Mental Tips, Tricks, and Life Hacks With Motley Fool Co-Founder David Gardner

Does cost equal quality? Can your smartwatch make you even smarter? We've got a lot to talk about.

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This video was recorded on Feb. 14, 2024.

David Gardner: Have you ever done a blind taste test with wine? What's on our wrist minding its own business too much? Raise your hand if you're an investor. Think about it for a moment, what are you waiting for finally to happen that'll make you happy? What is that thing? You'll be happy when? The questions will continue investing, business, and life. It's time for the ninth episode and one of my favorite recurring series on Rule Breaker Investing. That's mental tips, tricks and life hacks volume 9. This week, only on Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. A delight to have you joining with me this week, we're going to have some fun together. Let's get smarter, shall we? The latest, it's number 9 in our historical running series of mental tips, tricks and life hacks. The series started with volume one on June 15 of 2016. Now back then in 2016, it was just mental tips and tricks, but then I thought, when I did Episode 2, hey, it's not just about mental tips and tricks. Those are great, but what about life hacks? We all need those too. Ways to do life better, more elegantly, ways to make things that used to be kludgy effective.

That's how I think about life hacks anyway. I also love mental tips and tricks, which we've now done 8 times before. The most recent, last July, July 2023. If you want to hear earlier episodes of this series including that one, you could certainly always just [Alphabet's] Google the following phrase, Rule Breaker Investing mental tips. You'll find all previous ones which might be worthwhile since there are no repeats, every one of these episodes is chock-full of new, original, well, at least to this show, mental tips, tricks and life hacks.

Now, are these earth-shattering, are they all life improving and unforgettable tips? Absolutely not. Maybe, but these are hacks, a lot of life hacks. This series is designed to make life more elegant, fun, and navigable. I'm coaching you very explicitly here, like any good life coach might do, aiming most of all for your success. These are things that have worked for me that I hope work for you too. They can be quite small by the way, like 3.4 ounces small, looking ahead to number 4 this week. Well, without further ado, let's get started with, is this my favorite this week? I love all my children, all seven tips, tricks and life hacks this week, but I admit I might just be leading off with my favorite. We'll call this one Wine Taste Test, mental tip, trick, or life hack number 1.

I'd say this one's a trick. At a recent gathering of friends, I learned something about price and perception through three glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon. The story begins at the home of my good friend, Dan Pink. Now, Daniel Pink is a celebrated author. He's been on this podcast a number of times. He's also a friend who lives about 10 minutes away from me here in Washington DC. Dan had me and a few other more impressive guests to his house over the past weekend, and he had what he called as social science tests in mind for us. He had his wife pour three glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon wine for each of us in glasses that were labeled simply 1, 2, and 3. Dan himself did not know what wine was in what glass, it was all done completely anonymously.

Dan and his five guests, me included around the table, all six of us had the same wine in glass number 1 and 2, and 3, we just didn't know what it was. Although Dan did mention they're very different, they're all Cabernet Sauvignon. But one of them is quite an expensive bottle of wine, one of them is the cheapest he could find at our local Safeway, and the other was somewhere in between. He urged us not to try to guess which was the most expensive or at least, but simply to ask yourself, as you did this social science experiment, to ask yourself, which do I enjoy? Which did I enjoy most? For each, we were given an index card where we would write down zero to ten, our rating of that wine to us, along with, if you wanted to throw in some adjectives like dark cherries frolicking and a clandestine rendezvous with seasoned oak while a choir of blackberries, and a hit of pretentious leather, performed a melodramatic opera in the background, that kind of thing, If we wanted to.

Well, I tasted each of the three glasses. I have some history in wine. I'm certainly not an expert nor was any of us at the table, but some of us were slightly more confident than others that we could tell a good wine. One of us, I'll describe him as guests number 1, guess number 1 said, "I know nothing about wine, but I'll be happy to do this along with you guys." As Dan collected the index cards, he grouped them all together by wine glass and he read off the numbers for wine number 1. Three of us, as it turned out, liked wine number 1 the most [FOREIGN] . Generally getting 8s or 7s as a wine. Wine number 2, one of the six of us liked, and that was guest number 1, who knew the least about wine, and finally wine number 3 had two of us who liked it, although the numbers on that one, we're all over the map.

