Manisha Thakor | Money Zen: The Secret to Finding Your Enough

Srini Rao

Manisha, welcome back to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Manisha Thakor

 It's great to get to talk to you again.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you back here. You and I had probably one of those conversations that I feel like I have quoted and revisited hundreds of times over the past couple of years. You have a new book out called Money's in All of which we will get into. But I wanted to start by asking you, what did your parents do for work? And how did that end up shaping and influencing where you've ended up with your life and career?

Manisha Thakor

Yeah, so my dad was born in India in the state of Gujarat, and he came over for graduate school and started in civil engineering and wound his way into business and ultimately became the CEO of a Fortune 500.

company, not at the lower end of that. So his whole career has been in finance and his biggest, like my biggest money career memory with my dad, he and I still laugh about it, is I was about 11 years old and he sat me down with his financial calculator, HP 12C and showed me how if I

compounded my babysitting money out and my investments grew at six, 7% after inflation, how much money I'd have at age 65. And when I saw those numbers, I was like, I'm all into this money stuff. My mom has been a teacher all her life and I'm really proud of her. She went back for her PhD so she could teach at the college level at age 50. And

She's always, she was, you know, an original hippie and read me gender neutral books and had me play with gender neutral toys when I was a kid. And she taught me that money gives women voices and choices. So those were my early links around money, my childhood, and more or less how I got introduced to the fact that finance is a profession.

Srini Rao

Yeah, so the two things that I wonder, because you alluded to the idea of growing up mixed race and you say, you know, that your parents met in early 1969 in Rochester, married within a year and then they had you in August 1970 and then your brother came on seven years later. But you say, when my parents walked through downtown Columbus in the late 1970s with their mixed race children, it wasn't exactly a scandalous site, but it could still draw the occasional hard stare. So one thing that I wonder is.

One, what were the sort of cultural narratives that you inherited from parents? Like, and how did they integrate the two different cultures and preserve, you know, sort of the Indian aspect of your heritage when you're mixed race?

Manisha Thakor

It's been interesting to me to observe my mixed race experience versus other peoples. My mom, because of her hippie background, was fascinated by Indian culture. So she learned to cook Indian food. She learned how to, you know,

put on a sari. And we had, we used to go back to India every other summer to visit family. And my mom brought back lots of silk and batik prints. And, you know, so we had a lot of Indian artifacts and food and there's not a huge Indian community in the state of Indiana, but.

We would all congregate in Indianapolis, a lot of us at Diwali and celebrate. So I felt like I had, I felt very integrated into the Indian side of my family. Also, all of us to our Indian know there's a great emphasis on, on education. And I absorbed that as well.

But one of the things I talk about in the book is there's another part about being an Indian female that a lot of Americans probably don't know, which is that many of us have facial hair. And in India, the way you deal with it, especially on your upper lip, is you thread it. And it tends to hit in puberty. And when that happened to me, my mom had no idea kind of what.

to do that she was blonde hair and blue eyed, never happened to her. And I was so mercilessly teased for a variety of things but being called mustache mouth was definitely one of them. And so I have these various different imprints and that painful bullying was a factor that really played into the way my adult life evolved.

Manisha Thakor

And that came from being mixed race.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, one thing that I think that caught my attention, and the reason I wanted to start by talking about your parents was that you mentioned that, you know, the messages of getting married and you know, making money and having kids and all that were not passed on to you, which are so sort of pervasive in the Indian culture and their cultural narrative. And not only that, what's even more ironic about it is your dad was basically, you know, a C level executive at a fortune 500 company. So,

Explain how you end up on this path where you buy into what is effectively, you know, another version of this Indian cultural narrative when your parents actually didn't give you that. I mean, you alluded to it to some degree.

Manisha Thakor

So I think because my parents were both in their own way rebels, everybody in my father's family had arranged marriages. I mean, it was so shocking that he picked his own wife and then a white woman on top of that. So it makes sense to me that I didn't get those, get married, have kids, cultural messaging. But I didn't.

get the messaging that money gives you freedom and power to make choices and combined with being ostracized by my peers in this small Midwest town because I didn't fit in and finding solace with academics and teachers that

praised me as I moved into my career, that grades and praise from teachers got replaced with money and promotions. Because of the way in which we seem to worship money, and accomplishments, and work titles, and everything, it just spiraled out of control for me. I think that's a big-

part of the reason why my cultural narrative isn't.

necessarily what you would think for an Indian woman.

