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I love trying to #BetterMyself, but sometimes that drive can come at the expense of contentment. Is it possible to be both ambitious and satisfied? After a certain point, the pursuit of additional financial resources is not about money at all, but what it might symbolize.

This week’s episode is part-vulnerable exploration of my own hang-ups, part-manifesto for finding contentment in the midst of your ambition. Our guest is Cynthia Pong, founder of career coaching firm, Embrace Change.

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our Chief Content Officer and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.

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Katie:

When I first got my driver's license at the terrifying age of 16, it didn't take long for me to recognize the relationship between money and freedom. It was strikingly obvious every time I would be route to the latest house party and the gaslight would illuminate the darkness of my dashboard. Ever the spend thrift with a nose that could sniff out a Hollister sale from a mile away, I usually didn't have enough money to fill up the tank all the way, which meant my teen years were punctuated by the delicate dance of only ever having a quarter tank to power me through my week before I would return tail between my legs to the Sunoco station at the exit between my school and my house to put $15 on pump seven please. Having a full tank was an unthinkable luxury at 17 when I instead opted to spend my part-time job money on American Eagle Polos and Macaroni Grill half price entrees because the Midwest remains undefeated in its ability to offer just an eye wateringly mediocre adolescence.

But I recently heard an analogy that stuck with me. You wouldn't exclusively drive around from gas station to gas station just trying to see how much gas you can fit in your tank because accumulating as much gas as possible isn't the point. The gas is just a means to an end. The metaphor, of course, is meant to critique the bewildering way. Some of us approach money life's gas in the tank when you're 16 and you only have $30 in your checking account. The idea of making a full tank, the primary objective of your newfound freedom is preposterous. What do you need a full tank for? You just need to get to McCoy's basement rager before his mom gets home tomorrow morning and there are still watered down Jello shots left. Similarly, when you struggle to pay your bills without fully draining your cash reserves, the notion that you would orient your entire life in service of wealth accumulation seems similarly absurd. You are just trying to keep your literal lights on. And while it might sound counterintuitive on a platform about money to stress, the importance of knowing when to take your foot off the gas, I think it's one of the most profoundly important elements of our financial journeys.

Welcome back to the Money with Katie Show Rich Listeners. On today's episode, we're going to do the opposite of the thing we usually do. Instead of scheming ways to get more money, we're going to ask the question, what if I already have enough?

Today we'll be joined by Cynthia Pong, a career coach and author known for her work focused on empowering women and people of color in the professional world. She was Henah’s career coach for a while, and obviously that worked out for Henah because look at her now. She is the best job in the world. She gets to listen to me talk all day. I kid. But Cynthia originally worked as a public defender before transitioning into career coaching, and she's recognized for her holistic and empathetic approach to coaching, helping clients navigate the challenges of the workplace, achieve career advancement and pursue meaningful work-life balance. So Cynthia today is going to ask me to dig a little bit deeper in my reflections and my intent is that you, the listener, can then use those same questions wherever they are resonant to interrogate your own feelings too. We'll get into that conversation after a quick break.

Only a few years after my career as a basement party goer, I landed my first salaried job and I learned at the time about an older colleague who was earning a sum I could only dream of $72,000. Now, that was real person money and I was in awe of the freedom that I imagined it unlocked for them. What majestic adult accoutrement came with such a high salary. I wondered, did you get a mortgage full price appetizers, a Lexus, this was magic. I knew the lifestyle that that salary could unlock for me while I was earning $52,000 was substantial. With $72K, I could afford to live in a one bedroom apartment. I could spring for the occasional lunch with coworkers without checking my discover balance under the table. This was in retrospect, the beginning of the goalpost chase, as Cynthia zeroed in on our conversation:

Cynthia:

What was the impact of your starting salary on you?

Katie:

Well, at the time it felt like a ton of money because it was so much more than I was expecting to make based on my degree, but I also think that in some ways it anchored me to a certain pay band, it necessarily limited the aspirations that I had because I started to think of myself that my labor was worth that amount as opposed to a friend who maybe started college right away making $85 or $90,000 in a different profession.