Interesting to note right now that just among the 6 of us, which is a pretty small sample size, look at that distribution. Each of the three wines had number 1 fans, 1 or more of them sitting around the table. I guess it's about now that I come clean with the names of the wines and the prices. That's what Dan did as well. Wine number 1, which was my favorite, was $35 a bottle, it was from a vineyard named Theorize in Napa Valley. It was my favorite, I gave it an 8. Wine number 2, which I personally gave it seven-and-a-half, it felt just about as good as wine number one. Wine number 2 was a $300 bottle of wine, a Memento Mori, that was on the label. Dan himself would not, he said, pay that much for a wine.

He'd been given it after a tech conference that he'd attended in 2013. It was a 2013 Memento Mori Cabernet Sauvignon for $350. Wine number 3, two of us named it as our favorite. Wine number 3, $6.49 from Safeway, a Beringer Main & Vine. I of course have a few lessons here, but before I hit those three lessons, let me mention a couple of funny outcomes. One of us, I'll call him guest number 2, an extremely admirable, accomplished man in his '60s, somebody that I personally greatly admire was utterly shocked when he was the guy who said his favorite was the $6.49 bottle of wine. He has ordered wine throughout his life, he is a fairly confident gentlemen in terms of his own preferences, in terms of what works in investing business and life and there he was, favoring a $6.49 bottle of wine over the other two, somewhat crestfallen in the middle of an identity crisis as he described it.

He said, wow, I've been overpaying for wine all my life. Then the other funny story, guests number 1, the one of us who knew the least about wine, who really said I don't drink wine, I don't know anything about wine. He was the only one of us six who named in order by cost his preferences. He was the only one who said my favorite was the $300 bottle of wine. His second favorite was the $35 bottle of wine. His least favorite was the $6.49 bottle of wine. I see at least three lessons here. I'll share three with you from mental tip, trick, or life hack number 1, again, Wine Taste Test, which I consider a very good trick.

My first lessen, my primary takeaway, there was very little difference for me and a few of the other more experienced hands around the table between wine number 1 and wine number 2. I felt they tasted almost the same. I gave wine number 1 an eight. I gave wine number 2, a seven-and-a-half. Very little difference in the taste or my experience. The price, shockingly different. I liked, slightly more, the $35 bottle of wine than the $300 bottle of wine. The only difference between them was the 8x difference in price. The extra $265 you could have paid at an ABC Store or an expensive restaurant. That was a huge eye-opener for me. Dear listeners, you may have had this experience before and already learned this lesson, but for me, I learned a great lesson over this last weekend and I'm excited to share what could be cost savings for all of us for the rest of our lives? Because like investing in art, my wonderful discussion with the Carrolls last week where I learned it's not so much the thing itself, it's what people think about that piece of art, or that it's the original piece or the iconic piece from that artist.

It's not the thing itself, but what we story tell around it that adds value. It's true not just of art, it's true of wine as well, lesson number 1, the emphatic one. Lesson number 2, I was pretty good at ferreting out the really cheap wine. In fact, I gave it a 3/10. I was very confident as we reveal the results, that number 3 was the dog wine. The reason that I was confident, here's my closest thing I can give you a pro tip, was the bouquet, the smell of the wine or the lack thereof. All I had to do was bring each of the glasses up to my nose. I don't really sniff very well, but well enough that I can easily tell that one of the three barely had any bouquet at all. By the way, some people would say the same thing when talking of red wines, about the color of the wine.

You can usually tell from a more faded, lighter color, the cheaper ones. That's my pro tip, lesson number 2. Finally, lesson number 3. I think this is a trick worth replicating. Part of the fun of telling you my story from this past weekend was do encourage you to do this at some point for your own guests. If you have some oenophile or some people who think they're connoisseurs or you just want to have a fun time with friends, it doesn't take a lot of effort. It is good to make it a blind taste test for everybody, you included. But much merriment and stories will emerge. You don't have to go out and pay $350 for a bottle of wine, maybe a good $100 bottle of wine versus a $30 bottle of wine versus a $6.49 bottle of wine will give you and your guests a memory and a lesson, maybe for a lifetime.

