My intention is to post a Thoughtful Thursday column each week and share some of the insights I have learned in the past week. Here are some of the things I’ve learned this week:
These daily habits can cause you to feel stressed, anxious, and exhausted:
- looking on the negative side of life/being a pessimist
- overthinking
- living in the past and taking your focus off of the present moment
- associating with negative people and drama
- using social media to bring you down and fall into the comparison trap
- having a poor diet
- not exercising regularly
- having an unhealthy or irregular sleep schedule
When a box of girl scout cookies is sold for $5.00, $1.50 goes to the bakery that made it and $3.50 stays local and is split between the regional troop and the troop you bought it from.
The career record is $180,000 boxes sold, resulting in a college scholarship. Girl scouts can increase sales by setting up a booth at a populated place, such as a supermarket parking lot. This results in more sales than going door-to-door.
In 2014, Girl Scouts started accepting credit cards using mobile card readers and began selling cookies online.
The pandemic resulted in fewer girls enrolling in Girl Scouts, supply chain issues, and labor shortages that made it harder for bakeries to produce cookies. The Scouts started using DoorDash to deliver cookies same-day!
DoorDash Partners with Girl Scouts of the USA to Offer Exclusive On-Demand Delivery as Girl Scout Cookie Season Kicks Off
Business lessons:
- Each season, each scout commits to selling a specific # of boxes, and she gets to decide how many. The troop pays for the boxes upfront and the scout repays the troop with the money from the sales. If you have excess boxes because you didn’t sell as much as you committed to, you usually have to pay the troop, but sometimes you can swap flavors with cookie hubs.
- The harsh realities of cookie season (competition, finance risk, supply chain issues, technological disruption) are a part of the commerce business. This presents a great opportunity to build business skills.
**I have not used Cost Plus Drug Company myself. I combined information from this June 2022 episode and this updated article:
Mark Cuban got involved through a cold e-mail from a radiologist who was working on a compounding pharmacy that could sell pharmaceuticals for less. They spent four years working with manufacturers and regulatory agencies, and Mark subscribed to and read every report and article he could get his hands on regarding healthcare and pricing before starting costplusdrugs.com in January 2022.
In the standard U.S. market, the prices of pharmaceuticals are set by considering Medicare as a percentage of the retail price, insurance companies, rebates, paying pharmacy benefit managers, etc. Cost Plus Drugs (costplusdrugs.com) is transparent in pricing: 15% market from their cost + $3 for handling + $5 for shipping. They are able to keep costs low by eliminating all of the others involved in the standard insurance process, and they use True Pill as a pharmacy/fulfillment center.
Costplusdrugs.com offers over 800 generic drugs. The company/website is especially beneficial for those who are uninsured or those who have insurance but are in the high deductible phase. For many generic drugs, the co-payment can be higher than the actual price of the drug.
The challenge in getting this company to scale more has been getting manufacturers to sell to Cost Plus because they are afraid of the response they will get from insurance companies who also work with them. Cost Plus generally does not want to work with insurance companies because they want to be the low-cost provider of every drug they sell.
Lessons learned about life insurance:
- Index universal life insurance is a scam.
- Life insurance is a selfless product. You are paying for something YOU will never benefit from.
- The younger you are, the cheaper life insurance will be.
- A good rule of thumb is to have 10x your salary to cover all of your liabilities. Most people are only covered for their salary.
- Term life insurance (offered through many companies such as Ladder) is the most cost-effective because you are only covered for a certain amount of time. You can invest the difference you would save buying term life instead of whole life insurance. Whole life insurance is permanent and is 4-10x more expensive.
- Life insurance should be used for insurance, not an investment. Investing should be used for investing!
- When looking for life insurance coverage, look for good pricing, reviews, financial ratings, transparency, and what’s being added on as riders.
- If you are a stay-at-home mom, you should still have life insurance because your partner will need $ to cover childcare in the event you pass away. If you take care of your parents, you need life insurance to cover expenses for care providers for them in the event you pass away. If you have any liabilities, you should have life insurance.
- If you don’t have financial liabilities (mortgage, auto loans, etc.), debts, or kids, life insurance is not necessary.
The things you do right before bed can determine whether you toss and turn for hours or get a good night’s sleep.
Before bed, list priority items to handle the next day.
When you think of things you need to do during the day, think about whether you will do them today, tomorrow, or another day and schedule them. Then when you’re in bed you won’t have a racing mind of everything you need to do.
- Turn down the lights. Exposure to light causes your body to produce hormones that increase alertness. Don’t watch tv/use your computer/use your phone starting one hour before bedtime. Charge your phone in another room and use an actual alarm clock to wake you up.
- Slow down. By 8 p.m., your body should be in wind-down mode. Ditch the late-night workouts and active activities. Devote your evening to gentler activities.
- If you MUST, have a light snack or a treat. It doesn’t need to be something sweet. It can be something healthy but enjoyable to you—protein, a healthy carb, or chamomile tea
- Apply a fragrance. Lavender is an age-old remedy for insomnia. You can use lavender oil/vanilla pillow sprays, a diffuser, or a cotton ball with lavender in your pillowcase.
- Warm up. Raising your body temperature induces drowsiness. Take a hot bubble bath or slip under a heavy weighted blanket. A warm non-caffeinated beverage also works. Warm your body but keep your room cool.
- Treat your aches and pains earlier in the day to prepare yourself for sleep.
- Suspend all of your daily concerns. What if you get to bed on time but you lie awake worrying about credit card bills, tomorrow’s meeting, whether you watered your plants, called someone back, etc.> Let the day go and resolve to let go of distractions. You will sleep better if you can do this. If you are focusing on your breathing, your brain cannot simultaneously work overtime to worry.
- Meditate or pray.
Good quality sleep protects your mental and physical health. Rely on bedtime rituals that will help you doze off faster and stay asleep all night long.
We can have such tunnel vision of wanting to be better that we can lose sight of where we started. Stop, pause, and reflect on how far you’ve come and the progress you’ve made. TWe tend to forget about what our life was like before we achieved x, y, and z.
Document everything. Keep a notebook to record your emotions and thoughts. This will serve as a reference for how far you’ve come. I have been keeping a One Line A Day journal for over three years. It is a five-year dated journal in which you can look back on what you wrote that particular day for up to five years. Each night, I write something about my day–something that brought joy to my day, something I struggled with, something I did that day, etc. It has been interesting looking back at some things I wrote years ago and comparing those entries to where I’m at now.
Remember that you are a human before anything else and all moments of your life are worthy of being celebrated.
Sometimes when I am reading a book and come across an unfamiliar word, I Google it right then and there. One word I came across this week was bespectacled:
be·spec·ta·cled
[bəˈspektəkəld]
ADJECTIVE
- (of a person) wearing eyeglasses:
Ex: Mr. Merrick was a slim, quiet, bespectacled man.
I found this interesting because I have never heard anyone use that word!
I look forward to reading, learning, and sharing more with you soon!
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