While it’s a good idea to go to bed at the same time each night, there will be some nights when your brain is buzzing and not ready for sleep. If so, don’t lie down just yet. Your racing thoughts could lead to insomnia. Instead, do something to relax until you feel tired. Take a warm bath, for instance, or sit in a comfy chair and listen to soft, calming music. You’ll spend less time in bed but more time asleep.

Not Sleepy? Stay Up

<ul><li>Stressful subjects, like work or your finances, can make your thoughts churn. Take care of the bills and emails tomorrow. </li><li>Also, turn off scary or action-filled movies and TV -- even the news. Log out of social media, too. </li><li>Whether you engage in, or just watch or read a heated back-and-forth, your mind revs up and makes it harder to relax.</li></ul>

Put Off Paying the Bills

Work projects to finish, calls to make, kids to wrangle. It’s hard to drift off when you’re trying to remember every last thing you need to do when you wake up. Let go of this mental load by putting it down on paper. Take 5 minutes before bed to jot down every task you need to take care of in the a.m. You’ll get it off your mind and be able to fall asleep faster.

Make a To-Do List

Release tension from your body, and you’ll find it easier to let go of stressful thoughts. <ul><li>Lie on a flat surface and allow your body to go limp. </li><li>Take a breath and deeply exhale. </li><li>Then, squeeze and release one section of your body at a time. Start with your toes. Your heels can come next, followed by your knees, thighs, belly, and so forth. Let your forehead be last. </li><li>Notice how relaxed your body feels.</li></ul>

Let Your Muscles Fully Relax

<ul>
<li>Place a hand on your heart and feel its rhythm.</li>
<li>Breathe in deep for 4 seconds, then take a long, slow breath out.</li>
<li>Repeat this pattern until you can feel your heartbeat slow down. Your thoughts should soon ease up as well.</li>
</ul>

For A Good Night, Slow Your Breath, Slow Your Mind

Your phone, tablet, and other screens can mess with your sleep because they give off blue light, which signals your body to stop making melatonin, the hormone that controls when you feel sleepy. Instead, this light tells your brain to stay alert. Not to mention the late-night dings and buzzes that can jolt you out of peaceful slumber. The best bet for better sleep is to keep computers, TVs, and, yes, your phone out of your bedroom.

Make Your Bedroom a No-Screen Zone

Learn to calm your mind on demand, and you’ll find it easier to drift off at night.
If you’re new to meditation practice, it helps to find a point of focus. It could be the sound of your breath or a simple phrase that you repeat in your head, like “I am at peace.”
At first, you may struggle to tune out your thoughts. It’s OK to stop after a minute or two -- but try again the next night. Over time, you’ll be able to meditate longer.

Meditation For A Good Night

If they’re stuck inside your mind, worries and “What ifs?” can grow unchecked. Say them out loud, and they might just vanish.Try this: Start to recite the letters of the alphabet in your head. When you get a few letters in, say something out loud. Notice that your ABCs came to a halt? That’s what can happen when you give voice to your worries.

Call Out Your Worries

Many people say yoga helps them sleep better. Try “child’s pose” at bedtime. <ul><li>Kneel on the floor with your big toes together. </li><li>Separate your knees the width of your hips, and sink your chest to your thighs. </li><li>Let your forehead touch the ground. </li><li>Have hip or knee issues? Try “corpse pose” instead. Lie on your back, legs apart and arms relaxed at your sides. </li><li>Exhale and feel yourself sink into the ground. </li><li>Stay in either pose for 3-5 minutes.</li></ul>

Channel Your Inner Yogi

You won’t be able to get rid of all your worries for good. In fact, the more you tell yourself not to stress, the more you probably will. What can help is to schedule a “worry time” during your day. Choose a small window of time to sit quietly. Let yourself go over all the things that have you concerned, as well as some ways you might solve them. You may find that this allows you to worry less -- and sleep better.

Go Ahead and Worry

Here are the best things you can do for a good night.

habits

Habits

health

Health

mentalhealth

Mental Health

mindfulness

Mindfulness

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

How To Have a Good Night

Tips for a good night: Learn how to slow your thoughts so you can finally get some rest.