David Gardner: Onto mental tip trick or life hack. Number 2, this one is also a trick. It's a trick I pull, sometimes when I'm speaking publicly to a room full of investors, especially if I'm talking to newcomers, younger people, people who are not yet that savvy or hip to the stock market. I simply say, raise your hand if you're an investor. I'll ask you to do that right now, dear listener, as long as you're not driving or raising both hands up from your bicycle, raise your hand if you're an investor. Of course the trick question here is, you should have your hand out. Everybody should have their hand up. My hand's up. Your hand should be up because we are all, everyone.

Everyone is an investor. Some of us may have more money than others. Some of us may have more time than others, although all of us have the same number of hours in a day. But every choice you make, choosing this, not that, spending on this, not that, every choice you make is an investment. I think the Motley Fool has done a pretty good job in its first 30 years of trying to democratize this subject to make it clear that investors are not some specialized class. That's not you. That's not me. We're all investors. I think we've done a pretty good job in our first 30 years. I hope we'll do an even better job than that in our next 30 years to ensure that everybody raises their hand when we ask, if you're an investor.

There are studies that show that when you ask little kids to raise their hand and kindergarten, are you an artist? Everybody puts up their hand. If you do it in third grade, by that point, maybe only a third of the class is putting up its hand. If you do it in high school, only a few people will put up their hands. I think that's also an incorrect answer. I think we all have our arts, we're all creatives, we're all the creative class. Even if it's not professional for you, the decision that you make, is it creative act? I would say the same thing in terms of where you allocate your capital or how you're spending that dollar or especially for all of us that next hour right now, everyone is an investor.

Mental tip trick or life hack number 2, it's a trick for some. Raise your hand if you're an investor. Onto mental tip trick or life hack number 3. This one's a life hack and I didn't intend this, but number three actually includes the number 3 because we're talking about an amusing and interesting and I would even say sometimes probably life-saving app entitled what three words. Now I know some of you know this already and you're fans, but most others, whenever I randomly pull people out there, they haven't yet heard of what three words.

This is a British start-up. It's a company well, it's not a start-up anymore. It's now 11 years old, but this company operates a proprietary geo-code system that is designed to identify any location on the surface of Planet Earth with a resolution of 3 meters by 3 meters. In other words, every roughly 10 foot by 10 foot square on planet Earth has been mapped and randomized with a three-word address. For example, the Wikipedia page for what three words points out that the front door of 10 Downing Street in London is identified by slurs, dot this, dot, shark. In case you're wondering, I think you've already figured this out.

There's no real intended meaning to any of these. In fact, the mathematically inclined may be interested to know that there are approximately 57 trillion 10 foot by 10 foot square's around planet Earth if you map the whole thing. These Brits decided, what if we used many different languages in the world? I'll just use English for our purposes on this podcast and use tens of thousands of words from those languages. Those in a randomized trios can generate enough math to cover all 57 trillion squares of planet Earth. Now why am I talking about this? Why does this matter? Well, increasingly, what three words is being used in different contexts where it's really helpful.

For example, let's pretend you're going to the park and you want to meet your friend somewhere in that large park at the picnic table and you're not exactly sure because the park doesn't really have an address. It's way too expensive for an address. Well, it has a what, three words address and you and your friend can simply download the free app and let that friend know that we'll be meeting at Turquoise dot map, dot crazy. There you are having pinpointed the picnic table where you'll be meeting each other later today.

There are even more important uses. For example, if someone's just had a heart attack in a stadium and the ER is on its way to rescue them but they have no idea initially on the stadium grounds where this is or maybe which seat or section, what three words can come to the rescue? I see here that in July of 2022 in Baldwin County, Alabama, dispatchers use the app to pinpoint a Capsized kayaker with responders saying that they were within 50 yards, but they couldn't see him because of the conditions in the water, but they could because of what? Three words.

