Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

This past weekend my fiance's daughter Taylor came to stay with us for the weekend. In addition to Taylor, Megan's best friend came to visit and brought her 9-year-old daughter Aly and 1.5-year-old son Ayden.

Kids are pretty amazing. They see the world so differently than we do, and it is sometimes pretty amusing to see what kinds of things they find overwhelming. For example, the toddler, Ayden would get overwhelmed anytime his mother was out of his line-of-sight. He would show this look of bewilderment on his face and start screaming.

His 18-month old brain couldn't handle it. In all of his entire life, due to Covid, the amount of time he's spent without being able to see his mom is almost negligible. So, when he isn't around her for even the slightest amount of time, his world falls apart.

On the other hand, Megan's daughter Taylor isn't phased by anything. Taylor is almost 9-years-old and has been through the trauma of her mother having a stroke, being in a coma, and slowly re-learning how to move, talk, etc.

Taylor's seen some sh*t for a 9-year-old, and because of that, it is much harder to overwhelm her. We mature with damage, not age, after all, and not all damage has to be massive.

In this week's issue, I am going to talk about the value of overwhelming yourself from time to time to expand the capacity of how much crap you're able to handle at once.

Let's get into it.

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

P.s. - Do. You. Want. A. Dedicated. Crypto. Section?

Just reply to this email and say "crypto" or "yes to crypto" or anything that gives me some feedback. Pretty please?

I now get messages multiple times a day across all of my social media from friends, family, and random people asking me about cryptocurrency.

I love answering your questions, but would it not be better if I just wrote about it more, or created a short intro course that enabled you to learn and invest for yourselves?

You tell me.

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🧠 Wisdom Thought of The Week: The Value of Overwhelming yourself

Before I get into this, I want to be clear about something. Constantly getting overwhelmed is unhealthy. If you are constantly overwhelmed you don't have a chance to properly process everything and grow from it.

What I am espousing in this week's issue is the value of occasionally pushing the boundaries of your comfort zone far enough that you experience too much for yourself to handle.

As I have said many times in this newsletter, wisdom is a combination of several things. In its simplest form:

Wisdom = Knowledge * Experience

You need both to grow and become more capable, but the older I get the more I realized that experience compounds on itself.

The more life experience you get the easier it is to get more value from future life experience.

And, in my experience, there is a lot of value to be had from exposing your mind and body to situations that are overwhelming.

For example, think back to when you were learning how to drive. We all have different experiences with how we learned to drive, but for most of us the amount of information we had to be able to handle all at once was overwhelming.

• Where to put your feet
• How to adjust the mirrors
• Starting the car
• Understanding the metrics (odometer, fuel gauge, etc)
• Putting your seatbelt on
• Putting the car in gear (even harder for manual vehicles)

And that is before the car is even moving! It's overwhelming the first few times you do it. But the more you do it, the faster your mind can cope with everything, and the quicker all of it becomes normal to your mind.

My point here is that over time you become much better at handling intense or overwhelming situations the more you expose your mind and body to them.

Growth happens fastest when we force ourselves out of our comfort zone enough times that our comfort zone expands. Then we do it again. And again. And again, until everything is comfortable.

When everything is comfortable, stress and anxiety are far less intense. Life becomes easier to win at.

Shout out to my good friend Kendra, who forced herself through an entire year of this by doing a "Year of Fear" where every day she made herself do something way outside her comfort zone.

Apparently, she did a podcast about this that I had no idea about until right now. Feel free to check it out. I'll be doing the same.

🥑 Health Thought of The Week: Your Body is Too Slow for Immediate Results

I'm coming to the annoying realization that everything related to improving my health does not have immediate results.

Even sleep lately has had a lagging effect. What I mean by this is, if I sleep poorly, I don't really experience the negative side effects until the following day.

If I sleep great a night after I slept horribly, I might still feel terrible.

To find the best results regarding improving health, you really do need to be consistent over a long period of time. There really are no shortcuts.

Our bodies are responding to what happens to us and adjust slowly over time.

• You eat healthier food, your body starts to improve and nourish itself...over time.
• Sleep well consistently - your body is able to repair itself and properly regulate your hormones and emotions. Over time proper hormone regulation and emotional control leads to better decisions and less stress
• Exercise - the more you show your body you need to get stronger to survive (repeatedly lifting heavy things or running long distances) the more your body learns it needs to change.

One good meal, one workout, or one night of good sleep will never do much of anything. Our bodies are just too slow at adjusting.

So if you plan to improve your health at all, you need to plan to be consistent over a long period of time. Period.

💲 Wealth Thought of The Week: Don't invest in bullsh*t

A few clarifying comments on the above tweet.

A bull run is when the market is going up. A bear run or bear market is when the market is going down. Picture a bull using its horns to push up the market, and then picture a bear clawing down on the market.

The popularity of the WallStreetBets subreddit paired with the GameStop and Robinhood fiasco has put a lot of attention on the wild speculation happening in the investing world.

• Speculation is when you gamble on the stock market, hoping to time things right.
• Investing is when you put your money into something you expect to grow over the long term.

If you buy a stock or crypto in the hopes of selling it in a day or a week, then you are trading, not investing.

I don't trade. Ever. In the world of 2021 and beyond, it is extremely difficult to speculate on the financial markets with any kind of accuracy. Unless you're a hedge fund or Investment Bank with hundreds of analysts and millions of dollars worth of supercomputers, you're not going to have a good time trying to predict the markets in any way.

So don't try to time the market. Don't invest in anything that your friends "know will go up." Spend some time learning about where you plan to put your money.

I invest heavily in Ethereum and Bitcoin because I understand them better than 99% of all people.

Things I will never actively invest in because I understand them:

• DogeCoin - it was built to make fun of crypto. It was a joke from the beginning
• XRP - probably the most successful crypto scam. It took years before the SEC finally sued Ripple and all the crypto exchanges delisted this garbage.
• Individual stocks - because I don't have the time or desire to pay attention to company leadership, competitive advantages, and other news you need to understand before being able to successfully pick a single company or stock.
• Real Estate - been there, done that. There's nothing wrong with this really, I just have zero passion for it. Also putting this here to freak out my real estate investment friends :P

Quote 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.

BlockFi - Earn interest on your crypto. Currently, you can earn 6% interest on BTC, 5.25% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.6% on stable coins like USDC.

Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter.

I've earned thousands of dollars (in crypto) using blockfi the last few years.