2023-09-20_Build_Texture_Into_Your_Future
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00:00:27.300 | Guess what's back?
00:00:32.300 | ♪
00:00:48.300 | Let's see if I still have my timing.
00:00:50.300 | 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.
00:00:56.300 | Now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:59.300 | My name is Joshua Sheets. I am your host.
00:01:01.300 | And on today's podcast, I guess I'll tell you the story of what happened to the music.
00:01:08.300 | And I'll also tell you about the importance of phases and stages in life.
00:01:13.300 | ♪
00:01:20.300 | I was recently shamed by a listener. That's not right.
00:01:24.300 | The listener said, "Joshua, I really miss the music."
00:01:26.300 | And I made another effort after a long saga with the missing music to go and find the file.
00:01:32.300 | The reality of why the music has been away for a while.
00:01:36.300 | And for new listeners who may not know, this is the song that I used to introduce probably 600 episodes of Radical Personal Finance.
00:01:43.300 | Something like that.
00:01:44.300 | And what happened was that over the years, I had bought this piece of music.
00:01:49.300 | And I had several backup files from when I first bought it.
00:01:52.300 | And I would put it on my devices and use it as kind of the intro music, etc.
00:01:56.300 | And then at one point in time, I had swapped out various devices.
00:02:01.300 | And I had wiped the card and I went to go put it back on the device.
00:02:05.300 | And it disappeared from a computer.
00:02:06.300 | To this day, I don't know how it disappeared.
00:02:08.300 | Because I had so many copies of it. I had it stored in various formats.
00:02:11.300 | It's a mystery to me of where it disappeared to.
00:02:13.300 | But I searched and searched. Couldn't find it.
00:02:15.300 | So I said, "No problem. I'll just go and get it off of my backup hard drive."
00:02:18.300 | Well, lo and behold, my backup hard drive was inaccessible to me.
00:02:22.300 | Because I made myself a beautiful, enormous, fancy password that then I forgot.
00:02:29.300 | And I didn't write it down.
00:02:32.300 | Stupid security issues and whatnot.
00:02:34.300 | So I lost access to that hard drive.
00:02:36.300 | And of course, it was quintuple encrypted and inaccessible, etc.
00:02:40.300 | So no problem. I'll just get it off of another hard drive.
00:02:44.300 | Well, the problem is all the other backup hard drives were in another country.
00:02:47.300 | So I don't even have them.
00:02:49.300 | So I just didn't have it, didn't have it.
00:02:50.300 | And I thought, "Well, I'll just go to the website where I got it originally."
00:02:52.300 | Which is danosongs.com
00:02:55.300 | But Dano, of course, has every song on the website except for my song.
00:03:00.300 | So I wrote to him and I said, "Can I have a copy of it?"
00:03:03.300 | Didn't hear back.
00:03:04.300 | "No problem."
00:03:05.300 | "Well, fine."
00:03:06.300 | I just didn't find it.
00:03:07.300 | Well, anyway, after the listener saying that I really like the song and I miss it,
00:03:12.300 | I made another effort and I have found the song again.
00:03:15.300 | I don't have a high-fidelity version of it, unfortunately.
00:03:18.300 | So it's a little bit muddy and not quite as crisp as the original beautiful Dano songs version.
00:03:24.300 | But that's okay.
00:03:25.300 | I'm glad to have it back.
00:03:26.300 | And I will play it from time to time.
00:03:29.300 | Part of the reason I stopped playing it was just out of a desire to get to the point.
00:03:33.300 | I think with any kind of audio or any kind of video, etc., you need to get to the point.
00:03:38.300 | You have a little bit more time with a podcast, especially a long-running podcast,
00:03:41.300 | but still you've got to get to the point.
00:03:43.300 | And so having a less than 10-second intro is a good way of getting to the point.
00:03:47.300 | And even if I do an ad or something at the beginning, generally within 45 to 60 seconds,
00:03:51.300 | I'm right into the meat of the content.
00:03:53.300 | And in line with that, let's move into the point of today's show.
00:03:58.300 | On today's podcast, I want to talk to you about the phases of life.
00:04:03.300 | And I'm going to do this in the context of talking about it with regard to marriage.
00:04:07.300 | But this is something that's applicable to those who are married, who have children,
00:04:10.300 | and those who do not and are not.
00:04:13.300 | Because this is something that is a lot easier for married people with children to look forward to,
00:04:20.300 | but it is something that is vital for the unmarried to also integrate into their lives.