Srini Rao

Even though your life outcomes seem to be exactly what you know that they have led to. Like it's almost like you followed the narrative without necessarily inheriting.

Manisha Thakor

Yes, and I guess the reason I was thinking I didn't follow it is because the part of the narrative that to me seems so strong is family. You know, I mean, I look at, you know, I have an uncle in Boston and I have three cousins, both, you know, exceptionally, you know, a doctor, a PhD. You know, they've all super accomplished. They all have kids.

And at various points in time, they've all moved in with my aunt and uncle. So there is three generations living together. I mean, that's very Indian. I did not place emphasis on family. I placed emphasis on money. And so in that way, I feel like I, even though I had quote professional success, which we are so driven to in the Indian culture by our parents,

that connection, that emotional wealth connection to the family component of the narrative. I think that's why I answered the question the way I did.

Srini Rao

Well, I want to bring back a clip from our previous conversation, which I think will make a nice segue into talking about the book. So take a listen.

Srini Rao

So one, reflecting on that quote after having written this book, I want to hear your thoughts. Because when I read the book, I felt like the book was basically a much more expanded version of what you talked about there.

Manisha Thakor

Yeah, you know, when I think back, Trini, I think that may have been my very initial awakening in that period of time that you and I last talked that something was really effed up in the way I was living my life. And I was trying to figure out what that was, but it took me a while because

I was looking for a very clear cut answer to how do you find and define your enough? And it turns out it's a Rubik's Cube of interdisciplinary issues that lead each of us to find out what is enough or as in my case, to miss it for so many decades that you end up living a lot of your adult life on a-

24-7 hamster wheel of hustle culture trying to get more, but ultimately always feeling like it's never enough, and you're as a human, never enough.

Srini Rao

Well, you open the book by saying, I believe that we get stuck in the cult of never enough because we don't have a full understanding of the myriad of factors that have led us there in the first place. So talk to me about the factors that actually have gotten us to this place.

Manisha Thakor

Yeah, I think they fall into four big buckets. The first is what I call personal small-t traumas. And I call it small-t because oftentimes it's things that in retrospect you look back and you think, oh my gosh, that really shouldn't have had such an impact on me. You know, I referenced that bullying I went through. It was fourth to sixth grade. I'm not the first person on the planet to be bullied, but that bullying ultimately led me into this.

a winding path to being a good student, to being obsessed with work, to ultimately, literally, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, but identifying my self-worth as my net worth. And the roots were in that small t trauma. I talked to some executive coaches who deal with really successful people, and I asked them, you know, how many of your clients have been driven by small t traumas? And the answer

range from 75% to 100%. So this really made me want to talk about it because a lot of us feel embarrassed that something in our childhood could so painfully have influences as adults. The second thing is cultural influences. And briefly speaking, what I'm referring to there is what.

Derek Thompson of the Atlantic calls worshiping at the altar of workism. And so defining who we are and our value as a human with what we do. The third bucket are societal influences. And I know there's a lot of talk right now about how social media distorts things with overly curated images, but it-

My research led me to see that it went deeper than that. That starting in the 70s, we have increasingly easier access to credit. And starting in the 70s and really picking up steam in the 90s to the aughts and into today, we're exposed to media images that are not accurate. We will see, for instance, a paralegal on a TV show, living a life

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Manisha Thakor

wearing clothes, grooming, driving a car, living in an apartment, that when you look at the average income for that job, and then you add up what it would cost to live the way this person is being portrayed on TV, they'd have to earn 30 to 50% more. So the third bucket is the societal influences around things that easy access to credit has made it all too easy for us to

get out of control with. And then the final is evolutionary biological factors because while humankind and the way we live has changed dramatically over the past 400 years, for thousands of years before that, we lived in a very different way. We lived off the land and we knew how to survive off the land.

Today, if you think of Maslow's hierarchy of the needs, our basic needs, food, shelter, so forth, transportation, the way we get that in our lives is through money. So, you know, our medulla is going off to keep us safe. We need money. And when you stir all of those buckets together, you can end up in this place where you feel like, no matter how much money you earn, no many...

no matter how many accomplishments you achieve, no matter how much praise you receive, it's never enough and you're never enough.

