2020-12-09_How_to_End_a_Year_and_Plan_a_Better_One_Part_2-Dream
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00:00:30.260 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,
00:00:36.560 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:39.660 | My name is Josh Roschitz. I am your host.
00:00:41.060 | Today, we're going to continue part two of our series, "How to End a Year and Plan a Better One."
00:00:45.160 | In the previous part of this show, previous episode of this series, I talked about the power of reflection.
00:00:51.160 | Simply taking time to reflect upon the past.
00:00:54.760 | Taking time to reflect upon this past year.
00:00:58.060 | And learn the lessons from it.
00:00:59.860 | Rejoice in the things that have gone well and smoothly for you.
00:01:03.460 | Learn from the lessons. Learn from the challenges, etc.
00:01:06.560 | But the next step, after you have reflected on the past, is simply this.
00:01:12.260 | Dream about the future.
00:01:17.060 | Dream about the future.
00:01:19.960 | Notice I'm not saying plan the future.
00:01:23.360 | I'm not saying set goals. I'm saying dream.
00:01:26.860 | Dream about the future.
00:01:31.060 | Call it a daydream. Call it just a dream. Whatever you want.
00:01:34.460 | But dream about the future.
00:01:36.160 | What do you dream about happening in your future?
00:01:41.560 | What kind of lifestyle do you dream of?
00:01:44.360 | What kind of job do you dream of?
00:01:47.260 | What kind of activities would you like to do?
00:01:49.260 | Who would you like to be with in the future?
00:01:52.660 | What would you like your year to look like?
00:01:54.360 | Just spend some time dreaming about the future.
00:01:58.260 | Now, what I've learned in my years of working as a financial advisor
00:02:03.060 | is that this exercise is easier for some of us than it is for others.
00:02:09.360 | I don't know or understand all of the inputs,
00:02:13.960 | all of the reasons why some people have an easier time dreaming than others do.
00:02:19.660 | I think there may be certain inborn characteristics that we have
00:02:24.860 | where some of us think more easily about dreams
00:02:28.260 | and some of us are more present-oriented.
00:02:29.960 | Maybe some of us are more future-oriented.
00:02:31.560 | Some of us are more present-oriented.
00:02:33.660 | Some of us have the ability to detach ourselves
00:02:35.960 | from the daily conditions in which we live
00:02:38.460 | and connect ourselves to the world of the imagination.
00:02:41.560 | Some of us don't.
00:02:43.160 | Maybe it's due to circumstances.
00:02:44.760 | Maybe if you grew up reading fantasy literature,
00:02:48.960 | then it's very easy for you to connect with your fantasy dreams.
00:02:52.560 | On the other hand, if you grew up reading very tactile literature,
00:02:56.160 | maybe that influenced you.
00:02:58.160 | I think it's almost certain that our past experiences
00:03:02.060 | probably have a big influence on us in terms of the environment that we were raised in.
00:03:06.360 | If you were raised in a very harsh environment,
00:03:08.460 | perhaps the biggest dream that you could have
00:03:10.860 | is to graduate from college or something like that.
00:03:14.060 | Whereas if you were raised in a very safe environment
00:03:16.260 | where you were encouraged as a young child to dream,
00:03:19.460 | perhaps it's very easy for you to have grandiose ambitions.
00:03:23.560 | Maybe there's something to do about the kinds of friends that we got around,
00:03:26.460 | the kinds of input that perhaps our parents gave to us.
00:03:29.260 | Some people share a dream with another person
00:03:31.560 | and everybody around says, "That's awesome! You can do it!"
00:03:34.560 | On the other hand, some people share the same dream
00:03:36.760 | and other people want to put that person down.
00:03:39.960 | And I think we learn to be very careful about who we share our dreams with.
00:03:44.860 | Maybe there's some series of past experiences
00:03:47.260 | where there are certain things in your life
00:03:49.060 | where you've just failed and failed and failed and failed and failed again
00:03:52.260 | and eventually you stop dreaming.
00:03:53.860 | I know for me, I've certainly experienced some of that,
00:03:56.460 | not as much as some people, but you just want to give up.
00:03:59.360 | For me, it's always been being fat.
00:04:01.760 | I always dreamed of not being fat
00:04:03.460 | and it has felt for my entire lifetime.
00:04:05.760 | It's like, "Okay, I'm going to dream of not being fat."
00:04:07.560 | And then you get to a point and you're like, "Okay, I'll make some progress."
00:04:10.160 | And then right back down.
00:04:11.660 | Over the last year, I lost a bunch of weight
00:04:14.760 | and then I've gained a bunch of it back.
00:04:16.060 | And it's frustrating.
00:04:17.160 | You think, "Man, I've been through this cycle 20 times.
00:04:20.160 | Come on, I thought I was past this."
00:04:21.760 | Well, you still got to dream, right?
00:04:23.260 | You still got to do it.
00:04:23.860 | But we kind of put up walls is the point.
00:04:25.860 | We're just trying to say we put up walls around ourselves
00:04:27.760 | and we say, "Well, this is the thing that I dreamed
00:04:31.660 | and I'm just not going to dream this anymore.
00:04:33.260 | I'm going to put this aside."
00:04:35.060 | And so, again, I don't know the reasons.
00:04:37.960 | There may be many, many reasons.
00:04:39.960 | What I do know is this.
00:04:42.060 | I'm convinced that dreaming about the future
00:04:47.160 | is a very, very healthy thing to do.
00:04:51.160 | It's a very, very hopeful thing to do
00:04:54.460 | and it's something that will help you to know what to do now.
00:04:58.960 | It's something that can give you a sense of purpose in your actions today.
00:05:07.060 | I think it was usually ascribed to,
00:05:09.160 | I think the old success guru W. Clement Stone,
00:05:11.860 | where he talked about the definition of happiness
00:05:13.660 | and the definition of happiness that he used was
00:05:15.760 | that happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.
00:05:20.360 | The progressive realization of a worthy ideal.
00:05:25.860 | It's always stuck with me.
00:05:27.760 | There's a real sense of truth, a real kernel of truth
00:05:31.260 | in that particular statement.
00:05:33.860 | That happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal
00:05:38.060 | because it points out some things that I think we often miss.
00:05:41.560 | Specifically, happiness is not a goal achieved.
00:05:48.060 | That's not happiness.
00:05:50.460 | The saying indicates that it's the realization,
00:05:53.460 | the progressive realization.
00:05:55.060 | What I would simplify to simply say the doing,
00:05:57.560 | the act of achieving, the act of accomplishing,
00:06:00.660 | the act of working.
00:06:02.460 | That's part of the equation of personal happiness.
00:06:07.260 | But I think also importantly embedded in that statement is that word,
00:06:10.460 | a worthy ideal, a worthy goal, a worthy vision, an important objective.
00:06:20.260 | All of these are different ways of describing the same thought.
00:06:22.660 | Something that matters to you.
00:06:25.860 | And then happiness is the systematic, step-by-step, progressive,
00:06:32.560 | right, the progressive realization,
00:06:35.060 | the progressive working towards, the progressive accomplishment,
00:06:38.460 | the progressive just daily slog towards that thing that matters to you.
00:06:45.160 | It's easier to feel happy when you're working towards something
00:06:49.060 | that matters to you than when you're just simply working.
00:06:55.660 | We all know that there are plenty of psychological studies
00:06:58.460 | that would show that, and just from natural personal experience,
00:07:02.260 | we know that if we get in a situation where we're doing something
00:07:06.860 | that feels useless, that's a good way to kill the human spirit.
00:07:11.560 | Right, you want to drive a man insane,
00:07:13.060 | put him in that experiment where you say,
00:07:15.060 | "Your job today is to dig a ditch, and I want 20 feet from you,
00:07:18.260 | from here to there."
00:07:19.960 | And then bring that same man back the next day and say,
00:07:23.160 | "Your job today is to fill the ditch in."
00:07:26.060 | Bring him back the next day and say,
00:07:27.560 | "Your job is to dig this ditch, then fill the ditch in."
00:07:31.760 | Then the next day, "Dig this ditch, then fill the ditch in."
00:07:33.960 | I doubt that any man in the world would make it to the fourth day.
00:07:38.860 | That's hell on Earth, doing something that has no purpose,
00:07:43.560 | no value whatsoever.
00:07:46.960 | As human beings, we're wired to create, we're wired to work,
00:07:50.760 | but it's work that has an outcome, a sense of purpose,
00:07:56.860 | and there's pleasure in that process.
00:08:01.160 | You can take the most difficult of work,
00:08:04.660 | from changing a baby's dirty diaper,
00:08:06.660 | there's pleasure in taking a baby who's crying and upset,
00:08:10.160 | cleaning him up, and seeing him happy and refreshed,
00:08:13.460 | and knowing, "I've attended to that child's needs."