Can’t sleep because your mind is racing? Learn how to slow your thoughts so you can finally get some rest.

entertainment

Entertainment

Quiet Your Busy Brain Before Bed

Quiet Your Busy Brain Before Bed, For A Good Night

In today's digital era, physical printed branding materials are often overlooked. A concerning amount of business owners are dismissing print media as "obsolete" and unnecessary. However, print media could be the most powerful branding tool that companies are missing!Some examples of print media include books, business cards, brochures, coupons, ads in magazines or newspapers, ads on billboards, postcards and even product packaging. It is imperative that you utilize at least some of these mediums to enhance your brand's public image.

Old School Media

The consumer has the materials right in front of them, bringing a psychological understanding of "realness" that you would not get with digital media. Handling a physical object has an element of sensory input. It's something your brain remembers much more vividly than random pixels on a screen. <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-reading-brain-in-the-digital-age-why-paper-still-beats-screens/">According to the Scientific American</a>, the human brain will remember words on a physical paper much better than it would remember words displayed on dynamic screens.

Print Media Is Physical

The act of physically interacting with the paper of a book stimulates the memory section of your brain more than a screen can. This can give you an edge over the competition, even if they have a digital advertising budget much larger than yours. With the right mix of print and digital marketing, you will have the advantage over your competitors.Even just having business cards to hand out to people increases the chances of them engaging with your brand or services.

Here's My Card

In addition to the sensory aspects, print media is widely considered more credible than digital media. People who subscribe to magazines and newspapers do so for a reason — they believe the information contained in the publication is accurate, credible and provides them with some benefit. <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/364376">Advertising</a> in these mediums increases your brand's public perception, because they associate your brand's name with the publication's name. There's a reason businesspeople want to be on Forbes magazine so much: It's an incredibly prestigious magazine.

Print Is Real

With the oversaturation of the digital branding and advertising space, there's less competition for printed material.Digital advertising is simply easier and less costly to do. With the advent of Google and Facebook tracking billions of people's habits and providing tools to create, target and run ads within minutes, advertisers have an enormous amount of data to have extreme flexibility and control over who they target their advertisements.

Fewer Players

Magazines are an amazing option for print advertising. Even with the advent of digital media, magazines have barely seen any decrease in readership over the past eight years. In fact, 2019 had the <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/207850/total-gross-magazine-audience-in-the-united-states/">highest recorded magazine readership</a> since 2012. Magazines are often read by a very niche, predictable audience, so you get a higher return on investment from magazine ads than digital ads (assuming you choose the right magazine for the right target audience).

Magazines

Online, everyone does all they can to avoid ads. There are countless ad blocker plugins for every web browser that exists. There's a high chance that you have one installed right now! In 2020, an estimated <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/351862/adblocking-usage/">42.7% of all internet users</a> had an ad block plugin installed. However, in magazines, advertisements are part of the culture, they are expected, and they are part of the magazine experience.

People Do What They Can To Avoid Digital Ads

Digital ads are avoided at all costs, most digital ads are never even looked at, and when given the option, users close or skip the ad as fast as possible. <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/284331">Ad view times</a> are incredibly low online. However, in print media, advertisements stick around for years. Have you ever taken a look at the dates on some of the magazines found in waiting rooms? You can often find magazines over five years old in the piles of magazines and newspapers.

Print Stays

To further determine the value of print advertising, let's examine the pros and cons:Pros:<ul><li>Sensory experience</li><li>Builds credibility</li><li>High exposure</li><li>Less competitive</li><li>Longevity</li></ul>Cons:<ul><li>High buy-in prices</li><li>Can take weeks to appear in publications</li><li>Can't make changes after print</li><li>No fine-tuned audience targeting</li></ul>While print media is an amazing tool, it works best when it's mixed in several advertising and marketing mediums.

The Grand Verdict

Don't skip out on printed brand materials, you could be missing out on major brand opportunities!

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

The Importance of Print Media and How It Can Benefit Your Brand

One of the feelings of the age is a kind of anxiety or unease about things.One reason is that we’re on our phones all the time, we’re consuming more information than ever. Technology has enabled us to do everything on demand. We never get downtime between moments.We're exhausted because of social media and keeping up with the Joneses. In short, we have sort of merged with our phones.

Hooked on technology

A transformation has taken place that is not well documented. We can’t figure out why we can’t read a book. We can’t consume long-form complex ideas. During the Lincoln Douglas debates, Lincoln talked for three hours, Douglas for three hours, then after a break, everyone returned for another three hours. Now democratic debates are one hour and 20 minutes in total, and there are eight candidates. Yet, when we consume long-form stuff such as hours of television, we consume entertainment that doesn’t require us to engage deeply and robustly with it.