00:04:28.300 | And so I want to share with you why I'm talking about this first.
00:04:34.300 | As I introduced in a podcast last week, I want to talk about marriage.
00:04:38.300 | Because marriage is core to finance.
00:04:41.300 | I want to tackle a whole slew of financial-related questions and issues related to marriage,
00:04:47.300 | how to get a great deal on an engagement ring, and how much money you should spend on it,
00:04:51.300 | how you should spend on a wedding, et cetera.
00:04:53.300 | But when you think about the topic of marriage, what you will see is that it is intertwined in probably not 80% of financial decisions,
00:05:03.300 | certainly more than 50% of financial decisions.
00:05:08.300 | I'm going to estimate 67.34% of financial decisions involve marriage in some way.
00:05:16.300 | Just go through something like the CFP curriculum, and what you will see is that so many decisions are impacted primarily based upon marriage.
00:05:25.300 | For example, how big of an emergency fund does a married couple need?
00:05:31.300 | Well, generally three months if both spouses are working, versus a single person, generally six months.
00:05:38.300 | What tax benefits do we have and what tax rules?
00:05:41.300 | Well, there's a whole set of tax rules for married couples filing jointly, and they're different than single couples.
00:05:46.300 | What about insurance planning?
00:05:49.300 | Well, if you're married and have children, you probably need to get life insurance.
00:05:53.300 | If you're single, you probably don't.
00:05:55.300 | If you need disability income insurance, well, if you're married, you probably should have it,
00:05:59.300 | but it's not as fundamental as if you're single and you're all on your own.
00:06:03.300 | What about estate planning?
00:06:04.300 | Well, if you're married, you have a whole path you're going to go down and a whole set of goals that you're going to pursue
00:06:10.300 | that you're not going to pursue if you're single.
00:06:12.300 | What about children?
00:06:13.300 | A huge portion of financial planning is focused around providing for children in every way, shape, and form.
00:06:21.300 | And so the decision to marry is fundamental to financial planning, but it goes even more than that.
00:06:28.300 | The decision to marry and have children is fundamental to money, to how much money you make.
00:06:34.300 | We know that married people earn more than unmarried people, to how much money you keep.
00:06:38.300 | We know that married people not only are richer on average than unmarried people,
00:06:44.300 | but even married couples of the same age as cohabitating couples tend to have, I think it's three to four times as much net worth,
00:06:53.300 | three to four times higher net worth of a married couple rather than a cohabitating couple.
00:06:58.300 | And so these decisions are fundamental, but they're also fundamental at the things that people are most scared about.
00:07:04.300 | The divorce and losing half your money in a divorce and everything associated with that is a huge deal.
00:07:11.300 | And so I'm very concerned because not only do we need good guidance on these issues,
00:07:17.300 | but I see a present catastrophe in human relationships.
00:07:23.300 | Those of us who have been able to figure out how to develop and maintain a healthy, normal relationship,
00:07:31.300 | I think we consider ourselves to be fairly lucky and grateful for that.
00:07:38.300 | Just last night, my wife was telling me about close friends of hers growing up, seemingly wonderful couples,
00:07:44.300 | just flipped on social media and found out that they were divorced and divorcing.
00:07:48.300 | Divorced, I guess, it's been a while now. She goes on social media once a year.
00:07:52.300 | So the point is, and it's not only, by the way, let me just go one more minute on this.
00:07:57.300 | It's not only divorce and various issues associated with that, but it goes so much deeper.
00:08:03.300 | Right now we're in a crisis of relationship formation.
00:08:08.300 | We're in a genuine crisis of relationship formation among young men and women.
00:08:14.300 | To say nothing at all of marriage, to say nothing at all of children.
00:08:19.300 | We are in a crisis of relationship formation.
00:08:24.300 | And it is a deep, deep burden on our young people, and it is something that we have to step in and we have to fix.
00:08:33.300 | We, you and I, must be leaders in our society to discuss these issues, to identify potential solutions to these issues,
00:08:43.300 | and then to bring in those solutions to those issues and give guidance and counsel to our younger generation
00:08:51.300 | so that our younger generation is able to form successful relationships,
00:08:57.300 | is able to take those relationships into and through marriage, and is able to birth children into happy, stable, connected, loving families.
00:09:07.300 | The future of our civilization depends upon it.
00:09:10.300 | And so I feel a great burden to talk about these subjects most focusedly in the manner in which they connect with financial planning.
