The Infinite Loops Guide To... Money
"Money is like fertiliser. When spread around, things grow; when it's hoarded, it stinks." ~ John Densmore
1. Jared Dillian | Stop Stressing About the Little Things
“A lot of the stuff that's focused around cutting expenses puts you in a position where you're thinking about money all the time. Even the decision of whether to go to a soda machine and get a soda for a dollar becomes this complex decision-making process about, ‘Do I need it? Can I wait until I get home? I'm thirsty,’ whatever. So it really gets people thinking about money all the time. And I think the ideal state is to get to a point where you don't think about it at all. You never think about it because there's better things to worry about than money. There's a lot better things to worry about than money, like family, kids, job. There's all these other sources of stress and money stress is completely avoidable depending on how you structure your life.”
More from Jared: How To Live a Stress-Free Financial Life (EP.196)2. Sahil Bloom | Money Buys Happiness. Until it Doesn’t.
“In the early years of your life, money directly buys happiness. We know this scientifically. Early on the curve of income, money and happiness are very strongly correlated because you're reducing these fundamental burdens and stresses. You're getting food, you're getting shelter, you're getting the ability to take one or two vacations a year. You can take care of people that you care about. There is a very clear correlation, but what happens is we then get patterned in those early years into saying more money equals more happiness. And so we create this equation in our heads that gets firmly entrenched in those early years, and it's very hard to break that equation. So once you got to the point where you were already past the clear relationship where we know it starts to level off, where we know your incremental happiness is going to come from these other areas, we might know that in the back of our mind, but in the front of our mind, we have this equation that says, no, if I make more money, I'm just going to be more happy. It's just the equation just continues. So I'm just going to keep marching down that path and then it's too late.”
More from Sahil: A Multitude of Wealth (EP. 251)3. Christine Benz | If You Want to Give Your Kids Money, Don’t Wait Until You Die
“I have become a huge fan of lifetime giving. And the simple reason is when you look at the data on when people pass away, well, their children are typically in their mid-50s, perhaps even early 60s. Their financial fortunes are pretty well set at that life stage. Now, it might be impactful certainly for them to inherit money at that life stage. But I believe that you can make a bigger impact on your kids' lives earlier and with smaller sums of money.”
More from Christine: The Art of Retiring (EP. 257)4. Guy Spier | Don’t Ignore the Trade-Offs
“So one of the experiences, sitting at this famous lunch with Warren Buffett […] is the realization that I would not want to be living Warren Buffett's life because this is a guy who genuinely enjoys researching and analyzing and investing and understanding companies and businesses. But if he gets a book about, I don't know, behavioral psychology or the history of Rome, or he'll send it to his friend, Charlie, God bless him, before he even decides to read it, because he's not all that interested. So he has a very, very narrow focus. And I realized for me that's not a plus. It's just not a plus. I don't want to have a narrow focus. If you could tell me that I could have 10 times more money and speak one language less, I don't want to do it.”
More from Guy: Wealth, Wisdom & Enlightenment (EP. 197)5. George Mack | Money is a Video Game
“I think money is the best video game ever designed because it's multiplayer, it's a single number going up and going down. And you can contrast yourself constantly to where it was last year. It is the single best video game ever. You can even look at Brazilian jujitsu, which has become so big right now. And when I speak to people who do it, one of the most rewarding things they find is the belt system. You go from white belt to one stripe, two stripe, three stripe, blue belt, and all the way at purple belt, brown belt. And you're constantly getting these little stripes. Even with CrossFit, the way they do the rep maxes and things like that. And you notice everything that really begins to take off is a super well-designed video game or a game period. And things that really struggle both from an individual and as societal perspective are when just the game mechanics are terrible.”
More from George: The Game of Life (EP.195) | Marketing, Mental Models, and Technology (EP.114)6. | Imagine the Money Pile
“This saved my ass so much. This thought exercise is the only reason that I didn't lose everything that I put into crypto, because when you buy something for $1,000 and now it's worth $50,000, you're not thinking, ‘Oh my God, I made $50,000.’ You're thinking, ‘I'm going to make another $50,000.’ You're thinking, ‘It's going to 100, it's going to keep going up.’ And the question I started asking myself was, ‘Okay, pretend I don't own any of this. Pretend I don't have any of these tokens. Forget about what I bought them for,’ all of that. Just try to really get into that headspace and imagine I have all of that money in cash in my living room. It's in fat stacks of $100 bills.
