Manisha Thakor: Finding Your Enough
The author and financial educator on why we shouldn’t let our finances and accomplishments define us—and what we can do instead.
Listen Now
Listen and subscribe to Morningstar’s Manisha Thakor: Finding Your Enough from your mobile device.
Today on the podcast, we welcome back author and financial educator, Manisha Thakor. Manisha’s new book is called MoneyZen: The Secret to Finding Your “Enough.” She is also the founder of MoneyZen, a financial education consultancy. In addition to her latest book, Manisha is the co-author of two books with Sharon Kedar: On My Own Two Feet, published in 2007 and updated in 2013, and Get Financially Naked, which came out in 2009. Prior to founding MoneyZen, Manisha was vice president of Financial Well-Being at Brighton Jones. Before that, she was director of Wealth Strategies for Women at Buckingham Strategic Wealth. Earlier in her career, Manisha held positions at several investment management firms, including Fayez Sarofim, Sands Capital Management, and Atalanta/Sosnoff Capital. Manisha is a chartered financial analyst and a certified financial planner. She received her bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Wellesley College and her MBA from Harvard Business School.
Background
MoneyZen: The Secret to Finding Your “Enough,” by Manisha Thakor
On My Own Two Feet: A Modern Girl’s Guide to Personal Finance, by Manisha Thakor and Sharon Kedar
Get Financially Naked: How to Talk Money With Your Honey, by Manisha Thakor and Sharon Kedar
The Cult of Never Enough
Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life, by Jack Bogle
“Perfectionism Is Increasing, and That’s Not Good News,” by Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill, Harvard Business Review, Jan. 26, 2018.
“Does More Money Correlate With Greater Happiness?” by Michele W. Berger, penntoday.upenn.edu, March 6, 2023.
Other
“Manisha Thakor: Beware of ‘Junk Personal Finance,’” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, July 20, 2021.
Christine Benz: Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar. Jeff is on vacation this week, so it’s just me today.
Today on the podcast, we welcome back author and financial educator, Manisha Thakor. Manisha’s new book is called MoneyZen: The Secret to Finding Your “Enough.” She is also the founder of MoneyZen, a financial education consultancy. In addition to her latest book, Manisha is the co-author of two books with Sharon Kedar: On My Own Two Feet, published in 2007 and updated in 2013, and Get Financially Naked, which came out in 2009. Prior to founding MoneyZen, Manisha was vice president of Financial Well-Being at Brighton Jones. Before that, she was director of Wealth Strategies for Women at Buckingham Strategic Wealth. Earlier in her career, Manisha held positions at several investment management firms, including Fayez Sarofim, Sands Capital Management, and Atalanta/Sosnoff Capital. Manisha is a chartered financial analyst and a certified financial planner. She received her bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Wellesley College and her MBA from Harvard Business School.
Manisha, welcome back to The Long View.
Manisha Thakor: Christine, it’s always wonderful to get to chat with you.
Benz: Well, it’s great to have you here, and congratulations on the book. We want to talk about the book in-depth. You talk about what you call the “cult of never enough.” You have these great turns of phrases in the book. Can you describe what that cult is about?
Thakor: Absolutely. There are three ways that I think about the “cult of never enough” in terms of defining it. The first is this feeling that no matter how much money you earn, how many accomplishments you achieve or praise you receive, it’s never quite enough to make you feel whole inside because the finish line keeps moving. Then the second piece that defines in my mind the “cult of never enough” is that you’ve subconsciously embraced societal messages that are telling you that the answer to virtually anything that ails you is more—do more, be more. And then, the final component of being a member of the “cult of never enough” is this feeling where no matter how many times you try and put into practice things like gratitude lists, and meditating, and reading books on positive psychology, you still feel like a human doing versus a human being. And the manifestation, the outward manifestation of being stuck in the cult can be anything from extreme workaholism to extreme perfectionism. But the bottom line and the reason it’s so detrimental to our life satisfaction is that it leads to a really toxic relationship with work, money, accomplishments, and success.