00:09:20.300 | So that's why I'm doing this series.
00:09:22.300 | I haven't known where to start over the last couple of weeks, just thinking, "Okay, where do I start? What's the first show?"
00:09:28.300 | And so the mic's been silent because I didn't know where to start.
00:09:31.300 | So today I decided just to start in the middle.
00:09:33.300 | It's always where you start when you don't know where to start.
00:09:36.300 | It's just start in the middle and then go back and fill in the beginning and fill in the end.
00:09:39.300 | And the middle that I have chosen to start with has to do with this.
00:09:43.300 | I want to give one among many benefits and one among many reasons for people to consider being married and having children.
00:09:52.300 | And that is simply this.
00:09:55.300 | When you look forward in your life and you look back on your life, your children will give you a wonderful set of automatic goals, benchmarks, and milestones that will break up the monotony of your life.
00:10:21.300 | I have a personal theory and a personal goal.
00:10:24.300 | My personal goal is that I want to remember my life and I want all those that I love to remember their lives.
00:10:32.300 | And I want to be a catalyst in building those memories.
00:10:36.300 | My theory about memory is that memory is enhanced by emotion and variety.
00:10:44.300 | If we do the same thing again and again and again and again and there's little to no variety in the event and there's little to no emotion in the event, then all of the events of that day or that week or that month or that year will be over time systematically forgotten.
00:11:04.300 | And so we want to incorporate as much emotion and as much variety into our lives as is possible.
00:11:12.300 | This is good for our brains.
00:11:14.300 | We should, you know, if we always brush our teeth with your right hand, regularly you should switch to your left hand.
00:11:18.300 | If you always go the same route to work, sometimes you should take a different route.
00:11:22.300 | We want to incorporate variety into our lives on a daily basis.
00:11:26.300 | But we also want to incorporate this intentionally into the big events of life.
00:11:32.300 | We want to think about the big events and how we can make them peak experiences.
00:11:37.300 | And so I want to be a catalyst for this in my own life and in the lives of those that I love, bringing in variety.
00:11:43.300 | And again, this can be done just by doing something out of the ordinary.
00:11:47.300 | If you always go to your parents' house for dinner on Tuesday evening, then go on Tuesday evening, but this time bring your mom an enormous bouquet of flowers.
00:11:54.300 | Or if you always go to an Italian restaurant on the weekends, then go to a restaurant where you sit on the floor and eat with your hands or eat your sandwiches on a boat.
00:12:05.300 | You know, just anything you can do will help to remember things.
00:12:09.300 | At the end of our life, our memories, both in our minds as well as our memories that are encapsulated in the bodies and the experiences of others that we have impacted in our lives, is basically what we are going to have.
00:12:22.300 | That's it. Everything else is dust and to dust it returns.
00:12:26.300 | So in order to do this, in order to build a life of satisfaction, we want to incorporate variety into our life.
00:12:34.300 | Now that variety and change is something that we can and should plan for in advance.
00:12:46.300 | And we can do this in every aspect of our life.
00:12:49.300 | We can do this in our physical form.
00:12:52.300 | We can do this in our sport life.
00:12:54.300 | We can do this in our relationships.
00:12:55.300 | We can do this in our business.
00:12:57.300 | One of my favorite things personally about being an entrepreneur is that I have control over how I spend my time and I don't have to make big decisions.
00:13:07.300 | I've always been inspired by the idea that if I change 10% of my life per year, 10% of my work life, 10% of my business per year, then over the course of a decade I'll wind up living an entirely new and different life.
00:13:22.300 | I'll wind up with an entirely new and different business.
00:13:26.300 | This has been meaningful to me as I reflect back on a decade of radical personal finance and the work that I have done.
00:13:32.300 | And I am continuing to do radical personal finance, but it's not been my 100% focus along the way.
00:13:39.300 | I've had other things that I've worked on and that has led to a different life today than I had 10 years ago, which I'm very grateful for.
00:13:45.300 | So we can do this in business.
00:13:47.300 | We can do this in money.
00:13:48.300 | We can think about those stages of life and what our milestones and our benchmarks are along the way.
00:13:56.300 | But what's very difficult is what to do when you are a single man or a single woman or even a married couple without children and you have been highly successful at life and you no longer have to do anything.
00:14:20.300 | What do you do when you reach that point? What do you do when you retire at 35 with millions and millions of dollars in the bank and no need to make more money?
