Pet Perks, Vol. 3: Seven Little Things That Make Everything Better

This time around, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner leaves investing and business behind for seven small pleasures and practices drawn entirely from life.

What can a surprisingly good armchair teach us about spending? How might getting "upstream" today make tomorrow better? Seven reminders to notice, appreciate, and occasionally act on the good things hiding in plain sight--ending with one worth saying while we still can.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on Oct. 7, 2026.

David Gardner: A baby smiles. You sink into a surprisingly great armchair. You discover a restaurant you'd never heard of, step outside into the first crisp morning of autumn, or say something to somebody you love that you've thought for years and simply never said. None of these is a big thing, and that, my fellow Fools, is exactly the point. Pet perks are the little things that make everything better. Ordinary pleasures hiding in plain sight, made more valuable simply by noticing them. This week, seven of them, all drawn from life. Some playful, some practical, and by the end, one I hope might even prompt you to pick up the phone. Pet Perks, Volume 3, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing, and happy October to all. I was looking over the last few weeks of this podcast. We've been very investment-centric. Before last week's mailbag, we did a market cap game show, and before that, we did ChatGPT trying to stump me with investing questions, and before that, 10 years later, five low-risk stocks for the next year. So stock, stock, stock. This time, this week, I'm going to make it about life. This week, we return to an episodic series that owes its existence to my friend and fellow Fool, Ben Adams. Ben took one of this podcast's longest-running series, and that would be Pet Peeves, and he turned it on its head. How about Pet Perks? Ben asked the little things that make everything better. Optimism is contagious, and yes, Pet Perks was born. In fact, Ben himself gave us a wonderful one just this past August when I visited with him in the UK at Stratford-upon-Avon. He sent in his audio mailbag talking about the pleasure, the Pet Perk, of taking your kids to school in the morning. The scramble to get everybody dressed, fed, packed up, out the door, and there on time. Well, it can feel sometimes just like another logistical hassle from one day to the next, until you recognize that there will be a last one of those days, and suddenly something ordinary looks a lot more like a privilege, and that, to me, is the spirit of this series. A Pet Perk doesn't need to be profound. Noticing it is often what makes it profound.

Our first two volumes wandered through investing, business, and life. This time, I'm going to stay entirely with life. Seven little things, some playful, some practical, a couple perhaps more meaningful, all hiding, more or less, in plain sight. Before we get started, two bookkeeping items. The first is if you feel like, "Gee, David only speaks once a week on this podcast. I can't get enough of that. I need more," well, I was on the Investing Unscripted podcast a couple of weeks ago with my friends Jason and Jeff. Investing Unscripted, which is a highly capital F Foolish look at the markets, and I just want to give them a plug. I want to thank Jason and Jeff for inviting me onto their podcast. In fact, it was Number 222. I see it was September 9th, so several weeks ago. It was entitled David Gardner: Rule Breakers, AI, and the Next Great Stocks. If you haven't had a chance to listen either to that particular episode or Investing Unscripted at all, let me put in a good plug for two fellow Fools and their Foolish weekly podcast, Investing Unscripted. I'd also like to shout out someone else who's been on this podcast before, and that would be my friend Sam Horn, the author of Talking on Eggshells. I had Sam on as an author in August a year ago, summer 2025. Well, Sam just came out with her next book. It's called The Force for Good Project. It comes out in hardback in November, but you can actually get it now, right now, on Kindle or in audiobook. I'm really happy to say Sam is looking for some bright lights around the country or the world, people who are forces, in her terms, forces for good, doing something positive. I'm happy to say that this podcast and yours truly got called out in The Force for Good Project book. I want to thank Sam because she has so many remarkable people and a Fool in that book as well, The Force for Good Project, again, out in hardback in November, but out now if you're a Kindle reader like I am or enjoy audiobooks. I think all of Sam's books are great. Haven't read this one yet, but I hope you'll enjoy it. With all that said, it's Pet Perks time. Let's go to number 1. Pet Perk Number 1 I'm just going to call obtaining a baby's smile. I had completely forgotten about the pleasure of doing this until our first grandchild was born in February. I certainly remember when my kids were babies, when my kids were little kids. They're all adults now, and I remember the joy of getting them to smile, but I'd forgotten because it's been about 25 or 30 years since I spent much time around a baby. And to rediscover an old game, how much ridiculous effort we as adults can go to, happily expended by the way, faces, noises, gestures, just to get a baby, a three-month-old, a five-month-old, somebody still discovering the world, to get them to smile, instantly visual. Whether that baby was indifferent moments ago or even worse, had a frown on its face, doing something, saying something, making a face, making a noise, and turning that frown up to a smile on somebody who's so young is indeed a Pet Perk. Instantly visual, universally understandable, newly personal to me, again, I'll say in 2026, and almost comically pure here as just a Pet Perk. We're talking about a very small thing. But there is a wonderful asymmetry that I've discovered to obtaining a baby's smile, and that is that it costs nothing. It lasts perhaps three seconds, and somehow it feels like a major achievement.