00:08:15.760 | There's pleasure in that.
00:08:17.860 | Cleaning up a kitchen full of dirty dishes,
00:08:19.460 | there's pleasure in transforming something that's in bad shape
00:08:23.960 | into something that's pleasant to be in.
00:08:27.160 | There's pleasure in building a multi-million dollar business.
00:08:32.160 | Start with nothing and create.
00:08:36.160 | There's pleasure in that accomplishment.
00:08:37.860 | From the most simple and mundane of tasks,
00:08:41.360 | to the most large and ambitious of tasks,
00:08:44.760 | there's pleasure in that day-by-day work,
00:08:49.560 | if we can see the worthy objective at the other end.
00:08:58.160 | So where do you start?
00:08:58.960 | Well, you don't start, again, by planning.
00:09:01.260 | You start by dreaming.
00:09:02.660 | You start by getting some sense of clarity
00:09:05.260 | on where you're going at the end of the day,
00:09:08.160 | where you're going at the end of the year,
00:09:10.160 | and where you are going at the end of a lifetime.
00:09:15.060 | To steal the words of the much vaunted and respected Stephen Covey,
00:09:22.560 | "Begin with the end in mind."
00:09:26.460 | And to keep it simple, I would simply say,
00:09:28.160 | "You begin with the dream."
00:09:30.360 | What's the dream?
00:09:34.360 | What's the dream?
00:09:38.760 | I like that word "dream,"
00:09:40.360 | and I'm choosing to use it here
00:09:42.760 | because a dream does not necessarily imply action.
00:09:51.860 | I think there's legitimacy to the arguments that some people make
00:09:55.560 | that say you should set goals that are achievable, attainable.
00:10:01.560 | You want a goal that's not so far beyond.
00:10:03.760 | I think there's a lot of truth to that.
00:10:06.460 | Some guy walks into my office and says,
00:10:08.160 | "Joshua, I want to be a billionaire in a year's time."
00:10:11.660 | All right, well, how many millions do you have right now?
00:10:14.160 | None, right? I got nothing.
00:10:16.260 | All right, well, I don't think that's a useful goal to set,
00:10:19.160 | to be a billionaire in a year's time.
00:10:22.260 | But I'm convinced that a lot of times we spend so much time
00:10:25.860 | making our goals achievable, attainable, within reach,
00:10:31.660 | that we forget to dream about where we'd actually like to go.
00:10:35.760 | I'm all for achievability and attainability
00:10:38.160 | as long as it comes on the other side of dreaming.
00:10:43.660 | This is my opinion.
00:10:45.960 | I don't actually think we have the ability to dream a dream
00:10:52.460 | that we don't have the ability to achieve, personally.
00:10:57.060 | I don't actually think that any of us can dream a dream
00:11:01.460 | that we don't have the ability to achieve.
00:11:06.360 | Even the most ambitious of dreams, the biggest of visions,
00:11:11.060 | I personally think that in the fullness of time,
00:11:14.260 | almost all of those things can be achieved.
00:11:19.960 | We don't know what that word, "the fullness of time" means.
00:11:22.160 | Some dreams will require decades and decades and decades to accomplish.
00:11:26.560 | But I think that if you have the ability to dream something,
00:11:29.760 | you have the ability to say, "This is something that I want,"
00:11:32.660 | I think you also have the ability to achieve it.
00:11:37.160 | And I've never come across an example that convinced me otherwise.
00:11:44.560 | I'm not scared of big dreams.
00:11:46.760 | I'm scared of big dreams on short timelines,
00:11:49.860 | but I'm not scared of big dreams.
00:11:52.460 | So what I do, or what I try to do, is dream big dreams
00:11:56.160 | and then put in enough time into it to make me comfortable.
00:12:02.360 | Because I can manipulate either the size of the dream or the timeline,
00:12:05.960 | and I don't want to walk away from the big dream,
00:12:07.660 | so I just put more time in to make myself feel comfortable with it.
00:12:11.860 | For me, this has been useful, because I've learned that for me,
00:12:15.560 | the first step is to dream a dream, to conceive of a dream, to create a dream.
00:12:21.160 | The second step of that dreaming process is to bring myself to a place of believing in the dream.
00:12:28.560 | I need to build a sense of belief into myself.
00:12:31.660 | I need to be convinced and persuaded that it's possible for me to achieve the dream.
00:12:38.760 | And if I give myself enough time, then I can build that belief more quickly.
00:12:43.060 | And then once I've got the belief behind it,
00:12:46.660 | then I can shorten up the timeline without losing that belief.
00:12:53.960 | That's my personal trick.
00:12:58.760 | What do you do if you're not good at dreaming?
00:13:01.760 | My answer is, you start by recognizing you're not good at dreaming.
00:13:06.360 | Start by recognizing that for whatever reason, you don't think a lot about your dreams,
00:13:13.160 | you don't imagine a lot about the future, you don't do a lot.
00:13:16.560 | Just admit it.
00:13:18.960 | And then move on and just simply do your best to forget the past.
00:13:23.360 | Do your best to forget all the reasons why it didn't work in the past.
00:13:29.260 | One thing that I've become more and more convinced of the older I get is simply this.
00:13:35.060 | The past is an illusion. It does not exist.
00:13:41.460 | It does not exist. It's gone. It's gone forever and it does not exist.
00:13:48.060 | When you start to think about the philosophical concept of time,
00:13:50.860 | I'm fascinated by the philosophical concept of time.
00:13:55.560 | But just keep it simple. Like the past is gone.
00:13:58.160 | It's gone and it doesn't control your life unless you let it.
00:14:01.960 | It doesn't affect you unless you let it.
00:14:04.160 | Today is a brand new day and any one of us can change and live an entirely different life today.
00:14:10.960 | Right? There's not a doctor in the world that would sit down with me
00:14:13.660 | and if I said, you know, Doc, you know, I'm fat.
00:14:16.460 | I've been fat for whatever many years and man,
00:14:19.460 | I just don't know a doctor in the world that would say there's something wrong with you, right?
00:14:22.460 | There's nothing wrong with you. You just haven't found the right plan yet.
00:14:24.860 | You haven't figured out the right thing yet. You haven't solved the problem yet.
00:14:28.360 | The past doesn't have to hold you back.
00:14:30.360 | There's not a financial advisor in the world that if you walked in and said you're broke,
00:14:33.760 | they would say, oh, you're just doomed to being broke. Brokenness is not a condition.
00:14:38.560 | It's not something that you have that you're stuck with.
00:14:40.760 | It's not a fact. It's just something that where you're on the past
00:14:44.660 | and if you change your actions, then you can quickly become not broke.
00:14:49.460 | If you're fat and you change your actions, you can quickly become not fat.
00:14:53.160 | If you're stuck in a job that you hate, you can change your actions
00:14:56.060 | and you can quickly become not stuck in a job you hate.
00:14:59.360 | If you're living in a place you don't like, you can change your actions
00:15:01.960 | and you can quickly become not stuck in a place you don't like.
00:15:06.560 | The past has no control other than what you give it.
00:15:09.760 | And so by recognizing that it's an illusion, it doesn't exist. It's just it's gone.
00:15:15.360 | You can sever some of that control. Now, certainly, I'm not denying that there's scars that hurt you.
00:15:21.760 | There's not denying there's memories that you have or trauma that you've experienced.
00:15:26.160 | Of course, right? We all have that stuff.
00:15:29.160 | Just simply saying it's good to start by acknowledging that stuff doesn't exist.
00:15:34.560 | And I can today chart a different course. I can today make a different decision.
00:15:40.760 | Starting point is can I today see a dream?
00:15:44.960 | Can I today dream a dream of a place I want to go? A thing I want to do?
00:15:50.560 | I don't personally struggle to dream.
00:15:54.160 | But I have observed and learned that a lot of people do.
00:16:00.860 | And though I don't know all the reasons why, I want to give you just some ideas to possibly help you to dream.
00:16:07.060 | The first suggestion I would give to you is think about people that you admire.
00:16:11.960 | People that you look up to. There's often something about that person's life that you admire.
00:16:23.260 | Something that you think is cool and that you want to...
00:16:28.060 | If you'll just recognize the person, associate it with a person.
00:16:31.060 | I'll give you just a couple examples from my life. Things that have made helpful to me.
00:16:34.860 | I've often associated with people more than I've associated with certain things.
00:16:38.560 | And I've been able to see things in other people that I admire that, hey, that person could do that.
00:16:43.360 | So why can't I? It's one of the most valuable things to recognize.
00:16:47.660 | Anything that someone else has done, you can do too.
00:16:52.360 | Anything someone else has done, you can do too. It's a very useful mindset to adopt.
00:16:57.760 | I'll give you an example. When I was younger, my favorite author was Tom Clancy.
