Exploring the building blocks, temperance, and willpower

Welcome to the Intentional Dollar weekly newsletter — great work taking this small step to move your money forward. I’m Logan, a Certified Financial Planner™, and I’m excited you’re here!

What’s inside?

• One tool to experiment with

• Two quotes from others

• Three questions to dig deeper

• Four lines of poetry for the point

_{One tool to experiment with:}

The Building Blocks:

When starting something new there’s an allure to skip straight to the good stuff.

We skip the fundamentals — writing them off as too basic. The advanced levels seem more impressive. Selecting the perfect option spread for a trade is more enticing than something like starting a systematic savings plan.

Beyond the boring first levels, we also have a surge of starting motivation. This motivation alone can launch us past the fundamentals, running at an unsustainable clip. Have you ever set a financial target too high and abandoned it completely when times were tough?

By starting at levels two and three you rely too much on the initial ignition from the ephemeral motivation tank.

You are occasionally great, but not consistently. You occasionally stack big workouts, or big savings, or big accomplishments, but you fall back into your patterns because maintaining that effort is too difficult when the motivation tank is empty.

The point is to build off of easy points.

Show up. Save a dollar. Repeat.

As we explored in the clock, one day is 24 hours. Each of those hours is made of 60 minutes, and each minute is made of 60 seconds. You can always go smaller. $1,000,000 dollars is a million tiny, negligible dollars. But when you build them up, they become meaningful.

When you do this consistently, time carries your burden.

It’s difficult to battle the urge to try level two and three blocks. Yes, you’re currently capable of performing level two, and maybe even some level three — that’s the siren song. But when you stretch yourself to perform at those levels, you increase the odds you fall short and revert back to zero.

Avoid zeros.

Anytime you learn something new — sports, language, photography — you start with the elemental rules of play. When you buy a camera and start your photography journey, you aren’t immediately studying the ISO and aperture settings for each environment you might encounter. You start by learning how to turn the camera on, take a picture, and find the photos you’ve taken.

The first level is your foundation, so it’s the most important level. Don’t be led to the trap that the first block is too simple because it’s easy. You should carefully inspect every facet of this block and test your mastery.

Can you save a dollar consistently? Can you spend less than you make consistently? Can you control your spending impulses consistently? Can you choose simple investments consistently?

When you consistently master the first block, you earn the right to start on the second block.

_{Two quotes on temperance:}

Discipline yourself on your path to wealth.

_{Three questions on willpower:}

Willpower grows as a direct function of doing the things you don’t want to.

1. Where have I been taking the easy road?

2. Where have I been telling myself I don’t want to do something, and subsequently listening?

3. What if I leaned into the friction that I typically avoid?

Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.

_{Four lines of poetry for the point:}

Contact Me:

Content ideas, questions? Reply to this email or reach out to me at [email protected]