Benz: That comes through loud and clear in the book. I feel like this concept of what’s enough is coming up a lot in our cultural conversation. Of course, Jack Bogle wrote a book called Enough in 2009, but it seems to be coming up even more. Do you think it’s COVID related that people are thinking big thoughts about life and what they’re doing in the wake of COVID?
Thakor: I love that you asked that because I’ve really been chewing on—because you’re right, this phrase, “what is enough,” this question, it’s being asked, it’s just floating through the zeitgeist in so many manners. Yes, I do think COVID played a role in it because it was like a snow globe for pretty much everybody. It shook our worlds upside down. Whenever you have that kind of change, it causes you to ask questions. But I also think there’s something else going on. I recently saw a clip, I think it was on Instagram Reels, where Jim Carrey was saying, very few actors will say this, but I’m done. I’m not going to make any more films. Well, maybe if something truly mind-blowing comes, but I’ve got enough. You’re seeing this with athletes who are saying, you know what? I have accomplished a lot and I’m ready to move on to the next chapter. So, I think it’s this combination of being forced to rethink big issues, realizing maybe what you might be missing during COVID where things were so shut down; but also there’s something else that’s going on and I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I’m seeing signs of this questioning everywhere. Maybe at the end of the day, it’s just exhaustion, sheer exhaustion from being on this 24/7 hamster wheel of hustle culture.
Benz: Now, a follow-up question is, I feel like maybe we’ve overcorrected. There had been all this soul-searching in the depths of COVID, and people were spending a lot of time at home with their near and dearest. Now it’s like this revenge travel thing. I feel like it’s spend, spend, spend, spend. Do you sense that maybe we’re going back in the other direction and just hopping right back on that treadmill?
Thakor: Yeah, I do sense that. I think the reason is that the pull is so strong and the types of things that I observed happening during COVID and the types of things that I’m seeing right now in wellness-at-work programs are really well-intentioned—gratitude lists, meditation, focusing on positive psychology, reading positive psychology books. But the issue is that those things are Band-Aids, very useful Band-Aids, but they’re not addressing the core wound, and that’s why I think we’re getting so swept back up into this business as usual at the pace of speed of life because we’re lacking a framework for thinking about and encouragement for thinking about why we’re behaving this way. And that’s really why I wrote the book.
Benz: One thing I love about the book is that you share a lot of your own story. It’s woven throughout these bigger lessons for all of us. So, let’s talk about your early career introduction to this “cult of never enough.” Can you discuss that?
Thakor: Well, first, let me just say I was really apprehensive about being this raw and candid in the book because just societally, we don’t admit a lot of the things that I omitted and described in very fine detail in the book, but I did so because I felt that the book is very rich in research and studies and stats. In order to put those into context, we learn through story. So, it’s my story, but also the stories shared by a lot of very courageous other people who reached out. But in terms of my experience, right out of business school—I did my MBA at Harvard—right out of business school, I jumped into the institutional money management world. I worked for an amazing man down in Houston, Texas. He’s passed recently—he was in his 90s—named Fayez Sarofim. He ran a business for 60 years and what happened was, I started off as an analyst and then became a portfolio manager. And one of the industries I had been following was financial services. And I realized that while we had a client base almost entirely of institutional clients, corporations, foundations, endowments, and our minimum was sufficiently high that individuals, your average individual could not access our investment strategy, which I felt really strongly was a powerful one. And so, separately managed accounts were just starting to bubble up.
