2024-01-12_Friday_QA
00:00:00.000 | Today on Radical Personal Finance is live Q&A.
00:00:18.560 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:21.200 | skills, insights, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while
00:00:25.320 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:27.520 | My name is Joshua Sheets, today is Friday, January 12, 2024.
00:00:32.720 | And on this Friday, as we do on every Friday in which I can arrange the appropriate recording
00:00:36.480 | technology, I should come up with something a little bit catchier than that, we record
00:00:40.060 | a live Q&A show.
00:00:41.680 | You call in, talk about anything that you want.
00:00:46.680 | This is your chance to raise the topics, interact with me, give any feedback that you'd like
00:00:54.140 | to give on recent shows, ask any questions about your personal life, ask any questions
00:00:57.800 | about life in general, bring up any topic that you want.
00:01:00.200 | I don't screen the calls other than to, well, let's see, I don't screen the subjects of
00:01:05.040 | the calls, but I do screen the callers.
00:01:07.320 | If you would like to join me on a Friday Q&A show, you can do that by becoming a patron
00:01:11.240 | of the show.
00:01:12.240 | Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, sign up to support the show there on Patreon, and that will
00:01:18.640 | gain access for you to one of these Friday Q&A shows.
00:01:21.520 | I do that to keep the amount of callers at a reasonable number that works for recording
00:01:25.720 | a show.
00:01:26.720 | We begin with Martin in the Czech Republic.
00:01:27.720 | Martin, welcome.
00:01:28.720 | How can I serve you today, sir?
00:01:29.720 | Hello, Joshua.
00:01:30.720 | I'm calling again from Prague now with something completely different that's been on my mind
00:01:36.600 | that I'd like to hear your input on.
00:01:39.920 | Recently I had a chat with a German friend who's got this fantastic multilingual family
00:01:46.760 | dynamic going on.
00:01:48.720 | So he and his Ukrainian wife live in Sweden, and their daughter is picking up German from
00:01:54.360 | the father, Russian and Ukrainian from the mother, Swedish outside of the house, and
00:02:00.520 | English in school as a second language.
00:02:03.880 | And at 18 years old, she's basically fluent in all these languages, except maybe her English
00:02:08.880 | is a little bit less polished due to limited exposure.
00:02:13.120 | But this got me thinking.
00:02:16.260 | My wife and I are looking to start a family quite soon, and I've always envied kids with
00:02:21.560 | bilingual parents who just seamlessly pick up that second language.
00:02:25.800 | However, me and my wife are both Czech natives, so my idea was to exclusively switch to English
00:02:35.060 | when communicating with our future child, basically for their entire childhood.
00:02:40.240 | And of course, before doing that, I would definitely need to take a lot of time learning
00:02:44.000 | a proper accent in a way you, for example, mentioned to a previous listener a couple
00:02:48.860 | of weeks ago, since there I could really do some work.
00:02:52.600 | But I have two concerns with this.
00:02:55.760 | First of all, I do worry that this linguistic shift might kind of dampen the spark and humor
00:03:02.560 | in our relationship, because so much of our connection with my wife is built on the nuances
00:03:08.640 | and bonds and so on in our shared language.
00:03:11.480 | I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, and I fear losing that might harm our relationship.
00:03:19.680 | And secondly, I wonder if this approach would be genuinely effective, or if there might
00:03:26.040 | be a better way.
00:03:27.920 | I would really hate to embark on this long-term journey with the language, risking what I
00:03:34.420 | mentioned, only to find out that my child is no better off than others without an English-speaking
00:03:39.800 | pattern.
00:03:40.800 | So I would really appreciate your thoughts on this matter.
00:03:44.000 | Absolutely.
00:03:45.000 | So let me begin with the second concern that you have first.
00:03:48.480 | Is it effective?
00:03:50.940 | To make that kind of change, absolutely it would be effective.
00:03:56.560 | There's no question in my mind that any child who is raised in a genuinely multilingual
00:04:03.460 | environment that features people speaking to that child in different languages is going
00:04:10.760 | to have a significant advantage over other people who are interacting with languages
00:04:16.200 | in artificial ways.
00:04:18.640 | Where I first became inspired years ago with the ability of children to learn languages
00:04:26.000 | naturally was when I stumbled across a video on YouTube of a little Russian girl named
00:04:32.440 | Bella, and she was appearing on a Russian version of one of these Russia's Got Talent
00:04:41.480 | TV shows, something like that.
00:04:43.320 | She was, at the time, I think about five years old.
00:04:46.640 | She could have been four, could have been six.
00:04:47.800 | You can find the clip on YouTube easily enough.
00:04:50.120 | Just search for Bella Russian Polyglot and you'll find it.
00:04:53.360 | And she was being quizzed by native speakers in something like six languages.
00:04:59.260 | So she had Russian, she had English, she had Spanish, I think she had French, she had Chinese,
00:05:05.560 | and she had Arabic.
00:05:07.380 | And she was not only speaking those languages with the native speakers who were quizzing
00:05:12.900 | her, but she was also reading in those languages live on the show and basically narrating in
00:05:20.740 | a very concise fashion what she was reading as part of proving her ability.
00:05:26.460 | And so this I found really inspiring.
00:05:28.940 | Here's this little girl who speaks six very different languages that they're not part
00:05:32.420 | of the same language family in any way, shape, or form.
00:05:34.900 | And so I started looking into it and I found some interviews and discussions with her mother.
00:05:38.540 | I forget all the details now because this was years ago, but her mother was, I think,
00:05:42.380 | a teacher of some kind, a college professor perhaps, but highly educated.