Srini Rao

There's one other thing you say in the book. You say from a very early age, we're bombarded by deceptive messaging that draws our attention toward what we have and what we do. As we move through our social and professional circles, comparing our lot to our neighbors, we begin to believe that what we have is not enough, what we earn is not enough, and therefore we are not enough. But this message is an illusion. It's based on a set of beliefs and trends that I refer to as counterfeit financial culture.

We place added value on expensive objects and experiences, be they hot handbags, status watches, or pricing memberships at trendy gyms, where we work out in the latest must-have $150 yoga pants. One, I didn't know $150 yoga pants existed. But that's tripping me in particular, because as I mentioned to you, I think that there's something, like you had mentioned, before we record, in the zeitgeist. I feel like I've been having this ongoing conversation about enough. Like we had Tom Curran, who wrote a book about

Manisha Thakor

Oh, they do.

Srini Rao

perfectionism and how we need to be okay with you know good enough instead of perfect. You know Jennifer Wallace whose episode people probably have heard you know wrote a book called Never Enough When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic which was sort of you know geared towards in a lot of ways parents and young people who are really struggling with this and yet you know with this and this is something I want to hear your perspective on because I remember talking to Thomas Kern about this and you know I said

there's this really sort of weird paradox or dilemma, right? Is that consumption is what drives the economy. And if everybody stopped consuming, and we were all satisfied, the economy would fall apart. And I thought to myself, like, this is like a PhD thesis worth exploring. Like I wrote a note called the satisfaction dilemma, which is literally like what I'm trying to resolve here. And I'm like, wait, how does that work? Like how in the world, in a world that is driven entirely by consumption, if everybody said, okay, now I have enough.

we would have some potential problems on our hands.

Manisha Thakor

You know, yes and no, right? So what is enough? I mean, that's a big question and the answer differs for everyone, but we're all still gonna need to have some food, some clothes, some medical care, some exercise, some need to travel. So there are many things going on in our daily lives that fall into

Manisha Thakor (17:51.undefined)

a framework of enough that can sustain the economy, I would argue that we've been hiding behind this notion that consumption fuels the economy. So if we don't keep it going, the house of cards will collapse. Well, you know what? I think about, as we talk here today, Phoenix, Arizona has had whatever it is,

20 straight days of 115 degree weather, and people are burning their skin because the temperature of the asphalt is rising to almost 180 degrees. Not everybody will agree with this, but I would argue we're having a climate crisis and that the root of it is the things that help us consume. And so...

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha!

Manisha Thakor

I don't see it as, I don't see enough as a conundrum in that context. I actually think it will help our economy and our planet.

Srini Rao

Let's talk about this idea of flawed self-worth anchors. You say that flawed self-worth anchors are any external possessions, symbols, accomplishments, numbers, titles, experiences, or credentials that give us a false sense of worth or make us believe that others must be more happy, successful, and fulfilled because they possess this anchor. I think that struck me because I got the book deal, I had the self-published Wall Street Journal bestseller, and I'm like, wow, all the same self-doubt that I had prior to those things happening is still there. Like, whatever...

you know, sense of like enoughness or relief I got from those accomplishments was always temporary. So, how do you begin to sort of uncouple these flawed self-worth anchors from our ambition and at the same time not lose our motivation? Does that make sense? I realize it's a really weird question.

Manisha Thakor

No, it's not a weird question at all. It's at the heart of the matter. Can you embrace the concept of enough and yet not stop growing, stretching, experiencing things as a human? And I feel like there's a very black and white kind of narrative around

more versus enough. And so the phrase I like to use and the way I've come to think about this question you're posing is, why don't we just give ourselves permission to achieve less? And you can interpret that phrase achieve less, which by the way, when I first heard it, I wanted to dry heave because like,

no Indian child wants to go tell their parents that their new goal in life is to achieve less. But the notion behind this is there's stuff in life that's important to us. There's stuff in life we have to do just to keep our life going. But most of us are running around so busy that we're not living. As I said in the book, we're human doings.

We're surviving as human doings, not thriving as human beings. And so, you know, when I stir all this up, I realized that how do we, that the one way that we can address this issue is to let go of these flawed self-worth anchors and replace them with an authentic,

definition of how we want to value our self-worth. So mine was sick, it was self-worth equals net worth. I'm working towards replacing that with self-worth equals connection to my family, to my friends, which, you know, I have lost so many of over the years because I don't respond and...