And I went to Fayez and pitched the idea of what if we added this distribution channel and he said, go for it. I’m not going to give you a ton of resources, you’ll be the resource, but go for it. And so, for 10 years, I was, traveling 40 weeks out of the year and sometimes doing up to five or six client updates, or client pitches, and overseeing the operations team. And I one day found myself on a plane and I remember distinctly, I was sitting in seat 1B, I had my papers strewn all over the place, and I just had tears streaming down my eyes from exhaustion. I just had no idea (I was on my way from Houston to New York), how I was going to do all of the meetings I had scheduled in the next 48 hours. And a woman back in the fourth row who I’d seen at a variety of different professional conferences, just perfectly coifed and just so elegant. And she came up to me and opened this beautiful silver pill case and handed me these three yellow tablets and told me, “Take this, just a half to start.” And I did. And in retrospect, I didn’t even know what it was I was taking. That’s how desperate I was. Turned out it was Valium and it calmed me down. I view that as my initiation into the “cult of never enough,” because I was willing to do anything it took to just keep doing more, and build the business as big as I can, and make it successful, and make Fayez proud. I feel like it all really came to a head there, and I was living in the cult of never enough before that, but this was really the aha of the manifestation.
Benz: So, it was a combination of workaholism and accolades and financial rewards. Eventually, you did decide to head down a road where you looked into what was going on and through therapy, it sounds like you concluded that shame and what you call “small t” traumas were at the root of your own workaholism and your inclusion in this cult. So, can you walk through the connection, which you outline in the book, between not fitting in as a kid and your extreme commitment to work and just being excellent at work?
Thakor: Absolutely. I go through the gory details in the book, but I’ll just summarize by saying between fourth grade and sixth grade, I was now what they would call bullied. And you’d think, OK, as an adult, that’s three years out of your life, but research shows that literally these “small t” traumas, these things that happen to us can have physical … The National Institutes of Health, for example, talks about how they can have physical and emotional damage to self-esteem well into our adulthood. And a large body of scientific research indicates that childhood traumas can lead to workaholism and more severe traumas in childhood to depression and substance abuse. But one of the other things I just found fascinating in my case was that it wasn’t something that I thought about all the time. And what happened was the way I dealt with feeling ostracized from my peer group and made fun of was that I got rewarded in class for my academic performance. Teachers would praise me and then my grades would feel like accomplishments. And so, I moved into junior high and high school and there’s no bullying there, but I continued to hang on to this chasing after rewards to feel worthy. And I ended up valedictorian of my high school and then I went off to Wellesley College and did the same thing. The grades were my source of self-esteem. And then, I moved into the work world. And what becomes your metric there? Money and promotions and accolades.
And so, this early trigger may seem so small, but you can see how it led to different behaviors, which underneath them were a desire to fit in like that little girl who didn’t fit in. And that was my manifestation. There’s an interesting longitudinal study of American, Canadian, and British college students. They observed them from 1989 to 2016, and it found that extreme perfectionism can lead to all kinds of mental health consequences, including workaholism, anxiety, and so forth. And so, the main point is our brains aren’t fully formed until we’re 25. And so, these things that happen, even seemingly small things, can embed and drive decades of adult behavior.
The last thing I’ll say about this is I’ve talked to a variety of executive coaches who deal with really high-level professionals. One told me at least 75% of her clients had some degree of a “small t” trauma that was one of the factors driving them but also simultaneously limiting their success. Another one, he told me that it was a 100% of his high-performing client base that had this as one of the elements. And just because you should never say, “this is the last thing I’ll say,” because you always think of something else, I will say, I want to emphasize that it’s not just “small t” traumas. There are three other factors that I identified—social, cultural, and evolutionary—biological factors, and everybody has them in different combinations that can drive this behavior or put further fuel on the fire, so to speak.
Benz: Yeah, because it’s true. Our culture very much rewards a lot of the things you’re talking about. Rewards hard work, rewards accumulating great possessions, and all that stuff. So, it’s a very hard thing to jump out of. You don’t get any credit for having a rich inner life in the outside world.