Cynthia:

That is super relatable by the way, and that happens to a lot of us psychologically because we tend to think in increments from our starting point. So you just pointed out having a different starting point from someone else could have downstream effects that are really just that widening gap between different swaths of society from that one, it could start as a difference. Something as small as a couple hundred or a thousand dollars,

Katie:

Cynthia was right. That effect was exacerbated over time. Over the next few years, my salary crept upward from $52,000 to $60,000, then to $66,000. And before I knew it between my full-time job and my side hustles, I was earning $96,000. But I wasn't satiated. I didn't feel as though I had access to the real person world. I figured this type of money would promise, if anything, it just left me wanting even more. Suddenly it felt like a personal failing that I was not yet earning six figures. An income that felt laughably out of reach just a couple of years prior now felt like my birthright and I felt inadequate as I stared at it in the distance a couple thousand short.

Cynthia:

I'm curious, what were the factors that led to this shift for you from feeling like $72K was realistically unattainable to feeling like a failure for not earning more than a $100K?

Katie:

I think it had to do with the fact that the more money I personally made, the more I felt like I was becoming exposed to people or groups of people who were a lot more successful than I was and were making a lot more money. I remember in particular, there was one time where I was really good friends with a fitness instructor in town who got paid by the class and she taught 10 classes a week and I'm working 40, 50 hours full time and we just start talking about money and I don't know what I assumed, but I found out she was making $90,000 as a part-time fitness instructor, and it was just like, whoa. My frame of reference was totally wrong as I was just meeting more people and meeting people that I've perceived as being more successful than me. I think I started to see these arbitrary thresholds like a hundred thousand dollars as being particularly meaningful even though when you look at the gap, it was actually kind of negligible.

Cynthia:

I feel like I hear two things there. One is that kind of a similar phenomenon to the more you know you realize you don't know kind of thing, and then also that insidious comparison game stuff because yeah, it's true. The more you're exposed to things we're suggestible and so it can feel like we see that lack and the gap more than we see what we've gained and what we can have gratitude for already.

Katie:

How do you counsel clients through that constant comparison game? It strikes me that sometimes that can be productive in the sense that if you know someone doing the same job as you is making a lot more money that hey, maybe I'm being underpaid, but then to your point, it is very insidious and it can derail feelings that we might otherwise have of contentment and gratitude.

Cynthia:

Yeah, it's a tough one. I mean I think the strategies for each person can be kind of different and tailored to what that specific person's situation and circumstances and lived experiences are, but as a coaching firm that specializes in working with women of color in particular, I mean comparison game is a real gnarly one, and I really just try to support people to refocus back on themselves because externalizing too much in any kind of way can just lead down very unproductive and very damaging rabbit holes, no end to that. There literally is always going to be someone richer than you, someone more successful, someone more, whatever that descriptor is. So I think we have to be very tight with our boundaries. The first step really is getting cognizant of it. So once you're aware and you're conscious that that's what's happening, sometimes we can have gone a hundred paces down that path and then realize, oh wait, what happened?

So the first step is increasing the awareness and becoming aware that that's happening close in time to when it does start happening. And then the second step after that is to reroute, to kind of figure out what are the pathways for you. For some people it's like, okay, when I realize that this is happening, I just need to write it down and keep a log. There's another strategy that's like you just pivot. There's this kind of blue dolphin concept out there. I don’t know if you've read about it. It's kind of like an emotional intelligence. No. Yeah. So when I say something like, think about whatever you want Katie, but do not for the life of you think about a white polar bear, then the image in your mind becomes a white polar bear, right? For most of us it generally does. That's that suggestibility thing. So there's a strategy that a lot of people with high emotional intelligence employ, which is whenever they think of the white polar bear, they replace it with a blue dolphin and that's just another animal or whatever. But the idea is, okay, when I realize that this thing happened, this trigger, if you will, then I have a protocol and I go to actually think about this other thing or I do this other thing so you can rewire, we know what's going to happen, so let's make a plan that we can work on strengthening a different habit, a different neural pathway. So that's some strategies that people can try for themselves.

Katie:

It's like having a plan. I love that you focused on, you mentioned focusing on what you've gained versus where you have the gap because when you do focus back on yourself and you can focus on the gains that you've personally made, it reminds me a little bit of that phrase about the only person you should be comparing yourself to is yourself yesterday. That that's the only accurate comparison.

