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Today I installed the crossbars on the roof of our CR-V:

This is the first step in getting our kayaks for Flathead Lake. Now I’m off to buy some mounts, and I’m working with a friend to buy the actual yaks from a friend. Hopefully it’ll all come together in the next couple of weeks, so we can use them on the water when we travel up there in mid-July!

A while ago I read a thought-provoking article about how wealth isn’t money. Last night I stumbled across a very different article by Naval Ravikant that echoed that sentiment but added to it in ways I found fascinating.

Wealth is the thing that you want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory that’s cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that’s running at night, serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that’s being reinvested into other assets, and into other businesses… The reason you want wealth is because it buys you your freedom. So you don’t have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck. So you don’t have to wake up at 7am and rush to work and sit in traffic. The purpose of wealth is freedom. It’s nothing more than that. It’s not to buy fur coats, or drive Ferraris, or sail yachts, or jet around the world in your Gulfstream. That stuff gets really boring and really stupid, really fast. It’s really so that you are your own sovereign individual.

Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits. It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time. If I do my job right, if I create value for society, society says, “Oh, thank you. We owe you something in the future for the work that you did in the past. Here’s a little IOU. Let’s call that money.”

That definition of wealth, combined with the definition of money, resonates with me. I also like how he goes on to say:

Wealth is not a zero-sum game.  Everybody in the world can have a house. Because you have a house doesn’t take away from my ability to have a house. If anything, the more houses that are built, the easier it becomes to build houses, the more we know about building houses, and the more people that can have houses. Wealth is a very positive sum game. We create things together.

And finally, he compares wealth with status:

Status, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. It’s a very old game. We’ve been playing it since monkey tribes. It’s hierarchical. Who’s number one? Who’s number two? Who’s number three? And for number three to move to number two, number two has to move out of that slot. So, status is a zero-sum game.

So many people play the status game. “I’m better than you because…” or “I’m better than that entire group because…” And often status is associated (unfairly) with money. As humans it seems like we need a ruler to measure others with, and an easy ruler is how much money everyone has. That’s probably why it’s often a faux pas to talk about salaries or bank account balances or investments in more than broad terms. Any time we pull out that ruler, we either find ourselves lacking (leading to jealousy) or superior (leading to pride). We’re never going to find someone who’s in exactly the same place as us, measured by any social ruler, so that measuring isn’t really constructive.

It’s sad to watch so many so-called “leaders” in the world pull out their rulers, or tell us to pull out ours… it just leads to Bad Things. Instead, let’s play the game of wealth and growth and sharing. Let’s take that positive-sum game and turn it into a mechanism to lift everyone. We can all succeed together.

Yesterday, Zaque and some co-workers were cleaning bathrooms and had to wear latex gloves. One of them asked, “I wonder if you could stretch this over your head”, and Zaque accepted the challenge.

Yep, that’s my son.

This is my friend Mitch.

He retired a little over two years ago, and his son Sean took this picture as he came out of his home office. He was so happy to retire from a job that had become a slog. He’s told me many times (as all retired people seem to do) that he’s thoroughly enjoying his time without a full-time job.

Today it was my turn.

Yep, that’s my home office behind me, and I’m officially retired today. Unlike Mitch, I absolutely loved my job, the guys I worked with, and my clients. But it’s time to move on to the next adventure.

I’ll miss these yahoos on the Zing team:

But I know they’re going to do great, and the company will continue to grow and flourish. As for me, I plan to start my retirement with a bunch of summer trips, tons of ultimate, and then my move to Montana. Here we go!

The untimely demise of our van has made us think about buying a new car to replace it. We need something with all-wheel drive (for the Montana winters), some towing capacity (for the jet skis), and cargo/seating space (for our kids who aren’t really kids any more). After shopping around and test-driving several different vehicles, we settled on a Honda CR-V. We are, after all, a Honda family with our Odyssey, Accord, and Civic.

After a marathon afternoon of negotiating for a used one and failing (they didn’t want to meet our price), we opted for a new one. Laralee chose “lava red” as the color, and it’s pretty sharp.

We’re heading up to Breckenridge for a four-day weekend, and I figure we’ll spend a good portion of the drive figuring out all the controls and phone integrations and music settings and whatnot. Pretty cool stuff!

Zaque officially finished high school yesterday as he graduated from Skyline. We had beautiful weather, and his class was smaller than Alex’s or Kyra’s, so the ceremony went a little more quickly.

Here he is, walking onto the sports field:

And getting his diploma:

Afterward he posed with Grandma and Grandpa, Kyra, and of course Mom and Dad:

Congratulations to the youngest of the Schroeder Clan! Now it’s on to the next adventure…

Last night was the Longmont ultimate league tournament, and the end of many years running that league. Despite the fact that it’s the end of May, we’d had snow earlier in the week and it rained the entire day before. The forecast called for rain the day of the tournament as well, and I fully expected that we wouldn’t play because the city would close the fields. But the weather held, and we took the field in a 40-degree chill.

My team beat our first opponent handily, and started off strong in the second game, but then sort of imploded and lost the semi-finals. That team went on to take a dramatic victory in the championship game. Several of the players, including the captain, had never won a GRU league before, so it was cool to see them finally make it happen. One of them told me she’s been playing in GRU for 18 years and never won, so I was happy for all of them.

Despite the unseasonably cold weather, it was a fun evening. During a brief bout of rain, as the sun was setting over the mountains, we were treated to an amazing double rainbow. The pictures definitely don’t do it justice.

Since I’ll be gone in the fall, I won’t get to play in Longmont league again. I was touched when, just before the championship game, a big group of people gathered around me to present me with some t-shirts they’d all autographed. A few of my friends had taken the shirts around to all the teams that night, asking people to sign them. Even though I’ll play in the summer league, it’s sad to leave behind Longmont league. This one has been dear to my heart for a long time, and I love the spirit in the league and the camaraderie of the hundred or so people who play in it.

It’s been a few ultimate seasons since I won a championship, so it was fun to be crowned in last night’s indoor league.

Note the spiffy fanny packs… those were the prizes for the winners. Yeah. I promptly gave mine away to a six-year-old girl (the daughter of Sam, who’s on the far left in blue). And no, the score wasn’t really 115-9; the scoreboard was wonky all night.

To be fair, this wasn’t a traditional league. We used a “hat” format, where teams were randomly shuffled every week. One of my co-league-coordinators wrote a simulated annealing program (I don’t know what that means, but it sounds cool) which generated rosters based on skill level, height, weight, gender, and a few other factors. The idea was to create new teams that were relatively balanced, and it worked pretty well. Everyone scored points based on how their teams did in a given week, and at the end of the season the top players were considered the champions. In fact, I suspect it was pretty much random chance, though, rather than any particular skill on the part of the players.

All in all, it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed playing on teams with almost everyone in the league.