Thakor: We literally judge people’s insides by people’s outsides. There was a study in India that I found fascinating. They had created a job applicant named Arjun and one of them, the resumes and the descriptions made him sound wealthy and from a very successful family and a very strong academic background. The other candidate portrayed the same kind of academic record and level of intellectual success but was described as coming from a background of poverty and scarcity. Recipients of the resumes assigned much higher value to the first Arjun rather than the second. And so, I think we all know it gutturally that we often judge people’s insides by their outsides, but studies show this is a global phenomenon.
Benz: You discuss your evolution on all of this and your decision to try to remove yourself from the cult, but one of the pivotal moments was when you’re sitting there hearing about your financial situation, basically hearing that you were financially set, independent at the age of 50 or pre-50, and yet internally you still felt like it wasn’t enough. So, can you talk about that as a light-bulb moment for you to think about how you could grow other parts of your life?
Thakor: Absolutely. I had spent the first 15 years of my career on the institutional side of financial services and then the last 15 years on, you might call it the retail, the high-net-worth, the financial advisory side. What happened was I was working for a wonderful wealth management firm, Brighton Jones, and one of the things we did for all prospective clients was map out a vocational freedom analysis as part of our client prospecting process. And the way it worked is that you would sit down with an advisor, and they would run through a variety of different questions about your life, and what money meant to you, and where it came from, and what you had, and then run the numbers to see how close you were to vocational freedom.
I had a prospective client who was very, very private and didn’t want to share her numbers. So, I decided, well, you know what, I’ll just put it out there and get financially naked. And we ran the analysis on my numbers, but we also did the interview on me. And as I’m telling the story of, I graduated from undergrad—thanks to my parents, I did not have student loans—but I borrowed $2,000 from my parents for first month, last month rent, paid it back in six months, and every other dollar I earned myself. And as I went through the exercise and we got to the Monte Carlo portion, I’d run these numbers myself a bajillion times, but the answer showed, I can live to 100 and significantly increase my spending because I really live a fairly simple life. And my odds of running out of money are like 0.0001%. I just burst into tears because I had never linked together those numbers, which I knew to be real, but always kept thinking, never enough, never enough. With the human story of what it took to get there and some of the other questions that went along—who are the people you care about, who are the friends that are close to you, what are the hobbies that you love? And my answers to them were silence. And that’s when I realized that I had achieved this level of financial health at the expense of having any emotional wealth.
Benz: I think that you talk about that very well in the book, this idea of two ledgers. You’ve got your financial health and your emotional wealth, and people may have overcorrected, in many cases, in the realm of financial health and put that first at the expense of their emotional wealth. So, how did you aim to fix that for yourself?
Thakor: Here’s the tough-love part of the answer. I went on a journey. I went on a two-year journey. I started off as a research analyst in the industry, and so I dove into the research. I was really curious. How did this happen? How did I essentially lose three decades of my life to work at the expense of everything else? And more importantly, how the heck can I get out of it? And so, I dove into multidisciplinary research and identified that there really are four core pieces that lead us into this direction. As I mentioned: personal issues, “small t” traumas or societal issues, cultural issues, evolutionary, biological issues—everybody is influenced in different proportions, but the understanding of those factors is 80% of the solution. And so, people constantly want to ask me, what are your top three tips to getting out of the cult? What are the top five ways that you can reach money’s end? And it doesn’t work that way.
Most nonfiction books spend the first one quarter of the book describing the problem and three quarters of the book giving you the how-to tips. This book is the opposite, because the solution is understanding the origin of the problem. And so, in my case, it wasn’t solely “small t” traumas. All of the other factors were in there as well in varying degrees. But probably the biggest takeaway I had was that I had spent all of my working years optimizing my behaviors, my life, to maximize the equation: self-worth equals net worth. And that’s a pretty sick way to live. It leads to some really toxic behaviors around work and money and success. And a lot of people might look at that and be like, oh, greed, what’s wrong with that woman? In my case, the net worth represented the freedom to be able to extract myself from any situation where I felt as awful as I did during those bullying years. That also meant the freedom to help people I love, my family. I’m half Indian and there’s a very strong emphasis on intergenerational care, especially with elderly parents. There were a variety of things driving it that had nothing to do with stuff, but there also was plenty of stuff I bought that I loved.