Technology is diminishing our capabilities

Previously, media houses were the only trusted sources. Now, almost anyone can create podcasts, books or YouTube videos.  Traditional media institutions are becoming empty shells. Their only value is in their brand's reputation, but their content is decreasing. They seem to only talk to each other and themselves. Focusing on themselves could lead to being irrelevant and wrong or misleading. Yet they still have a measure of coherence that the wild west lacks. On the one side, we have the interesting stuff that is incoherent; on the other, we have stuff that is coherent but meaningless.

The media landscape is shifting

We may watch stuff that doesn’t make sense and leave us fixed in a sort of hypnagogic state. We pay attention to the traditional media houses, but we completely miss important things because they are filtered out by whatever the dominant media narrative is.  We pay attention to the media narrative because our mind is looking for symbols to inform us what is the important narrative. Or that has been vetted. We’re unreachable by real art. The art created now that matters, that is appropriate to this time, and would genuinely pierce the cultural consciousness is mostly unseen.

Why we're fixated on the unimportant and miss the crucial things

People these days try to find meaning in things like polyamorous relationships, travelling, or being an influencer. We emptied our life of real meaning, then tried to replace it with nothing. We tear down marriage and replace it with nothing. We tear down the office, community, the small town square, and replace them with nothing.  If you want to have a meaningful life, get married, have kids, live within your means, find work that you find purposeful and fulfilling, participate in your community.

If you want a meaningful life, start a family

The baby boomers caught a wave that made it easy to prosper. But in their selfishness, they are more concerned about themselves than their children.  They hoard stuff they are not willing to give up. They think everybody will find their bliss and make their own way, just like they did, but they don’t know how expensive college had become relative to themselves or home prices than when they were young. Millennials experienced 9/11, the Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis, huge student debt, and more. “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”

The disconnect between the Boomers and the Millennials

Informed in an interesting fashion by his relationship to stoicism, Ryan shares that he cares deeply about the future, but always in a thoughtful and measured way. In this podcast, he shares what is really driving our current moment across many areas.

Ryan Holiday is a master manipulator with a cool head, and keen eye for social observation and a big heart. Eric sits down with the Author of "Conspiracy" and tries to get a self-confessed former manipulator and one of the top emerging millennial social analysts to tell us how he unweaves society's artifices to see what is really driving our current moment across many areas.   Ryan is a unique voice who uses stoicism to remain intellectually detached but without seemingly succuming to emotional or moral disinterest in the issues of our day. With a background in marketing and media. he has gone beyond mere vice signaling to try to help people see how open they are to having their own media and digital habits weaponized against them. In some ways, one could say that he has migrated from grey-hat mind hacker to a white hat analyst and conversationalist helping us to better understand ourselves using ancient wisdom in a modern moment.    This interview was recorded slightly before the quarantining and so is interesting to think of in light of what is about to happen.      Thank You to Our Sponsors:  Four Sigmatic: foursigmatic.com/portal  Personna: Amazing.com/personna and use the code RAZORS25   Blinkist: Blinkist.com/portal  Theragun: theragun.com/portal  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

podcasts

Podcasts

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Ryan Holiday is a master manipulator with a cool head, and keen eye for social observation and a big heart. Eric sits down with the Author of "Conspiracy" and tries to get a self-confessed former manipulator and one of the top emerging millennial social analysts to tell us how he unweaves society's artifices to see what is really driving our current moment across many areas. Ryan is a unique voice who uses stoicism to remain intellectually detached but without seemingly succuming to emotional or moral disinterest in the issues of our day. With a background in marketing and media. he has gone beyond mere vice signaling to try to help people see how open they are to having their own media and digital habits weaponized against them. In some ways, one could say that he has migrated from grey-hat mind hacker to a white hat analyst and conversationalist helping us to better understand ourselves using ancient wisdom in a modern moment.  This interview was recorded slightly before the quarantining and so is interesting to think of in light of what is about to happen. Thank You to Our Sponsors:Four Sigmatic: foursigmatic.com/portalPersonna: Amazing.com/personna and use the code RAZORS25 Blinkist: Blinkist.com/portalTheragun: theragun.com/portalSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Portal is an exploration into discovery, including conversations with thought leaders. Host Eric Weinstein, Managing Director of Thiel Capital, brings his unique expertise and diverse roster of guests for a wide range of discussions, including science, culture, business, and capitalism. The show will feature people whose lives demonstrate that portals into what we would normally consider impossible, are indeed possible.  Guests include presidential candidate Andrew Yang, NY Times bestselling author Sam Harris, and retired Navy Seal and creator of the hit business podcast Jocko Willink.

