- Noah Cracknell
- Posts
- Everything is an Investment
Hello friends, and welcome to The Daily Preneur! If you want to join 172 other readers learning about entrepreneurship, economics, and life, subscribe below:
A Quick Note 📝
Welcome to another issue of The Daily Preneur.
Before we get into today's piece, I have a favor to ask. Later this week, I'll start my Master's program in NYC. During my studies, I plan to work or do research. I've tried using LinkedIn and other platforms to secure interviews but haven't had much success. Instead, I figured I'd ask all of you. If you or someone you know is hiring and you think I might be a good fit, please respond directly to this email to get in touch.
Thank you for the help! Now to today's piece 😈
The business of life.
When I was 15 years old, my parents gifted me a roundtrip ticket to Chicago to visit my aunt and uncle for my birthday. It was the best gift I've ever received. I thought getting on an airplane and going somewhere new was cooler than getting a pair of shoes or any other material gift. And I still do. Gifting life experiences like trips to Chicago, concerts, and sports tickets have a much higher ROI than material gifts.
This is because experiences have memory dividends.
A memory dividend is the re-experiencing of an experience. When you're 90 years old, sitting with your lady (or man) happily sipping a cup of joe, you may think back to your early twenties when you stayed up all night in Barcelona – on the beach – drinking beers till sunrise with your buddies. That's a memory dividend.
6am on the beach in Barcelona
If you've ever shared an experience with someone and talked about it weeks, months, or years later, that's also a memory dividend. While visiting my best friend's house over the holidays, I spent hours talking with him and his family about the cool shit we did as kids and the memories we've all shared. Reliving those experiences we all shared after the fact is pretty damn cool if you think about it.
Memory dividends are one reason you should do cool shit. I first came across the idea in Bill Perkin's book, Die With Zero, where he writes about using money to invest in experiences that you love. He claims that those experiences have the highest ROI for your life. More than any monetary return you'll make from the stock market.
"Buying an experience doesn't just buy you the experience itself – it also buys you the sum of all the dividends that experience will bring for the rest of your life."
To invest in experiences that yield memory dividends and positive life experiences, you first have to view everything as an investment. When everything you do becomes an investment, you can better align your actions with what you want. And it makes it much easier to say no to people and activities that don't produce meaningful returns. It's kind of like having superpowers.
I'm not claiming that everyone should be grinding 24/7. There's a time for relaxation, no schedule, and boredom. But even those things are investments. Relaxing helps you recover and feel refreshed. Not having a schedule leaves more room for spending time with friends and loved ones. And being bored can lead to unbelievable creative breakthroughs.
The average American today spends more than 11 hours engaged with digital media. Boredom is indeed dead. Anytime we feel the discomfort of boredom we reflexively pull out our cell phones, watch TV, listen to a podcast, or surf the net.
But boredom is an evolutionary, beneficial discomfort we’ve engineered from our days. As humans evolved, we’d become bored anytime we were doing something that had a low return on our time invested. For example, think of picking berries from a bush. It’s engaging as you pick all the big, easy-to-reach berries. But as you pick the easy-to-reach berries, it eventually becomes harder and harder to find berries and you have to reach deeper and deeper in the bush. Boredom kicks on because you aren’t getting as many berries for your time invested. It tells you to do something else.
Traditionally, when we became bored we would go inward and mind wander. Mind-wandering is a rest state that restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently any time we’re focused on the outside word (from writing to coding, to having a conversation). It also allows us to introspect and develop creative ideas to improve our lives. Time in unfocused mode — rediscovering boredom — is critical to get shit done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more.
By the way, Michael Easter is the author of The Comfort Crisis. It's a fascinating book on why comfort is crippling our greatest strengths.
The purpose of viewing everything in your life as an investment is to avoid living on autopilot. Living on autopilot can be dangerous, especially if you're on course to fly into a f***ing mountain. I don't know about you, but I'm not trying to fly into a mountain. I'd rather think deliberately about how my actions produce returns and avoid the mountain altogether.
I'm not sure I've lived long enough to see all the ways this advice has manifested in my life. But it makes sense in principle. And for what it's worth, that 15-year-old kid who got on a plane by himself and started exploring the world hasn't stopped.
Keep crushing.
Cheers,
Noah Cracknell
If you enjoyed this blog post, check out Die With Zero and The Comfort Crisis.
P.S. Feel free to respond to this email and say hi! I love hearing from you! You can tell me what you liked, didn't like, something good that happened this week, or whatever is on your mind.
Reply