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:

• What do I want/need to accomplish this week?
• What’s the weather going to be like this week?
• Is everything on my list in alignment with my unique priorities and values?
• Is my to-do list for the week reasonable and realistic given my other commitments?
• Do I have sufficient self-care scheduled in each day?
• If something comes up last minute, do I have the flexibility to handle it with grace and ease?

• Everything on social media seems so urgent. Influencers say that there is a limited time to make this purchase with their discount code, so people are likely to make impulse purchases. Realize that you can probably find a different discount code later if you really want to.
• Take the time to compare prices and check out reviews online before purchasing items on social media. You can use the Honey browser extension to pull in discount codes.
• I have been tempted to impulsively purchase items on social media, but after looking at reviews online, I have decided against it many times. Keep in mind that many influencers are being paid to promote products and do not have your best interests in mind. Sometimes these products are not highly-rated.
• Consider using a credit card for extra fraud protection.

• Know how to save for emergencies and work to save 3-6 months of essential costs. Weigh your investment options.
• Invest in stocks if you don’t need the funds for at least five years. This is because dips in the stock market can take time to recover.
• Index funds are a popular investment option because they are hands-off. They can generate a reliable return over long periods of time. Index funds average returns of up to 10% each year.
• If you want to be more active than index funds, you can buy mutual funds or exchange traded funds (ETFs) that target particular segments of the market (ex: technology, healthcare, etc.) You could also buy individual stocks. Researching individual stocks can take a lot of work and they are likely to fluctuate a lot.
• Short-term options: high-yield savings account, money market savings account, CDs, and short-term bonds

• Use Google Flights to search for multiple dates, airports, and airlines
• International travel: book flights to a major city near the non-major city you want to travel to and then look into local options to get to non-major city (saves $$$)
• Negotiate your Airbnb, especially if last-minute or a lot of availability is showing on their calendar. Reverse-image search to see if this listing is posted elsewhere at a lower cost. Then try to negotiate. I have never tried this, but I have read many success stories!
• Large families- ask hotels if they have a discount for booking a second room.
• Book hotels directly on the hotel’s website. Ask for upgrades.
• Use Autoslash.com for car rentals.
• Airalo – directory of esims you can buy all over the world for international travel for your phone.

• There is no amount of interest charged on a credit card that makes it worth getting points. If you can’t pay it in full each month, it’s not worth it.
• If you’re using points and miles to go on a vacation, you could have used cash back to buy other things, so it’s not truly a “free vacation.”
• In general, when you earn points and miles, you have two options: you can either use them as an equivalent cash rate (through Chase portal, Amex portal, etc.) or transfer the points to airlines and hotel rooms. Any trip you take using points is good. The best value you can get is to transfer the points to an airline and book directly.

• Ways to earn: sign-up bonus with new card (spending $3-4k within first 3 months usually) or spending optimally. Some cards are great for airline tickets. Others are best for gas and groceries. Look at where you spend your money and choose a card that earns the most points on those categories. Some people use a card for a specific category and a different card for everything else.
• Some cards are worth annual fees if the credits and perks they give you are utilized and worth more than the annual fee. Some cards come with travel credits, delivery credits, etc.

• Travel hacking mistake: optimizing a trip by getting the best deal rather than going where you want to go and doing what you want to do.
• Use points portals from your credit cards to get cash/points back with purchases you plan on making anyway, buy gift cards to meet minimum spends to get sign-up bonuses (Amazon, Home Depot, Menards, etc.) If your card awards you for grocery purchases, you could buy gift cards at a grocery store to maximize points. Retailer gift cards don’t have fees to buy them, but paying activation fees for things like Visa or Amex gift cards is usually not worth getting points for unless it is a last resort to achieve a minimum spend sign-on bonus.
•  Get different auto insurance quotes every 6 months-1 year.

• You don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to. You can’t reason someone out of a position that they didn’t reason themselves into. Most views are not going to be changed within an argument with logic. The best way to change someone’s mind is to try to listen to them and understand why they believe what they believe. You will have much more power to nudge them by using compassion and listening.
• You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person. It’s a burden.

• James Beard is a very highly regarded chef who was self-taught with no formal training. He started the farm-to-table concept and new American cuisine. He made a name for himself by making food for cocktail parties.
• In 1937, he moved to New York and taught himself how to cook. He published his first cookbook in 1940.
• He published 20 cookbooks from 1940-1983.  In 1972, he published James Beard’s American Cookery, a 877-page compendium with 1,500 recipes, in which he tried to do for American cooking what his friend Julia Child had achieved for French cooking with Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
• James Beard took French food and Americanized it and made American cuisine in the process.
• He founded, with restaurant critic, Gael Greene, City Meals on Wheels. It is similar to meals on wheels but covers New York City.

• Julia Child and James Beard were very good friends and were some of the most well-known chefs in America.
• Many of Beard’s cookbooks are still in print, and he is acknowledged as one the most influential exponents of good cooking in the twentieth century. The James Beard Foundation in New York preserves his residence and makes annual awards that carry on his legacy.
• The James Beard Foundation gave awards for great American chefs with a certificate and chef’s knife. The James Beard Foundation Award, the most coveted individual honor in the American food industry, is known as the “Culinary Oscar.” The Michelin Star is also highly coveted and is awarded to restaurants, not individual chefs.
• James Beard Chef and restaurant awards started in the early 1990s. Wolfgang Puck was the very first winner. Bobby Flay once won rising star chef.
• Restaurants that have been nominated for a James Beard award typically double their reservations and increase sales by 20-25%.

• Controversies: some award winners have reputations of berating chefs and treating employees poorly. There is also criticism that most winners have been white male chefs.
• The James Beard awards were canceled for 2020 and 2021. They said it was due to the pandemic, but insiders report that it’s because every award winner is white and they were already being criticized for lack of diversity.
• There is now an ethics committee that evaluates nominees on a personal level. Private investigators now investigate the nominees. This has also brought significant criticism.

This post is directly from Seth’s Blog, one of my favorite blogs and the top business blog:

Goals and expectations

[a note to a frustrated friend, just starting out on a long career]

There are three reasons that our goals might not be achieved. In order of palatability, they are:

Perhaps the goals are too lofty, too based on chance, unlikely for anyone to achieve, surrounded by barriers that are rooted in class or caste, or simply unrealistic.

If that’s the case, change expectations and/or pick different goals.

Or, perhaps the goals are useful, but we need more persistence, more time and some hard-earned lucky breaks along the way.

If so, be persistently patient.

Alas, if it’s not these two, the most likely reason is that we need to walk away from our expectations and our insistence that we’re already doing the work perfectly. It could be that we need to expend more effort than we hoped, develop new skills, find and embrace new strategies and develop a taste for the emotional labor that’s required to get from here to there.

Empathy, a cycle of skills improvement, developing new attitudes and showing up in service often accompanies the careers of people who get from here to there.

Ambition is insufficient.

I heard this quote on TikTok this week and it has stuck with me: “Expectations are premeditated resentments.”

I look forward to reading, learning, and sharing more with you soon!