Cynthia:

And I mean, just as a little more bow on this too, what we do when we're comparing ourselves is that thing that maybe a lot of people have heard from social media and whatnot is you're comparing your insides to somebody else's outsides because you truly have no idea that fitness instructor who was making $90K, who actually knows what was going on in that person's private life, what happened to get them to that point? Maybe that income was coming from somewhere else, maybe they were independently wealthy, and so it access to different networks. You really never know, and there's always a cost and a price too, and you don't know what is the cost or the price that that person is paying for that, and maybe you wouldn't want to pay that cost or that price. So food for thought.

Katie:

At the time though, my bottomless pit of ambition sent me into overdrive in its pursuit. A time I chronicled for my blog in the little free time I could eke out of my week while working four jobs simultaneously. One might observe this experience and wonder, see, this is why lifestyle creep is so dangerous. Katie spent more as she earned more and had to run faster on that consumerism by capitalism hamster wheel to keep up. But no, no, my friend, I was only spending around $36,000 per year at this point. The relationship between my spending habits and income had divorced long before that point. The pursuit of additional income was not about supporting a flashy new lifestyle or unlocking a different level of freedom anymore. Now it was a means of score boarding. Could I earn X dollars by age Y?

Cynthia:

It sounds like it became gamified simply because that's how you were motivated or was it because of societal messaging?

Katie:

It's hard for me to even extricate one from the other because I think financial reward came to symbolize the idea for me that society valued and approved of what I was doing. So making more money meant I was better at my work, almost the same way grades function in school, you get a better grade when you do better work theoretically. That's how the system is supposed to work. So I think it just became a bit of a progress marker to reaffirm for me or reassure that I was going in the right direction and that the things that I were doing were valuable.

Cynthia:

Yeah, it totally makes sense. We are so trained to externalize our own value of ourselves through the schooling, through societal messaging from when you're young things that happen in the home. It's so ingrained, so that makes a lot of sense.

Katie:

To make matters more complicated, the arbitrary hoops I happily leapt through provided a confusing sense of both pride and self-loathing and dropped me into a confusing feedback loop. Pride because I was successful in reaching the various benchmarks and self-loathing because the more successful I became, the more I associated with people who were earning more worth more and doing more than me. As Cynthia gently pointed out, this real life game of hungry, hungry hippos is not one you can win. There's always going to be another dollar out there to be claimed. We never reach a natural conclusion or satiation point where all the pastel plastic balls are off the game board. The more your little plastic hippo eats, the more plastic balls materialize in front of you. I had made a critical mistake. I didn't define enough. So how much is enough when you're 16 enough is obvious enough is precisely the amount of money it takes to score a Forever 21 bodycon dress to wear to your friend’s older brother’s graduation party.

And when I started working, I thought enough was obvious then too. It was just $20,000 more than whatever I was currently earning. Even if you already make enough money to support yourself now I have a feeling you have a fuzzy notion of a number that would make you feel just a little bit more secure. And if you look back, I'll bet that at one point the amount you earn or have now was your answer to that question. One of the hardest things about getting good with money is getting the goalpost to stop moving. In fact, we rarely question the premise that it should stop moving as opposed to adjusting upward. Every time we summit a new mountaintop, Cynthia says, this is normal.

Cynthia:

There are a number of factors that make it seem normal that the goalpost would continue moving over time, inflation, consumerism, keeping up with the Joneses, increased cost of living from family related expenses, moving to a more expensive place. You can see how the real or perceived increase in the cost of your life makes this feel completely natural.

Katie:

Moving the goalpost otherwise known as the hedonic treadmill or hedonic adaptation or honestly just being a really ambitious person is a concept in psychology and behavioral economics that suggest that people tend to return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. This theory was first introduced by Brickman and Campbell in their 1971 essay, “Hedonic Relativism and Planning The Good Society.” It wasn't until recently that I questioned the validity of that insatiable drive as I progressed in my career and changed it several times over. Contentment was apocryphal. It's about what's next, the next rung on the corporate ladder, the next business goal. In my last corporate role, we even had a word for our coworkers who had been in the same role for many years, content to receive their annual merit increases and nothing more the coasters. But is that truly worse than an inextinguishable compulsion for more?

