Speak Up or Shut Up? The 'So What?' Principle to the Rescue!

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Communications Management  

A long-time friend (who I’ll call “Stu”) loves talking about finances. Stu is very active in the stock market and spends hours researching exchange traded funds. He is also very big on maximizing rewards points and signing bonuses with credit cards. Stu is not at all in debt (that I know of); he is just really big on accumulating wealth.

Admittedly, I share some of Stu’s zeal. I too am active in the stock market and use credit cards for specific purposes to maximize cash-back rewards. Aside from saving money, it’s a fun game to see the great deals I can get.

Where Stu and I differ, though, is in what we are willing to sacrifice for our wealth accumulation journey. I enjoy comfort and convenience, and value my personal time and generally will not sacrifice much in those areas to save a dollar. I believe in sound fiscal management, but not at the expense of comfort, convenience, or impacts to my time.

Stu, on the other hand, is much more willing to sacrifice comfort, convenience, or personal time if it means more money in his pocket. It’s needled at me for years, particularly when Stu tries to project his values about finances on others and criticize those who are less willing to make the sacrifices he makes.

In a recent discussion, I confronted him on his views on finances. Needless to say, the discussion didn’t go …

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