventually say to Megan when we get married
2. Let me practice empathy at the most intense level. Try putting yourself in the shoes of someone in a coma, or someone fighting to regain the ability to move or talk. It makes you grateful to be able to physically do anything.
3. For the first time in my life, I was able to spend months of my life treating each day the same way. No dreading Mondays or looking forward to the weekend. Every day felt the same, and that was so peaceful.
4. Deeply instilled in me the power of stoicism and on only focusing on what you can control.

Most of the silver linings above were from major mistakes on my part. I learned from those mistakes and am much wiser now because of them. But some of the experiences above were events that just happened. They were no one's fault, but were still tragic, infuriating, and forced me to let go of the shit in life I can't control.

When you can take the bad experiences from your past and derive value from them, you take ownership of those events in your mind. You have agency over those experiences and can dictate how they affect your present and future.

Everything has a silver lining if you look for it.

Ethereum Stats:

Total ETH burned - 391,000 ETH (or $1+ billion!!)

ETH burned in the last week - 45,500 ETH !!!! 😱

Avg ETH burn per minute (all-time) - 4.94 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
• 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 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.