I'm not so sure. I was reflecting on the concept of enough, so enough income, enough revenue, enough prestige. The other day when I heard an interesting podcast episode from a writer I like Haley Nauman, she was discussing the way in which she became comfortable no longer doing sponsored content on her platform, maybe baby, so no longer accepting advertiser dollars for her writing because she felt like she earned enough from her paying subscribers. Could she earn more? Almost certainly. But she was comfortable with capping her income where it was because she felt like it was enough to some, this might sound perfectly reasonable, but in the online circles that I frequent, this is akin to claiming you've decided to start flushing your extra a hundred dollars bills down the toilet because you don't have any other use for them. And it's not just within the context of my fin twit comrades that her decision feels out of place. The functioning of our growth at any cost financial system as a whole is predicated on the assumption that humans are rational actors who respond to incentives and while their incentives may shift as they accumulate more, the idea of someone determining that they're happy with what they have and hanging up the old cold sales pitch template is pretty much absent from our economic models, but in our gas in the tank analogy, her decision makes perfect sense. The system around her that looks totally absurd.

We'll get right back to it after a quick break.

As I shared earlier, once I began meeting people whom I had formerly read about in Forbes 30 under 30 lists, I had a very startling discovery. I thought, oh my gosh, I ain't shit. My income, my net worth, my accomplishments. These things felt impressive to me through my life experiences lens, but it looked downright poultry compared to other men and women my age who had built far larger audiences, far bigger brands, far more successful businesses than I had. I found myself envious of their success and my own life, started to feel kind of small and insignificant by comparison, which if you've been paying attention, you probably know means that it just made me want to try even harder. And it turns out maybe this comparison and jealousy game started earlier than I had even realized. Katie,

Cynthia:

When did you first learn to judge yourself by comparing yourself

Katie:

To others? The first time that I remember it most strongly was probably in high school. I remember I really wanted to be valedictorian or my mom was valedictorian of her high school and college classes. She was a two time valedictorian. So I really wanted to graduate first in my class in high school. And I remember, I think I graduated like seventh and I was furious that I did not even crack the top five. That is my first memory of really using other people as benchmarks for myself.

Cynthia:

I have to say I want to give younger Katie a big hug because is also still amazing. And also what are these hierarchies and who decided these things and it's all so arbitrary, but also by design it serves larger purposes. And I'm also curious as a follow-up question, did you feel like you wanted to be valedictorian because you wanted to be like your mom or kind of as good as your mom? Or was it to make your family proud?

Katie:

I think it was probably both. And seeing academic success as the marker of almost like a good person or I perceived my mom to be very good. And so I think following in that path or following those footsteps was really important to me.

Cynthia:

Yeah, that's really interesting too because it taps into one of these concepts and penance of it, if you will, is there's one way or there's only certain demarcated ways that you can be a good person and if you hit those marks. So that's what it made me think about there too, because there are powers that are served if we kind of stay in line and we do certain things and we work hard, so we're productive and we earn money and that helps the economy and the GDP and all that stuff, right? It's very interesting how it can become personified in something as intimate and familial as a mother-daughter relationship. I'm not trying to essentialize it to that, but

Katie:

No, but that makes sense. I do wonder too, to even dig a step deeper there because I think that's where things become almost tricky because to your point, this concept of well school is important because it ladders up to the workplace and falling in line and then being productive and then your productivity helps a business make money and then the business making money helps the economy do better, and then if the economy does better, the GDP does better and then if the GDP does better, the country does better. There's this whole upward ripple effect, so to speak. And I think that someone could argue or someone could say, I can just imagine someone listening to this thinking, well, it is better for the country if GDP is higher or it is better if the economy is doing better because then people can X, Y, Z. And so it's almost hard to untangle what maybe has upsides or positives from where things become personally damaging.

Cynthia:

Yeah, no, it's very complicated. It's very nuanced, it's very intertwined. This has kind of just been the complex interconnected systems that we've all been steeped in for our entire lives. The point really is more just to sort of tie back to that earlier point about awareness is that let's just be aware of these things happening around us and we can gently question or gently interrogate something without being like, let's burn it all down. It's not a binary either. So I think there's a lot of space in the middle for people who are interested to just really unpack things more because ultimately it's more for yourself. It's for your raised consciousness and awareness around your own relationship to yourself, and then how do you want to interact in this world that we live in with the larger systems that you're going to interface with. So really just questions that I think it's important for us to ask every so often.

Katie:

Back then I didn't think to question any of what Cynthia pointed out. Instead, I figured the solution was to work harder. If I could operate at their level, I reasoned these feelings of inadequacy would go away to bastardize the alleged Sean Parker quote from The Social Network, “A seven figure business isn't cool. What's cool an eight figure business.”