It's like the Walter White scene in the storage unit where he is swimming on the pile of money. I guess that's his bodyguard who's doing it, but try to imagine that and then ask yourself, ‘If I had all of that money in my living room, would I then take it and put it into Dogecoin? Would I put it into this video game currency? Would I put it into this bored Ape?’ And it'll probably be no.
More from Nat: Crazy, Crypto, Confidential (EP. 244)7. | Don’t Follow the Money
“And in almost all cases, if you study great scientists or you study great artists or you study great startup founders, it was an obsession with a new frontier of something that was interesting to that person. And they did it not because it was going to be popular or not because it was going to make a money necessarily, but because they couldn't not do it, and they just kept going. When someone's a teenager, I always encourage them, always have a project that you're working on that doesn't make you progress in any way in the normal social dominance hierarchy. Work on a project that's not going to look good on your college application, that's not going to help you get better grades. But that is interesting only because it's interesting to you, a project of your own by yourself defined on your terms. And because that's where the breakthrough ideas come from is people willing to engage that way. It's a different way of showing up in the world, but it's a really valuable way of showing up in the world, and I think it's going to be increasingly valuable.”
More from Mike: How To Become a Pattern-Breaking Founder (EP.233)8. | Money is Irrelevant to Financial Security
“Financial insecurity, basically, I don't think it has any correlation to how much money you have. I'm talking to somebody who has like 100 grand in college debt, and he's 22 and he's like, ‘I'm not going to work in a traditional job. I'll be fine. Just tell me how to carve my own path.’ Right? And then I talk to the Google employee who has $3 million in the bank, he tells me, and he's like, ‘What if I can't get a job after six months?’ I was like, ‘Well, you can live forever pretty much anywhere.’ But he doesn't experience that […]
You got to figure out what your actual traits are. How are you wired? For me, this current path is great for me. The uncertainty of not knowing how I'll be making money six months from now is super exciting to me. It's like, ‘Oh, what will I come up with?’ At first, it was really hard because I hadn't experienced it, but I really enjoy it. It cracks me up. But I can't give you that natural tendency towards that.”
More from Paul: The Pathless Path (EP. 112)9. | Avoid Successfluencer Dopamine
“People will listen to podcasts, read books, and take courses on how to be successful without ever actually taking action on a thing that would help them be successful. And it tricks your brain, you're getting that dopamine hit without actually doing the work. It's actual success when you've had a very successful career in a lot of endeavors and a lot of it was probably doing a lot of boring work that compounded over time. It wasn't this flashy, you didn't take some course then a year later, you were making millions of dollars. It's just doing a lot of small decisions right along the way, but that doesn't sell.”
More from Jack: The Authentic Path (EP.170)10. Nick Maggiulli | Debt is Most Useful to Those Who Need it the Least
“The point about debt is like it's not necessarily good or bad. It's how you use it. And I think a book that really helped me a lot was called The Value of Debt and Building Wealth. And it talked a lot about how you can use debt and manage it properly. And I think the main takeaway here is the people who could best use debt are the people that don't know it. That's really the truth.
If you could buy a house cash, you should probably use some debt, right? Like that's the thing. If you can't get to a 20% down payment and you're like ‘okay, I'll just put five percent down.’ Those people are probably more likely going to run into trouble […] So it's like if you don't need it, use it because then it's a benefit for you.”
More from Nick: Just Keep Buying (EP. 103)Explore previous instalments of our ‘Guide To’ series: Agency, Getting Sh*t Done, Leadership, Failure, Communication, Creativity, and Happiness.
“Financial insecurity, basically, I don't think it has any correlation to how much money you have."
Counterintuitive at first but so true. Nobody can make enough that it's impossible not to spend even more and over-leverage themselves into problems.
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