00:17:03.560 | I loved his thrillers. I loved the Jack Ryan series.
00:17:06.460 | I just devoured the whole series when my high school Bible teacher turned me on to Tom Clancy.
00:17:12.260 | And I devoured the series and I loved everything about it.
00:17:16.460 | And there was always this picture of Tom Clancy on the back cover.
00:17:19.560 | And I never saw a documentary on Tom Clancy's life.
00:17:22.660 | I never read about him. I never read a biography of him.
00:17:29.160 | All I ever had was his picture on the back of a dust jacket of his books and the little author blurb.
00:17:36.660 | But I knew that I loved his books. And I imagined what the life of an author was like.
00:17:42.160 | And I always imagined Tom Clancy living in Baltimore, Maryland or wherever he lived.
00:17:46.560 | And I always imagined him sitting out by a pool.
00:17:49.860 | The thing I always loved about writing is I loved the concept that there weren't any constraints on time.
00:17:55.560 | There weren't any meetings to attend. It was just you sitting and writing and creating.
00:18:00.560 | I know that not all writers write like this, but I always had a picture of just a writer sitting at their laptop.
00:18:06.160 | And I had this picture of a writer sitting there at their laptop, banging away at the keys.
00:18:10.160 | And then a successful writer, of course, has money, has royalties coming in.
00:18:14.560 | And I imagined Tom Clancy sitting out on his pool deck. I have no idea if he had a pool.
00:18:19.860 | Just this was a picture in my head. I imagine him sitting out on his pool deck,
00:18:22.860 | sitting there on his laptop, smoking a cigar and working on his computer.
00:18:26.560 | That was just always the picture. And I loved that picture.
00:18:29.560 | And I thought, I want to do that. That's what I want my life to be like.
00:18:34.160 | I don't want to have any meetings. I don't want to have to go anywhere.
00:18:37.560 | I want to be able to sit out on my pool deck with my laptop, smoke a cigar, and write and create.
00:18:45.360 | And bring joy and pleasure to other people. Bring them stories. Bring them something interesting.
00:18:52.060 | And it was a simple personification of an ideal that clicked in my head.
00:18:58.860 | That was always a personal ambition of mine for many, many years.
00:19:02.860 | Now, I wouldn't call myself a writer. A writer is one who writes. I struggle to write.
00:19:07.860 | Maybe someday I will be a writer. I don't know. Haven't decided to become one yet.
00:19:11.660 | But the vision of the kind of lifestyle is a dream that I had that I have accomplished.
00:19:18.860 | I'm not currently recording this podcast episode on my pool deck.
00:19:23.860 | Although I have recorded podcast episodes on pool decks.
00:19:27.160 | But I am sitting in front of my computer. I'm not currently smoking a cigar.
00:19:31.560 | But I'm sitting in front of my computer. I don't have any schedule.
00:19:35.560 | I don't have any time constraints. And I have the ability to live wherever I want to live.
00:19:41.360 | But it was easier for me to imagine a person and visualize a person
00:19:46.260 | than it was for me to imagine the specific thing to do.
00:19:50.560 | And so I have accomplished and I intend to continue to accomplish my personal dream
00:19:56.360 | of the kind of life that I wanted to live. But it started with seeing a person.
00:20:04.260 | Give another example. When I was younger, I worked for a guy named Warren.
00:20:10.560 | And I've interviewed him on the show several couple hundred episodes ago.
00:20:14.960 | But I worked on his farm. And I would be out there on the farm.
00:20:19.460 | And Warren would bring out, he was learning to fly a helicopter at the time.
00:20:23.760 | And so he'd bring his helicopter out with his flight instructor.
00:20:28.760 | And he would bring his helicopter out and he would fly around the fields
00:20:31.860 | while I was driving a tractor down the fields mowing and doing the farm work on a tractor.
00:20:37.860 | And I was just sitting there and I'd sit there and I would look at him and his helicopter
00:20:40.660 | and I would think like, I want to have the time that on a Wednesday morning
00:20:44.760 | I can go and fly a helicopter. And the other thing Warren loved to do is he loves to hunt.
00:20:50.560 | So I would call him and I needed a question from him and I was like,
00:20:53.660 | "Oh, I'm in Texas bird hunting" or "I'm in the Dakotas, you know, doing this and that."
00:20:57.160 | He would just hunt all hunting season. And I thought,
00:20:59.460 | I want the ability to go hunt during hunting season.
00:21:03.860 | Now, I don't want to buy a helicopter. Warren eventually sold his helicopter.
00:21:07.260 | He decided to get, I never asked him the story, but he didn't want to have his helicopter anymore.
00:21:12.160 | But I always wanted that time freedom and that location freedom.
00:21:14.360 | I always wanted a business that would function without me so that I could come and go.
00:21:19.160 | Because I wanted to be able to hunt on a Tuesday morning.
00:21:22.360 | Now, these things are not unattainable, right?
00:21:24.660 | You don't have to have 30 million dollars to sit out by a pool deck and work
00:21:28.060 | or to go and hunt on a Tuesday morning. You can do it with far less.
00:21:32.660 | But the dream that I had as far as what I wanted my work life to look like
00:21:39.960 | was a dream that was personified in certain people.
00:21:44.860 | Your dreams may vary, right? They certainly will. Your dreams are not my dreams.
00:21:49.660 | But look for a person that you admire or something that you wish you had.
00:21:56.960 | And then bring that back. There's other people where I've admired their families, right?
00:22:01.760 | I've observed them with their children. I've seen the relationship that they had with their children.
00:22:05.660 | I've seen the joy and the pride that they were able to create
00:22:08.960 | when they built children that were successful.
00:22:11.560 | And I thought, "I want that. I want that."
00:22:16.460 | And so what I try to do is I try to pick and choose people that I like and admire
00:22:21.560 | and try to pick and choose things that they do, ways that they live,
00:22:26.160 | that I like and admire and simply identify them. Simply notice them.
00:22:32.460 | Pay attention and notice. I'd like to be able to do that.
00:22:36.660 | I'd like to be able to have this. I'd like to be able to live like that.
00:22:42.760 | And it starts by noticing them, paying attention.
00:22:47.960 | I personally have a long list of people in my notes.
00:22:52.560 | This guy, I admire this about him. You know, that guy, I admire that. I want to have that.
00:23:00.360 | So pay attention to people that you observe. You don't have to know them.
00:23:05.860 | I never knew Tom Clancy. I never read anything about him.
00:23:09.860 | I just read his books and I imagined the kind of lifestyle that I thought a guy like him would probably live.
00:23:16.660 | And it actually doesn't at all matter to me whether he actually lived that way or not.
00:23:20.960 | I care nothing about who he was or about the way he lived,
00:23:24.460 | other than obviously at some point I may read a biography of him.
00:23:27.560 | But I don't care about the person he was.
00:23:30.360 | I care about the image that I created in my mind of the person I imagined him to be.
00:23:38.660 | And I wanted to live a life like I imagined that he lived.
00:23:43.660 | These things don't have to be real. The people don't even have to be real.
00:23:47.360 | There can be an image that you have of a novel, of a book, a character, someone that you admire.
00:23:55.560 | Another example. I hate to give away all my personal things,
00:23:59.760 | but I like to give some personal things so you can connect.
00:24:02.060 | I keep enough stuff private, but an example.
00:24:05.660 | There was always... I also like Clive Cussler novels. Rather predictable, right?
00:24:12.560 | But Clive Cussler was a very, very prolific author of the very kind of simple mass market thriller approach.
00:24:19.260 | And Clive Cussler created this character named Dirk Pitt.
00:24:22.760 | And the character Dirk Pitt was a man who had this swashbuckling lifestyle all around the world.
00:24:29.360 | I never was attracted to his lifestyle necessarily, but I was attracted to the way that he lived.
00:24:33.960 | And Cussler created this character who he owned an old airplane hanger on the backside of an airport in Baltimore.
00:24:43.060 | And in that airplane hanger, on the outside it was this old dilapidated building.
00:24:47.660 | And on the interior he had an upstairs apartment. He had it full of all his classic cars.
00:24:54.160 | Cussler himself was a classic car collector and he wrote that into his protagonist.
00:25:00.360 | And then he had as an extra room, a guest bedroom, he had an old Pullman rail car in that hanger.
00:25:08.860 | And I always loved that idea. I always loved that idea of living in kind of a weird way.
00:25:14.560 | I've never been attracted to the idea of living in a mansion.
00:25:17.060 | I was always attracted to living in a little apartment inside a dilapidated hanger, but living in total luxury.
00:25:22.060 | And having a railroad car parked in that hanger.
00:25:24.460 | You can go to the Henry Flagler Museum on Palm Beach and they got a Henry Flagler railroad car sitting there on the property.
