Peruze

If you’re ambitious, you live in an echo chamber of business advice. You’re told to stay lean, iterate, disrupt the competition, and follow a thousand other "best practices." The noise is overwhelming, and much of the wisdom is conventional, contradictory, and leads to the same crowded place: a brutal, head-to-head fight for incremental gains. The constant pressure is to compete, to be just a little bit better than the next person, and to measure success in inches.

Most of us are trapped on a money-go-round. We spend far more than 40 hours a week on our jobs when we account for commuting, decompressing, and the “escape entertainment” required to numb ourselves before the next week begins. The result is a paradox fueling today’s burnout culture and quiet quitting phenomenon: we work more, but enjoy life less. Our relationship with money—earning it, spending it, worrying about it—has become the central drama of our lives, and the material progress that was supposed to free us has left us feeling more enslaved.

How well do you really know your own mind? Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s answer, distilled in his masterpiece _Thinking, Fast and Slow_, is that we are strangers to ourselves. We believe we are rational beings making conscious, deliberate choices, but most of our mental life is guided by an automatic, intuitive system we’re barely aware of.

We are taught to think about money like it's physics—a world of clear rules, formulas, and data where the right inputs produce the right outputs. But if that were true, we would all be much better at it. This rigid approach often fails us because real financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where psychology is far more important than intelligence.

We’ve all been there. The New Year’s resolution to exercise every day that fizzles out by February. The vow to start a new productive routine that never quite gets off the ground. We often blame ourselves for a lack of willpower or discipline, but what if the problem isn't us, but our understanding of how habits work?