But what I came to realize was that that equation, self-worth equals the net worth, gets you nowhere because there is no finish line. So, my research led me to discover a new mental model, mental rubric, mental mindset—whatever you want to call it—equation, financial health plus emotional wealth is what leads you to what I call MoneyZen, that place where you have calm, confidence, and clarity about both the role money plays in your life and the relationship that you have to money. And so, that ultimately is the answer: learning how to reallocate your time so that you have both financial health and emotional wealth.
Benz: It sounds like understanding the specific factors that have fed into getting you into whatever place you’re in now is crucial, which is why you discuss some of those factors in such detail. I want to talk about some of those and you referenced stuff. So, one of the things you talk about in the book is what you call counterfeit financial culture. Can you talk about what that means and what you think is stoking it?
Thakor: Oh, yes. So, counterfeit financial culture is a huge driver in this having a “never enough” mindset. And the idea there is really that we have a set of beliefs where we judge ourselves and others on bogus barometers of our value as a human being. And I think about it in two different ways. One would be flawed self-worth anchors, which would be external possessions, symbols, accomplishments, titles that give us a false sense of our self-worth. And what we think is that those things, those anchors will lead us to be more happy, and successful, and fulfilled because others are seeing these and mirroring those thoughts back on us. And then, the second one, which I think is the most insidious one these days is what I call false financial comparisons, where we are comparing ourselves to either our neighbors or much more dangerously to the images that we see on TVs and in movies.
Again, I go this into detail in the book, but just to summarize, pick any TV show you watch. Right now, I happen to be binging on the five seasons of S.W.A.T. on Netflix. So, these are highly trained LAPD officers. But when I look at their homes, the size of their homes do not make sense with the incomes that those positions actually pay. And I see the same thing on legal dramas where you’ll see an assistant who is wearing clothes that are exquisitely tailored and of very expensive fabric and has no frizz in her hair, even though this show is taking place in one of the most humid cities in America. And so, back of the envelope, what I’ve estimated is that almost all the time, the images that we see would require the characters to earn 30% to 50% more than the jobs that they are portrayed as having pay on average. And so, this is really dangerous. So, we judge ourselves and each other by possessions. And then, we’re seeing images of people that are “just like us” living these bigger lives on TV, constantly in movies.
And then you ask, what causes this? Easy access to credit. Starting in the 70s, with the plethora of financial products available to us, it’s not hard to buy more home or a car than you can afford and to finance on plastic more lifestyle than you can afford. So, that’s what I’m referring to. To me, when I think about the four factors, that’s really the societal piece. And that’s the one that really is pushing us to earn more so we can buy more, so we can be more in that kind of judgmental, unrealistic framework.
Benz: Another one you talk about is hustle culture. It sounds like this was very much part of your life, the idea that you need to be constantly go, go, going in order to be successful. Do you think COVID improved things on that front or did it get worse? What did the data show about that?
Thakor: So, it varies. There are some individuals for whom this did get a little better, but for so many people, the reverse happened, which is they lost the blurred lines between work and home. And whether it was the commute that delineated the end of your day or the after-work workout that you went to the gym to do or taking your kids to a lesson or a sporting practice, those kinds of rituals that helped us de-connect from work went away. And so, many of us got pulled more into hustle culture than we ever had before. And I think that we glamorize working hard. There’s the Elon Musk, nobody-ever-changed-the-world-on-40-hours-a-week kind of concept. Or when Marissa Mayer was CEO of Yahoo, she was talking about how many extra hours you can squeeze out of work if you can optimize the amount of liquid you drink so you don’t have to take as many bathroom breaks. That’s underlying all of this. The rise and grind, crush it, toil, glamour—as The New York Times has referred to it—has led to something that The Atlantic writer, who I just love his readings—I encourage people to follow him—Derek Thompson, says is that, in the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings, and from necessity to status to meaning. And the problem with that gospel is it tells us your dream job is out there so never stop hustling and that’s a blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion.