The Portal

31: Ryan Holiday - Conspiracy, Manipulation & other Pastimes

Our minds need decluttering too. Whenever we are occupied by things that are not helpful, we are burying the good things underneath. Leave the things that don’t bring us joy, don’t let them steal our peace. 
Like the physical decluttering, you need to do it often. Every day if you can: just as you should tidy your room every day, so the mess doesn’t accumulate.

A Cluttered Mind Can Mess Up Your Life

Make a list. Are there any important things that you’ve wanted to do but never started? How important are they? What is making you delay them?
Understand whether and how these things are important. Then decide how to tackle the challenges preventing you from starting them. When everything is clearer, make a plan and follow it.

Clear Your Procrastination List

Daily practice of mindfulness will help you detach from your emotions and watch them from above. Many times we are worrying without recognizing it.
Worrying is the biggest unhelpful thing that can occupy our minds. It takes up so much space that we can’t enjoy the present. Mindfulness will help recognize it as soon as it emerges. When it does, acknowledge it and let it pass like a cloud in the sky, then move on with the present. Don’t let your worrying control you.

Stop Worrying

When you ignore or delay something that you promised to do, it still stays on top of your mind. Whenever you do something else, your brain will remind you that you should have been doing that other thing instead.
This is not helpful. Declutter the negative emotions for yourself so you can free up space for productive action.

Follow Through on Promises and Commitments

We can’t focus on ourselves when our brain is occupied with emotions related to someone else, or anger and hate of the world. We need inner peace before we can focus on the present. Let go of those emotions that you bear inside.
Your emotions will only affect you, not anyone else (unless you act on it). Find your closure if you need it, but let it go.

Let Go of Anger and Forgive

You don’t need a journal to know that someone or something is toxic to you.
You need to say NO to anything that takes you down from your current state.

Say No to People and Things that Drag You Down

The problem with clutter is that, once you are in the middle, you don’t realize it anymore. You carry on ignoring, going around it. You get used to the disorder so much that you become the disorder…

5 Easy Steps to Declutter Your Mind

Doing well with money is not necessarily about what you know, but about how you behave. Is what Morgan Housel explores in his popular book, where he shares 19 stories that explore the behavioral aspects of personal finance.To Note:<ul><li>Financial success is not hard science, it’s a soft skill where how you behave is more important than what you know.</li><li>To grasp why people bury themselves in debt, you need to study the history of greed, insecurity & optimism.</li><li>Not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself</li></ul>

Money = Behaviour

Everyone looks at money through the lens of their past experiences.You can read what it was like to lose everything during, say, The Great Recession, but you will never bear the emotional scars of those who survived it and are now afraid to invest again. It’s important to remember, then, that until you’ve lived through a financial crisis and felt its consequences, you will never understand why people behave the way they do.

No One’s Crazy

Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems. Every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. Bill Gates had a competitive advantage over millions of other students because he attended one of the only high schools in the world that had the cash and foresight to buy a computer. In finance, luck is as much a force as risk.<ul><li>Be careful who you praise and admire, and be careful who you look down upon.</li><li>Focus less on studying specific individuals and more on studying broad patterns.</li></ul>

Luck & Risk

Success is a lousy teacher, it seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

Rich people do crazy things. Bernie Madoff had everything only to lose everything because he had no sense of enough. The lesson? There is no need to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.<ul><li>The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.</li><li>If expectations rise with results there is no logic in striving for more because you’ll feel the same after putting in the extra effort.</li><li>Happiness equals results minus expectations.</li><li>Social comparison is the problem.</li><li>Accept that you might have enough, even if it is less than those around you.</li></ul>

Nothing is Ever Enough

Our minds are not built to handle the reality that compounding leads to logic-defying results.Warren Buffett’s fortune isn’t due to just being a good investor. Rather it’s due to being a good investor since he was a child. Simplifying we can say he then just waited. The counterintuitive nature of compounding leads even the smartest of us to overlook its enormous power.Linear thinking is so much more intuitive than exponential thinking. You never get accustomed to how quickly things can grow with compounding.