Manisha Thakor

I've been a very bad friend and to my community. And so, you know, the answer for everyone will be a different thing, but I think it's getting at that. And just to add one last thing, you know, when I say self-worth equals net worth in my mind, along with that went flawed anchors like,

having the Chanel handbag and wearing the Manolo Blahniks as I'd head into a business meeting because that made me feel like I was more important and more successful. And frankly, I noticed that, you know, when I'd walk into reception, people would treat me different if I was dressed to the nines versus not being. And so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy if we hang on to these flawed self-worth anchors.

Srini Rao

Well, letting them go, I think, to me, is one of the things that feels easier said than done. I can read your book. I can have this conversation with you. And I don't think I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning and suddenly feel like, OK, I don't care what my parents think about how much money I'm making or the fact that I haven't gotten as far as I want to. That's not going to happen. So talk to me about understanding this intellectually versus actually taking action on it.

And I know that you alluded to some of the consequences of this in the book, like ending up in the hospital and somehow even that didn't really change your behavior from what I read. Um, and the thing that I, this is something I've always wondered, you know, for a lot of people that I talked to on the show, it's almost always some sort of crisis that becomes a catalyst for wake up call for them to do something. And I'm like, okay, can you bring about the change without the crisis? Or is it necessary? Cause I feel like the crisis just pushes you to such a point of pain. You're like, God, I got to do something. Whereas if you're comfortable.

Manisha Thakor

Right?

Manisha Thakor

Yeah.

Srini Rao

It's like, okay, yeah, I don't feel entirely content and I still feel like I'm not enough all the time, but it's not so toxic that I'm ending up in the hospital. So it's easy to keep believing that.

Manisha Thakor

Right, I mean, and that is the question, right? Can we prevent this? Or do you have to face plant multiple times like I did? You know, I share in, when I shared my story, this has been without a doubt, the most candid and raw I've been in anything I've put out publicly. And the reason,

I did that and some of the amazing people I interviewed for their stories of never enough and how it affected them. I felt that we could not, because it's not an intellectual change, that that's why we can't just wake up and turn it off. And story has been one way that we pass down wisdom throughout history. And the stories I think of.

of how other people have experienced this. Cause I think we keep it very private. We don't like put a billboard on our head saying, you know what, I've got to, I feel like I'm a loser because, and this is true, the guy who sat in front of me in my first year of business school is now the CEO of Amazon, Angie Josie, you know? It's like, those things happen and it's so easy to fall back into that. Like, I'm not enough. And what I have found is that

There are a couple of exercises that sound maybe simplistic, but they're really powerful. And the one I would like to share here, because anyone can do it, is ask yourself, if $50 million after tax dropped on your head, and at the same time you got a diagnosis that you're only gonna live five more years, what would you stop doing? And what would you start doing?

And as you really start to think through your answers to that, that combined with the stories of other people, I feel can help you start to make incremental change. And that's why I wrote the book. But the other thing that I wanna mention is that it's not a linear path.

Manisha Thakor

After I wrote the book, I felt like I had been so liberated. I'd done the research, I understand how I fell into the cult, and then I had a mental framework for how to get out. And I was doing great until it came time to market this darn book. And you know, you can never chase after enough publicity when you're launching a book. It's never enough. And I have found myself back in that never enough cycle.

questioning if I'm enough. But now that I've gone through the Money's End process and framework, I'm able to pull myself out and use the tools in the book to help me say, whoa, something's going on here and I need to get reset.

Srini Rao

Oh, I can relate. I wrote a book about creativity for its own sake and basically for the first month all I was worried about were how many copies it was selling. My sister's like, you're an idiot. So like that basically means that you're questioning the message of your own.

Manisha Thakor

Right, right. Which is human nature. Change is always three steps forward, one step back, 10 steps forward, three steps back. That's just, it's messy. That's how it happens. We didn't get to a place where we were struggling with a never enough mindset in a simple way. We talked about the multifactorial, multidisciplinary set of factors that leads to this.

So, you know, it makes sense. Unwinding it all is not going to be easy.

Srini Rao

Well, I have to ask you what role aspirational media plays in all of this. I mean, things like self-help books and things like this podcast. You know, because if you think about it, every person who comes here is some person who's, you know, this extraordinary person who's accomplished something. And I think the thing that you've got Thomas Kern, who had written The Perfection Trap, said to me is he said, yeah, he said, what we don't account for in all of this is survivorship bias.