00:25:29.960 | So my answer is do this with an RV. I love this idea.
00:25:33.260 | You have an airplane hanger and you park your RV in the airplane hanger and you have a luxurious quarters, luxury living,
00:25:41.860 | but it's kind of tucked away, kind of hidden. You have privacy about it.
00:25:45.360 | It's just a cool concept to me. So things like that, if there's something that you notice,
00:25:50.460 | it doesn't really matter whether anyone else cares about it or not.
00:25:53.260 | Like you pay attention to it and say, someday I want to have that.
00:25:56.160 | Maybe for you it's an airplane hanger with a train in it. Maybe for you it's a mansion on the water.
00:26:00.960 | Whatever you care about, pay attention to it and write that future.
00:26:05.360 | Pay attention to it and create the composite image.
00:26:10.760 | I find it simpler to do with people. And if you open your eyes and pay attention,
00:26:17.060 | you'll often find the kind of people that you're attracted to and notice the things that you're attracted to.
00:26:24.660 | I encourage you, don't make this exclusively about money or material possessions.
00:26:33.260 | Money and material possessions are important, but they're not ultimate.
00:26:40.460 | They're important, but they're not ultimate.
00:26:44.660 | So I encourage you, don't just choose the people that you want to imagine something about because,
00:26:51.660 | well, they're rich. Okay, they're great. They're rich. Fine.
00:26:55.260 | I told you about some rich people that have inspired me certain things.
00:26:59.260 | I want to be able to go hunting on a random Tuesday in the fall like my former boss Warren does.
00:27:06.760 | I want to be able to sit out on my pool deck and write on my laptop with a cigar in my mouth,
00:27:11.160 | like I always imagined Tom Clancy did. It doesn't matter.
00:27:15.360 | So those are financial related things to a certain extent.
00:27:21.360 | So don't, but they're not ultimate, right? On the flip side,
00:27:25.360 | make sure you pay attention to character qualities, personalities, physicality, hobbies, right?
00:27:36.260 | Do you want to, what kind of person do you want to be when you're 90 years old?
00:27:40.960 | There was a guy that inspired me when I was younger.
00:27:43.660 | I haven't yet been able to, you know, live up to it, but it's still a dream that I have.
00:27:48.660 | We don't have to apologize for things we're not accomplishing. It's a dream.
00:27:51.860 | I used to drive for a job. I used to drive a ski boat and I would pool water skiers.
00:28:00.260 | That was my job. I usually taught summer camp and I taught kids to water ski and wakeboard.
00:28:05.160 | And but I would, we would have this, we had this client that came out.
00:28:08.860 | His name was Dick and he would come out and he would trick ski and he was in his late 80s
00:28:14.260 | and he would come out and he would trick ski with us several times a week.
00:28:17.560 | And I'd pull the boat for Dick down the road, down the lake.
00:28:22.760 | And if you don't know anything, trick skiing is a really cool, like classic water ski sport,
00:28:30.560 | where you do all these tricks. You wear this little ski and do all these spinning around tricks,
00:28:37.460 | all these jumping tricks and whatnot. And Dick would come out, he'd wear a Speedo
00:28:40.460 | and his little, I think he didn't bother with a life jacket or most water skiers
00:28:46.660 | wear these little really thin water skiing life jackets.
00:28:50.760 | And he'd come out at almost 90 years old and he'd do these amazing tricks on his water ski.
00:28:54.960 | And there's, I can still see it in my picture. There's, you know, Dick going down the river
00:28:59.760 | in his Speedo, totally fit, totally strong, doing his Dick trick.
00:29:04.660 | He would take the, we called it the Dick trick. He would take the handle of the ski rope,
00:29:10.160 | put it around his neck, lean back and cross his arms at basically almost 90 years old.
00:29:15.160 | I don't remember his exact age. And I'm, you know, we're all nervous as anything.
00:29:18.860 | You have a release on a ski boat when you're doing trick skiing and you have your hand
00:29:23.160 | on the emergency release and you're watching him like a hawk because you're thinking,
00:29:27.960 | this is the day that my 90-year-old client falls down and I ripped his head off his shoulders
00:29:33.160 | because he's got the water ski rope wrapped around his neck. Super dangerous trick.
00:29:38.460 | But I just like, like this is the guy. And I read his autobiography. It was never published,
00:29:43.060 | but he wrote an autobiography and he was this really rich guy.
00:29:46.760 | He had made his money in the Texas oil business.
00:29:50.060 | And when I read his biography, sorry, his autobiography that he wrote about his experience,
00:29:54.760 | I just, I thought, this is such a cool guy. When I'm 90 years old, I want to be like Dick, right?
00:29:59.960 | I want to be, I want to be water skiing behind a boat, trick skiing behind a boat in total health,
00:30:07.760 | totally happy, tanned in my Speedo, cruising down the boat at night, down the road, the river at 90 years old.
00:30:13.760 | And, you know, this is a big focus for me because I still have this dream and I'm like,
00:30:19.860 | I'm not on track, right? I want to have that kind of health and strength at 90,
00:30:23.760 | but I'm not on track. How do I get back on track so I can work towards this dream?
00:30:27.760 | But it comes from seeing somebody that I admire. Physical health, vitality, those things make all the difference.
00:30:36.060 | They're not financial, though finances can certainly help. But they make all the difference in the world.
00:30:44.660 | What about spirituality? Is there somebody that you know where you think,
00:30:48.160 | this person, I want to have a sense of calm in their spirit.
00:30:53.560 | I want to have a relationship with God like they do.
00:30:55.260 | I want to experience the kind of life that they live. Picture that. Picture that person.
00:31:05.460 | Maybe a person that you've read about, maybe a person that you've admired from afar,
00:31:09.760 | maybe a person that you know. But when you admire somebody, pay attention to what you admire about them.
00:31:19.860 | Pay attention to what you notice about them. Other life decisions.
00:31:29.260 | Some people admire, let's talk about family, for example.
00:31:32.060 | There are lots of people who will find somebody who is a single man about town,
00:31:37.360 | girlfriend in every country. If you admire that, pay attention to it.
00:31:42.260 | I've not ever been attracted in that direction.
00:31:44.560 | I've always been attracted to having a family that I could see touch the world.
00:31:49.260 | I'll give you two examples of people that inspire me.
00:31:52.460 | The first is the Rothschild family. When I started kind of learning a little bit about the history of the Rothschild family,
00:31:59.960 | I became fascinated with that particular family.
00:32:04.060 | You know, the patriarch of the Rothschild family, I think it was Meyer Rothschild,
00:32:09.160 | you know, here was this guy who started from extraordinarily humble origins.
00:32:15.660 | You know, the family was extremely humble. But then out of that incredibly humble family,
00:32:22.260 | he launched his five sons all over Europe and created a global empire from his five sons.
00:32:32.860 | And I've often thought, you know, what is it about, what is it about, what was it,
00:32:37.960 | how on earth did Mr. and Mrs. Rothschild, how did they create this family that was so strong
00:32:47.560 | that they could send out these five boys who all, you know, started these banking operations all around Europe
00:32:54.060 | and yet brought in, brought in this, this, this built this incredible global dynasty that continues to this day.
00:33:03.160 | How do they do it? One of the things I've, one of the reading projects I haven't done yet,
00:33:07.360 | but I've wanted to read more of the, the biographies of, to try to understand more of the story.
00:33:13.060 | But it's hard because they're very secretive and don't talk a lot publicly.
00:33:17.860 | And then there's all the tons and tons of conspiracy theories about their influence behind the scenes and whatnot.
00:33:23.360 | But I'm just fascinated by the guy, right? I admire him. I admire what he was able to build, right?
00:33:29.660 | The classic, the coat of arms, right? He had the Rothschild coat of arms,
00:33:34.460 | where it was a clenched fist with five arrows in it, you know, basically saying,
00:33:39.860 | "Here are my arrows, my five sons," and then they send them out, right, to establish their family dynasty.
00:33:46.060 | It harkens back and alludes, of course, to Psalm 127, like, "Arrows in the hands of a warrior,
00:33:50.160 | so are the children of one's youth." And so, you know, I'm fascinated by, by that.
00:33:55.060 | Like, here's a guy who, who, what did he do? And I look at my children and I think, you know,
00:34:00.660 | what, what would Mr. Rothschild do? Like, what did he put into his children, the family identity and whatnot,
00:34:07.260 | that he was able to build this global empire? I admire that.
00:34:14.060 | Another guy in the family, years ago, before my wife and I had children,
00:34:16.960 | we started watching the TLC show on the Duggar family.
00:34:20.560 | The, sorry, it's like 15 kids and counting, 16 kids, I guess they ended up, what, 19 kids and counting, I think,
00:34:25.460 | 18 or whatever. And we watched this show, story about the Duggar family.
