The Connection Newsletter 21 - Birthday (resend)

Hello!

Sorry for the two emails this morning. Somehow the first email had all broken links :( Without further ado:  

This is edition #21 of The Connection, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!) Thanks so much for reading. 

(If you’re not interested in these newsletters, click the unsubscribe link at the bottom. No worries, we'll still be friends.) 

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Every year I write a letter to my dog Deefer on his birthday. This year he turns four years old. I talk about crying babies, asshole dogs, and unconditional love. If you’d like to read this year’s letter, click here. 

Next, onto this week’s articles: ...

Follow these Little Money Rules. This is a great list of aphorisms about money from Morgan Housel. There are five that really resonated with me: 

• About once a decade people forget that bubbles form and burst about once a decade.

• Avoid disaster, be patient, and you don’t need many smart decisions to do well over time.

• The only way to build wealth is to have a gap between your ego and your income.

• Debt removes options, savings adds them.

• No one’s impressed with what you have.

...

On the flip side, Meghan Daum recounts how much her New York City life on a journalist’s salary cost her. 

Ms. Daum published this in The New Yorker in 1999, but the story is cyclical (every year college graduates will move to NYC/SF/LA and make the same mistakes) and the lessons evergreen. Trying to keep up with Joneses (or the Kardashians, or the Gaines, or name any Instagram Influencer) will never go out of style.  

Super fascinating were the “ephemeral luxuries that have come to seem like necessities” to Ms Daum at the height of her misspent youth: “I’ll go to Starbucks in the morning, and then order sushi for lunch. I’ll meet a friend for drinks and drop forty-five dollars on Merlot and chicken satay. I make long-distance phone calls almost daily, with no thought of peak calling hours or dime-a-minute rates. I have a compulsive need to keep fresh-cut flowers in my apartment at all times, and spend eight to ten dollars a week on tulips from the Korean market.”...

In a Global Business Travel Association report (as reported by Erika Adams of Skift Table) that surveyed business travelers, of those who use an app on their phone to research places to eat while traveling: 

• 53 percent use Yelp 

• 50 percent use Trip Advisor

• 36 percent use Grubhub

• 34 percent use OpenTable 

...

The biggest lie we still teach in American history classes. James Loewen says the biggest misconception propagated by American history classes is that “things progressively get better,” when in fact, they don’t. Racism, for example, got progressively worse from 1890 to 1940. 

“Nothing good happens without the collective efforts of dedicated people. History, the way it’s commonly taught, has a way of obscuring this fact.” 

... 

I finally watched The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a movie about the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. Really powerful and strong recommend. Available for rent on Amazon.

Thanks for reading!

Any questions, comments, or recommendations, feel free to reply directly to this email.

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