The Compounding Of Money

Good investing is not about making good decisions. It’s about consistently not screwing up. There are a million ways to get wealthy. The only way to stay wealthy is some combination of frugality and paranoia.<ul><li>Money success in a single word: survival. The ability to stick around for a long time without wiping out, or being forced to give up, is what makes the biggest difference.</li><li>Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there.</li><li>Keeping money requires the opposite of taking risks, it requires humility.</li></ul>

Getting Wealthy vs. Staying Wealthy

You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.Anything that is huge, profitable, famous, or influential is the result of a tail event, an outlying one-in-thousands or millions event.<ul><li>Most of our attention goes to things that are huge, profitable, famous, or influential.</li><li>When you accept that tails drive everything in business, investing, and finance, you realize that it’s normal for lots of things to go wrong, break, fail, and fall.</li></ul>

Tails, You Win

Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays. The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want, when I want, with who I want, for as long as I want.” This is the highest dividend money pays:<ul><li>The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.</li><li>Using your money to buy time and options has a lifestyle benefit few luxury goods can compete with.</li></ul>

True Wealth Is Freedom

No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are.People tend to want wealth to signal to others that they want to be liked and admired. But in reality, those other people often bypass admiring you, not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired.<ul><li>You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. What you really want is respect and admiration from other people.</li><li>Having expensive stuff will never bring people to respect and admire you.</li></ul>

Man in the Car Paradox

Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money.We tend to judge wealth by what we see because that’s the information we have in front of us. But the truth is that wealth is what you don’t see. Rich is a current income. Nice cars purchased. Diamonds bought. But wealth is hidden. It is an option not yet taken to buy something later. Not knowing the difference is a source of countless poor money decisions. Someone driving a $100,000 car might be wealthy. Or he may just be poorer by $100,000.

True Wealth Is What You Don’t See

Aiming to be mostly reasonable works better than trying to be coldly rational.“Do not aim to be coldly rational when making financial decisions. Aim to just be pretty reasonable. Reasonable is more realistic, and you have a better chance of sticking with it for the long run, which is what matters most when managing money.” You’re not a spreadsheet, remember. You’re a person.

Reasonable > Rational

Building wealth has little to do with your income or investment returns and more to do with your savings rate. The value of wealth is relative to what you need. A high savings rate means having lower expenses than you otherwise could, and having lower expenses means your savings go further than they would if you spent more.<ul><li>If you view building wealth as something that will require more money or big investment returns, you may become too pessimistic.</li><li>You can build wealth without a high income but have no chance of building wealth without a high savings rate.</li></ul>

Save Money

History is an unassailable guide to the future. A trap many investors fall the “historians as prophets” fallacy: an over-reliance on past data as a signal to future conditions in a field where innovation and change are the lifeblood of progress. Past performance is not indicative of future results—the world changes.<ul><li>Good ideas taken too far are indistinguishable from bad ideas.</li><li>People underestimate the need for room for error in almost everything they do that involves money.</li></ul>

Mistakes & Errors

Long-term planning is harder than it seems because people’s goals and desires change over time.We’re such poor forecasters of our future selves that there’s a term for this phenomenon: The End of History Illusion. We’re aware of how much we’ve changed in the past, but we grossly underestimate how much our personalities, desires, and goal will change in the future.You can’t prepare for what you can’t envision.

The Uncertain Future

The most important part of every plan is planning on your plan, not going according to plan.Have room for error when estimating your future returns. For his own investments, Housel assumes the future returns he’ll earn in his lifetime will be ⅓ lower than the historic average. So, he saves more than he would if I assumed the future will resemble the past. It’s his margin of safety.<ul><li>Avoid single points of failure. If many things rely on one thing working, and that thing breaks, you have a catastrophe.</li><li>The biggest single point of failure is a reliance on a paycheck to fund short-term spending.</li></ul>

Leave Room for Error

Everything has a price, but not all prices appear on labels.The price of investing success is not immediately obvious. It’s not a price tag you can see, so when the bill comes due, it doesn’t feel like a fee for getting something good. It feels like a fee for doing something wrong.Most things are harder in practice than they are in theory. This is often because we are not good at identifying what the price of success is, which prevents us from being able to pay it. The price of successful investing is volatility, fear, doubt, uncertainty, and regret.

