Another short and sweet intro--I had planned to write a little update on some things I've been working on, like the AlignedLife Community, which is going to be pushing the Founding Member sign-up to January instead of next month. Ang and I spent too much time living this summer and not enough time setting up Circle, so instead of rushing the opening, we decided to start in the new year. More to come, like dates for a few information sessions we're going to hold and insight into what is planned for the first year.

I'll share more next week, as I'm currently in Baltimore waiting for my connecting flight back home after flying to Huntington Beach for the day yesterday.

I will share this picture I snapped of the morning sky--as nice as the picture is, the real thing was so much more beautiful.

Let's get to the Notes...

📝 this week's Daily Notes

9.08.26 #1297 live your life​

9.09.26 #1298 the labels we receive​

9.11.26 #1299 what do your habits say?​

9.12.26 #1300 directionally correct​

9.13.26 #1301 passion, talent, and purpose can coexist​

🦅 The Omens

​J. Cole Showing What I Love Most About Hip-Hop "There are times when I’d choose songs with less depth and complexity, but if you ask me who my favorite artists are and why I consider them to be great, lyrics will always be at the top of my list."

🎙️Aligned Life Podcast: Rethinking Money, Time, and What Your Twenties Are For with Jack Raines

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Listen

​Apple Podcasts​

​Spotify​

In this episode of AlignedLife, I sit down with Jack Raines — venture capitalist, Substack writer, and author of the new book Young Money — to talk about what money actually means once you stop treating it as a scoreboard.

Jack grew up around entrepreneurial parents and grandparents, which shaped his view of money as fungible rather than scarce. He shares the story of the trip his grandmother took him on to Tanzania at age 11, and the lesson she passed down that money is only worth what you eventually spend it on. We get into why he treated his early twenties as a season for building experience and social capital rather than chasing a paycheck — including the year he spent backpacking Europe and Latin America before business school — and why he thinks time, not money, is the one truly finite currency we have.

We also dig into the tension between planning for the future and staying present, why he pushes back on the advice to obsess over savings rate in your twenties, and how intuition — backed by a disciplined information diet — has guided his biggest decisions, from career pivots to where he lives to how he dates. Toward the end, Jack shares a rule of thumb about planning your asset location for the version of you at 40, not 65, plus a half-joking pitch for a "degenerate account" every young investor secretly needs.

If you're trying to figure out how money and time actually fit together at different stages of life, this conversation is for you.

Jack's book, Young Money, is out now, and his newsletter of the same name lives at youngmoney.co on Substack. Find him on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram — search his name and look for the cowboy hat.

🔗 Young Money (the book): www.amazon.com/Young-Money-Wealth-Purpose-Twenties/dp/B0FZS5PL15

📩 Jack's newsletter: www.youngmoney.co

📹 Vlog: Breaking In V.O.L.T. with Franqlin Gatson

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I came into this year wanting to do more vlogs, and while I've shot a couple, none were good enough to put out--until this week.

I've known Franqlin since 2017/2018 when a mutual friend connected us. Since then, he's interned with me, been my trainer on and off (he's my full-time trainer now), and been a friend. We've talked many times about him opening his own gym, and the time was finally right for him to go out on his own and bet on his Self.

So I brought a couple of cameras to record one of the first workouts in his new space and talk about the gym, his vision, and whatever else came up during our workout. I plan on doing more exercise vlogs and would even love to host people at V.O.L.T. for convos while we work out.

I'm really happy with how this turned out--recorded and edited in the same day!

See you next week (or tomorrow) and keep pursuing,

JC