Emotions & Finance

Creative and artistic people often feel a tension between making what they want to make, and making money. We can resolve this tension by first asking ourselves, "who are we serving?"

Many of us seek a flow state in our work. However, we often also encounter an emotional state I call the “panic state,” where nothing we do seems to work. By relaxing into the sense of overwhelm, and introducing small successes, we can gradually overcome the panic state.

We all understand the importance of feedback but few of us stop to recognize our own emotional experience as we are in the process of receiving feedback. Moreover, the absence of feedback itself can be lonely and isolating.

Once we identify what makes us happy and what stresses us out, we can start to bridge the gap between the two. Mindsets are a powerful tool to help us focus on the right things and make the decisions that serve us in the long run.

Work is a source of stress for most people, but some find work to be a source of joy. This post dives into some of the sources of joy that people derive from their work. Which ones resonate for you?

Work is stressful for most people, but it doesn't have to be. We can move from associating work with stress to associating it with joy by understanding the sources of both, and adopting a mindset that reinforces the work attitude we want to have.

Even though bad things happen to everyone, we harm ourselves when we default to seeing ourselves as victims of circumstance. The victim mindset robs us of agency. When we recognize that we never can lose total agency, we transform ourselves from victims to powerful agents of change.

A salaried job provides fear of punishment as a powerful motivator to work. A self-employed person lacks this top-down, fear-based motivator. In the absence of fear, a person can tap into pride, excitement and anger as alternative fuel sources for action.

Luck isn't entirely random. People who consistently get "lucky" have a mentality around putting themselves into situations where good things might happen to them, and being prepared to take advantage as those opportunities arise.

This note is about the emotions that underlie market manias. I wrote it as a companion note to yesterday’s piece on the stock market. Something about the human emotional experience changes when people gather into groups. Actions that people would never undertake alone (e.g., mob violence) suddenly become