Again, for those of us, my fellow Fools, who are regularly around babies, you will already know what I'm talking about. But for those of us who never have been or haven't done that for quite a while, obtaining a baby's smile is a true Pet Perk. Let's move on to number 2. Number 2, I've suddenly realized after about five weeks, because that's how long I've been doing grand jury duty here in Washington, DC. I've mentioned this obliquely once or twice in the podcast over the last month. I am in my final week of a remarkable ask. I really couldn't believe it when I got the letter from Washington, DC government, this serves Washington, DC, and some federal government too, to join a grand jury for five weeks. There we are in what I will describe as very spare surroundings. A lot of government buildings might be attractive on the outside, but inside, fluorescent lights. I will say in my case, no windows. We're there from 9:00-5:00. The first thing you have to do at the door is check your phone in and out, your laptops, all your technology comes off of you because you need to be in completely private settings where nobody can record anything and have private conversations. By the way, for those who don't know what grand jury duty is, it's not the typical one- to three-day single trial that was made much fun of by the Amazon Prime Video series, Jury Duty. I totally recommend Season 1. Very funny. This is actually quite different because grand juries don't serve court trials. We actually decide what should go to trial. Over the course of now almost five weeks, I've seen over 60 different cases, and I and my fellow jurors, all 23 of us, sit there and hear one story after another, listening for evidence and trying to decide, is there enough probable cause to think that that should go through to trial. We never see what happens from that point on. We're just presented one sad story. Sometimes a few have been horrific. Some are tragic. Some seem completely silly. Most you'd want to avoid in your real life.

Now 60-plus stories, and what I've recognized as a Pet Perk is the surprisingly excellent armchair that each of us is given in this otherwise very spare room with simple tables. Again, I mention fluorescent light, and I will again mention no windows at all. But when you're sitting in a place for eight hours with no technology on you and not that much extra to do, sitting again for eight hours, a good chair is no small thing. It's a reminder as a Pet Perk that you and I should generally be spending, I would say proportionately on things we're going to be using proportionately. I had a fun conversation with a young Fool employee 10 years ago or so, and I was asking him at the time, "Are you going to buy the new iPhone?" He said, "Yeah." In fact, he was going to Pro Max it out. He was going to splurge. I thought, that's a young employee. I'm surprised he's going to spend that much money on the phone. But then he explained his reasoning. He's like, "How many hours every day are we using these things? What other object do we use this many hours a day?" He's like, "We should be spending our money where our resources really count, where we're going to be using these things from one day to the next, sometimes one hour to the next." What initially might sound extravagant in that context all of a sudden made total sense to me, as does a good armchair for people in jury duty. Now, armchairs are provided for all of us if you ever join a jury in Washington, DC, I hope your own home city has the same. A good, comfortable chair makes a lot of sense. We don't have real control over that, though, but we do have a lot of control in our own lives where we're spending money. Of course, before we move on to number 3, how can I not think humorously of some of the opposite examples where we spend disproportionately on things that we use infrequently. What comes to mind? The kitchen gadget that's designed to perform one task brilliantly, which we discover we perform once every three years.

That's a good example of the opposite. Here's another. That subscription we bought enthusiastically, but we stopped using it in March, and we're still funding it faithfully through December. Or what about the expensive luggage that spends 50 weeks a year enjoying considerably more closet space than we do? To close, maybe, is this the classic paying extra for the feature-packed version of something and then spending the next five years using exactly two of the features? All of those are opposites of what I will call a good armchair, which is indeed Pet Perk Number 2. Pet Perk Number 3 is the act of discovering something new. The pleasure of finding a new restaurant, a new app, or, I don't know, how about a new technology, an electric car, if you've ever discovered that? When you first heard about it or drove one. These are all examples of discovering something new. I mentioned this recently. Was it last week or the week before on this podcast? That when we, as self-directed investors, pick stocks as opposed to merely index our money and just buy a little bit of everything, when you're being choiceful, often you are rewarded by paying attention to new products, new services, new technologies, new experiences. You're naturally a cool hunter as you go through life, and you're also looking to find other cool hunters that you can learn from. One of my best cool hunters throughout my life has been my daughter, Kate. I remember when Kate said, something like 15 years ago, "Hey, Dad, have you ever eaten at Cava?" Kate was a teenager at the time, and she had her eye out for Mediterranean food. Cava, which is now a public company and a stock that I own, thank you, Kate. Cava started here in Washington, DC, so it was a local success story back then, but that's a good example of discovering something new. In this case, I didn't do it. I was just listening to people who are.

