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Wise Money: Other People's Shoes

Quote to Ponder

"You must be willing to learn from the experience of others. Learn from their mistakes so you don’t that’s to make them yourself." - Charlie Munger

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Insight

Reading is a superpower. You can live someone else's life for 300 pages. A novel transports you to a different perspective than your own.

This week I read "The Road" by Cormack McCarthy. I walked the road along with a fictional father and a son in a post-apocalyptic world, without food or safety. Their journey south to survive the winter amid starving cannibals was a stark contrast to my daily life.

The difference between my life and The Road left me feeling grateful. For food in the fridge. For my comfortable bed. For the money in our bank account.

There are billions of people in the world whose lives look nothing like yours. If your perspective is only shaped by your own experience, your blind spots will hinder your view of reality.

Wisdom is the discovery of the best of what other people have already learned. Reading biographies and autobiographies is superhighway to wisdom. These books contain the experiences and lessons learned from an entire life, compacted down into a few hundred pages. A whole life!

Authors spend years researching and gaining knowledge to produce their work. You can absorb the refined final product in just a few hours time.

One of the reasons I love being a Financial Planner is I have the opportunity to see many different financial situations and perspectives. Everyone comes to us with different values, goals, and experiences with money. I am hired to advise, but I also learn from our clients. You give us the privilege of seeing your financial life from the inside out. I have a much more expansive view our our relationship with money because of my job.

Our own experiences predominantly shape the way we view each other and the world. It's like looking through a straw. To widen our perspective, we have to learn from the experiences of others. Walk a mile in their shoes. We have to learn from their mistakes so that we don't make them ourselves. And the easiest way to do that is to pick up a book.

Perspective Expanding Reading Recommendations:

  1. Endurance by Alfred Lansing
  2. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
  3. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD
  4. Educated by Tara Westover
  5. Island of the World by Michael D. O'Brien
  6. Crashing Through by Robert Kurson