It wasn't until I really questioned this inclination more recently pressing my thumb into the black and blue of my bruised ego that I realized even if I did earn as much or have as much as they did, I could not think of a single thing that money would really do for me. Now this is a slippery slope of a thought exercise. Of course, like everyone can think of moonshot things they would do with tens of millions of dollars. But when I thought about how my day-to-day life would change if I suddenly had what they did, I realized I already really like my life.

I like where I live. I like what I eat. I like how I spend my time. Sure, I could upgrade some things at the margins, but for the most part there was nothing reasonable that more wealth would unlock for me. I already have more than enough. Sure, I can't walk blindfolded around Neiman Marcus tossing every size 37 European shoe behind the register for safekeeping with my Amex. But like I said, there's nothing reasonable that more wealth could unlock for me, nothing that would actually materially change my happiness. That knowledge points us toward an important and useful truth after a certain point. The pursuit of additional financial resources is not about money at all, but what it might symbolize. Now, this is a tricky balance because the majority of positive action in our financial lives is often defined by this very sense of lacking. It's the feeling that pushes us to save for the future at all.

But money lends a unique realism to our progress. Its quantifiable nature makes it the perfect object of our dopamine fueled pursuit because we get immediate feedback somewhere along the journey to financial freedom. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that the money itself is not the objective. In fact, the quasi addictive nature of watching the number go up is why I always recommend tracking your net worth to those who are trying to grow it. Because seeing your progress almost always rewires you to go seek more of it, which is great if you're in the thick of your accumulation phase. It could be considered self-destructive to remove this drive from your money mentality entirely, like repeatedly allowing yourself to run out of gas on the side of the road. But the assumption that the best income is always double whatever you're currently making is self-defeating in a different way.

As Morgan household, the author of The Psychology of Money, writes, the best measure of wealth is what you have minus what you want, which means the best way to guarantee you never feel wealthy is to constantly want more. I learned a lot about how to increase my income and inflate my savings rate and grow my net worth. As I became well-versed in personal finance, but apart from determining a financial independence number, I never learned how to assess when it was time to stop reaching out my palm for more. As many in the financial independence world will tell you, many surpass their number and continue adding to the pile simply because they don't know how to stop. This is I think why people who objectively have more than they will realistically ever need still have trouble spending freely on relatively small things that would improve their lives.

They're no longer using the metaphoric gas to power their lives. Instead, they've made their lives about ensuring the tank is as full as possible. The problem with that mentality is probably obvious. It means you're going to live most of your life parked, doing a whole lot of nothing or sitting at the gas station refueling for a trip to nowhere. So how do you know when you have enough? There are a few ways to address this question. So I'll start with the most mathematically reasonable way. You have enough when the cashflow created from your assets is enough to support the spending that provides your desired lifestyle. In other words, when you're financially independent, but most of us spend entire lifetimes working toward that point and experiencing contentment isn't something that we should save for our deathbeds once a spreadsheet formally gives us permission to feel that way.

Instead, I wonder if each of us can define enough by identifying a few things. Number one, the lifestyle we want to live. Now, this is the hardest part. This is a goalpost in itself that's hard to stop moving. Number two is the amount of money that that requires. Now that's relatively easy. And number three is the net worth required to provide that money in perpetuity. Now, this part is just math. For most of us, becoming satisfied with number one is the most challenging step. But once we are, the rest of the pieces kind of fall into place and enough becomes calculable. But that internal drive toward progress and personal growth is probably not going to go away. And I would argue that maybe we don't necessarily want those feelings to go away. Instead, it might be fruitful to practice channeling that drive somewhere else. Much like the first $50,000 you earn will impact your life far more than the last 50,000 will.

For example, the fifth $50,000 chunk in a $250,000 income, that last fifth chunk is not going to be as meaningful as the first one. Each incremental dollar is worth just a little bit less than the last. Now, this is known as decreasing marginal utility. This is in part why designing your life around the infinite pursuit of the next incremental dollar becomes less and less rational as you accumulate more of them. But since money is often the most tangible reflection of our own progress, it becomes the default metric that we optimize for. The only way to disentangle our sense of forward movement from our income or net worth is to channel that drive into something else, preferably something that's more inherently gratifying and meaningful. We turn to money as a proxy, as proof that our work means something of tangible value in this world. But what if you don't want to derive your professional sense of accomplishment from the income it generates?