Now backing away from life and death situations, I have found this greatly amusing on my own. You can look at your own house, your property, and see what random patches around the apartment or your backyard are named. My producer Rick Engdahl and I, we're looking across Fool HQ, 2000 Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia and Rick noticed that one of our patches, this one is probably near one of our conference rooms is golf.clown.supporter. That doesn't necessarily have a lot of meaning, but a lot of Fools looked like clowns to others. We are here to support our members and a lot of our members like golf, so golf.clown.supporter maybe we should rename that conference room. Wait, breaking news. Rick, what else are you finding?

Rick Engdahl: Yes. It turns out that also fool.dirt.stray and I don't know what significance there is there except that it has the word fool in it, so they're on to something.

David Gardner: I guess it was destiny for told from the dawn of time that we would have a what three-words patch with Fool. I'm not sure dirt or stray are great for our brand, but yeah, that's part of our legacy and who knows dear listener where you're sitting or standing right now. One way you can find that you can download the what three words app and have fun with it. By the way, if you're ever asked to give a spontaneous speech or you find yourself short of remarks. In front of the assembled gathering, you could quickly check your phone ahead of time and see one or two of the 10 foot by 10 foot patches around you and build an entire speech around that. What three words as your punchline, that's if you're hard up for a spontaneous speech.

David Gardner: All right, onto number 4 this one is a live hack. It was mentioned earlier in the show. It was mentioned as a tiny point, and it is, it's about 3.4 ounces in size. Here's my life hack for you. Have you ever find yourself a little bit but drag a little bit stress, maybe a little bit late getting to your airplane gate and you're not there yet, your insecurity and oh my gosh. That favorite bottle of something. It might be something that you put in your hair or something that you would drink. Your favorite bottle of something was in your luggage and they need you to toss it out and maybe you've just been given it as a gift.

Well, a lot of us know this, but not everyone I don't think does 3.4 ounces is the official size of liquid bottles you can take on planes, you can take through the TSA security 3.4 ounce bottles. My life hack here is while I knew that I really wasn't smart until about a year ago when i was like, I should go on Amazon and I should just buy a bunch of 3.4 ounce bottles, not randomly hope my shampoo or friends expensive lotion is actually going to make the cut, but very specifically have the maximum size that I can pour anything from, I don't know, from my adopt kit to maybe a gift of Spirit's somebody gave me right into the right size bottle, 3.4 ounce bottles.

They're not very expensive on Amazon, you can get a six pack. Your life might be a little bit easier, mine has been in the years since I finally got wise to the number and the bottle. Onto our only mental tip of this episode, mental tip trick or life hack number 5. This one I'm going to entitle I'll be happy when and it comes as a straight read and excerpt from one of the better books I've read in the last five years and that's positive intelligence by Shirzad Chamine, a previous guests on this podcast multiple times. One of my favorite people in the world of coaching his book, Positive Intelligence. If you've not yet read it, I highly recommend it to you and yours. This 667 word passage, I'm about to present as a dramatic reading and I'm here to promote this book and his site positiveintelligence.com because I see a more positive world created by the more and more of us who become wise to this.

Again, just an excerpt, but before I share, I want to mention he uses the word judge a few times in this and for those not familiar with his work by this term, judge Shirzad is referring to something that's up there in each of our heads. He would describe it as a force that we let sabotage ourselves because he would say we're constantly sitting there judging things, most of all, often for many of us ourselves in a negative way, in a discriminating way, sitting there going that person or thought or that thing about me is not good enough and that's what he means in this passage when we talk about your judge. Let's get started again number 5, a mental tip. I'll be happy when and I quote many CEOs i coach who are in their mid '40s or early '50s, show signs of a midlife crisis of some sort.

Ironically, the deepest crises are experienced by those who have attained many of the goals they had set out to achieve. These goals often have to do with financial achievements and reaching the pinnacle of one's profession. The crisis comes from finally achieving these long sought after goals and realizing that the promised happiness that was supposed to accompany them is nowhere to be found. At the heart of the midlife crisis is the question, can anything really bring me that elusive piece and happiness I've been chasing all these years. The chase has of course been orchestrated by your inner judge and it's big lie, ''You will be happy when'' When you examine this lie more closely, you'll see that there are actually two lies embedded within it. The first lie is that you can't be happy with your current circumstances. Much of our unhappiness stems from this lie alone. This lie places a when condition on your eventual happiness.

