1583 | Ambition + Meaning

In this episode, Carl continues exploring what happens when fierce ambition meets a deep sense of meaning. He’s discovering that getting clearer about what matters isn’t making him less ambitious. It’s making him more ambitious about fewer things. Through his daily index card experiment, Carl reflects on how directing our time, energy, money, and attention toward things we genuinely care about can change the way ambition feels. What if the goal isn’t to tame our ambition, but to give it something worthy of our effort?Want more from Carl? Get the shortest, most impactful weekly email on the web! Sign up for the Weekly Letter from Certified Financial Planner™ and New York Times columnist Carl Richards here: https://behaviorgap.com/ 

In this episode, Carl continues exploring a question that’s challenging a belief he’s held for much of his life: What if you didn’t have to choose between doing extraordinary work and living an extraordinarily meaningful life? He examines the stories we tell ourselves about ambition, sacrifice, and success, and why we spend so much energy optimizing our lives without asking what we’re optimizing for. What might become possible if our ambition and our sense of meaning were pointing in the same direction?Want more from Carl? Get the shortest, most impactful weekly email on the web! Sign up for the Weekly Letter from Certified Financial Planner™ and New York Times columnist Carl Richards here: https://behaviorgap.com/ 

In this short episode, Carl shares a question that’s been challenging one of his long-held assumptions about success and meaning. What if the trade-offs we’ve accepted between doing extraordinary work and living a meaningful life aren’t quite as inevitable as we think? It’s a question Carl is still wrestling with, and one worth sitting with for a while.Want more from Carl? Get the shortest, most impactful weekly email on the web! Sign up for the Weekly Letter from Certified Financial Planner™ and New York Times columnist Carl Richards here: https://behaviorgap.com/ 

In this episode, Carl shares another update on his daily index card experiment and a surprising lesson about following through. After choosing one meaningful action for the day, he’s discovering the value of taking the decision out of his hands and simply doing what he wrote down. Through a couple of small moments of resistance, Carl explores the difference between making a plan and following one, and how learning to trust a simple system might lead to remarkable progress over time.Want more from Carl? Get the shortest, most impactful weekly email on the web! Sign up for the Weekly Letter from Certified Financial Planner™ and New York Times columnist Carl Richards here: https://behaviorgap.com/ 

In this episode, Carl shares the story of his friend Brad, who kept showing up for early morning bike rides in Las Vegas even when he couldn’t keep up with the group. Over time, something remarkable happened, so gradually that Brad barely noticed it himself. Carl reflects on the incredible compounding power of small, boring things done consistently, and why the things we choose to practice today might make us entirely different people a year, five years, or ten years from now.Want more from Carl? Get the shortest, most impactful weekly email on the web! Sign up for the Weekly Letter from Certified Financial Planner™ and New York Times columnist Carl Richards here: https://behaviorgap.com/ 

In this episode, Carl explores a question that may be more important to financial planning than we realize: How do you feel about money? Beyond the spreadsheets, investments, and technical advice, much of the work involves helping people change how they feel about their financial lives. Carl reflects on how surprisingly difficult it can be to recognize and describe our own emotions, and why learning to notice what we’re feeling may be an essential part of the craft of advice.Want more from Carl? Get the shortest, most impactful weekly email on the web! Sign up for the Weekly Letter from Certified Financial Planner™ and New York Times columnist Carl Richards here: https://behaviorgap.com/ 

In this episode, Carl shares a conversation that left him wondering whether he’s spent much of his career searching for a mythical “big switch” that would suddenly make everything take off. From marketing strategies to social media and the endless pursuit of the next big thing, he explores how easy it is to get caught up in the promise of a shortcut. Carl reflects on what might happen if we stopped looking for the magic switch and invested our energy in work that compounds slowly over time.Want more from Carl? Get the shortest, most impactful weekly email on the web! Sign up for the Weekly Letter from Certified Financial Planner™ and New York Times columnist Carl Richards here: https://behaviorgap.com/