Nothing Is Free

Avoid taking financial cues from people playing a different game than you are.Few things matter more with money than understanding your own time horizon and not being persuaded by the actions & behaviors of people playing different games than you are. Go out of your way to identify what game you’re playing and ignore the rest.<ul><li>Bubbles happen when long-term investors playing one game start taking their cues from short-term traders playing another game.</li><li>It is hard to grasp that other investors have different goals than u do.</li><li>Rational people can see the world through a different lens than their own.</li></ul>

You & Me

Optimism sounds like a sales pitch. Pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.In finance, pessimism is paid more attention than optimism and is, therefore, more persuasive. “It’s easier to create a narrative around pessimism because the story pieces tend to be fresher and more recent"<ul><li>Optimism is the belief that the odds of a good outcome are in your favour over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way.</li><li>An iron law in economics: extremely good and extremely bad circumstances rarely stay that way for long because supply and demand adapt in hard to predict ways.</li></ul>

The Seduction of Pessimism

Stories trump statistics. The more you want something to be true, the more likely you are going to believe a story that overestimates the odds of it being true.<ul><li>The more you want something to be true, the more likely you are to believe a story that overestimates the odds of it being true.</li><li>Everyone has an incomplete view of the world, but we form a complete narrative to fill in the gaps.</li><li>Coming to terms with how much you don’t know means coming to terms with how much of what happens in the world is out of your control.</li><li>The illusion of control is more persuasive than the reality of uncertainty.</li></ul>

Believing In Narratives

Psychology of Money: how to have a better relationship with money and to make smarter financial decisions

books

Books

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

The Psychology of Money

The Psychology of Money is a collection of short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of it.

Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Money—investing, personal finance, and business decisions—is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Money—investing, personal finance, and business decisions—is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

Morgan Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, winner of the New York Times Sidney Award, and a two-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two kids.

Morgan Housel

In 1964, US President Johnson declared war on poverty. He stated that the wealthiest nation on Earth should be able to beat it. Yet, up to that point, the US had no official measure of poverty and no statistics on its scope, form or changing nature.

The US war on poverty

Poverty refers to not having enough money to buy necessities such as food, shelter and clothing, to maintain a minimally adequate life. In the mid-60s, the government drew up an official method for counting poor people: It examined the annual costs to purchase a minimally adequate diet for a certain sized family, then multiplied that number by three—one third for food expenses and two thirds for all other costs.&nbsp;

Counting the poor

<ul><li>Most analysts believe that the official poverty line is very conservative as today's families must spend more on things other than food. For example, since the 1960s, housing costs have increased by 800%. </li><li>Some sceptics believe that the multiplier should be raised to four or more.</li><li>In 2011, taking into account the differences in the cost of living across the country, an alternative poverty measurement standard was developed.</li><li>The EU defines poverty as the percentage of the population whose income is less than half of the median income.</li></ul>

Other measures of poverty

To solve a problem, you need to understand its scope. Inaccurate measurements, such as the federal poverty line, can minimise the extent of a country's poverty level. Research shows that approximately 60% of Americans will live below the poverty line for at least one year of adulthood. To win the battle against poverty, we must first recognise the poor before we can hope to win the fight against poverty.

Why measure poverty is important

Newer measures of poverty may do a better job of counting America's poor, which is necessary to helping them.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

Poverty in 2021 looks different than in 1964 – but the US hasn't changed how it measures who's poor

Tokyo was almost destroyed during World War II but was quickly rebuilt and reinvented itself as a world leader in manufacturing and technology.
Today, Tokyo is Japan's economic centre. The city is safe and prosperous and known for its glamour and cosmopolitanism. The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan area in the world, with over 37 million residents.

Tokyo - A prosperous city

Tokyo began as a fishing village. It was first named Edo and was appointed as the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603. By the 18th century, it grew into one of the world's most populous cities.
The city benefited from peace (the Pax Tokugawa), where the city's resources were used for economic development. Then, in 1868, the Tokugawa shogunate ended, and the new imperial court moved to Edo and renamed the city Tokyo - meaning "eastern capital."

From Edo to Tokyo

The city was vulnerable to fires and earthquakes. In 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake caused a fire whirl and burned down the city centre. Over 140,000 people died, and around 300,000 homes were destroyed.
World War II cost Japan between 1,8 and 2,8 million lives and a quarter of the nation's wealth. The Great Tokyo Air Raid was deadlier than the bombings of Dresden or Hamburg and even the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The firebombings cut Tokyo's economic output in half.