00:14:31.300 | When you look forward and life has very little texture to it.
00:14:39.300 | Now if that is you, I want to coach you. I want to tell you that you can insert texture into your life and you should so do.
00:14:50.300 | You should think about, "Okay, I'm 35 years old. I may have six decades remaining.
00:14:57.300 | So with those six decades, I need to make a plan for decade number one, decade number two, decade number three, decade number four, decade number five, and decade number six."
00:15:05.300 | It's wonderful that I've achieved this success at an early age, but I can't just have a sea of sameness out in my future.
00:15:12.300 | Otherwise, I don't have anything to pull me forward into the future.
00:15:16.300 | One of the maxims that I live by is that your future must always be bigger than your past.
00:15:21.300 | Your future must always be bigger than your past. It needs to be bigger and more exciting.
00:15:25.300 | And so you have to insert variety and texture and you can do that in your activities, in your business life, etc.
00:15:33.300 | But here's what's cool. What about the rest of us who may not be so accomplished?
00:15:44.300 | Being a parent is something that automatically gives you texture and variety to your life.
00:15:54.300 | And while that's not the only benefit of having children, when I think about it, it's an enormous benefit.
00:16:02.300 | It is fundamental to the experience of humanity to desire to have children and then to enjoy the different stages of your life as associated with those children.
00:16:15.300 | And if you don't have that, you miss out on a whole kind of automatic set of goals and of potential satisfaction.
00:16:25.300 | Also the risk for trial and trauma and difficulty and frustration, but a whole set of goals and a whole set of things that you can look forward to.
00:16:34.300 | What's so interesting to me is that ideally these two things can and should go together.
00:16:41.300 | I don't think that you have to choose in life one or the other. That's a false choice.
00:16:47.300 | Either I'm going to be really great at business or I'm going to get married and have children.
00:16:51.300 | But what we're finding is that many of our fellow citizens are making a choice to choose one or the other or to deal with things in a linear format.
00:17:05.300 | And so one of the big fundamental problems that we're facing in the population problems, potential crisis,
00:17:14.300 | I try to be careful with that word crisis, but I do think it's apt here in population, is that people are not having enough children to sustain and grow our cultures.
00:17:24.300 | And one reason that they're not having children is that we have made life decisions linear.
00:17:36.300 | With the separation of natural sexual urges from marriage, that separation enabled by contraception,
00:17:47.300 | with that separation we have made family formation optional.
00:17:53.300 | And due to its optionality we have imposed a significant set of goals and requirements on our young people that they have to be successful in their careers.
00:18:07.300 | And they have to be successful financially. And they have to be financially free in some way, shape or form in order for them to form families.
00:18:17.300 | And this has pushed the average age of marriage very far back and made it entirely optional.
00:18:25.300 | And so people are often financially successful, have great jobs, great careers, etc.
00:18:31.300 | And yet then they're not able to form families for a variety of reasons and they're not able to enjoy that other aspect of life.
00:18:41.300 | Now, from time immemorial, human beings, due to their natural urge to be with the one that they love and to procreate,
00:18:52.300 | throughout history human beings have borne these things forward at the same time.
00:19:00.300 | They have had children and moved into a starter house and enjoyed the stages of life of moving up.
00:19:07.300 | But our modern society has stripped away so many of those pleasures in favor of money, money, money, money. More money. More money. More career success, more career success.
00:19:19.200 | And it doesn't seem to me that we have done a very good job of showing the vague emptiness that occurs if you don't bear these things forward together.
00:19:35.300 | This is why married people and people who have children have an enormous advantage.
00:19:44.300 | Because they can look forward and there's always something to look forward to due to simply natural family formation and natural reproductive cycles.
00:19:55.300 | I myself keep a chart. I look at it every day. And in that chart I lay out the decades of my life.
00:20:00.300 | This is something that I didn't used to do. I started doing it a number of years ago though and it's been something that's been really helpful to me.
00:20:05.300 | And it's part of my really big focus on trying to say how do I make my future bigger than my past.
00:20:11.300 | And it started with kind of the next few years which I could see and what I want to accomplish in the next few years.
00:20:16.300 | But as my wife and I got out of baby mode where we're just dealing with little babies all the time and we started to deal with actual human beings that we can interact with and relate with in some way.
00:20:24.300 | Then I started to be very very conscious of the time bound nature of things.
00:20:29.300 | And so I started laying out my charts. And so on my charts I show the decade of my life.