And he said, for all the people that you have on your show who did all these things and share all the things they did to get to where they're at, there are a hundred a million people who did the same things but didn't get anywhere.

Manisha Thakor

Yeah, you know, I was, somebody forwarded to me, Instagram reel, it was Jay-Z talking about his career path to becoming Jay-Z. And he said, you know, people just look at the end result. They don't look at the journey that other people, they just wanna dive in and hit that.

and result that they see maybe a successful person, musician like him having. And on that path, all the work you do behind it, there's no guarantee that it's gonna lead to success. And you're absolutely right. Two people may do the exact same thing and one becomes a sensation and one doesn't. You know, I wrote my first book,

at this literally at the same time that Brene Brown and Gretchen Rubin, both of whom I adore, were putting out their first book. Now, both of them are global phenomenal. I'm not a global phenomenal. And I did the same sorts of activities that they were doing. And so the survivorship bias can exist on so many levels to you completely wiped out.

to you didn't, you know, you thought you were gonna make it to this level and you made it only to that level. And it's not easy. I mean, my ego hurts when I stop and I think like, well, what did Gretchen and Brene do that, what did they have that I don't have? You know what I mean? That's human nature. And that's why the practice, the desire to want to embrace the concept of enough can be so powerful.

because when those questions bubble up, and they do for all of us, and they have for all of eternity, it can give us an anchor or a north star to start changing our thinking.

Srini Rao

It's funny as I'm hearing you say that about Brene Brown and Gretchen, like we've never had Brene's guest, but I've had Gretchen before. So I've seen to myself, well, imagine my world where at my imprint, not just people were publishing books at the same time, but at the same publisher, your peers are Ryan Holiday, Simon Sinek and Seth Godin.

Manisha Thakor

I hate pride!

Srini Rao

I'm like the redheaded stepchild of portfolio.

Manisha Thakor

And the thing that strikes me is that it doesn't matter who you are. If you measure yourself by some kind of external metric, there's always gonna be somebody who has more of it. The person who has the most money in the world today, because markets fluctuate,

will not be the same person who has the most money in the world tomorrow. And I mean, it fluctuates down. I once had the opportunity to talk to the chairman of Juniper Networks because he and his wife founded a wonderful spiritual retreat called 1440 Multiversity. The name references the number of minutes in a week. And he was saying, no matter how many incredible

things he accomplished over his career. Whenever one would get done, he'd say, okay, now how can I top that? What's next? And, you know, this is an incredibly successful individual. So, you know, I really think it's about changing your relationship.

to yourself in a way that the definition and the equation, like the word self, the equation self-worth equals question mark. I think you start to get on the path here enough by answering that with whatever feels internally authentic to you.

Srini Rao

Well, let's, yeah.

Manisha Thakor

I mean, for you, self-worth could be creativity, you know? And, you know, that's an internal thing.

Srini Rao

So let's talk about hustle culture briefly, because I know you alluded to it. You said that productivity is not a measure of my self-worth. I recognize this now, but at the height of my embrace hustle culture, I had so thoroughly internalized the idea deep in the nooks and crannies of my brain that it felt too difficult to detach my very worth as a person from the progress I made or did not make on my daily, weekly, monthly, and annual to-do list. I teach a productivity course on knowledge management. So that stood out to me. So talk to me about that.

you know, how do we find some sense of sanity while also feeling like we're making progress? And how did this hustle culture become so pervasive?

Manisha Thakor

I think it started with the shift from, again, what Derek Thompson in the Atlantic would say, from jobs to careers to callings and the emphasis on the, of the attachment of our identities to work, which in an increasingly global world,

with technology can now grip you literally 24-7-365 in a way that could not grip our parents. Logistically, it would have been impossible for them to be gripped in quite the way we are. Then for reasons that I'm not entirely clear on, we started to

assign a level of worth to busyness that we related to the person's character. In other words, when you meet someone these days, everyone's struggling with it. You know, how are you? I'm good, busy. Or, crazy busy. Or, oh my god, I'm so busy. But you know, when we hear that, we don't think, oh gosh, you must really not have a grip.

on what's important in life and who you are as a human. Many of us think, oh wow, you must be doing something important. And so we've come to use busyness as a metric. And then I think the other piece, and Johann Hari has written about this in Lost Connections, in the book Bowling Alone. I mean, there've been a number of different books that have talked about this trend of loneliness.

