#63 September 23rd, 2022
Blake Carroll, CPA
PwC People Team - Manager | Helping Aspiring CPAs Navigate the CPA Exam with Confidence
Thought of the Newsletter: I would guess probably every person you look up to has felt imposter syndrome at some point in their career, if not all the time. That goes for people starting their first job after school all the way up through partners and CEOs. We make imposter syndrome so much worse by thinking that we shouldn’t ever feel it or by thinking it’s a sign that we’re in over our head or not capable. But what if we reframe it as a completely normal and even an expected feeling that accompanies trying something new?
Imposter syndrome doesn’t mean you’re going to fail or that you chose the wrong path, it means you’ve been brave enough to put yourself in a situation that will challenge you to learn and grow. To me that actually sounds like a positive thing! All of us are figuring life out as we go.
This article was written early on during Covid but it is still very applicable for how we can deal with times of great uncertainty. It is tempting to just consume as much information as possible in order to try to get rid of the uncertainty, but if we do that too much we will burn out from information overload. It’s crucial to take breaks and not have a fire hose of content aimed at your head all the time. Great disruption and change also offers the opportunity to reevaluate how we spend our time. When your normal routine is impossible or in disarray you’re forced to reevaluate it and look at what things you do that actually don’t provide much value at all. Lastly, it can be great practice at finding the good out of a bad situation. It is possible to find opportunities from the bad times while not diminishing the pain and suffering at all. Those ideas are not mutually exclusive. It is empowering to believe and look for lessons and growth in every difficult thing we go through. It’s better to grow through things than just go through things.
It can be surprising to learn the different ways that our diet can affect all of our well-being, even things like sleep and our ability to focus. It goes far beyond just your weight. If you’re feeling very off, however that is manifesting itself, and you can’t figure out why then your diet may be the culprit. This article gives examples around sleep, mood, digestion, and health plateaus.
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This article does a great job analyzing why television shows that discuss the stock market and investments are actually terrible sources for making your own personal finance decisions. I think the most important observation in the article is that by the time the shows are talking about a stock it has probably already drastically outperformed the rest of the market. That means if anything it’s due for a drawback, not continued huge growth. They’re not actually making any sort of accurate prediction about the future, they’re reacting to what has already happened. Their purpose is to entertain and get views. If they were really that great at investing, wouldn’t they be investing full time rather than being on television? They’re not actually teaching sound principles of personal finance and long-term investing for retirement. A lot of personal finance actually is pretty boring and does not make for good television.
You will not experience a completely fulfilling and fantastic relationship if you are just going through the motions of life together. You need to create a deeper sense of shared connection and meaning. You need to have goals and visions for your life both as an individual and as a couple, and you need to share them together on a regular basis. This article also talks about the importance of spending time together to really focus on each other and the relationship. It’s easy to let that kind of thing slide as you get older and the magic fizzles or as kids enter the picture and take a lot of your time. Many people forget that relationships take time and effort and work for their entire duration. You can’t just put it on cruise control and continue indefinitely. You want to have goals and a future that you are working on together and trying to create together.
It’s common to hear the advice “just be positive” when you are faced with a difficult situation. The term toxic positivity gets used more frequently these days, where people may discount and invalidate all negative feelings and forms of suffering and try to only focus on the positive. There are times I have gotten close to toxic positivity myself But we do not make bad things better by ignoring them. We don’t want to stick our heads in the sand and fool ourselves about the difficulties that we face. This article argues that instead we should look to what the challenge can teach us, what lesson is there in this? That is a much more helpful exercise. You can find a value from what you’re learning while still acknowledging the pain, discomfort, or negative emotion.
This article applies the 80/20 Pereto principal to living a healthy lifestyle. You do not have to eat broccoli and chicken breast for every single one of your meals in order to lose weight or stay healthy. In fact making your diet that restrictive will often be counterproductive. The author makes the point that if you are getting 80%, so 16 or 17 of your 21 meals a week, as healthy meals with only whole foods you are going to see great progress. It also is a lifestyle that is sustainable long-term so you won’t yo-yo back-and-forth on your weight. So many people gain back weight that they lose because they cannot stick to their diet plan long-term. Similarly with working out you don’t have to exercise every single day. You can have rest and take breaks. It’s even recommended so that you do not overtrain and injure yourself or burn out. You can still enjoy food and you can still rest while you are in the process of getting healthy.