• leg day # 2, I just learned that I'm putting the bar on my neck and it's what caused pain on monday, and is causing pain again now
• saw M one last time? hopefully i see him in Vancouver in winter.
• kiwis for 1 dollar beside hua xing
• tofu for 1.39 per pack
• finally cooked bitter melon black bean beef
• checked out more books from the library
• walked chinatown more, slowly getting familiar with the town, it never gets boring here. i see tourists everyday, tour guides talking about chinatown. there's so much that the elderly in chinatown has experienced, I can't imagine the life they've lived, and the hardships they've faced immigrating here. i wonder who their children are. and how often they visit.
• paid 19k for fall tuition and i felt major financial anxiety calculating all my credit card bills and upcoming braces cost.
• i realize i haven't been doing. actions is so important. I consume too much. the balance is tilted. i need to do side projects. code fun little things. write code. write anything. as long as I'm touching it. I need to start. It feels so scary to start. I have the project ideas. I just need to implement. it feels difficult in my head. it feels nice to plan and think about what to do. but i really just need to start.
• i'm here in sf and i've been doing such normal things. buying groceries, going to the library, going to YMCA to lift weights, i'm not increasing my surface area of luck by going to events and hacker houses and socratica. i'm not meeting people that I wanted to meet. which was the entire reason coming to SF. although i read that if you work on great things, people naturally come, you don't have to actively seek out anyone. so I still need to work on stuff. so hard to balance time.
• had a panic attack trying to decide whether i got to Yosemite or not the night before a quiz I have not started to study for, hopefully the future me on August 14th says I'm so glad I decided to go.
• started reading Mere Christianity. C.S. Lewis is an interesting character that I want to learn more about.
• i definitely have ADHD, i can't focus studying and i context switch every 37.37 seconds
• i hate fruit flies

fs newsletter #587

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.” — C. S. Lewis

Morgan Housel on Knowledge Project podcast

• Increasing surface area of luck is not luck. If you can do something that changes your outcome, thats not luck by definition. Luck is something you have no control over, your socioeconomic background, your family and upbringing.
• Money is the oxygen of independence
• 99% of buffets network was accumulated after his 60th birthday
• He kept going for 33 years and on, his endurance and psychological temperament are key traits
• Save money, be very patient, let it accumulate
• the lack of fomo is the one trait you want to build wealth
• Index funds: If you didnt own nvidia or faang, your odds of performing are very low. If you owned 1000 stocks in that index, only 20 of them performs
• Wealth is the money that you don’t spend, the car or house you don’t buy
• A lot of people who are successful are just walking anxiety disorders harnessed for productivity
• The single word to describe all successful people is not passionate or driven, it’s tortured. They wake up every morning tortured. “I have to solve this problem, i have to get ahead.” They wake up anxious and depressed, tortured about achieving all those things
• risk is anything that will prevent you from achieving the goals that you want
• Risk is has a very personal definition
• Personal finance is more personal that it is finance
• Getting rich and staying rich are completely different skills
• Lead by example for kids. Every time you say we can’t afford this, thats too expensive, i value this, i don’t value that. They absorb everything create a mental model
• Don’t think that all poverty is due to laziness and don’t think all wealth is hard work. If you are ranking people and their values by net worth that is probably the most dangerous thing you can do with money. Its the most profoundly wrong takeaway for money
• Its always the case, or its ideal, that there is some level of inequality in the world. The opposite of that is a nightmare. Because people’s skills are unequal. Once you get to some critical level, if enough people wake up and say this sucks, this system doesn’t work, then its going to reverse itself, and it becomes a pitchfork
• There’s always a pendulum between labor and capitol, workers and investor, 1920s it was capital, 50-60s it was labor, now its back to capitol. But the past few years it had flipped around, its lower income groups had huge growths, the rich get richer and poor get poorer is not true
• Read with a wide funnel and a tight filter, read anything that is mildly interesting, and stop if it stops working.
• Comedy is showing how smart you are without being arrogant
• it's much easier to contextualize stories than statistics. it has a human element, it has emotion embedded in it. stories are good leverage for statistics (i.e. Ken Burns WWII documentaries)
• better storytelling:
  • write for an audience of one (yourself), write a sentence that moves you, once you start thinking about an audience, you start to pander.
  • don't forget how impatient everyone is. hook people in 5 seconds. people are most impatient in the first two seconds. most people only go a quarter into books (based on kindle highlight data). constantly ask yourself: what is the point i'm trying to make? get to the point and get out of people's way. read the story out loud, if you see people getting bored,leave out the parts that people tend to skip.
• raise kids to be good adults, not good kids.