And so I think as work has replaced for so many of us, what places of worship or community events and organizations used to do in society, bring people together, we feel there's a need for human connection that is not being fulfilled and we don't want to feel that it's empty. So we fill it up by being too busy to feel anything.

Srini Rao

Absolutely. Yeah, it's so true. I found myself in my own bones of loneliness. I'm like, OK, if I don't want to feel lonely, I know the one thing that won't make me feel lonely is to find something work related to do and bury myself in it.

Manisha Thakor

Yeah.

Manisha Thakor

When I first embarked upon this journey, and I had quote, free time, I literally could not fathom any other way to fill it than work. And so in other words, I mean, it literally was an addiction to that busyness. And the...

the antidote to any kind of addiction is almost never a permanent one, right? No matter if you have an addiction to something, you are in recovery for the rest of your life. It doesn't go away. And, you know, that's why in AA there are meetings.

Um, you know, one thing, there's all other topic, but one thing I've struggled with, um, is binge eating and. You know, it, I am not doing it right now. It it's been something that's come up in periods where I've been extremely stressed and I shove enormous amounts of food in my mouth in order to numb myself. So I don't have to feel the stress. Um, I'm in a very good place with my food right now.

But I'm not cured. That is an addiction. And it bubbles up, and I have to revisit the healthy practices that I have put around it to help me not engage in that behavior. And I think it's the same thing for busyness and over-attachment to the role work is having in our lives. Those have become.

for so many of us, not everyone, but for so many of us, I believe they've crossed over the line into addiction.

Srini Rao

Think that the other part of the book that really struck me was this idea of a magic number in it I feel like we all have this sort of fictional number in our head and you know writer Carol actually talked about this and he said, you know the problem with these goals is that they're often just arbitrary and They're not based on anything. It's like oh million dollars. He's like, but yeah, why do you need a million dollars? Nobody ever asks why and what they would do with it But you actually say in the book that I'd spent my entire life working toward this moment

toward a single magic number, getting there was no small feat. And I knew that I should have been celebrating. But as I apologized and wiped away my tears so we could get back to my friend and her financial needs, I could feel myself slowly sinking into an existential crisis. The truth I knew was that I wasn't. I was just shy of my 50th birthday. Most likely half of my life was gone. I had nothing to show for it except the privilege of potential early retirement scenario that filled me with dread. Because if I stopped working now, that would mean I could no longer hide behind my work.

Manisha Thakor

Yeah. And I mean, the number there, there once was a series of ads from the financial company, ING, and they used to have people walking around in the commercial with these pieces of paper tape to their head with

literally their number on it. And it was an ad for retirement advice and services. And I think you are so right. We don't ask why. And for those who have a spiritual practice, you may be familiar with the writer Byron Katie, who has a practice where she has people when they're dealing with

tough situations and toxic beliefs to ask, is this true? Is this true? And to ask it for multiple layers. And what I find when it comes to this subject of never enough thinking, why? Why is the most important question. And I don't mean it in a Simon Sinek way of why, which is a very important and powerful way of why, but this kind of why,

why is that my number? Why do I think that number is going to make me happy? Why do I? Why? And you know what's interesting is parents know this. Small children constantly drive you crazy by what? Asking why? Why? And they do it oftentimes.

going down so far into your explanation that you realize, wow, that's actually a really good question. I can't answer that last why. So that I think is something that we can do for ourselves as we seek answers.

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Srini Rao

Well, you, you know, towards the end of the book, make these really, I think, critical distinctions between money worries and money problems and financial health and financial stability. So expand on those for me and then tie them to the concept of money.

Manisha Thakor

So money problems are things that can be solved with intellectual solutions. My credit score is in the tank. How do I repair it? I'm drowning in student debt. How can I ever pay this off? How much house can I afford? These are money problems. The answers are intellectual.

