This week, I had the great joy of celebrating my birthday in France with great friends and again in NYC with more great friends. It's these moments, between all the anxiety and chaos of the mind in everyday life, that I will cherish and think about forever.

I observe many relationships very closely because I think choosing who you spend most of your time with in life is the most important decision you'll ever make. From my observations, the best predictors of success in relationships is the compatibility between desired rate of change. If one person seeks familiarity and comfort while the other is on the pursuit for more, it’ll be a mismatch. The comfort person might feel like the other doesn’t want to spend time with them, and the ambitious person feels like they can’t share new things.

The ability to preserve things has negative and positive externalities. Refrigerators gave us the ability to preserve food. There is now less waste, but there is more consumption. Currencies give us the ability to preserve wealth. Now less value creation is lost, but there is more greed. Much like eating junk food, there is spending junk money, leaving you hungry for more money. Odd to think that things that are so useful and helpful have played a role in making humans fatter and greedier.

The true gift of presents isn't the item, but the intentionality of the giver. This is evident in children's awful drawings that parents care so much about and the special socks got me for my birthday because, in passing, I mentioned a specific brand I thought was cool.