Five years after launching this blog, and two years after signing this book deal, I’m stoked for you to finally read Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties. Buy your copy below, and make sure to leave a review!
A story from last summer:
While briefly living in the CitizenM Bowery Hotel, I lost approximately 15 pounds due to stress in the ~2 weeks between June 25th and July 8th.
Some context: I moved to San Francisco in January 2025 for a new job, and, at the time, one of my goals while in San Francisco was to write the first draft of Young Money before returning to New York for the summer.
My schedule for the first five months of 2025 was simple: work (and try to figure out how to ‘do’ venture capital) during the week, then write from 6 PM on Friday until 10 PM on Sunday, then rinse and repeat. I, surprisingly, stuck with this schedule pretty consistently, and I was confident that I would finish draft one by mid-June, with a couple of weeks to spare.
Finishing draft one by mid-June would have been ideal. After spending the first half of the year on the other side of the country from most of my friends and family, I was looking forward to a few weeks in my New York apartment before my lease ended (I had subleased my room to a friend for four months when I moved to San Francisco), then a trip to Ibiza and Mallorca with my best friends, then a month working from an Airbnb in East Hampton with five friends before flying back to California in August.
Then I experienced a canon event familiar to all authors: On May 28th, I stared at my manuscript in disgust and thought, “This writing sucks.”
When you’ve published something like 1,000,000 words via blog posts, covering everything from philosophical musings on the role that entropy plays as life’s antagonist to debaucherous antics from my time at The Rising Cock Hostel (seriously, this place is awesome) on the southern coast of Portugal, writing a 60,000 word book doesn’t seem all that intimidating. But the complexity of a book, I quickly realized, scales exponentially, not linearly, with length.
After five months of cranking away on this thing, I hated the product, and I had less than one month to rectify that problem.
I convinced myself that I could work overtime in the first two weeks of June until my revisions yielded a satisfactory product, but after 12 days of waking up at 6 and going to sleep at midnight to aggressively write and rewrite, I still hated it, and I realized I was going to have to restructure something like 85% of the book to get it where I wanted it over the next few weeks.
“But how are you going to revise that from Spain with your friends?” I asked myself. The answer, of course, was that I wasn’t. So I texted my friends and said, “Hey, so I’m out on the trip.” I had already taken the time off work, so I knew I would have ~12 uninterrupted days to do nothing but write, which was just what I needed. A few other logistical nightmares at play in mid-June:
My lease was ending in four days, meaning that I was going to be homeless during a window in which I had planned to be out of the country.
At the end of those 12 uninterrupted days, I had to fly to Georgia to pick up a vehicle to drive back up to New York, at which point I would have to go back to work, meaning that I couldn’t extend my self-induced writing retreat longer than 12 days.
I was mid-fallout with a girl I’d been seeing, which, as we all know, feels like emotional seppuku.
With this as a backdrop, I tossed all of my clothes in a few suitcases, booked a room at the CitizenM with a nice view of the NYC skyline, and spent 22 out of 24 hours (excluding meals in the restaurant downstairs and the occasional trip to the Equinox across the street) in that hotel room, either sleeping or writing, with my phone locked away under the bed.
Writing non-stop, with minimal distractions, for 10+ days in a row proved to be an insane experience.
Going into that stint, my manuscript was approximately 49,000 words. According to Microsoft Word, I wrote 48,735 words in ~12 days, or 4,061.25 words per day, generating a ~60,000 word manuscript. I effectively wrote as much in those 12 days as I had in the prior five months.
And I was finally happy with it. So I turned in the manuscript. (I then revised it 4 more times that fall, to create the version that you can read today, but no need to take you through another three months of my writing journey. Suffice to say: this version is the one you want to read)
And when I flew back home to see my family for a few days after my hotel stay, I weighed myself in the guest bathroom and noticed that I’d lost 15 pounds. Which was fine, I probably needed to cut a few pounds before the beach.
Anyway, I say all of that to say you have no idea how stoked I am that it’s finally PUBLICATION DAY, and I want you to buy your copy of Young Money right now:
So, yeah, Young Money is live. There are about 61,000 of you on my mailing list, and my hope is that each of you buys a copy (or 2, or 3) so you can opine on the brainchild of my hotel fever dream.
Why should you read Young Money?
Young Money is a book on opportunity costs. Specifically, the opportunity costs that you experience in those transitional years between “youth” and “adulthood.” If you, like younger me, have found yourself second-guessing how you’re spending your time, running in loops overthinking “money,” “career paths,” “status,” and the ever-quickly-depreciation of your youth, this is for you.
In the last chapter of his memoir, Norm Macdonald warned us that “The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you’re not careful it’s too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth.”
Norm is right, but since this book is coming out while I’m in the last year of my 20s, my hope is that young people will listen to me.
Your twenties should be an incredibly fun, exciting, adventure-filled decade of life. But they’re also filled with stress. Anxiety. Uncertainty. You have no money or skills, the guardrails of higher education are gone, and you are, for the first time, wholly responsible for the outcomes of “your life.”
You’re supposed to be planting the seeds that you want to compound for decades with a romantic partner and career. But memories compound, too, and what about the memories that you only have a few short years to create before the opportunity disappears? Fun nights out with friends? Taking an impromptu job opportunity across the world? Starting a business on a whim? Learning a new language, or taking up a new sport? With time comes complexity. Responsibility. Commitment. Risk.
It’s easy to get so preoccupied with chasing a particular thing, or, worse, reeling in indecisiveness worrying about chasing the wrong particular thing, that your youth goes by before you blink, and so many of the things that you wanted to do once you had a bit more money, stability, or certainty, are no longer available or enjoyable.
Anxiety and uncertainty are the biggest obstacles facing young folks today, and it’s my hope that this book can help a few of them navigate this highly-fun-but-equally-uncertain phase of life.
(Of course, this book isn’t just for the younger folks in the room. While many of the stories in Young Money are reflections from my 20s, opportunity costs and the “stage-specificity of life” tend to be rather timeless topics).
So, anyway, if you’ve followed along for a while, or if you’re new here but you liked this piece, I think you’ll like this book, and I’d love nothing more than if you ordered your copy here:
- Jack
And make sure you leave an Amazon review :)
Congrats Jack!!! So well deserved and can't wait to read.
Crushed the book this weekend. As a biological 35 year old who feels like he's 28, I found many of your insights very relevant. Helped me reflect on my last 15 years. Thank you for all the hard work you put into writing it!