We all benefit from having cool hunters in our lives. They give us that little thrill of encountering something maybe ahead of most of the rest of the world that hasn't yet discovered this product or service. I would also say there's probably more innovation here in 2026 than any day in history, certainly more than existed in 1926. While I was around for this one, 1976, I feel as if technology almost has gotten to the point of overwhelm. The amount of innovation, the sheer number of new possibilities of how we might lead our lives, what we might choose or not choose, is something we have to confront on our own. But I think the truth is that you don't have to hunt everything. You don't have to follow every technology. Just hunt, look where you're naturally curious. When you do, when you discover something new, that is certainly a Pet Perk. Sometimes that discovery will make you money. I can think back to 20-plus years ago when I first heard about robot-assisted surgery, and Intuitive Surgical became one of my great stocks of all time. I lightly referenced Tesla just minutes ago. Tesla is another great example for me. But sometimes it's a new band, a new comedian. We all benefit from keeping our eyes out and staying connected with others around us who can help us discover the new. Even when that thing doesn't make you money, discovering something great makes your life better. So I say, Pet Perk.

ADVERTISEMENT: Do more of what you love all day long. Get the new iPhone 18 Pro on EE, with a big leap in battery life to keep you streaming, browsing, and connecting for longer. With EE's Fast Lane, you can do it all, even in the biggest crowds. The ultimate pro iPhone deserves the ultimate network. EE does more. Fast Lane requires eligible plan and 5G Plus coverage. UK's best network. Rankings based on the RootMetrics UK RootScore Report H1 2026. Verify at ee.co.uk/claims.

David Gardner: This morning, as I took my Uber in to jury duty, something simple happened, and I'd already looked at my weather app, and it said it was going to be a beautiful sunshiny day here in Washington, high of 71 degrees. But when I actually looked around, it was surprisingly completely cloudy at around 8:30 A.M. Then I saw the little sun icon was supposedly popping within the next half hour or so. During that drive, all of a sudden the sun broke through those October clouds and rolling down my window, the temperature, which last Friday just three days ago was 87 degrees, the temperature was all of a sudden 59. There was that first unmistakable autumn in the air. Pet Perk Number 4 is the four seasons. Four times a year, nature changes the set. It changes its light. The temperature changes the smells, change clothes, change foods. In some cases, they change to activities. Certainly change even some might say our moods, four times a year, they change. I think about the firsts. For example, I would say this morning I discovered my first crisp fall morning. That's a first for this season. If you're in climates that allow this, the first snow each season is always distinctive. The first warm spring day and the first properly hot summer evening. Four seasons. Now, I do love the Number 4, and I treasure the Mid-Atlantic region of the US where I was born and live for that. I know many other places have four, too, but not every place has maybe the four seasons. I like the seasons at each of their extremes. I love a really hot summer and a really snowy winter and a fallly fall and a springy spring.

Maybe that's just me, but I suspect it's not. I bet a lot of you listening to me right now recognize the incredible Pet Perk that is the four seasons and that change in the season. It's also worth pointing out that each season, eventually, think about it, eventually, wears out its welcome. It makes us ready for the next, and I think that's part of the perk, too. That's not a bug. That's a feature. Just as one season starts wearing out its welcome, another arrives. This is a recurring gift that we did nothing to earn or arrange. You get four fresh starts every year, four times a year, the regular cycle of businesses reporting their earnings, by the way, that I have always appreciated and hope that that regular rhythm of corporate reporting will be maintained. But as I was flipping through my notes the other day, I came upon something that I had written on September 22nd, 1999. Back then, the Motley Fool was a much smaller thing. In fact, it was an AOL-centric. We did have a website back then, but we had a daily write-up at the end of the market day that one of us would write up, talking about our stocks and what had happened. Just like this podcast, it's about investing, but it's also about life, too. I came upon this short essay that I wrote on September 22nd, 1999. I hope you enjoy it. It seems apropos of Pet Perk Number 4. Here it is in brief, 27 years later, I wrote it happened last night once again. That annual discovery, I slept poorly with light covers on the bed and traditional summer garb. I spent my standard six hours of sleep tossing and turning for comfort, no socks. What a mistake. I never really reached enough consciousness to get up and pull them on. Autumn is here. Over Alexandria, Virginia, and much of the East Coast last night, a chill wind blew in and changed the seasons. It found me, as it always does once a year, unprepared. I froze, but freezing like that precedes the pleasurable experience every year of waking up the next morning and opening my front door and breathing in the delicious coolness of the air outside with its subtle, spicy autumn tang. There is a natural burlap sac robustness to autumn air that puts the thin heat of summer to shame.