Benz: I guess a question is, what are the signs that it’s time for a change, that you’re on this treadmill you need to get off or at least slow it down? And I wonder how people can be preemptive about that? I think sometimes people wait until there’s a health crisis, or they get divorced, or something really bad happens in their life before they start doing some soul-searching about all this.
Thakor: The clearest signals that I see are, one, you can’t mentally disconnect from work—you’re taking a hike, you’re on vacation, you are with your kids watching Frozen for the 14th time and your mind is drifting to work constantly. Another very clear one is it’s affecting your relationships, your spouse feeling like you don’t have enough time together, your kids saying, “Mommy, why are you always traveling, why can’t you be here?” Or daddy, the same thing. And then, the one that oftentimes slams us into the wall is that we get sick. The easy answer to how to prevent it is to adopt a mindset of valuing emotional wealth.
There’s some wonderful sheets you can find on the internet if you just Google “values exercise” where they list a hundred different values on a piece of paper and you circle 20 that means something to you, and then you narrow it down to 10, and you ultimately identify like the top three or five that you want to be your north stars guiding your activities. And when you have a sense of that, whether it’s family or self-care or community or whatever those values are, that can help you preempt. But again, I cannot emphasize enough in the absence of understanding the four core factors that lead to this and your relationship to the four core factors. Preempting can be very difficult and once again, that’s why I went on this journey, because I’d tried all of the other stuff and it wasn’t working. People would tell me to take a vacation. I would force myself to go to a spa. But you know what? It didn’t help. I hopped on my computer. I did work. I took conference calls. So, one way I have come up with for people to assess where they are on this spectrum, how deep they might be heading into this cult, I created a quiz, and you can find it at moneyzenquiz.com. It’s just seven questions. They’re fun. It’s not deeply scientific, but it is a remarkably qualitatively accurate wake-up call if you are, like I was, falling down this rabbit hole.
Benz: One interesting thing you noted in the book was that even when you made it a priority to downshift and focus more on being and a lot less on doing, you still found yourself looking at someone else’s career gains, for example, and saying, gosh, they did that, that sort of thing. It’s hard to completely disconnect, right?
Thakor: It is, and part of it is just raw human nature. There are all sorts of things that throughout the years philosophers have given us wise words on how to deal with them—greed, envy, ego. I saw several of my close girlfriends become CEOs of significantly sized asset-management firms. The guy who sat in the row in front of me in business school, Andy Jassy, is now the CEO of Amazon. It’s hard to not compare yourself to these people who have risen into very significant corporate jobs. I will tell you personally, I went through a period of just feeling like I had a gigantic L, for loser, taped to my head as they’re progressing. And it took me a while to really remind myself, some people were meant to work in that way. It brings them deep engagement and life satisfaction. And I’m not cut from that cloth. I hate managing people. I think about myself as kind of a sniper, if you will. I love solo tasks where the outcome is very clearly defined. And I really had to work myself through the jealousy, the envy, and the quieting of my ego.
Benz: I wanted to ask, because you emphasized this in the book, but I just want you to talk about it, because you’re not saying that financial wealth and having financial security isn’t important. You’ve written whole books about this. You’re just saying it’s not the only thing.
Thakor: Yeah. Let’s just be honest about it. People say money can’t buy happiness, but the absence of money will absolutely generate extreme anxiety, stress, and fear. And unfortunately, wide swaths of our population are in that bucket. They are making minimum wage, working two to three jobs, and in an environment where culturally we have a lack of safety nets or different safety nets than perhaps other countries. This book, unfortunately, is not geared at that population; it’s geared at the two thirds of the bell curve that are making a living wage. But what I’m saying is really that if you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, essentially achieving financial health, which I would define as meeting your expenses while having some money left over, feeling in control of your overall financial picture, feeling financially secure.