Manisha Thakor

concerns that have emotional answers. By far and away, the number one worry I hear from women is I'm worried I'm gonna be a bag lady, the proverbial bag lady under the bridge. I'm worried that I'm gonna be old and alone and broke. And I hear this from women of every income range, income and net worth ranges that you would, I mean, literally, they couldn't spend all of their money.

in their lifetime unless they started giving it away at the rate that Mackenzie Scott is giving away her billions to make the world a better place. And so money worries stem from emotional issues, oftentimes found in those four buckets we talked about at the beginning of our conversation. And

multi-traumas in what are relation to cultural norms, how we're responding to societal influences, the impact of evolutionary biology. And so I used to think I could help people achieve happiness by helping them solve their financial problems. That was my career for 30 years. And what I came to realize is no...

you do not have financial serenity until you address the money worries as well. And that leads us into the second part of your question. Financial health, I define as the ability to meet your current obligations with ease, no stress, you've got money set aside for an emergency, and you feel good about the money that you are setting aside for the future, the purpose of it. And

the amount of it. Now you notice I didn't give you a number in that. That's how I define financial health, what the numbers will look like, vary for everyone. And I also want to acknowledge that there are far too many people who earn less than a living wage or are in professions that don't pay them anything remotely close to what they deserve given the value that they bring society.

Manisha Thakor

So there's a swath of people for whom structurally, financial health may never be an option. But if you are in the, you know, in the US, I would say it's the two thirds of the population where that is a financial reality. Looking at financial health, rather than striving after financial wealth, financial health gives you stability. And now,

you have the resources in terms of your limited time and limited money, none of us have unlimited both of them, and you can decide how you wanna invest in your emotional wealth. And so the way it relates back to Money's End, I think of Money's End as a state of mind where you have calm, confidence, and clarity about your relationship with money.

and the role that you want it to play. And I also think of it as a mental framework that you can refer back to when you start to feel off-kilter in any emotional kind of way. I'm too busy, I don't feel good about myself. I'm striving to do more than I have time in the day. Then you can come back and say, is this effort?

helping my financial health, helping nourish my emotional wealth, or not, because if it's not, why am I doing it?

And there's one other thing, if you don't mind me sharing a piece of academic research around this.

Srini Rao

Yeah, of course.

Manisha Thakor

So for years, there was a stat that was highly quoted. And it said, $75,000 is the maximum amount of money that you need in order to be happy. And any money beyond that doesn't really increase your happiness. And now that's an old study. So that number would have to be inflation adjusted. It would be significantly higher today. But it turns out,

researchers from Princeton and Penn teamed up, that study, which many people rolled their eyes out, because even back when it was $75,000, people on the East and West Coast were saying, okay, if you are raising a family on $75,000, like you definitely could use a little bit more than that and it would increase your happiness. But what the researchers found was there is a number and that number is different for everyone, but it's a number,

where you've reached financial health, you have the flexibility to do the things that you don't feel financially in pain. Earning money beyond that will not increase your life satisfaction, the researchers found, unless it was.

happening on a base of emotional well-being. And that's really the crux, you know, when they say money can't buy happiness and then there's arguments like, well, yes, it can because it can get you insurance and somebody to clean your house and it can help if your roof needs a repair. But the point is there is a level for all of us above which more money will not make us happier unless we have emotional well-being. And that's where I got.

my financial health was really strong, but as I mentioned, I was emotionally bankrupt. So it didn't matter if I kept making more money. It wasn't going to do a thing for my life satisfaction.

Srini Rao

Well, let's wrap this up by talking about joy based spending because you say joy based spending is the opposite of budgeting. It's a concept that I came with after seeing time and again, the mere mention of the B word budget declines and students cause their eyes to glaze over their ears to shut down at its core. Joy based spending is about squeezing the maximum amount of pleasure out of each dollar you spend so that your financial values are aligned with your emotional values, whether it's connection, creativity, authenticity, nature, or whatever reams you reflected on in chapter six. And it reminds me a lot of for meets concept of money dials and you know,

like I think in what I like about his approach to this is he says, you know, like cut ruthlessly on the things you don't give a shit about and spend, you know, freely on the things that you care a lot about. And I'll give you a personal example. Like I'm moving back to Boulder. I've been here at my parents' house for the past year because my nephew was born and I wanted to spend time with my family. And you know, I traveled to Brazil. And one of our friends looks, so are you going to live alone? And my cousin happened to decide to stay in Boulder. I was like, no, I'm not actually, you know. And what I realized was, I was like, wow, I'm like,

having my own place, like if I could spend my money on different things, I'm like, rent falls pretty low on that list. Like I was like, I'll get my own place when I'm dating somebody I want to move in with them. But I want to have the money that I would have spent on my own place to travel. Like that's pretty clear to me. Now I was like, I don't want to spend that money on rent.

Manisha Thakor

Yeah.