00:34:30.560 | And I found so many things that I just thought were so cool.
00:34:33.860 | I liked how Jim Bob Duggar lived big, right? If he was going to travel, he bought a bus for his family, right?
00:34:38.760 | Of course, he had to because he had so many children, but he bought a giant bus.
00:34:42.260 | He was the kind of guy who would go and buy a, he was a real estate guy.
00:34:46.660 | Okay, I need to, I need to dig something. So I'll go and buy an excavator.
00:34:49.460 | I just, I thought he was cool. He lived, lived, lived big.
00:34:51.860 | And of course, with the financial success from his investments,
00:34:54.660 | and then, of course, is the TV show, which catapulted everything even bigger.
00:34:58.660 | Just a big guy, right? A guy who lived big.
00:35:03.060 | But more importantly than that, and yet, by the way, on the big guy, I went,
00:35:07.460 | I read his autobiography where he wrote about his early life, right?
00:35:11.060 | He built, he built from nothing. He and his wife started with nothing.
00:35:16.260 | And he built a car, a towing business. Then he built a real estate business.
00:35:21.660 | And just an astonishing guy, hard-working, astonishing guy.
00:35:26.960 | And then I watched his, I watched his family.
00:35:30.560 | And here he was, I don't remember what he was, probably almost 60 or 60 something.
00:35:34.360 | And they would do, show pictures on the show of the family reunions, right?
00:35:40.260 | They'd get the extended family and the young family.
00:35:41.960 | And by the end of the show, they were, he was starting to have grandchildren.
00:35:46.660 | And I stopped watching before all the controversy stuff happened.
00:35:50.360 | And the show got pulled from the, from the, from TLC.
00:35:53.960 | And I haven't seen it in years.
00:35:55.460 | But I would see, you would see him with all his grandchildren.
00:35:59.660 | And I thought, like, here's a guy who will never be lonely.
00:36:05.160 | Here's a guy who will always be surrounded by the joy of youth.
00:36:12.260 | Here's a guy who in his 50s, he's got, you know, sons in their 20s.
00:36:16.360 | And he's got, I think his little girl was, you know, a couple years old,
00:36:19.960 | or just born when I stopped watching.
00:36:22.260 | And so here's a guy who will be surrounded, of course, by his own children
00:36:25.160 | and the joys and the trials and the, the, the, the euphoria and the sorrows
00:36:30.260 | that comes with that.
00:36:31.760 | But then of course his grandchildren.
00:36:33.260 | Here's a guy who will always have dozens of little fishing buddies to go through,
00:36:38.660 | to go, to go fishing with him and to help grandpa with his work.
00:36:43.160 | I admired that, right?
00:36:44.160 | It's like, that's, I want, I want that kind of, when I'm an old man,
00:36:47.960 | I want to be surrounded by tons of grandchildren.
00:36:53.060 | I don't want to be a lonely old man.
00:36:55.460 | I want to be surrounded by tons of grandchildren.
00:36:59.260 | You know, I thought, just as a parallel, right?
00:37:03.960 | I think it's useful to reflect on things you don't admire, things you don't like.
00:37:10.060 | Again, I used, I do this with people.
00:37:11.960 | You observe someone, you say, you know, I don't want to be like that person.
00:37:15.660 | I don't want to be someone like that.
00:37:17.860 | I don't admire that person.
00:37:19.260 | I don't admire this thing that that person does.
00:37:21.860 | I don't want that to be any expression of my life.
00:37:26.260 | Or observe people where you think, you know, I don't have anything against the person,
00:37:29.560 | but they're experiencing something that I don't want to experience.
00:37:33.560 | When I was a boy, I had a neighbor who would take me fishing.
00:37:37.760 | And things I admired about him were that he was kind enough to take me fishing, right?
00:37:44.160 | We'd go catfishing in the Orange Groves.
00:37:46.160 | He was, he was a country, he was a redneck guy, had no money.
00:37:49.160 | We'd drive his little thousand dollar car and drive out in the Orange Groves
00:37:52.160 | and go catfish fishing in the canals with a cane pole.
00:37:58.260 | And we had a great time, right?
00:37:59.160 | He taught me to clean fish and he was very kind and I really enjoyed going with him.
00:38:04.360 | But, back to the children, he lived a very, he had a very lonely, he had a very lonely life.
00:38:10.760 | He and his wife, they had both come from big families, but he had one son.
00:38:13.960 | They didn't have a close relationship with his son.
00:38:16.360 | He didn't have, he had a very kind of small life and he was lonely a lot.
00:38:22.560 | He didn't have a lot of friends and he was a wonderful guy.
00:38:25.660 | He was very, very kind and he did make friendships with that,
00:38:28.760 | but I could just see the loneliness and he died at a relatively young age.
00:38:32.560 | I think because he didn't have anything to live for.
00:38:37.760 | Enough personal stories from me, right?
00:38:39.660 | You know who I am, you know kind of the things that I admire.
00:38:42.760 | My point in today's show is just to share with you that you can collect things that you admire about somebody.
00:38:52.460 | And they can be things that you admire, they can be people that you know, right?
00:38:57.160 | My father is a hero of mine.
00:38:58.760 | I have a long list of things that I really want to be like my father in these certain ways.
00:39:04.460 | There are some things I don't want to be like him.
00:39:05.960 | So, I noticed, like these are the things, ways I don't want to be like my dad.
00:39:11.560 | They can be people you know, they can be people that you don't know.
00:39:15.660 | They can be people that you've just read about.
00:39:18.560 | Never met Meyer Rothschild.
00:39:20.460 | Don't think I ever will.
00:39:22.160 | But I can admire and say, how is it that he's doing that?
00:39:25.560 | How did he do that?
00:39:26.360 | What was it that built like this global empire?
00:39:31.360 | And then what are the pitfalls, right?
00:39:32.860 | Where was the danger of building that global empire?
00:39:35.760 | Where did things go wrong?
00:39:38.460 | But you can use and associate with people the things that you personally love, you personally dream about.
00:39:48.360 | I think people are the most powerful, but they're not the only thing.
00:39:52.060 | Maybe you don't really associate with people.
00:39:53.560 | Well, I think in today's world, one of the benefits we have is to learn more about lifestyles than we've ever known before.
00:40:02.160 | So, how else can you dream?
00:40:03.760 | Well, expose yourself to diversity of lifestyles.
00:40:09.360 | Some people simply don't have the ability to imagine earning their living with anything except a 40-hour week job.
00:40:19.160 | 40-hour week jobs are great.
00:40:21.860 | Awesome.
00:40:22.260 | They give you a really cool lifestyle.
00:40:24.260 | But they're not the only way to make a living.
00:40:27.760 | So, expose yourself to the ways that other people live.
00:40:31.960 | To me, I think that this has been the most powerful thing that you see right now happening in the fire movement.
00:40:38.360 | You see that people are being exposed to other lifestyles, and they're saying, "Wait a second.
00:40:44.660 | I didn't know I could choose."
00:40:47.260 | The information has been out there for a long time.
00:40:50.160 | I have books written back in the '70s about the conserver lifestyle and basically frugality, extreme frugality, etc.
00:40:57.260 | But those books were either on specialized mailing lists or maybe there was a copy at your local library.
00:41:03.760 | Many people would never go to a library.
00:41:07.360 | You would kind of have to come across it.
00:41:09.360 | You have to get yourself a Lumpenamics catalog or something like that, where all of a sudden you find these weird books.
00:41:16.160 | And you had to be the kind of person who's willing to pay money and get the weird books and read them and think, "Wow, I could live this other lifestyle."
00:41:22.660 | But what's happening is discoverability of alternative lifestyles is much easier today than it has ever been before.
00:41:31.260 | And so you see people who can come across information.
00:41:35.560 | I have a friend of mine who's talking about building a tiny house.
00:41:39.560 | You can go into any corner and all of a sudden, "Wow, wait a second.
00:41:42.260 | There's a whole tiny house community or a shed-to-house community or an RV-living community or a boat-living community."
00:41:49.860 | And it's so simple now to expose yourself to something that you're interested in and then to have really good, high-quality content that it can help you to make a picture of something.
00:42:00.560 | It can help you to see something that you didn't previously imagine.
00:42:05.060 | Last couple years ago, my wife and I traveled full-time living in an RV.
00:42:10.960 | I've dreamed and been interested in weird, funky stuff for a long time.
00:42:16.460 | So for me, the concept of living in an RV was a totally normal concept.
00:42:20.260 | My wife wasn't exactly on the same page.
00:42:23.660 | She didn't really—she'd never thought of going and living in an RV.
00:42:26.760 | They had an RV when they were little, went on short trips, and that was it.