Those are not terms that require that you have a seven-digit net worth. You can achieve those things at any income level through an understanding of the tactical financial literacy and education skills that I have spent years talking about. But the point is financial health, when you achieve it, it gives you the foundation where you can now move further up Maslow’s hierarchy of the needs to self-actualization and life satisfaction by being able to invest in your emotional well-being. And if you spend all your time just focused on building that financial health and saying, I’m going to enjoy that emotional well-being later, actually you will be less happy as that financial health continues to come in. And I know I’m giving a very wordy answer but let me continue on with just one very interesting study that has just come out.
For years, we heard $75,000 is the amount you need to have to be happy and anything beyond that doesn’t make you happy. And that’s been out for well over a decade. So, you can inflation adjust that and make it a bigger number. But most people rolled their eyes, especially if you lived on the East or West coast, because it’s not always easy to raise a family. But a recent study out of Penn indicated that, yeah, that is a flawed study, but not because the number is too low, but because it doesn’t incorporate the fact that if you do not have a foundation of emotional well-being, a solid sense of enjoyment separate from money, once you reach a certain level of income—and I don’t think you can put one number on it, it’s different for all of us—but once you reach a certain level, in the absence of that emotional well-being, more money will not create more life satisfaction. And I ironically came across that study after my manuscript was turned in and the book was already being sent out as galleys to early reviewers. And it made me so excited because it was the first actual research study conducted rigorously according to academic standards that showed that financial health plus emotional wealth are not only interlinked but turbocharge each other.
Benz: So sticking with that, you talk about how, and you speak to groups about how to balance financial health alongside their emotional wealth. You shared what you think is a clarifying question that you share with audiences at talks you’ve given. Can you talk about that?
Thakor: I’ve been doing this for over a decade now. I have people write down on an index card anonymously the answer to this: If you receive $10 million today after tax, and you also receive a diagnosis that you have exactly 10 years left to live, so you don’t have a financial constraint, but you do have a time constraint. What would you stop and what would you start? And it is amazing. I have hundreds of these index cards now and almost uniformly people say I would stop work and/or I would stop worrying and I would start spending more time with my family and friends. I would engage in my hobbies. I would travel, learn a language, play a musical instrument, volunteer, give back to my community. So, then the question becomes what’s stopping you from doing those things right now?
Benz: Or at least doing some version of them, right? Maybe downshifting work and emphasizing the goals.
Thakor: Right. Spending time with your family doesn’t mean you have to abandon your career. Many people listening to this are in professions that historically have long hours, and many people may with children have to do some work in the evening in order to leave work in time to be there for whether it’s school pickup or bedtime. So, what I’m saying is, if family is important to you, be present during those hours. You want to learn a new language? Well, hop on Duolingo and do five minutes when you need a mental break between projects at work. So, there are a lot of different ways to incorporate these things, and to me it’s like flossing your teeth. I’m embarrassed to say it wasn’t probably until I was in my 30s that I regularly flossed my teeth after hearing my dentist say if everybody flossed their teeth, he’d have no business. And once I started doing it, literally I cannot envision going to bed without flossing my teeth.
Benz: Same.
Thakor: Yay, we both have good dental hygiene. The point is by adding these things in, identifying what are the things that feel like emotional wealth to you, it starts to build a muscle. And just over the times that we’ve had, we’ve been able to just chat on a personal level, I love coffeehouses. So, for me, emotional wealth comes to me from being able to spend time in a coffeehouse for two hours with a great iced coffee or pour over, listening to jazz and journaling or reading a book. So, these don’t have to be huge things, but they start building up your comfort with spending time in this way.
