In a few short months, I'll wrap up the remaining classes I need to complete my MBA at the University of Michigan (Go Blue!). While I'm super excited, I'm also faced with what feels like, to me at least, a yawning chasm of... well... free time. Matt likes to say that I fill calendars like air fills a room, and he's not wrong. My family's current running joke is that I will only last a year before enrolling in a doctoral program, and they're not entirely off base. I love academic environments and learning in general. But as I face this next chapter and consider what I will do with my newfound free time, I've found myself distracted by what seems like a more critical conundrum. Sure, I can find tasks to fill that time – join a gym, get into baking, take up birding. But the choice here isn't just what I will occupy my time with, but what I will focus my attention on.
A few weeks back, I found an interview between one of my favorite academics (Adam Grant) and one of my favorite authors (John Green). On their own, I would read anything either of these men wrote, but getting to read their conversation together felt like an extra special gift. For those less familiar, Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist who teaches at Wharton's business school and has built an impressive body of research around, in his words, "how people find motivation and meaning," among other things. John Green is a bestselling author of several young adult novels, including The Fault in Our Stars and one of my favorites, Turtles All the Way Down. In their interview, they discussed the importance of paying attention to, ironically, what we pay attention to. In the middle of the interview, Adam asks John about how one of his recent books came about, and he says the following:
...And then, as I started to get better, I re-read the work of my friend named Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who had died a few months earlier. And I read this moment where she says, "Pay attention to what you pay attention to if you want to know what to do with your life." And I realized that I had not been paying attention to what I was paying attention to. I just, I was kind of letting the information flow happen very passively in my life. And I wasn't paying that kind of careful sustained attention, that really for me, is the way toward hope and wonder and joy. And for me, that meant writing a series of extremely in-depth Yelp reviews about plague and penguins of Madagascar.*
There's so much in this statement that I resonate with. We face a constant barrage of information, and it's so easy to let our attention get hijacked. My husband and I recently started playing the Strands game in the New York Times. I have now spent a considerable portion of my life figuring out which letters connect to form the day's" spanagram." This is all good fun, except that my attention is a finite resource, arguably even more so than my time. I have time left to sleep, eat, and work, but the time that I have to be specifically present for things is even less so, and it's a resource worth considering.
For those familiar with our process, we root everything we do in a financial plan, which is, in its simplest form, an in-depth assessment of your resources and what you want to spend them on. We look at your money, your time, and, in some respects, your health and well-being, and then we ask, "What do you want to spend these things on?" The answers are often simple at first. Most people want to travel while they still can. They'd like to pay off their house. Usually, they want to retire as soon as possible while still feeling confident they will have enough. But the best plans are the ones that consider what your attention will be spent on. It's not just that you want to travel, but you want to travel to see the kids and the grandkids. It's not just that you wish to pay off the house but build something special where memories can be made.
Later in the interview, Adam responds: "And I was stunned in part because I had tweeted a couple of years ago, sort of a random thought that we reveal our goals through our actions, but our values through our attention and that if you want to figure out what's really important to you, you should just scan what you pay attention to." On my last trip to Westlake, Matt and I were conversing about what I wanted to do next (truthfully, I think he was trying to feel out the doctorate question like everyone else). I surprised us both when I said I was ready to be a little bored. Not because I enjoy being bored. I am genuinely incapable of sitting still. But I'm realizing I need margins to focus my attention. Ultimately, I want to focus on what I value, which means spending this next chapter attentive to my family. As many of you have told me, it goes by quickly, and I have about ten more years before my brood hopefully leaves me for grander adventures. If my most precious resource is my attention, I want to ensure my "plan" has that resource appropriately assigned.
One of the things that I've always enjoyed about wealth management is that it's centered around where our resources and values intersect. Many of us spend our whole lives saving, but it sometimes needs to be clarified for what. Without that clarity, we often seek financial advice disconnected from our values, and there is an endless supply of articles on how to maximize your wealth. That advice is often good and valuable but it may not be the best place to start. We want to ensure your estate is correctly set up and your taxes are efficient. I'm incredibly proud to work with a group of people who work hard to ensure you receive the best advice possible regarding optimizing your wealth and the resources you've amassed. But I believe there's more to a successful plan than just the numbers. Consequently, I'm even more proud to be a part of a company that takes the time to consider how technical knowledge and know-how can help simplify the firehose of financial information facing all of us to free up your most valuable resource – your attention. Because our time is short and our attention is even shorter. We should all get to spend it on what is most important to us.
If you'd like to further explore what it might look like to organize your finances and free up your attention, we'd love to chat. You can reach us here!
Grant, A., & Green, J. (2021, June 22). Taken for granted: John Green wants you to pay attention to your attention (transcript). TED. https://www.ted.com/podcasts/taken-for-granted-john-green-wants-you-to-pay-attention-to-your-attention-transcript
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