Manisha Thakor

I feel like Ramit and I are two peas in a pod when it comes to our attitudes about pretty much anything financial. I've yet to find something he says that I disagree with. And joy-based spending is, you know, the dial, muddy dial in a different form.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Manisha Thakor

And for me, there are three steps. The first is to encourage people to do a joy audit where they, for a period of time, the gold standard would be a month, but for most people, two or three days is as much as they can tolerate. And you literally just write down whatever you're spending money on. And if it's a, you know, your health insurance payment gets processed and you get the notice online, well, you write that down, or you're at the grocery store. You write down groceries and however much you spent.

But the thing is at the end, you don't add up anything. You just take out a yellow highlighter and you highlight anything that you spent money on that did not bring you joy. And I call those money leaks. And some of them are the usual things that we roll our eyes at. The cable bill, the internet, et cetera. Yeah, definitely see if you can negotiate those down.

But the really interesting stuff comes when it's like going out to dinner with this couple who always orders the super expensive bottle of wine and we don't drink and then we split the bill 50-50 and no matter how nice the conversation is, come away feeling I'm seething. Okay, that's not bringing you joy. Next time, invite them over for pizza and bring them beer.

Manisha Thakor

There are ways and then I find people, to your point about housing, taking a look at their mortgages for the first time and saying, wow, wow. Sometimes it's in the context of, my kids have gone off to college and now I have more bathrooms than people in the house and what's the point? I could use this money to travel. So the joy-based audit is the core. The second...

tool is the hourly wage test. This is inspired by Vicki Robbins' marvelous book, Your Money or Your Life, that came out in 1992 and is the book that's had the biggest impact on my life. And I had the opportunity to interview her for the book. And if people haven't read Your Money or Your Life, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

But the idea is most of us spend about 2000 hours a year on work-related activities when you include commuting, getting ready, blah, blah. That's like 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. And so if you're earning $80,000 and you divide that by 2000, that's $40 an hour before tax. So now if you see something that costs $400, you have a ruler you can use. You can say, is that worth 10 hours? Well, more than 10 hours.

of my life's energy or not. And you get to say whether the answer is yes or no, nobody else, but now you have a framework to equate what you're buying with the life's energy that went into earning the money that you'd used to buy it. And then the third is the power of a pause. Whether you're shopping online, I mean, that's so dreadfully easy to overspend. I encourage people.

to put things in their shopping cart and step away for a week and then come back and revisit if it's an item that's a want, not an absolute need. And if it's something in a store, then take a photograph and keep it on your phone and come back in a week and look at the item and ask. Those three things together, I find, enable people to redirect their money.

Manisha Thakor

towards the things that they love to do, or find leaky money to pay off debts that are completely stressing them out, such that the end result is ultimately more joy when those debts are paid off. So that's joy-based spending. And I've yet to meet anybody who's actually tried it, who has not found it to be transformative on some level.

Srini Rao

Well, this has been amazing as I expected it would be so I have one last question for you Which is how we finish all our interviews and I'm really curious to see up to go back and compare your answer this time To the one from before but what do you think it is to make somebody or something on mistake?

Manisha Thakor

I think it is curiosity. I think that curiosity is a superpower that we do not value highly enough. And I, oh, Sreeni, I'm so sorry. I live in rural Maine. I have a little cabin. Okay.

Srini Rao

Yeah, no worries. We go ahead and let the train go by. We'll have our editor edit this out.

Manisha Thakor

I am five feet from a lake and 25 feet from the railroad tracks. Like I'm literally in the middle of nowhere. And, um, I love it. It's like this quiet minimalist life, except when the darn train goes by, um, which is not on any set schedule. So we're at another couple of seconds. I think it should be.

Manisha Thakor

down.

Sometimes it's a really long train. That's what this one is.

Okay, gone. So I'll start again. You're asking, do you want to ask me the question again and I'll just start from there.

Srini Rao

Yeah. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Manisha Thakor

I think it's curiosity. I find that curiosity is a superpower that opens your mind and leads you in directions that you may never have imagined even existed. And that's how I think people become unmistakable.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and your insights with us. Where can people find out more about you, the new book and everything else?

Manisha Thakor

So I like to keep things simple. Everything is at moniesen.com. Info on the book, a fun link to a quiz so you can take it and see if you are trapped in the cult of never enough. All my socials and even, you know, book club guide and I've got a fun free reflective journal. So people who read through the book,

often are very touched by different parts. So you can download that as well. So everything at moniesend.com.

Srini Rao

And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.