00:20:33.300 | I have the ages of my children at certain times.
00:20:35.300 | And what is really cool about that is as I look forward into the future on those goal setting charts, on that timeline, on that visioning that I do.
00:20:46.300 | There's never not something to look forward to.
00:20:51.300 | There's always a change.
00:20:56.300 | My wife and I can look back on baby mode and say that was what babies were like.
00:21:01.300 | But then we can look forward to high school graduation, teenagers.
00:21:05.300 | What's it going to be like? How exciting is it going to be to interact with our teenage children when they're somewhat responsible and yet still need us?
00:21:12.300 | And then again the series of graduations and excitement of people getting their jobs and building their careers and getting married and grandchildren and grandchildren's graduation and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.
00:21:24.300 | You look forward to the decades and you imagine what it's like.
00:21:28.300 | And it brings this incredible joy to thinking about the future.
00:21:32.300 | And that joy runs alongside all of the other joys of business success and world domination that ideally will be a part of your and my future.
00:21:43.300 | But they don't have to be in conflict.
00:21:46.300 | They do affect one another but they don't have to be in conflict.
00:21:49.300 | You don't have to choose. You can have them both.
00:21:51.300 | I want to speak carefully but candidly.
00:21:55.300 | I feel a great sympathy for people who don't have a full experience of life.
00:22:06.300 | And I believe that if you narrow your ambitions exclusively to the financial, it will seem to you in the shortness of time that you have won because your lifestyle will be easier.
00:22:23.300 | You will have more time to work.
00:22:29.300 | You'll probably make more money in the short term.
00:22:32.300 | You can have full control over that money.
00:22:34.300 | You don't have to interact with anybody, etc.
00:22:37.300 | You can just decide what you want to do.
00:22:39.300 | But if you pull it back and you look over the course of your entire lifetime, you will want all of those non-financial things as well.
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00:23:26.300 | But you have to make your decisions early.
00:23:32.300 | That's what's so hard about it.
00:23:34.300 | Maybe you don't have to make them as early as you once did.
00:23:37.300 | A couple of years ago, I was at a conference and I heard Tony Robbins speak.
00:23:41.300 | He shared that he and his third, second wife, third wife, second, I don't know.
00:23:46.300 | He and his wife Sage had just welcomed a baby and I looked it up and I think he's 60 years old, 61 years old.
00:23:53.300 | And so here he was, he already has three adopted children, one biological, so this was his fifth child.
00:24:01.300 | But here he was at 61 years old, starting over again with a baby.
00:24:05.300 | And more power to him.
00:24:08.300 | I get concerned with the morality of surrogacy and whatnot, but a friend, okay, fine, you know, wonderful that they can do that.
00:24:15.300 | And I thought, isn't it incredible to be, wouldn't it be incredible to be 60 years old and have all of the resources, all of the everything and be able to go through that again?
00:24:26.300 | I've watched that a lot with friends and people who have gotten divorced and then formed a new family and started over again, that they go through the experience in a different way.
00:24:36.300 | I think that's not the ideal.
00:24:38.300 | The ideal is that you should enjoy that at a certain point in your life and then enjoy that with your grandchildren.
00:24:43.300 | That's the proper way.
00:24:44.300 | There's something a little strange when we go the other directions.
00:24:47.300 | But the point is that we can see that it adds texture and variety to life.
00:24:53.300 | And you want that texture and variety in your life.
00:24:55.300 | You want that joy.
00:24:56.300 | You want that, those Christmases surrounded by your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren.
00:25:02.300 | You want more of that in your life and it makes life planning and life anticipation simpler and more straightforward.
00:25:10.300 | I've been on something of a biography spree over this past couple of years.
00:25:15.300 | And I want to encourage you to read some biographies and consider the lives and lifestyles of people who have gone before you.
00:25:23.300 | Because a biography, especially about someone who's dead and gone, is a really neat way for you to test your own thinking.
00:25:30.300 | But a couple of years ago I read the biography of Steve Jobs and the Isaacson biography.
00:25:34.300 | And it really impacted me because I thought he did a great job of bringing out the variety of experience that Jobs had and kind of who he was, etc.
00:25:44.300 | But here was this guy who was completely brilliant and yet you reflect on his life and it seemed like with all of his brilliance and all of his financial creation,
00:26:03.300 | the incredible companies that he began, all of his accomplishments, etc.
