Dear Reader,

Last week, I gave you the first six lessons from a list I originally wrote back in 2023.

Those covered everything from earning and saving more money…

To building skills, taking asymmetric risks, and creating more control over your time.

Today, I want to give you the other six.

And that last one – control over your time – is a good place to pick back up.

So let’s continue with…

#7: Don’t Sacrifice the Important for the Urgent

You’ve probably seen the Eisenhower Matrix before.

It separates everything you need to do based on whether it’s urgent, important, both, or neither.

I think a lot of people spend most of their lives trapped in the urgent side of the matrix.

Because there’s always something.

A deadline…an email that needs an answer…extra work that has to get done.

Some new emergency always finds a way to jump to the front of the line.

The problem is that a lot of that stuff is urgent – but NOT important.

And that means it just keeps you afloat, instead of truly moving you forward.

The things that can actually change your life are often much easier to postpone.

Working overtime feels urgent.

Going home on time and learning a new skill doesn’t.

Neither does putting a couple of hours into the side business you’ve been thinking about.

Or spending that time with your kids.

You can always tell yourself you’ll do those things next month.

Or worse – “someday”.

But someday never comes…

And eventually you realize you’ve spent years putting out fires…

While the things you said were most important to you barely budged at all.

So you have to deliberately make room for them…

To schedule them as non-negotiables…

Even – or especially – when something else feels more urgent.

And one of the easiest places to get this wrong is with your family.

Which brings me to lesson #8.

#8: In 20 Years, the Only People Who Remember How Much You Worked Late Will Be Your Kids

This one hits me pretty hard because I struggle with it myself.

There are plenty of days where I’m working and I finally get into a great flow state…

You know, that feeling when you stop having to force it and suddenly everything just starts clicking…

Right around the time I’m supposed to shut the computer down and go have dinner with my family.

That can make it incredibly hard to just put down everything and stop.

But for me, family still takes precedence over everything else.

I think the family unit itself is more fundamental than nations, governments, cultures, or religions.

It’s where we first learn human connection.

Compassion. Love. Decency. Drive. Strength.

And if you continually sacrifice that for something else, you do so at your own peril.

I think that’s especially true when your kids are young.

Those first few years are just different.

There’s something special about that toddler phase that you simply don’t get back.

And when you look at the numbers, you can see just how quickly that window closes.

By the time your kids are grown, the vast majority of the time you’ll ever spend with them is already behind you.

They go to school.

Then they’d rather spend time with their friends.

They start driving.

Eventually they move out and build lives of their own.

Which means there will be a last time they ask you to pick them up.

A last time they want another hug before bed.

A last time they ask you to wrestle.

And when those moments happen, you probably won’t know they were the last ones.

Meanwhile, 20 years from now, the customer you stayed late for probably won’t remember that night.

Your old boss likely won’t either.

But your kids will.

That doesn’t mean there can never be sacrifices.

Sometimes there have to be.

But there’s a huge difference between making a sacrifice because your family genuinely needs you to…

And allowing work to consume every hour you’re willing to give it.

Because work will take as much as you let it.

But your kids won’t stay young long enough to wait for you to finish.

#9: Talent Is Just Practice in Disguise

As a culture, I believe we give natural talent WAY too much credit.

We see someone who is exceptional at something and think they were just born with it.

Sure, genetics certainly plays a role.

But there’s a huge part of skill that gets built the boring way – through deliberate repetition.

Take somebody like Tiger Woods.

People look at him and see an extraordinary golfer.

They don’t see that Tiger Woods was hitting full buckets of balls at 18 months old…

And by age 8, he was already good enough to win a Junior World Championship.

By the time most people first pick up a club seriously, somebody like that already has years of focused practice behind him.

That’s why I don’t think you should get discouraged when somebody is much better than you at something.

Maybe you’re comparing your first 100 reps to their 10,000th.

Why should you be as good as they are yet?

Last week I talked about stacking skills.

This is how you actually build those skills.

You do the thing. You get feedback.

Then you keep doing it, while integrating said feedback.

You don’t control your genetics.

You do control how many reps you put in.

#10: You Receive in Proportion to What You Give

Last week I talked about creating value.

This is really the other side of that idea.

If you want to receive more from the world, you generally have to give more first.

That could mean solving a bigger problem.

Helping more people…

Creating something more useful…

Or becoming better at something other people already value.

In a voluntary transaction, somebody gives you money because they believe whatever you’re offering is more valuable to them than keeping that money.

That’s why your net worth is, in large part, a measure of how much value you’ve created (assuming you didn’t steal it, of course).

So in a very real way, you receive in proportion to what you give.

That’s the deal.

But most people get it backward.

They think if you receive “too much” – or if you want to receive more – you’re “greedy”.

Now, don’t get me wrong…

Greed is a toxin that will rot you from the inside out.

But the opposite of being greedy shouldn’t be to hate money.

Because if you despise wealth, the only thing that will happen is that you will never do the things necessary to create wealth yourself…

And that’s a recipe for a restricted life.

Instead, we want to practice generosity – the actual opposite of greed.

We want to give more…

Which, paradoxically, will actually allow us to receive more as well.

Win-win.

#11: Readers Are Leaders and Leaders Are Readers

Most of us don’t personally know the best investor in the world.

You probably can’t call up a great entrepreneur and ask them to spend 20 hours walking you through everything they learned building companies.

And good luck getting some historian who spent 40 years studying one subject to sit down and personally teach it all to you.

But in many cases, you can buy their book…

One that they likely spent hundreds – if not thousands – of hours writing.

That’s pretty incredible when you think about it.

Somebody can spend decades developing expertise…

Then compress a large chunk of what they learned into something you can absorb in 10 or 20 hours.

All for a mere twenty or thirty bucks.

If you want to build human capital, reading is one of the highest-ROI ways I know to do it.

Now, the caveat is that you have to read a lot.

For me, maybe one out of every 50 books I read turns out to be truly great.

But when I find one of those books, I don’t care about adding another title to some annual reading count.

I go back and read it again. I may even revisit it a year later.

If you’re early in your reading journey, this may seem strange.

When you first start reading heavily, almost every book seems fascinating because you’re constantly encountering ideas you’ve never seen before.

After a few hundred books, your standards change.

You revisit some of the books you once loved and think “Huh, this actually isn’t that great” or “I’ve heard this idea expressed better elsewhere”.

That’s a good sign.

It means your thinking and perception have been elevated.

That’s the whole goal.

But of course, that will take time.

And this brings me to the final lesson…

The one that ties everything else together.

#12: The Time Will Pass Anyway

Anything substantial takes time.

That can be very discouraging when you’re standing at the beginning.

I experienced this with my health.

At the end of 2020, I was around 230 pounds, probably somewhere around 35% to 40% body fat.

So I went on a carnivore diet and over roughly six months, I lost about 50 pounds, most of it fat.

But once I got leaner, I realized I didn’t have much muscle.

So I started working on that.

And I’ve now been training basically every weekday for more than five years.

I still feel like I have a long way to go. But I know I’m getting there.

However, if somebody had told me at the beginning:

“Joe, getting the body you actually want might take ten years”…

That would have been pretty demotivating.

Ten years is a LONG time.

But here’s the thing.

Those ten years were going to pass whether I trained or not.

The only difference is that, at the end of those ten years, I could choose whether I would still have the same old 230-pound body…

Or the body I actually wanted.

This applies to everything you want to improve on – including your finances.

Maybe you look at where you want to be financially and think:

That could take me 15 years.

Okay. 15 years from now is still coming.