Don't be the Bryan Johnson of money.

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” - Goodhart's Law

I used to have a spreadsheet to track my net worth. It was crude, just a list of accounts and values that I entered by hand. I didn’t use the number for anything except track progress toward my goal.

The goal was a large amount of money. That, I figured, was success. It seemed ambitious but, frankly, the number didn’t mean anything. It disappeared from my mind as soon as I closed the spreadsheet. Its most important quality, its only important quality was that it could be measured.

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“In our society, money is like health,” someone told me over dinner last week. When you have it, you don’t think about it much. But when you don’t, it’s hard to focus on anything else.

But wait: here is a counterexample: Bryan Johnson who turned his life into an anti-aging experiment.

At first, Johnson aged like the rest of us. Then he decided not to die. Now he tracks lots of biomarkers and despite being in pretty much perfect health, he is completely preoccupied with it.

There is another man working to “push the man upstairs back” as far as possible — 92-year-old former market wizard Ed Thorp (my profile: Survival of the Fittest Mind). Compared to Johnson, what Thorp does is … boring. He uses a trader’s framework: control downside, capture upside, no crazy experiments, limit complexity. Exercise, regular checkups, basic supplements, some drugs, thinking through risks independently. (He recommends Outlive by Peter Attia).

Choose your fighter?!