00:26:07.300 | Wouldn't it have been so much more fulfilling if he were surrounded by his children and his grandchildren instead of the very empty personal life that he wound up having?
00:26:23.300 | And you compare a biography of him to...what name should I cite?
00:26:32.300 | Maybe Rich DeVos? Rich DeVos, the founder of Amway. I was super interested.
00:26:38.300 | Last year I found some reports of...I found Rich DeVos, one of his grandsons, who had spent a year basically traveling around the world on a boat with some of his buddies.
00:26:50.300 | And I was fascinated to hear his stories and whatnot.
00:26:53.300 | And I imagined...I don't remember when this was, I think it was when his grandfather was still alive, but I imagined the joy that that grandfather felt of seeing his young grandson go off around the world on a global expedition.
00:27:05.300 | And I thought, how much more satisfying is it to be a billionaire and see those that you love while you're alive able to enjoy the fruits of your labor?
00:27:15.300 | Isn't that more satisfying than just having the money yourself?
00:27:19.300 | And I want to be cautious because you have the right to respect to make your own choices, but I want to urge you to think about it very, very carefully.
00:27:30.300 | I have a hard time understanding how people who don't have this kind of built-in set of goals in life that just is so fundamental to what it means to be human,
00:27:45.300 | how you ultimately find satisfaction unless you create it for yourself in a way that I'll get to in just a moment.
00:27:52.300 | I think of an example like Alex Hormozy, right?
00:27:56.300 | I'm a big admirer of Alex Hormozy.
00:27:58.300 | He's incredibly smart, incredibly hardworking, very successful.
00:28:02.300 | And yet he and his wife, Layla, and he and his wife, Layla, have built an enormous empire with their business and they're only getting started.
00:28:11.300 | I mean, his goal is to be the most jacked billionaire of all time and there's not a doubt in my mind that he will achieve it.
00:28:17.300 | And yet from the very beginning, the only point that he has to any of it is to just play the game.
00:28:25.300 | The goal, the point is to play the game.
00:28:28.300 | That's admirable, but it rings very hollow to me.
00:28:35.300 | I've never spoken with Alex. I'm sure he's thought carefully about the life decisions that he has made thus far.
00:28:41.300 | And he's very young. There's still time for him to do whatever he wants to do.
00:28:45.300 | But think about someone like him as an example.
00:28:50.300 | Imagine yourself in that position.
00:28:52.300 | Imagine yourself that you're 30 years old.
00:28:54.300 | You've made tens of millions of dollars.
00:28:56.300 | You're completely financially independent.
00:28:58.300 | You've married the love of your life, a beautiful woman that you're partnered side by side in creating a business empire.
00:29:06.300 | Now imagine the decades, 30 to 40, 40 to 50, 50 to 60, 60 to 70, 70 to 80, 80 to 90, 90 to 100.
00:29:20.300 | You can go on if you want.
00:29:22.300 | Imagine those decades passing.
00:29:24.300 | How are you going to structure your decades?
00:29:27.300 | What is going to be your theme to the decades so that you will remember it?
00:29:32.300 | How are you going to build and suck the juice out of life so that you live a life that fills your mind with rich memories and all those around you?
00:29:43.300 | You're going to have to build it in artificially if you don't have the natural growth of your family.
00:29:53.300 | So let's talk about how you do that.
00:29:56.300 | And by the way, even if you do have a family, think about this because I think that, again, you don't have to choose one of these.
00:30:01.300 | My hope is that in the fullness of time I can do both.
00:30:04.300 | You are definitely limited in your ability when you have young children.
00:30:09.300 | You are limited in your ability to do the other things.
00:30:12.300 | But there's plenty of time.
00:30:13.300 | For most of us, life is very long.
00:30:16.300 | What do you do?
00:30:18.300 | You need to expand your goal setting and your vision beyond dollars on a page.
00:30:25.300 | I will at some point do a separate podcast on -- but I'll give you the two-minute version of it here.
00:30:30.300 | Money is the most easily measured metric.
00:30:38.300 | That's why we love to measure it.
00:30:41.300 | But it is one of the least rewarding metrics.
00:30:47.300 | It should not be a primary metric of success.
00:30:51.300 | It's only a primary metric of success because it is easily measured.
00:30:56.300 | But the analogy that I would draw is that your weight is also easily measured and your weight is informative.
00:31:07.300 | A physician can know your weight and have some sense of the meaning of those numbers.