Every year, I love to encounter it once again, new for the first time. It's a pleasure of the Mid-Atlantic and New England states that is still missed by many people who grew up here but moved away. I love California as much as the next guy, and perhaps I'll spend my last decade or two in New Mexico. I know that other areas of the country see delightful autumns as well, but for sheer polished brilliance, you simply can't beat the red and gold and purples and burnt orange of New England. Takes me back to my schoolboy days. Or like my son today, being three years old and lying in a huge heap of leaves, just to breathe it all in. I don't have much else to say tonight, content instead to set aside the fleeting pleasure of a fine day on the stock market, in order that I might make my way back into our autumn cool. Breathe in through the nostrils, perhaps blue smoke will trail in wisps out of the red brick chimneys of Old Town tonight where we live and work. I hope so. Maybe read some Robert Frost and warm socks tonight. Boulon. Pet Perk Number 5, I first started channeling when I read Warren Bennis' book on Becoming a Leader, where he wrote the following. He said, and I quote, "Playwright Athol Fugard said that he worked his way out of a depression by starting every day thinking of ten things that gave him pleasure". Bennis wrote, "I've found thinking of the things in my life that bring me pleasure a peaceful and positive way to start the morning, and I've started doing it regularly". That again from Warren Bennis' book on Becoming a Leader. When I first read that years ago, I thought, I'm going to do that. Not every morning, but I'm going to say most mornings, specifically as I take a shower because I'm going to be taking a shower anyway. This is, in James Clear's words, the author of Atomic Habits. This is habit stacking. As long as I'm going to be standing under the water, I'm going to count 10 things that I'm grateful for that morning, that day. The Number 10 forces some specificity. You can't just say I'm grateful for family, grateful for my health. No. To what am I grateful for this morning? This has just been a tiny ritual for me that can change the emotional weather of your day before it really begins. I'm sure you're already doing something like that. If you're somebody who believes in God, you can certainly make it a little prayer. If you're somebody who doesn't, you can simply appreciate the benefits of gratitude, which have been proven many times over by scientists in labs, the power of gratitude to lift us all up. Ten things in the shower. Ten gratitudes is a Pet Perk. Pet Perk Number 6 is nothing so visceral as autumn tang or a hot shower with gratitude.

No, I'm just going to go with the abstract phrase Getting upstream. Toyota became famous, as you probably know, through its practice of encouraging its engineers to ask in situations of manufacture or problems that they were having, or maybe even in corporate boardrooms, Toyota famous for its five whys. It's the simple question that little children ask over and over. I think we've all experienced this. When something would go wrong at Toyota, they would say, well, why? Why is that? Then the answer would come. Then the next question was, of course, why Number 2? Well, why is that? It goes through why is Number 3, 4, and the idea is, by the time you hit five, you hit the real root cause that you really need to examine. That's Toyota's famous five why framework, and it's certainly one that can be used to great effect, whether you're three years old or 60 years old. Why is always going to be a powerful question. But as I've thought about it more, it's not just about the why, is it? Because really what we're trying to get after is, well, thank you for your answer to why. What could I do? How might I prevent X, Y, Z from happening? As powerful as those five whys are, I'm here to say Pet Perk Number 6 is the act of getting upstream of future problems. In fact, even just by asking the question, how might we prevent this? How can we get upstream of this in future? You're already getting upstream. There's a delicious realization you have as you start looking at other people's problems or thinking your way through life, you can realize, oh, my gosh, I can make this problem never happen in my own life. It's one part planning. But even before you can plan, you need to spot the downstream mess in the first place, and for a lot of us, that's its own thing. Spotting the problem, asking the whys, and then getting cheaply and easily, if possible, upstream to set up, let's say, a small decision you make now, a small action you take now that will prevent all aggravation, expense, apology, scramble later.