It could be when you make your first million, when you get promoted, when you get to run your own company, when you raise the kids and see them off to college when you achieve retirement security. The second lie is that the when is a moving target rather than a promise to be kept when you do make the first million, the judge will allow you at two minute or two day celebration before it is convinced you that you can't be really happy until you also have a second vacation home like your best buddy from college. After all, you're just as smart as she was and it's only fair that you have one too. The when gets renegotiated, the moment it is about to be reached.

Millions of people die every year still waiting to reach the last when. This ever-moving target is a mirage and a key technique the judge uses to ensure your everlasting on happiness. The fascinating thing is that each when is selected based not on objective criteria, but on relative comparisons that are completely arbitrary. I was a first-hand witness to the absurdity of this phenomenon while living in San Francisco in the late '90s, at the epicenter of the dot-com craze, I watched highly educated and very successful people lose perspective completely and allow their judges to renegotiate their when targets to absurd levels. Peter an entrepreneur who had long ago declared $10 million to be the target for as happy retirement, rejected a $125 million offer for his company. His rationale, his college buddy had sold his for 330 million and was now traveling with his own personal jet.

After running some numbers, Peter had decided that the lifestyle he could now envision, including a personal jet and vacation homes on multiple continents required a target higher than 125 million and he couldn't be happy with that offer. As it turned out, within a year, he witnessed the complete collapse of his company's valuation and eventual bankruptcy. His when was then renegotiated by his judge. He could now be happy when he came out of debt, got to $10 million in net worth and regain some respect ability in his field.

The when for peace and happiness is actually now, regardless of the circumstances of your work or personal life, it's not about the circumstances. It's not about the when. It's about who is whispering or screaming in your ear while interpreting the circumstances for you. Think about each when you've declared for yourself in the past and actually reached. How long did your happiness last before you or your judge renegotiated a new one? In conclusion, what when are you chasing right now as a condition of your own happiness and peace? Would you be willing to reconsider and give up that when believing instead that you can have great piece and happiness in your work and life right now?

David Gardner: Well, thank you again to a friend of the Fool, Shirzad Chamine, a fellow Rule Breaker through and through. I don't think that passage needs any editorializing from me. I think it speaks for itself and I hope it's helpful for you, and/or those, you know. Thanks, Shirzad. As we transition to our last two in this case to number 6, I can't help but be reminded of that old proverb which fits very well into that last passage. That thing that you're thinking about putting off till tomorrow, that thing that is going to happen tomorrow, the old proverb goes, tomorrow never comes. Well, mental tip trick or life hack, number 6, this one's a life hack. I said at the top of the show what's on our wrist, minding its own business too much? And I would say, at least in my case, it's my Apple Watch.

Now a lot of us have smartwatches, watches we can talk to, the Apple Watch is just one example, but one thing that's become clear to me as I observed my own habits and those of others I'm around who have smartwatches themselves is we could be using them to remind us of things a lot more frequently. One of the best features of the Apple Watch, and I'm sure many of the others is, it knows where you are. For example, if you're driving into your driveway pulling up at home, it knows that. You can have told it earlier in the day when I get home, dot, dot, dot remind me of this or that thing, dot, dot, dot. That's just a geo-located and almost what three words like experience if you will. But of course, many of us think about times like remind me at 04:30 PM, to let the dog out.

Reminds me of that old song, who let the dog out? You don't want your significant other coming back saying, didn't you let the dog out? I think statistics and medicine teach us that over the course of our lives, our memories get a little worse as we go, therefore, this life hack, which may not seem that relevant to you in your mid-late 30s might feel more relevant to you in your mid-late 50s, especially your mid-late 70s. But technology really can be our friend here. I challenge you in the week ahead, at least two different times, to specifically make use of that smartwatch on your wrist that you're probably not using as effectively as you could, by asking it to remind you of certain important moments coming up in your week ahead. By the way, I'm not the guy who just discovered my Apple Watch.