00:31:15.300 | But without all of the other metrics, using my analogy, whether you're male or female, how tall you are, how much muscle you have, etc.,
00:31:27.300 | it's hard to draw any adequate conclusions about the meaning of your weight.
00:31:32.300 | You need a whole lot of texture.
00:31:34.300 | And it's the same thing with money.
00:31:35.300 | Money is a useful metric, but it's only useful when it comes in the midst of all of the other metrics that lead to life satisfaction.
00:31:48.300 | And those other metrics are not so easily measured.
00:31:53.300 | Some of them are number of years married, personal sense of happiness and contentment in your life,
00:32:02.300 | satisfaction that you have with your spouse, number of children you have, number of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc.
00:32:10.300 | There are other numbers that can be measured, but it's only in the fullness of analysis that money is a useful metric.
00:32:19.300 | So be careful only measuring money without those other things.
00:32:24.300 | To somebody who has the full perspective, just like a physician who has the full perspective, you're standing in front of him,
00:32:31.300 | he can see how tall you are, he can see how much muscle you have, etc., well, then weight is a useful metric.
00:32:37.300 | But then there's all those other metrics that need to be brought in as well.
00:32:41.300 | But it's not the metric of success.
00:32:45.300 | The same with money.
00:32:46.300 | Money's primary benefit is that it's easily measured.
00:32:50.300 | But because of the fact that it's easy to measure, it often takes on a wrong size.
00:32:57.300 | It takes on a wrong sense of proportion and people value it too much to the exclusion of other things.
00:33:03.300 | So back to what do you do.
00:33:05.300 | What do you do if you're an Alex Hormozy or someone else who's been phenomenally successful at everything you've ever set your mind to?
00:33:14.300 | And I use him because it's hard to come up with a better example.
00:33:17.300 | He's very financially successful, all self-made, did it his own way, drawing himself up.
00:33:25.300 | He's achieved fame, modest internet fame, but fame in certain circles, looked up to, admired by many, married to a beautiful woman who he loves.
00:33:34.300 | They seem to have a wonderful relationship together.
00:33:37.300 | And he's got tremendous physical shape.
00:33:41.300 | He has the ability to come and go and do whatever he wants in the world.
00:33:45.300 | And he's 30 years old.
00:33:47.300 | What would you do if you were he?
00:33:54.300 | Well, you have to establish purpose.
00:33:57.300 | And that purpose can't just always be growing bigger companies.
00:34:01.300 | And again, I'm not picking on an Alex Hormozy, I bet he's done this.
00:34:05.300 | But you need to think, okay, 30 to 40, what's going to be that area of focus?
00:34:09.300 | What problems am I going to tackle?
00:34:10.300 | 40 to 50, what are some problems that I'm not going to tackle now, but some problems that I'd really like to tackle then?
00:34:15.300 | What's a career that I would really like to have from 50 to 60?
00:34:22.300 | In order for you to experience the fullness of these decisions, you will want to incorporate some sense of generation, meaning through the generations of people into your life.
00:34:33.300 | And so one of the most empowering things that you can do when you're 35 years old or 40 years old, especially, I mean, in addition to your own children, especially if you don't have children, is you need to bring in a crop of 15-year-olds or 22-year-olds or 30-year-olds and start training the next generation.
00:34:51.300 | And as you watch their success and you see your ability to reproduce, you will derive much more joy and satisfaction from that than you will from just doing more of what you want to do.
00:35:07.300 | Back finally to the point of variety of life.
00:35:14.300 | If you're going to build a life and a lifestyle that is meaningful, you are primarily going to experience the greatest joys in your ability to impact the lives of other people, not in higher and higher levels of consumption for yourself.
00:35:35.300 | Hedonism is fun for a very short period of time.
00:35:41.300 | After that short period of time, your mind and body and psychology will adapt to whatever it is that you are expressing in a hedonistic way, and you will need some new stimulation to get you going again.
00:35:57.300 | It's a cheap thrill that feels good for the moment but doesn't last.
00:36:03.300 | But investing into other people, investing into your neighbor, investing into your neighbor's children, investing into the next generation and the next generation and the next generation, be that generations of impact that ripple out from you through your fellow man or be it generations down through the ages, continually impacting the younger generation, the younger generation, the younger generation for the future of humanity.
00:36:31.300 | That's where you will ultimately draw the largest source of satisfaction.
00:36:37.300 | So in conclusion, I want you to do both of these things.