In my own life, I'm working on redirecting my appetite formerly reserved for increasing my income to becoming a better writer. And this takes a lot of forms, reading more varied material, more often, spending time writing every day and seeking feedback more intentionally. In one of my largest personal challenges to date, I'm currently writing my first book. Little by little, I'm trying to change the metric by which I judge my own growth from its ability to increase my net worth to focusing on honing my ability to communicate well. The hedonic treadmill might highlight the importance of seeking happiness, not just through external achievements or possessions, but also through internal growth, such as developing personal relationships and practicing gratitude and engaging in activities that provide a sense of purpose and fulfillment. And this can feel really foreign if you've only ever thought about success in the narrower way that I defined it before,

Cynthia:

It's always our prerogative to choose a different path, right? I think a lot of us do feel very tied to whatever identity we've crafted or molded for ourselves over time, and that is probably also very influenced by what our families wanted for us, what we felt our communities wanted, education, all of that. So as hard as it may feel to take a hard left turn, I think that actually is the literal subject to one of the sections in my book, Don't Stay in Your Lane, is like a hard left turn because sometimes you do have to do that and it's very hard. But that's also my second point, why it's important to have your support systems in place so people you can talk to, people you can trust, people that provide that psychological safety for you where you can really talk it through and be like, listen, I'm scared that if I dig further in this direction, I'm going to see some stuff that I really don't want to see.

And what is that going to mean, all the downstream effects, et cetera. Because maybe there's actually a way, and this is kind of like a bonus third thing somebody said to me recently in the past week, the thing that you're afraid of, that's probably the direction in which you should go because there's something there and that's your major growth edge, and that's that success that you're even more terrified of or whatever it is. But it's really worth going in that direction and leaning into it. And I'm fond of saying action conquers fear as well. So for that person and whoever else feels that a similar resonance with that crossroads kind of thing, yeah, go there. It doesn't have to be now or today or this week, but go there at some point when you're ready because that is going to be the path

Katie:

That's really powerful. I think that that speaks to a lot of how ambitious people might feel about one specific type of career choice that they've made, maybe because it mapped to the ambition and the way that they felt, the prestige path, and then they feel pulled in this different direction. But it's like I can't even look in that direction or acknowledge fully that that's where I want to go. But I like that you're saying the fear is the indicator that that is the path. If you are feeling that way about it, there is something there instinctually to listen to and explore deeper.

Cynthia:

And I think what people think, it's a bit of another binary that we encounter a lot is the fear is that if you go towards the fear, then it will cause you to then have to burn something down or whatever. And sure, in the sense of a phoenix rising, we are always reinventing ourselves, et cetera, but it doesn't necessarily need to be a negatively destructive thing that happens, and that's why it's important to also have your people in place so that you can be like, listen, here's what I'm feeling. They can help you get out of that place of reaction where we do tend to make choices that we might regret later, make mistakes, et cetera. You could still learn from mistakes, so I'm okay with that to an extent, but get you out of that reactive space into a responsive place where you can actually be like, okay, I can actually see the thousand foot view right now and I'm going to make this set of choices to move forward because I'm able to take everything into account. I'm not being triggered or activated by stuff, and this is my in intentional set of moves.

Katie:

If you're looking for someone like Cynthia to work with, unpack limiting beliefs or supercharge your personal and professional growth, she has an incredible firm and resources to look into. For

Cynthia:

Folks who did resonate with anything, my firm is called Embrace Change. We're a career coaching and training firm. We specialize in working with women of color and people of color and companies and orgs that are invested in their staff and leaders of color, but everyone is welcome to check out what we're doing. The website is embracechange.nyc, so that's embracechange.nyc, and everything is linked from there. We're on all the socials, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and we have a great newsletter as well that I write personally called The Trajectory. So encourage folks to sign up for that if they're interested in more career leadership and entrepreneurship advice. That's embracechange.nyc/signup.

Katie:

To close this out, one of my favorite mythologies about the power of this concept comes from a Kurt Vonnegut poem at a party hosted by a billionaire. Vonnegut tells his friend Joseph Heller, that their hedge fund manager host made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel, Catch 22, over its whole history. Heller's response is now famous: “Yes, but I have something he will never have enough.”

That is all for this week. I'll see you next week. Same time, same place on the Money with Katie Show. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.