Two major disasters in Tokyo

Prewar Japan had been a major power. The capital city kept their memory of what it was like to be an industrial centre. They still possessed an educated and skilled workforce.
The US forced Japan to surrender its right to a military, causing Japan to allocate its total resources toward civilian activities. When Japan established a national defence force in 1954, the expense was small. When the Korean War broke out, the US procured many of its war supplies from the geographically close Japan, which supercharged Tokyo's recovery.

Tokyo's quick recovery

Tokyo rapidly reindustrialized. With the country's drastic increase in imports and exports, Tokyo acted as a major trade hub.
Japan had few natural resources but imported large amounts of raw materials to manufacture finished goods. The profits from the manufacturing output were reinvested into better equipment and technological research, boosting production and profits. The United States government also removed trade barriers on Japanese goods, ensuring that Japanese entrepreneurs could freely sell their goods in the US and elsewhere.

Tokyo: Economic growth

Less than twenty-two years after World War II, Japan had the world's second-largest economy, and Tokyo was at the centre of the nation's prosperity.
Tokyo is known for producing cars (Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Mitsubishi), cameras (Canon, Nikon, and Fujifilm), watches (Casio, Citizen, and Seiko), and digital goods such as Panasonic, Nintendo, Toshiba, Sony, and Yamaha. Since the 1970s, Tokyo has become well-known for cutting-edge robotics.

Tokyo's success

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History

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Centers of Progress: Tokyo (Technology)

A passport is issued to a country’s citizens for international travel and identification.
<ul>
<li>A passport is used to verify one’s country of citizenship. If traveling outside your country, it is used to regain entry into your country of citizenship.</li>
<li>Passports include your photo, name, birth date, gender and physical characteristics.</li>
<li>Diplomats and government officials are granted different passports than what's given to regular travelers.</li>
</ul>

What is a Passport?

A visa is an endorsement placed within a passport that grants the holder official permission to enter, leave or stay in a country for a specified time period.
<ul>
<li>The most common visa types are tourist, student, work and transit visas.</li>
<li>Depending on where you are traveling, a visa can be valid for single or multiple visits.</li>
<li>Some visas require an application to be filed prior to entering the country and other visas are granted upon entering the country.</li>
<li>Certain countries require an interview or medical screening prior to applying for a visa.</li>
</ul>

What is a Visa?

Traveling soon? Before embarking on your journey, be sure you know the difference between a passport and a visa because you may need both.

What is the Difference Between a Passport and a Visa?

The 'less is more' term is applied to many philosophies, products or lifestyle choices.
The definitions are broad, from intending to reflect on the damage we're doing to the world to Marie Kondo method that helps people live meaningful lives with less. Marie encourages people to declutter and only hold on to the possessions that 'sparks joy.'

Minimalism

Critics point out the irony of the Minimalists' output - it just adds to all the stuff. But minimalists believe that it is not just about decluttering and simplicity. It is about making room for more time, peace, creativity, experiences, contentment, and freedom.
This makes minimalism a growth industry, as the "stuff" they throw out is piling up.

The critics of minimalism

Kyle Chayka, the author of The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, reminds us that minimalism started in the art world and was about finding beauty in unexpected things, such as industrial materials.
Throwing out all your stuff might seem to be against consumerism, but you still have to buy the right new things to follow a fitting austere aesthetic. Owning minimal and having white walls and floors can become oppressive and empty.

Minimalism in not the same as anti-consumerism

The roots of modern minimalist philosophy reach some 2,500 years back with Diogenes. Born around 412 BC, Diogenes decided he didn't need a house and lived in a felled rainwater pipe. All he possessed was a cloak, a walking stick and a leather pouch. He discovered happiness through self-mastery and self-sufficiency.
In the 3rd Century BC, Stoicism's philosophy informs a minimalistic lifestyle by adhering to simple living ideas and focusing on the self and community instead of possessions.

Modern minimalism is an old philosophy

In the context of a happy life, people feel more energetic and focused when they deal with the clutter.
John Pawson states that it takes discipline to reduce until you can't further subtract. But not having anything can make spaces uncomfortable to be in.

A strict minimalist aesthetic

'Less is more' is a familiar refrain recently – in fact it's an idea that goes back 2,500 years. Beverley D'Silva explores outer order, inner calm – and why simplicity makes us happy.

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