00:42:30.060 | And so the idea of leaving your house and going full-time on the road and doing slow travel and whatnot was not something that she was accustomed to thinking about.
00:42:37.560 | It sounded a little bit crazy.
00:42:39.160 | So what I did was I was like—we started watching YouTube videos, right?
00:42:42.660 | We found a couple of YouTube channels that we liked of people living that way.
00:42:45.860 | And she could start to see, "Okay, well, I see that these are kind of normal people.
00:42:49.860 | They're not too weird.
00:42:51.060 | These are normal people that are living in this way.
00:42:53.460 | Okay, I guess some people do this.
00:42:55.360 | I guess it's not so weird."
00:42:56.960 | Now, it was never her dream.
00:42:59.560 | It wasn't something that she dreamed about, but it became something where she could see.
00:43:03.960 | She could believe it.
00:43:04.860 | She could see that, okay, it's not too crazy to go and to do that, to live like that, and see it.
00:43:10.860 | So you can do the same thing with your dreams.
00:43:13.360 | If you think you have a dream in a certain direction, explore it a little bit, and then you'll start to see, "Maybe I do.
00:43:19.860 | Maybe I don't.
00:43:21.760 | I'm kind of crossing over here into the planning."
00:43:25.260 | But my point is, if you can find somebody doing it on YouTube, you can find someone living in a certain way, talking about it, then you can consider whether that might be a dream for you.
00:43:39.160 | Might be a dream that you want, and then you pursue it more vigorously.
00:43:44.260 | Might be a dream that you don't, and then you leave it and move on.
00:43:52.360 | I think one of the most valuable things about my using the term of dream is that there's no commitment to a dream, necessarily.
00:43:59.460 | At some point in time, if you take a dream and you say, "I'm going to commit to this," and start putting a plan and whatnot, now you have some accountability.
00:44:05.760 | But with a dream, you don't have much accountability.
00:44:08.660 | Is that a bad thing?
00:44:09.960 | Maybe.
00:44:10.760 | But I'm more inclined to say, "Not really," because you can just let it go.
00:44:15.360 | It's fun to dream, but you don't have to accomplish all your dreams to get all the fun about them.
00:44:19.760 | And sometimes you just say, "I'd like to do this."
00:44:21.860 | You play around with it for a while in your head, and then you decide, "No, it was fun to think about, but I don't think I actually want to play around with it."
00:44:29.860 | So maybe there's not people that you associate with, but go and find a book that has inspired you.
00:44:35.660 | Unwalled and Pond has inspired many, many people into a minimalist lifestyle long before becoming minimalist became a website.
00:44:46.260 | This is not new.
00:44:47.560 | This just has—we have newer ways of sharing the information, sharing the ideas.
00:44:54.260 | Charles Long was writing about the conserver lifestyle probably before Mr. Money Mustache was born.
00:45:01.260 | It's not new.
00:45:01.760 | He didn't do anything new.
00:45:03.460 | Just popularized it with a different voice, different method of communication, different means of communication, etc.
00:45:09.260 | There's nothing fundamentally new about what I'm talking about here.
00:45:13.160 | It's just my voice, my take, and a slightly different slant on things.
00:45:18.260 | There's nothing new under the sun in any of this stuff.
00:45:25.260 | Find people who inspire you.
00:45:27.460 | Find things that inspire you.
00:45:30.460 | Surround yourself with those things and work to see a dream in your head.
00:45:37.860 | Don't be scared to start where you are with what you care about.
00:45:42.860 | If you are inspired by a materialist consumption item, right?
00:45:48.160 | I used to think I had a dream to have a Harley-Davidson Road King.
00:45:52.060 | I used to think that that was my dream, and I would put it on as a picture and look at the pictures.
00:45:57.260 | I'd put it as my screen saver on my computer so that I could have the images before me.
00:46:01.860 | I thought, "This is what I want."
00:46:03.560 | That was fine for a time.
00:46:05.660 | It was totally fine.
00:46:08.260 | Then in time, I realized, "Okay, this is fun. I like riding."
00:46:11.460 | I went and rented a black Harley-Davidson Road King from the Harley dealership one time.
00:46:15.860 | I rode it all weekend with a buddy of mine.
00:46:17.660 | I was like, "That was awesome. That was really cool, and I love that bike.
00:46:22.960 | I don't need to own one."
00:46:26.960 | Now my dreams are much more about freedom of time,
00:46:29.260 | but there will be a time, I don't know, 10 years from now, where they'll be totally different.
00:46:32.660 | In fact, they've already changed dramatically.
00:46:35.060 | That Tom Clancy dream, that vision of a guy with his laptop,
00:46:39.760 | I'll tell you the story of when the first time I achieved it.
00:46:42.060 | A few years into a financial advisor, a friend of mine started a company.
00:46:46.160 | I didn't really love being a financial advisor.
00:46:48.060 | I was struggling with certain things about it.
00:46:49.660 | I was doing okay, but I hadn't kind of broken through.
00:46:52.860 | My friend started a company, and he wanted to hire me.
00:46:58.060 | I saw an opportunity where I could help him and work for his company.
00:47:01.360 | I thought, "You know what? I'm going to go work for his company."
00:47:03.660 | I quit my company.
00:47:05.560 | I didn't actually fully finish the paperwork,
00:47:07.760 | but I told my boss I was quitting, and my boss was like, "All right, let's just see."
00:47:10.860 | I disappeared. I didn't come into the office for a couple weeks, basically.
00:47:14.460 | I went, and I started working for my friend.
00:47:17.460 | I remember I would sit in front of my laptop, and I would go to Starbucks,
00:47:22.860 | and I would go to his house.
00:47:26.360 | I was single at the time, and I would sit in front of my laptop.
00:47:29.760 | I thought, "Oh, here's this dream. I don't have to go to meetings anymore.
00:47:33.260 | I don't have to go to meetings anymore. I don't have to go anywhere.
00:47:37.360 | All I need to do is be right here and work from my laptop."
00:47:43.260 | I quickly realized, "I don't like this. This is lonely."
00:47:47.360 | This is no fun.
00:47:49.160 | All around the world, there are millions of people who've always dreamed about working from home,
00:47:53.160 | who are finding out that it's not as great as I thought it was going to be.
00:47:56.660 | I miss the office. I miss my friends. I miss the water-cooler conversation.
00:48:05.160 | So, you can have a dream, and then you take steps towards it,
00:48:09.060 | and you realize, "This wasn't quite right."
00:48:12.560 | And that's valuable. That's healthy.
00:48:14.760 | And so, continuing the point, I went back to the financial advisor business.
00:48:17.860 | Then, later on, I wound up closing that business, and I started Radical Personal Finance.
00:48:21.860 | One of the things I've learned about Radical Personal Finance is I miss the contact with the physical world.
00:48:26.960 | I miss the physical office. I miss the employees. I miss having co-workers.
00:48:30.860 | I miss having that structure. I miss it a lot.
00:48:34.360 | I love having the freedom, but I miss a lot of things about that.
00:48:37.960 | And so, in the future, I think I'll give up some of the freedom that I currently enjoy
00:48:42.660 | because I've lived that, right? I don't mind a structure.
00:48:46.760 | I work a very structured day. I work on a structured hour and whatnot.
00:48:51.360 | A four-hour workweek was a dream at one point. It's not anymore.
00:48:54.460 | And so, things will change. And so, stay open to it is my point. Stay open to it.
00:48:58.160 | Remember, you're just dreaming. You don't have to be committed to anything.
00:49:01.260 | You don't have to set it as a goal. You don't have to be scared of anything.
00:49:03.960 | If you want to toss one dream out and change, you can do it on the fly.
00:49:08.360 | These things are not set in stone. At the beginning of the year, 2020,
00:49:13.260 | one of my goals was to—one of the goals was I wanted to pass a Spanish exam.
00:49:18.860 | I wanted to sit for the DELE C2 Spanish exam.
00:49:21.460 | It was just basically a way to force myself to study my Spanish
00:49:24.760 | and get myself to a really high level and pass this exam.
00:49:27.760 | I didn't need the exam. I didn't need the certification for anything.
00:49:30.960 | Just, I was like, "Okay, this will give me external proof, and it'll keep me focused."
00:49:35.260 | So, I got six months into the year, and then, you know, COVID was happening.
00:49:39.060 | And then, all the exams got canceled. And it just—everything got canceled.
00:49:46.160 | So, I quit. I quit studying Spanish, and I started studying French instead.
00:49:49.560 | And I've had so much fun studying French. It's been awesome. It's been really, really fun.
00:49:56.060 | What's the point? The point is that you can toss a goal out at any point in time.
00:50:00.560 | A goal is just a way to articulate something that,
00:50:02.960 | "Hey, I think this would be fun. I want to work in this direction."
00:50:05.360 | And you can pivot on a dime. You can change.
