Notes.

The door

Someone opened a door for me once that I hadn’t earned yet. I’ve spent a long time trying to understand why they did it, and I’ve mostly given up looking for the reason. What I kept instead was the obligation.

The older I get, the more sure I am that talent is spread evenly across people and opportunity is not. Most of the folks who never got their shot were not short on ability. They were short on someone deciding to hold a door open for a minute longer than they had to.

So that’s the work underneath all the other work: find the people who are ready, and hold the door. It almost never shows up on anyone’s résumé, mine included. It’s still the part I’m most proud of.

— Mike

What money is really for

I’ve spent years building things that teach kids about money, so people assume I must care a great deal about money itself. What I actually care about is what it does.

Money isn’t a scoreboard. It’s a set of choices — the freedom to say yes to the right things, no to the wrong ones, and to not be afraid while you do it. Most people never get taught that part. They get taught to chase the number, and the number never tells you when to stop.

What I want for a ten-year-old is simple. By the time real money is in their hands, I want the habits already there and the fear already gone. You can’t teach that in one sitting. But you can start it early, before the stakes are real.

— Mike

Learn, lift, create

Three words sit at the bottom of every page on this site: learn, lift, create. They’re in that order on purpose.

Learn comes first because everything else runs downstream of it. You can’t lift what you don’t understand, and you can’t build what you never studied. Lift comes second, because knowledge you keep to yourself is just a hobby. Create comes last, because it’s what the first two are for — the making, and the bringing of people along with you.

I don’t always get the order right. But it’s the closest thing I have to a compass.

— Mike

On being wrong

I’ve learned more from the things I got wrong than from the things I got right, and it isn’t close.

The trouble is that being wrong feels awful in the moment and useful only in hindsight, so most of us build our whole lives around avoiding it. I’ve tried to do the opposite — to treat being wrong as information that arrived early, while it was still cheap. A bad assumption caught in week one costs you an afternoon. The same assumption caught in year three can cost you the company.

None of that makes it comfortable. I still don’t enjoy it. But I’ve stopped confusing the discomfort with a sign that I’m off course. More often, it means the opposite.

— Mike

The work that waits

I’ve never kept a public journal, and I’m wary of people who perform their thinking online. So think of this as the opposite: short, and only when I have something worth your time.

Mostly it will be what I’m actually working through — a decision, a book, something I got wrong. A reminder I keep having to relearn: the work that matters is rarely the work that feels urgent. The urgent things announce themselves. The important ones wait quietly until you make room for them.

— Mike