I think I've had one on my wrist since the first series came out and I've gotten a few upgrades ever since but I have to admit guilty as charged, I really don't make effective enough use of this technology. That's at least one way to use it a little bit better. Of course, I'm always very open to better ways to use chatGPT as well. I love to figure out the best uses I can make of technology to improve my life. That was a life hack and that was number 6. Onto mental tip trick or life hack number 7. I'm going to call this one a trick because it has some shenanigans involved. But the truth is the greatest use I've seen made of this trick is corporate off-sites.

Now, when I did the previous episode in the series last July, I told you about something we've done at The Motley Fool before. We don't do it every year, it would get boring, it wouldn't be a surprise if you did it every year, but having employees at the all-hands offsite spend a few quiet moments. Let's say give them 15-30 minutes, hand them a nice pen and a sheet of paper and an envelope, and as I talked about this last July, you may remember they're writing a letter to themselves.

Dear me, if you will, about their intentions in the year ahead, their hopes, their fears, whatever you'd like to write to your future self, and then fold it up, seal it in the envelope, and hand it in. We took them all in, put them in a vault, and one year later at the following year's corporate offsite, we surprised people, people with bad memories like me who had forgotten we'd done that a year ago. We surprised them with what they were saying to themselves one year before. That is the Dear Me, mental tip trick or life hack.

But as I reflected on that one, since doing last year's podcasts, I remembered another trick, I guess I'll say, that we've played at our corporate offsite, we call it Foolapalooza. We had a fantastic one in December, the first one really since before COVID, something dearly appreciated, I think will be memorable for many of us who were there for many years at the Motley Fool's, Foolapalooza, this past December. But years before that, pre-COVID, we did what I'll call mental tip trick or life hack number 7, the snowball fight of goodness.

Somewhat similar to the Dear Me tactic, you hand out a sheet of paper and a pen or pencil to every one of your employees and you ask them in the 10 minutes or so, you're going to give them to think about somebody else in the room, somebody else on their team, or maybe somebody who's not on their team. Somebody they see every day, let's say as they come into the office or a casual acquaintance, somebody that they appreciate for some reason. They write just a few lines, they name that person, and then they say what they appreciate. They describe the circumstance, 10 minutes or less. That part's pretty easy.

Most people get at what they're not expecting is the next instruction. The next instruction is to take whatever you've just written and ball it up. Like you're going to throw it away, crush it in your hands, turn it into what we can call for our purposes here, a snowball, and over the next two minutes, we're all going to have silly fun in a massive corporate snowball fight, the snowball fight of goodness. Your in-house rival, that person who beats you at the card game that you guys sometimes play at lunch, whoever it is, get up in their face throughout your snowball at them.

Now that of course, is the one that you wrote up. That's the one you balled up and threw but once it's gone, you don't know where it is. Pick up three more anywhere around you, throw those too. Dunk on somebody, have fun, shenanigans ensue over the next two minutes. Then the final step of the snowball fight of goodness trick is you ask each employee simply to pick up one snowball anywhere near them, here's an open mic. Just open backup that snowball on your hand, take a look. If it seems like something you'd like to share if it feels appropriate, here's an open mic, name the person, and read the sheet of paper. Now there's only going to be a little bit of time for that. This is, after all, a corporate offsite.

You're probably somewhat serious-minded, there might be a strategic plan you're working on, but all of those snowballs eventually can be and should be delivered to the person who is the recipient of the appreciation of the other person. While it's nice to read some of the best snowballs and some fun can ensue there as well, the real gift is handing over that note of appreciation, maybe more than one note to whichever employees have inspired them. I'll say the one I got some years ago. Yeah, I still have it right here in my office. It hangs in a little place on my wall.

So there you go. That's how we're closing it out for this episode of mental tips, tricks, and life hacks. Volume 9 with number 7, the snowball fight of goodness. Well, thanks for joining in with me this week. Let's really quickly summarize all seven mental tips, tricks, and life hacks. Number 1, a wine taste test, something you can try out with friends and family. Number 2, raise your hand if you're an investor. Number 3, what three words? Number 4, 3.4 ounces, bottles. Number 5, I'll be happy when. Number 6, use your smartwatch, be smarter, and number 7, duck because I'm aiming at you, the snowball fight of goodness. Fool on.