00:50:09.660 | You don't have to justify it to anybody. You don't have to tell anybody that you've done it.
00:50:13.660 | You just say, "All right, that's it." All I did, I pulled open my goals list.
00:50:17.760 | I stopped writing it when I write my goals down, and I pulled open my goals list.
00:50:20.760 | I highlighted, you know, "Pass Spanish C2 exam," and I hit delete.
00:50:26.260 | Goal gone. New exam. Learn French. Read a million words in French.
00:50:31.360 | Right? That was my goal. Read a million words in French.
00:50:34.360 | New goal. Done. You can pivot on a dime.
00:50:37.560 | So the relationship between dreams and goals, a little bit funny, right? A little bit hazy.
00:50:42.260 | You can do the same thing with your dreams. You can say, "That's no longer my dream.
00:50:46.160 | That's not what I want to do." For me, I find this incredibly liberating.
00:50:51.860 | The dreams that you had at 13 years old, you should pay attention to.
00:50:56.560 | But you should not be imprisoned to. You don't have to fulfill your childhood dreams.
00:51:02.460 | They may have been things that you thought were cool as a child,
00:51:05.960 | that you now recognize, "Those things aren't important to me. I've changed."
00:51:10.860 | You should pay attention to them, but not be imprisoned to them.
00:51:15.160 | And your dreams today should probably not be your dreams 10 years from now,
00:51:20.960 | because you're going to change.
00:51:23.760 | But that process of changing systematically is a process that will keep you excited
00:51:28.260 | and enthusiastic with life. If I come up to you and say,
00:51:32.360 | "What are you dreaming about right now? What are you working towards?"
00:51:35.760 | I think you should have something that you say. It doesn't have to be impressive to me.
00:51:40.860 | One guy says, "Well, I'm working towards being a millionaire." Great.
00:51:44.260 | Another guy says, "I'm working on, you know, running more per week."
00:51:48.260 | I've always struggled personally with like the hobby question.
00:51:50.160 | People say, "What do you like to do for a hobby?" I'm like, "Well, I got boring hobbies, right? I read."
00:51:55.260 | That's my hobby. It doesn't sound as cool as I do, you know, horseback art,
00:51:59.960 | Japanese archery where I hang upside down on a horse and shoot an arrow.
00:52:03.260 | Maybe that's cooler than reading, but that's not my hobby. I read.
00:52:07.060 | So, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you choose and what I choose.
00:52:11.060 | The only thing is that you have some idea about where you're going towards.
00:52:14.460 | So, you feel like you're getting, you have some purpose, some direction, some vision.
00:52:21.060 | 51 minutes and 50 seconds in and I haven't said anything about money.
00:52:23.960 | Why is this on a financial show? Well, partly because it's important,
00:52:29.260 | but most importantly because it guides your finances. It directs your finances.
00:52:35.660 | It gives you a vision and it allows you to connect what you're doing now versus what you do later.
00:52:45.860 | Traveling to the United States next week.
00:52:48.760 | When I go to the United States, I buy stuff because it's cheap in the United States.
00:52:52.960 | So, I buy stuff. So, I like, I sit down and I make all these orders.
00:52:57.560 | I just bought about $500 or $550 worth of books for my children, French books.
00:53:07.160 | Because one of my dreams, like I want my children to be multilingual.
00:53:09.560 | I've shared on this show a little bit about, a little bit about kind of the success
00:53:15.660 | we've had teaching our children Spanish. Now, I think, man,
00:53:18.360 | I think I've got a really good system here. This really worked.
00:53:21.260 | It wasn't particularly painful and we had phenomenal results.
00:53:24.860 | So, now like maybe I can do this again. Maybe I can, maybe I can repeat the process.
00:53:30.860 | I'm not trying to turn my children into internet sensations,
00:53:34.360 | but I want them to be, I want them to have a lot of capabilities.
00:53:38.760 | I'd like them to be multilingual. I think I stumbled upon a pretty decent methodology
00:53:43.760 | and now I'm thinking, well, let me test it again and see if it works.
00:53:46.460 | Maybe there is, maybe I could do it better the second time around.
00:53:49.860 | So, I bought like $550 worth of graded readers for French that I'm going to use with my children
00:53:55.160 | and teach them French. I think, you know, maybe I'll toss it out in a couple months,
00:53:58.360 | but that's my plan. That's a lot of money to spend on books.
00:54:02.360 | That's a lot of money to spend on books all at once.
00:54:06.760 | Why did I do it? Well, because I popped open my goals list, my dream list.
00:54:11.560 | I don't distinguish much. I do set goals with specific times,
00:54:15.560 | but I just write down like here are my goals.
00:54:17.460 | I have a list of, in my notes, I have a list of language goals for me
00:54:22.460 | and then for my children. And one of them says, you know, here are the languages
00:54:25.760 | I want my children to be fluent and literate in.
00:54:28.760 | And I made a list of those languages.
00:54:31.860 | And so to justify my financial decisions today,
00:54:37.860 | I go to my dreams, to my goals. And I say these are my goals and dreams.
00:54:45.360 | And here's how it connects to today's money.
00:54:49.860 | If my dream is to travel to every country in the world,
00:54:54.560 | maybe that's my dream. I love to travel. I'm like, I want to travel to every country in the world.
00:54:59.260 | Then when I have a $30,000 credit card bill for a few months of airfares
00:55:05.660 | or whatever I've booked or whatever the certain thing is,
00:55:09.460 | I don't feel bad about it. Oh, I just wish I'd put more money in my 401k.
00:55:14.460 | I look and I say, do these expenses reflect a personal dream?
00:55:19.460 | And it gives you direction for your money.
00:55:23.460 | If you have a goal of giving away a million dollars
00:55:29.660 | and you open your checkbook and you realize you don't have much money,
00:55:32.860 | you ask yourself, is it because I gave it all away?
00:55:36.060 | Or is it because I spent it all on stuff I didn't care about?
00:55:39.860 | If your dream is to give away the million dollars and you open up your checkbook
00:55:42.660 | and you have no money because you gave it all away, you're happy.
00:55:45.360 | If your dream is to give away a million dollars and you open up your checkbook
00:55:47.660 | and you have no money because you spent it without paying attention to it,
00:55:50.960 | now we got trouble. And so the purpose of goals and dreams is to guide your actions in the present
00:55:57.860 | so that you're not driven by some guy on the internet telling you,
00:56:00.860 | you shouldn't do that. You shouldn't spend so much money on travel.
00:56:03.360 | Well, this is my dream. This is what I want to do.
00:56:06.560 | If you've decided that you want to travel to every country in the world
00:56:08.960 | and that's your dream and you don't put any money in your 401k and you spend money on that,
00:56:15.560 | I personally am totally okay with it.
00:56:19.560 | You should count the cost of not having much money in your 401k, but I think it's fine.
00:56:23.960 | If your dream is to work outside on a ranch as a cowboy
00:56:27.760 | and you leave your $150,000 a year job in New York City
00:56:31.960 | and you go get a job making $40,000 a year as a cowboy, I think that's fine.
00:56:37.660 | If your dream is to make a million dollars a year and work on Wall Street
00:56:42.860 | and you leave your job as a cowboy in Wyoming and you move to New York City, I think that's fine.
00:56:47.360 | What makes it fine? What makes it fine is, this is what you want to do.
00:56:53.460 | This is what you're working towards. This is what's exciting for you.
00:56:57.660 | There's no external constraint.
00:57:00.860 | There's nobody coming, there shouldn't be anybody coming in saying, you can or can't do that.
00:57:03.960 | It's a free world, you're a free man. Live the way you want to live.
00:57:08.760 | Do what you want to do and make sure that the things you're doing on a daily basis
00:57:12.560 | are connected to the things you want to be doing.
00:57:18.860 | Because then you can get up and go to work every day with a sense of joy, a spring in your step, right?
00:57:23.360 | A sense of purpose, here, now, today.
00:57:29.060 | And you can feel good about it.
00:57:33.960 | Do you get it?
00:57:39.060 | Do you get it?
00:57:41.660 | Well, you start paying attention to your dreams.
00:57:46.760 | It's all you got to do. Pay attention.
00:57:49.460 | Cool if you write them down, awesome, right?
00:57:52.560 | Cool if you whip out that notes app in your phone and you stick them in there.
00:57:57.860 | That's what I do. Just pull out your phone, hit notes, keep a list.
00:58:04.560 | I keep one pinned. Joshua's goals and dreams, that's what it's called.
00:58:07.460 | Pinned at the top of my notes.
00:58:10.260 | Use your Apple notes or your Google notes or your standard notes or whatever you want, right?
00:58:16.560 | I use standard notes. I have it triple encrypted so no one can get into it and steal your dreams, right?
