Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

Does 2022 seem even more chaotic than 2021 or 2020 did? What is the deal, ya'll? Celebrities are slapping each other, Ukraine and Russia are still at war, the crypto market is back on the rise, and the world feels tired.

I don't hate chaos as a concept, It's a part of existing, but what I do hate is when chaos starts to gain control over my life. I can't control chaos, so chaos should not control me.

This week I write about different ways I try to cultivate calm in my life by focusing on what I can control.

Let's get into it.

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🦉 Wealthy Owl Thought(s) of The Week: How I Try to Cultivate Calm

This is a process of both purging the bad and accepting the good.

To cultivate is to prepare an environment for growth, then to raise and assist that growth by continuing to remove obstacles or impediments to that growth.

To cultivate calm, you have to first create an environment where calm has a chance in hell of growing.

Here are a few ways I try to do this.

Defining good enough - The presence of calm requires becoming comfortable with the idea of "enough." To put it simply, if you don't define good enough, it will never be good enough.

Then anxiety gets another foothold in your life. Knowing when something is good enough allows you to be at peace with it and move on. Being at peace with something seems pretty critical to creating a space of calm.

This practice will probably be hard for the perfectionists out there, but it is essential to your mental health to always create a definition of done for whatever you are working. You need to give yourself permission to move on.

Understand the actual power of "No" - I'm not sure when saying "no" became a bad thing, but I hate that there is a cultural compulsion to be agreeable.

If you think about it, No is a much cleaner way of going about life.

• If you say No, it is much easier to say Yes later, rather than the reverse.
• And while Yes is easier to say, No is far easier to do.
• No is always clear and concise. Yes is only as clear and concise as the original request.
• Saying no removes a single option while saying yes removes dozens of options

Default to saying no, so that you can spend more time defining what you actually want to say Yes to.

No is always calm, but yes rarely is.

JOMO not FOMO - Have you heard of FOMO? FOMO stands for "Fear of missing out" and is that weird feeling of loss when you see others having fun, making money, or living the "good life," whatever that means. It's that shitty feeling you get when you see others experiencing or about to experience something you think you want.

Not surprisingly, I think FOMO is silly. We just covered the power of "no," and that power helps me maintain ownership over my time. FOMO creates tension, stress, and anxiety. For what? People aren't supposed to experience all of the same things. People aren't meant to know all of the same information.

Introducing JOMO! The Joy of Missing Out! I'm not sure when I first started experiencing JOMO, but I do know that it is a wonderful and powerful feeling.

These days I will often not go to meetings that don't benefit me or meetings I don't think I can add value to. I started experimenting with no-showing a few meetings at a time to see if anyone asked where I was. In almost every instance, my presence wasn't missed at all! Yay, more time for actual work.

The power of an hour -

1 hour can be 60 minutes.

1 hour can be 30 minutes twice.

1 hour can be 15 minutes four times.

This means an hour of work can take 60 out of 60 minutes, or it can take up 15-minute chunks spread out across four hours of time.

Think about this question - Are you able to find the time to work on something for 60 minutes straight without being interrupted, distracted, or compelled to distract yourself?

Some of you will say yes, but most of you will say no.

We live in a world of fractured time, catchy headlines, notifications, pings, and an overall shortening attention span.

It's hard to get anything done with fractured time.

So look at the hours in your day. Are they fractured hours?

If they are, why? Who or what is so important that your focus can be so casually broken?

Don't just defend your time, be more specific and defend your hours. Work to gain back at least one full complete hour back in your workday, then see how many more you can get back.

Cultivate Calm:

These were just a few ways that I try to cultivate calm by being a little less agreeable.

I accept and understand what "good enough" is.

No is my default to requests or demands of my time.

Joy can often be found in missing out, rather than fear.

Full hours are calmer than fractured ones.

Try one or all of these and see how it changes the dynamic of your day-to-day life.

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 4% interest on BTC, 5% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.5% on stable coins like USDC. Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter. BlockFi is currently not accepting new customers from the USA for its Crypto Savings Account. International customers are still welcome!

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.