The Connection Newsletter 45 - Departure

The Connection Newsletter 45 - Departure from normal

March 04, 2019

Hello!This is edition #45 of The Connection, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hiya!) Glad you're here.This week Amy and I start a new parenting adventure: we’ll both be working while Oliver starts daycare. We spent last week and a major part of the weekend thinking about how to structure our lives and schedules to make this two-working-parents-thing work for the family.The tl;dr: it’s going to be a departure from normal :) When we lived in NYC (pre-Oliver) we spent Sundays afternoons prepping for the week. Then weekdays, we both worked until 8pm or 9pm, ate dinner together, then went to bed around midnight.Now we’ll navigate getting Oliver to and from daycare, eating together as a family, then putting him to bed before trying to squeeze in another hour or two at the laptop. And on weekends, we want to maximize our time with him, and I don’t think we want to give up afternoons to food prep.Plus, for now both Amy and I will (mostly) be working from home, which adds another element of coordination. We have different work styles -- Amy likes being around people, while I could go weeks where my only eye contact is with Deefer. It’ll be an interesting experiment. I hope none of this is construed as complaining. We’re both lucky to have roles where we can work remotely, and our daycare of choice came through at the 11th hour. We’re grateful to be in this situation, and the new challenges that come with it.If you’ve had to make a similar adjustment as a parent, what was the experience like for you? What worked well and what didn’t? I’d love to hear your take :)Meanwhile, the Reforge programs have been open for a week and applications have been coming like new Ariana Grande Instagram followers.(Want less email? No problem, you can unsub at the bottom. We'll still be friends.)

Make sure to hit "Display Images" above to see puppy pics. 

. Fortune magazine recently published an article about the best paying side hustles for 2019. I don’t remember much about it, other than it was a terrific headline but complete waste of time.

If you’re interested in earning money on the side, Justin Mares put together a better framework for thinking about businesses you can start. They fall into 4 categories:  

  • Buy an existing asset

  • Launch a product on a marketplace with existing demand

  • Launch a unique, one of a kind product in a new space where you can buy demand

  • Arbitrage

Most importantly, Mr. Mares points out that starting a start-up is the

absolute worst thing you can do if you’re interest in earning money on the side, and digs into why.

Strong recommend.

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. This is a stark account of the alcoholism and addiction that can run rampant in the restaurant industry. David McMillan talks about his experience running Joe Beef, a restaurant built on decadence, and what happened when he decided to get sober.

The punchline: restaurants can be a fun time but the fun doesn’t last.

“The community of people I surrounded myself with ate and drank like Vikings. It worked well in my twenties. It worked well in my thirties. It started to unravel when I was 40.”

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. ESPN did a terrific job covering the Tim Donaghy scandal and the impartial efforts of the NBA to quickly and quietly put this behind them as fast as possible.

“Donaghy's track record of making calls that favored his bet was 23-3-4.

If one assumes there should be no correlation between wagers and the calls made by a referee, the odds of that disparity* might seem unlikely. And they are. When presented with that data, ESPN statisticians crunched the numbers and revealed: The odds that Tim Donaghy would have randomly made calls that produced that imbalance are 6,155-to-1.”

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. Like many Paul Graham essays, this is less how-to and more philosophical, but it forces you to think about your career and how you’re spending working hours.

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. I’ve been on a steady Morgan Housel kick. This essay is no exception.

“A culture of equality and Togetherness that came out of the 1950s-1970s innocently morphs into a Keeping Up With The Joneses effect. Now you can see the problem.

Joe, an investment banker making $900,000 a year, buys a 4,000 square foot house with two Mercedes and sends three of his kids to Pepperdine. He can afford it.

Peter, a bank branch manager making $80,000 a year, sees Joe and feels a subconscious sense of entitlement to live a similar lifestyle, because Peter’s parents believed – and instilled in him – that Americans’ lifestyles weren’t that different even if they had different jobs. His parents were right during their era, because incomes fell into a tight distribution. But that was then. Peter lives in a different world. But his expectations haven’t changed much from his parents, even if the facts have.

So what does Peter do?

He takes out a huge mortgage. He has $45,000 of credit card debt. He leases two cars. His kids will graduate with heavy student loans. He can’t afford the stuff Joe can, but he’s pushed to stretch for the same lifestyle. It is a big stretch.This would have seemed preposterous to someone in the 1930s. But we’ve spent a half-century since the end of the war fostering a cultural acceptance of household debt.”

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Personal finances continues to be top of mind as we continue making the switch to Vanguard. I recently asked my co-workers: “How involved are your spouses with the household finances?” The answer: Not very.

While not everyone needs (or wants) to understand all the details or spend time tagging expenses in Mint, I think it’s important for partners

to be aligned and aware of their finances. Here’s a great how-to on writing an

” with your partner, and

.

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started the season 2 podcast. It’s a riot -- especially if you’ve spent any time in the industry of personal development.

Thanks for reading!

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