The difference between
Making art and doing work:
Joy in the process.

The late, great Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” show taught me an important lesson. One of Bourdain’s favorite cuisines was street food. Even when he was in a city with legendary fine dining and Michelin-star-winning restaurants, he would always pay a visit to local street food vendors.

He sampled offerings from carts and stalls around the world, each offering something unique, delicious, and steeped in local history. He loved how people with limited resources would gather whatever ingredients they had at their disposal to make something delicious.

Watching this every week, I learned that transforming the drudgery of life into joy is part of the human condition. It’s a process that happens regardless of culture, region, language, or wealth.

When people encounter a requirement – like eating – we could just find the nearest source of nutrients and ingest it. But that’s not what happens.

People want food to be delicious, and we will search desperately for ways to make it so. Why else would there ever have been wars over salt, pepper, and other spices?

The lesson is that over and over, all over the world and throughout history, people take something necessary and make it joyful.

Many couples I work with – and my own marriage falls into this category – have one spouse who handles financial management and monitoring, and another who would rather eat a plate of mossy rocks than deal with money. It’s not hard to understand why.

As I write this, Quarter 1 of 2023 just ended. Our firm is now preparing review packets containing a financial blueprint of a family’s accounts and performance reports for the accounts and instruments we are managing.

We are always working to make this information dump as engaging as possible. But it’s impossible to avoid sharing several pages containing nothing but rows and columns of numbers and ticker symbols. This information is mission critical for evaluating the results of your financial decisions, and whether those helping you make those decisions are doing effective work. The problem is these reports are about as much fun for most people as the above-mentioned mossy rock meal.

If you are making and saving money, knowing what that money is doing and how those accounts work is essential. For most people it may take years of consistently good habits to build wealth. Understanding what those habits are, and how to manage them as they change over time, is essential for long term financial success.

If cooking can transcend the necessity of eating and turn it into an art form, is there a corresponding mechanism that can transform the process of working with money into something artful?

The problem with answering this question is that there isn’t a physical sense that corresponds to our financial successes and failures. Unlike eating, there are no smells or flavors or textures that can either repulse or delight us. Graphs and charts can help appeal to our visual senses, but what do those colors and shapes mean for you personally? How do you know if you are on track to achieve what you’re trying to achieve?

The biggest challenge of all is the time required before you know whether something is working or not. Unlike cooking a meal, where at most you might need to wait a few hours before you know whether or not your recipe is a hit or a dud, with money you might have to wait years before you know if a decision is a mistake or not.

In the search for financial recipes that appeal to your unique taste, patience is arguably the most important ingredient. Patience for yourself as you learn how to monitor accounts and evaluate performance, patience for professionals you hire to learn what strategies align with your values, patience for the economy to recover from contractions, patience for time to work its magic.

Cooking is really a process of devoting engaged attention to the food you have to eat to survive. Over time, the more attention a person pays to their food, the more personal, delicious, and artful it may become.

This same process can be applied to anything, money included. Spend a small amount of time devoting engaged attention to your finances and you will learn more about what you value, what enhances your happiness, and what pushes it farther away. Repeat the process over years and what seemed at first like slogging drudgery may transform into something you love.

The most important part of this process? Starting.