00:58:21.260 | If you're worried about other people knowing, use standard notes on your device
00:58:24.460 | and then you have it triple, you know, it's encrypted all across the board
00:58:27.360 | and zero knowledge encryption and you're good to go, right?
00:58:29.960 | No one will ever find out about your goals and dreams.
00:58:31.860 | Just pay attention to them yourself. That's the point.
00:58:35.160 | So all you got to do is pay attention.
00:58:37.560 | You don't even have to write them down.
00:58:39.760 | Better if you do, but just pay attention.
00:58:43.260 | So imagine I come along and I chat with you and I say, "What are your goals and dreams?"
00:58:48.060 | Tell me a little bit about some of the things you dream about doing in the future.
00:58:54.260 | If you lack for inspiration with anything we've talked about, let me close just a couple of journaling exercises.
00:58:59.360 | I'll give you two. These are my two favorite... three. I'll give you three.
00:59:02.160 | These are my three favorite exercises. I do these regularly. I encourage you to do them.
00:59:08.660 | When I say do them, pick a way that works for you.
00:59:11.960 | If you're a leather journal and a fountain pen and a coffee shop kind of guy, go for it.
00:59:17.860 | If you're an Apple notes app on your iPhone while you sit in the cigar shop, go for it.
00:59:22.660 | If you're a sit out by the ocean and speak into your voice recorder, go for it.
00:59:26.860 | If you're a make a video for yourself and post it on YouTube, go for it.
00:59:30.760 | Right? Whatever your thing is.
00:59:32.860 | I personally like to take myself to a nice restaurant with a nice view,
00:59:35.960 | sit down with a journal, a piece of paper, and sit and write.
00:59:41.360 | That's what I like to do. Your mileage may vary, but here are three exercises.
00:59:44.760 | Number one, make a list of 30 things you want to do,
00:59:48.860 | 30 things you want to be, and 30 things you want to have before you die.
00:59:53.560 | 30 things you want to be, do, and have before you die.
00:59:58.460 | 90 things total. Make a list of 30 things you want to be,
01:00:02.760 | 30 things you want to do, 30 things you want to have before you die.
01:00:06.760 | Don't judge them. Don't criticize them. Don't ask yourself if they're feasible.
01:00:10.860 | Just write them down. That's the first thing.
01:00:14.560 | The beauty of this one is it's a lot. You got to stretch.
01:00:19.260 | Right? Things you want to be. I want to be an accountant.
01:00:24.160 | Well, that's good for the first few. I want to be in good shape.
01:00:28.360 | That's good. But by the time you get to about number 27, 28, you got to think, right?
01:00:31.860 | I want to be compassionate. I want to be generous.
01:00:36.560 | I want to be kind. I want to be rich.
01:00:40.760 | Whatever, right? 30 things you want to be, do, and have.
01:00:43.560 | Make those lists. Do it regularly.
01:00:48.160 | Second exercise. Design your perfect day.
01:00:52.760 | Perfect day. Right? Lie down in the middle of your bed.
01:00:56.060 | Close your eyes. Turn on your voice dictation.
01:00:59.860 | And imagine yourself waking up in the morning. Just dictate to yourself
01:01:03.860 | everything that you would want your day to look like.
01:01:07.560 | You know, what's out the window? What kind of room are you in?
01:01:09.660 | What's out the window? Are there a beautiful sandy beach out the way?
01:01:12.960 | Is there a beautiful sandy beach out the window?
01:01:14.360 | Or are there beautiful snow-capped mountains? Big difference there.
01:01:18.260 | What do you do all day? What do you accomplish?
01:01:20.660 | What does your daily structure look like?
01:01:23.860 | Do you leave your house and go to an office to do something?
01:01:26.160 | Do you stay at home? What do you do?
01:01:29.460 | For me, this has always been the most powerful.
01:01:31.460 | I live almost every day today, my perfect ideal day.
01:01:36.960 | It's cool. It's really cool.
01:01:41.060 | Exactly what I close my eyes and dictate into my phone
01:01:45.160 | is basically almost exactly the way that I live every day.
01:01:48.460 | And I love it. It's awesome.
01:01:50.660 | That one has always been really easy for me
01:01:52.260 | because a lot of things that I wanted to be and do and have
01:01:54.360 | have to do with the kind of feeling that I want to have on a daily basis.
01:01:57.360 | The structure I want in my schedule.
01:01:59.360 | The, just the feelings on a daily basis.
01:02:03.260 | Final thing is always the ten. I'll give you my last two with money.
01:02:07.760 | Ten million dollar question, right?
01:02:09.760 | Your rich aunt Sally dies, leaves you ten million bucks tax-free.
01:02:14.460 | You take the money, you squeal like a little child,
01:02:17.460 | you start spending left and right,
01:02:19.460 | and you do all of the cool hedonistic stuff that you've always wanted to do.
01:02:23.160 | You buy a Ferrari, you go to Hawaii, you pay off your mom's mortgage,
01:02:26.660 | you go ahead and give away a hundred thousand dollars to the SPCA.
01:02:29.560 | Great. Done. All that stuff, done.
01:02:32.460 | Fast forward a year.
01:02:34.260 | Pretend you've got a bunch of money in the bank
01:02:36.460 | paying you a bunch of money every month in passive income.
01:02:39.060 | You don't have to work.
01:02:40.860 | It's now Monday, a day late, a year later.
01:02:43.260 | What are you going to do on that Monday? What would you do?
01:02:46.960 | Spend a whole year in your mind doing all the stuff.
01:02:50.160 | Gambling in the greatest casinos in Macau,
01:02:52.860 | you know, water skiing on Lake Mead,
01:02:56.160 | hiking all the great hikes that you want to do,
01:02:58.060 | do all your hedonistic stuff that you want to really do.
01:03:00.460 | Now come back. It's Monday, a year or two or whatever later.
01:03:04.660 | You've gotten all that stuff out of your system.
01:03:06.260 | What do you want to do on a daily basis?
01:03:08.760 | Imagine that Monday when you design your perfect day.
01:03:13.660 | Last one just simply comes down to always,
01:03:17.960 | what would you do if you knew you could never retire?
01:03:20.960 | How would you live if you knew you could never retire?
01:03:24.660 | If I said, the way that you're living now
01:03:27.760 | is the way that you're going to be living for the rest of your life.
01:03:30.360 | How would you live?
01:03:33.860 | It's always been so productive for me to think about
01:03:37.260 | because it causes me to pull back a little bit from the extremism,
01:03:41.760 | to focus on soaking up each day
01:03:44.860 | and building the kind of life that I don't want to retire from
01:03:49.460 | before I ever put a dime in a 401k.
01:03:55.160 | None of us are guaranteed tomorrow.
01:03:58.760 | Tomorrow literally does not exist.
01:04:03.360 | Yesterday literally does not exist.
01:04:07.460 | Today is all we know, this very moment, this very time.
01:04:11.860 | So anything that helps you to be more present now,
01:04:16.260 | to be more focused now, to be more energetic now,
01:04:19.160 | to be more connected now, to have a greater sense of purpose now,
01:04:24.560 | those are things that should be very, very high on your to-do list.
01:04:30.060 | Hope it's useful for you. We'll continue the series very soon.
01:04:32.560 | Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here.
01:04:35.560 | Thank you for being part of Radical Personal Finance.
01:04:38.560 | I'm so grateful for your being here.
01:04:41.860 | In closing, let me just say that I do a good amount of private consulting.
01:04:44.660 | I had a bunch of people take me up on my offer here for the end of the year.
01:04:49.460 | Booked out through February, but if you would like to talk with me,
01:04:52.660 | let's do some private consulting,
01:04:54.860 | you can book a call with me at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult.
01:05:00.760 | I'm not going to talk a lot in this particular series
01:05:04.160 | about how to make dreams a reality, although we'll talk a little bit about it next time.
01:05:07.860 | But what I do want to talk about is just say that I have yet to find a single dream
01:05:12.660 | that someone has been able to articulate to me
01:05:15.560 | that I couldn't help design a plan to accomplish in a very reasonable amount of time.
01:05:21.660 | I think that's where external input is so valuable.
01:05:25.360 | I can't dream for you and you can't dream for me.
01:05:29.460 | Our dreams are different.
01:05:31.860 | But what other people can do is they can help us to design plans
01:05:35.860 | that make those dreams a reality.
01:05:38.160 | And I have found again and again and again
01:05:42.360 | that I'm very good at helping people do that
01:05:46.160 | and that at some of the best time and money,
01:05:48.760 | people say that they invest in their lives.
01:05:51.360 | I want to encourage you very strongly to please consider that.
01:05:57.860 | If you'd like to book a consultation with me, go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult.
01:06:01.460 | RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult and you can do it there.
01:06:04.960 | Thank you very much.
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