00:36:43.300 | I want you to get married.
00:36:45.300 | I want you to have babies because I think that you will gain immense amounts of life satisfaction from that decision.
00:36:56.300 | In a separate episode, I will talk to those of you who are saying, "But Joshua, I might get divorced."
00:37:02.300 | I just simply want to say to you, and I might lose half my stuff, right?
00:37:05.300 | And after all, she didn't do anything to earn it.
00:37:08.300 | Why would I take the risk?
00:37:10.300 | I can't find a decent spouse anyway.
00:37:12.300 | I'll deal with that in a separate episode.
00:37:14.300 | What I want to tell you is that victory has never belonged to the timid.
00:37:20.300 | Never in the history of humanity have the weak and the timid and the fearful ultimately come to conquer.
00:37:29.300 | Victory has always gone to the bold.
00:37:34.300 | If you want to be surrounded by your great-grandchildren on your 85th birthday and you want to see yourself as the patriarch of a dynasty and you want to see your ability to impact the world,
00:37:50.300 | you are going to have to start that process long before there is any certainty of victory.
00:37:59.300 | I've been thinking a lot about Alexander the Great.
00:38:02.300 | Alexander the Great was only great in other people's eyes at the end of his conquest.
00:38:12.300 | At the beginning of his conquest, he was simply Alex.
00:38:18.300 | Now, I don't want you to go off and set across the world raping and pillaging and conquering your fellow people with violence.
00:38:26.300 | The point is that if you are going to be great, you are going to have to make risky decisions.
00:38:34.300 | And there is nothing in life that you can do that does not entail risk.
00:38:41.300 | You might marry poorly.
00:38:44.300 | You might be divorced.
00:38:46.300 | Your wife might take your children and you never speak to them again.
00:38:50.300 | That is possible.
00:38:53.300 | But it is one of those things that if you are not willing to take the risk, you never have the possibility of conquering, of building a dynasty, of building a life of satisfaction.
00:39:07.300 | So when you are 95 years old, in your ornate castle, you will be surrounded by your 113 great-grandchildren.
00:39:15.300 | It is not easy, but it is doable.
00:39:22.300 | And here is the other thing about risk.
00:39:24.300 | In the same way that military risk is largely predictable, well, not entirely, virtually all of the risks of marriage, children, etc., are also predictable.
00:39:39.300 | They are not random.
00:39:42.300 | You don't just randomly win military victory over somebody.
00:39:47.300 | It comes with strategy, with research, with spying out the land, and then making intelligent decisions.
00:39:53.300 | Now the battle can go against you in certain occasions, but as we talk about in this series, it is not random.
00:40:01.300 | So let me stop with my monologue and simply say, I want you to have that.
00:40:07.300 | I believe that is worth working towards.
00:40:09.300 | I have been working towards it for more than a decade.
00:40:12.300 | It feels really good when I compare my life as compared to some of my friends who have made different choices.
00:40:19.300 | I also want you to have everything else, because if you are not able to marry or you are not able to have children, life is not over.
00:40:27.300 | But I want you to recognize that you need to insert that into your life.
00:40:31.300 | You need to build that into your life.
00:40:33.300 | And the things that you are going to value the most is going to come from your service to others, especially as it ripples through the generations.
00:40:41.300 | Thank you so much for listening.
00:40:44.300 | I want to encourage you as I close today's show, if you have not yet come and signed up for the event that I'm holding in January in Panama, I want to encourage you to do that.
00:40:54.300 | Go to expatmoney.com/radical.
00:40:56.300 | In January of 2024, I am hosting a one-week tour of Panama with my friends Mikkel Thorup and Gabriel Custodiat.
00:41:03.300 | We will be in Panama City, Panama and the surrounding environment for one week, talking about internationalization.
00:41:10.300 | If you're interested in Panama, you should definitely come.
00:41:15.300 | If you're interested in internationalization and you're not sure about Panama, you should definitely come.
00:41:21.300 | Because while we're going to be discussing Panama specifically and some of the many benefits that Panama brings to many people, it is not exclusive to that.
00:41:30.300 | And you'll be able to hang out with me, be able to hang out with Mikkel the entire time.
00:41:33.300 | If you just want to come and hang out and have a good time with Joshua, you want to come and smoke cigars and hang out and talk about Alexander the Great, then go to expatmoney.com/radical, expatmoney.com/radical and sign up today.
00:41:48.300 | expatmoney.com/radical.
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