Certainly not going to name names, but I can think of family or friends that have gotten into situations where had they had I had we just gone upstream a little bit, and thought about preventing that by doing or saying or not doing or not saying something, we would have made our lives a lot easier. I'm finding myself becoming slightly obsessed here at the age of 60 about this idea of getting upstream in as many contexts as possible. Really, you can almost become a superpower when you think about preventing problems that your future self never even has to know about. Potentially, if you're getting successfully upstream. Just a few examples, I'm sure you have ones you can come up with in your own life, but sometimes getting upstream is incredibly mundane. Like, let's just say you're going out of the country tomorrow. Why not put your passport in your shoes? Because most people are not going to miss their shoes on the way to the airport. That is a simple way of getting upstream of a future problem. Of course, sticking with the mundane, reordering that medication or that dog food or that coffee or that printer ink. While still having one left is another great example of an incredibly boring form of getting upstream, boring but effective. On a slightly deeper, slightly longer form level, you're earning your first real paycheck. Automate 10% of that into your savings or investment plan before your expensive future lifestyle ever learns that money exists. Pay yourself first. The old line goes. We love 10% of the Motley Fool. We've used that for many years. Not everybody can save 10% of their paycheck. Some people can save even more, but even if it's just your first 1%, that act of invisibly shooting it off into your savings or investment plan without ever even seeing it is an incredibly good example of getting upstream. Twenty years later, well, that future self has already had his or her problem solved in a way that otherwise that future self might have had to spend 20 years more trying to solve. That's a very on-point capital F foolish thought, an example of getting upstream. Here's one more that applies for lots of us. Your parents are healthy.

Their stories are still theirs to tell. Ask the questions now, record some of their answers. There are things that we eventually desperately want to know at precisely the point when sometimes we might no longer be able to ask, getting upstream. That brings me to my final Pet Perk again, shout out to Ben Adams. I want to thank Ben again for not just being the founding father of this particular episodic series, but also leaning in with his recent example just a month or two when I got to meet Ben in person. But let's go to Pet Perk Number 7, which flows somewhat naturally from having that conversation with your parents that I just referenced. We're going to call Pet Perk Number 7, saying it now. I've spoken before about Walter Green. I mentioned him briefly on this podcast, but I haven't really pounded the table for his work, but I really appreciate it, so I'm going to do it here. He founded a movement called Say It Now. Walter once took an entire year of his life to travel around and visit 44 people who'd made a meaningful difference in his life, not because they were dying, not because he was dying, and not because there was some special occasion. Simply because they were alive, and Walter wanted them to know what they had meant to him. He tells that story in his book, Just Say It Now. Then there was a friend of Walter's who asked him, Walter, would you organize a celebration of my life after I die? This person was getting on in years. Walter basically said, why would we do that, then? Why would we gather everybody who loves you into a room to say all these wonderful things about you at precisely the moment when you are the one person who can't hear any of it? Instead, Walter gathered friends together for that friend's birthday and made it a living tribute.

His friends and family got to say the things to Walter's friend that they might otherwise have saved for his funeral, and he got to hear them. That is such a simple idea. It strikes me as almost crazy that we need reminding, but I do, too, myself. Most of us have somebody in our lives right now whom we admire or love or owe something to, and we've never we've never quite told them, or never told them fully. Maybe it's a teacher or a parent, a sibling, an old boss, a friend you've known for 40 years, somebody who believed in you before you quite believed in yourself. We think we'll get around to saying it, and usually we probably will until sometimes suddenly we can't. Yes, saying it now is a Pet Perk for the person who hears it. What a wonderful thing to be told while you were alive and well, that your life has mattered to somebody else. I think the perk runs equally in the other direction, too, because when you say it now, you get to be the person who said it. You get the conversation. You get the hug, perhaps. You get the surprised smile. You get to see your words land. Unlike so many things in life, and yet, like so many of these Pet Perks this week, this one costs almost nothing. Phone call, a letter, a lunch, just a kind word, looking somebody in the eye and saying what you've been thinking. Maybe for years. We're almost done here. Let's review. I started Pet Perks Volume 3 by talking about getting a baby to smile. I talked about a good armchair, discovering something new, the changing seasons, 10 things we're grateful for in our showers. Getting upstream of problems before they become problems. Seven little things that make everything better, and perhaps that last one, say it now, is also a great example of getting upstream. Don't save your best words about somebody for a room they won't be in. Say them in the room they're in. Say it now. Fool on.

David Gardner has positions in Amazon, Apple, Cava Group, Intuitive Surgical, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Apple, Cava Group, Intuitive Surgical, and Tesla. The Motley Fool recommends Uber Technologies and recommends the following options: long January 2028 $520 calls on Intuitive Surgical and short January 2028 $530 calls on Intuitive Surgical. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.