Benz: My last question, Manisha, relates to relationships, which you really emphasize in the course of the book as they’re crucial for finding emotional wealth. So, can you talk about that? You wrote something that I thought was really insightful. You said we have to give ourselves permission to connect with others in a way that does not involve competition. And it made me wonder, do you think that even if we’re not acknowledging it, we are competing with others sometimes when we relate to them?
Thakor: Yes, I do. I think part of it is, again, human nature. We compare ourselves to each other. And social media hasn’t helped that, right?
Benz: Right.
Thakor: Because it’s made us all curators of our own magazine of our life, and we’re putting out the highlight reel. But I think that what happens is, especially for those of us who are balancing precariously, perhaps, on that fine line between work engagement, healthy enjoyment of our job, and workaholism, and never enough thinking, is that you can end up with connections that are transactional. And I realized when I was having my wake-up call that over the years, it had gotten to the point that the only holiday cards I received were from my immediate family, people I paid to work with me, and/or different points when I’ve not been running my own business. It’s been colleagues in a corporate sense. And I really noticed that I had these close, tight relationships when I’d be at one firm, and then I’d move to the next firm, and we’d stay in touch for a year or two, and then it would just stop other than a comment on their LinkedIn post.
The reason connection is so important—one of the experts I interviewed, Mary LoVerde, who’s spent years working as a director of a hypertension center at the University of Colorado, and what she found between healthy and unhealthy patients was what she ultimately summarized as people who, when they are out of kilter, ask, to whom or what do I need to connect in order to move in a direction of slightly more happiness, are the ones—people who have that mind frame around connection, end up living a life, and the tagline Mary LoVerde uses is, connection creates balance. So, if there’s one thing I would say to people, it is, what is the one tip you can walk away from this podcast from that actually will help you get closer to money’s end, and that is to ask yourself, to whom or what do I need to connect? And it may be myself. It may be quiet. It may be some time alone. It may be a friend. It may be the gym. There’s a lot of different answers to that. And the corollary question would be when your brain starts coming back to you on that and saying, I don’t have time for connection. I don’t have time to ask yourself, whichever phrase is most effective to you. Why? And you have to ask it at least five times. Why? Why? So, you go deeper with your answer each time. Or it’s, I need to finish this project, and the other phrase would be for what? For what? For what? And eventually, in my case, I would do that in certain exercises, and the answer ultimately would be to feel like I’m successful. And then, I’d realize, wait a minute, is that the definition, is that the person I want to be? Is that the characteristics that I want to use to define success? Or do I want to go jump in the lake with my nephews and my niece and splash around? So, yeah, that’s how I think of it.
Benz: Well, Manisha, I’ve loved this conversation. There are many insights here and also a lot of fun. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Thakor: Christine, you always ask the most insightful questions. Thank you so much for having me on.
Benz: Thank you for joining us on The Long View. If you could, please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can follow us on Twitter @Christine_Benz.
Ptak: And @Syouth1, which is, S-Y-O-U-T-H and the number 1.
Benz: George Castady is our engineer for the podcast and Kari Greczek produces the show notes each week.
Finally, we’d love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email us at TheLongView@Morningstar.com. Until next time, thanks for joining us.
(Disclaimer: This recording is for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. Opinions expressed are as of the date of recording. Such opinions are subject to change. The views and opinions of guests on this program are not necessarily those of Morningstar, Inc. and its affiliates. While this guest may license or offer products and services of Morningstar and its affiliates, unless otherwise stated, he/she is not affiliated with Morningstar and its affiliates. Morningstar does not guarantee the accuracy, or the completeness of the data presented herein. Jeff Ptak is an employee of Morningstar Research Services LLC. Morningstar Research Services is a subsidiary of Morningstar, Inc. and is registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Morningstar Research Services shall not be responsible for any trading decisions, damages or other losses resulting from or related to the information, data analysis, or opinions, or their use. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. All investments are subject to investment risk, including possible loss of principal. Individuals should seriously consider if an investment is suitable for them by referencing their own financial position, investment objectives and risk profile before making any investment decision.)
United States