00:05:45.960 | And her mother had accomplished this multilingual ability primarily by hiring people into their
00:05:53.600 | home who spoke those languages natively.
00:05:57.040 | And so Bella had been exposed to these languages from infancy based upon having nannies, au pairs,
00:06:04.300 | tutors, et cetera, in the home speaking those languages with her.
00:06:07.620 | And she clearly had a significant level of comfort in those languages.
00:06:12.420 | I have found a couple of other polyglot parents who have done the same thing with their children.
00:06:18.500 | I forget the guy's name, and I forget the name of his platform, but I found a guy in
00:06:22.180 | Canada who had done something similar.
00:06:24.780 | He himself was a Chinese speaker.
00:06:27.120 | His wife was a Japanese speaker.
00:06:29.900 | He was living in Quebec.
00:06:32.700 | And what he did was he hired also a Spanish speaking nanny and his children from infancy
00:06:38.340 | were fluent in all five of those languages.
00:06:40.940 | He spoke to his children in Chinese.
00:06:42.880 | The mother spoke to the children in Japanese as did grandparents.
00:06:46.620 | The mother's parents were speaking in Japanese.
00:06:49.540 | I think their household language was English.
00:06:53.100 | And then in school they were learning French and English.
00:06:56.340 | And so they were covering, and then they had the Spanish speaking nanny who taught them
00:06:59.780 | Spanish and they were fluent with her.
00:07:02.000 | And so that approach absolutely works.
00:07:04.980 | And if you had the highest goals for total fluency with your children, with them having
00:07:12.860 | the best experience of being native speakers in these languages, then I think what your
00:07:17.020 | German friend and his Ukrainian wife are doing is absolutely the way to go about it.
00:07:22.020 | Because the children never know anything other than this native level fluency and they're
00:07:27.100 | completely competent in the languages from birth.
00:07:29.580 | Excuse me, I need to sneeze.
00:07:36.380 | So is it effective?
00:07:38.180 | My answer is yes, it is effective.
00:07:40.980 | Is there a better way?
00:07:42.320 | My answer is no, there is no better way.
00:07:45.460 | Now the caveat that I would point out would be that if that were all you did, you only
00:07:51.440 | had native language tutors or speakers involved in the children's lives in the way that Bella
00:07:57.660 | or the Canadian guy has done, then that would not be enough to reach the highest levels
00:08:04.060 | of fluency desired.
00:08:05.780 | One of the things that was interesting for me growing up in the United States, I interacted
00:08:09.580 | with a lot of people whose native language was Spanish.
00:08:12.320 | Their parents were immigrants to the United States.
00:08:14.060 | They exclusively spoke Spanish with their parents.
00:08:17.380 | However, they were in an English speaking school system, et cetera.
00:08:20.540 | And what I found so fascinating is that they spoke colloquial Spanish better than I did.
00:08:28.660 | They spoke Spanish fluently.
00:08:30.560 | They had a native accent.
00:08:32.300 | They spoke colloquial Spanish very fluently without any trouble because that was their
00:08:37.180 | native home language that they speak with their parents.
00:08:40.300 | But they had no academic ability in the language.
00:08:42.700 | They couldn't pick up a Spanish novel and enjoy reading it because there was too much
00:08:48.020 | unknown vocabulary.
00:08:49.980 | And so I, on the other hand, because I learned my Spanish in something of the academic approach,
00:08:54.740 | my reading ability was higher than their reading ability.
00:09:00.540 | And yet I didn't speak native sounding Spanish.
00:09:03.420 | My accent was inferior to their accent and I couldn't speak the language as fluently
00:09:07.880 | as they could, but I had a higher level in the language.
00:09:11.860 | So I'm pointing out that speaking a language colloquially is a perfectly acceptable way
00:09:17.220 | to do it.
00:09:18.220 | But if you genuinely wanted your children to be educated, you would need to make sure
00:09:22.020 | that they were reading, that they were doing work, that they were writing in whatever your
00:09:25.980 | target language is, et cetera.
00:09:28.860 | Now, is it effective?
00:09:30.860 | Yes, it's effective.
00:09:31.980 | Is there a better way?
00:09:32.980 | No, there is no better way.
00:09:34.660 | But now let's go back to the beginning.
00:09:37.760 | Could that linguistic shift dampen the spark or the humor or even the relationship that
00:09:42.500 | you have with your children?
00:09:44.300 | My answer is it could, and this is why I have chosen to maintain all of my relationships
00:09:51.340 | with my children in English.
00:09:53.940 | Even though my wife and I both speak Spanish at a pretty decent level, probably an advanced,
00:09:58.460 | a lower advanced level, something like that, certainly your English is probably much better
00:10:04.340 | than my Spanish, and you have a chance to use it more frequently than I do.
00:10:09.940 | Even so, I have not chosen to try to pursue this path because it's just not entirely comfortable
00:10:17.480 | for me, and I don't know how to have that nuance of communication and the intimacy of
00:10:25.980 | relationship that I desire to have with my children in another language.
00:10:30.420 | And so I choose to speak English.
00:10:32.100 | My wife speaks English to the children, and we don't try to do anything else for the reasons
00:10:38.980 | that you stated.
00:10:40.540 | It's not because I'm concerned about accent.
00:10:43.260 | I think you should wipe that concern off of your list.
00:10:46.860 | You have a perfectly acceptable accent in English.
00:10:49.700 | There's no need for you to spend any time in accent training, and you would not damage
00:10:53.580 | or harm your child in any way, shape, or form from speaking to your children with the English
00:10:57.640 | accent that you have right now.
00:10:59.220 | So I don't think that's a concern at all.
00:11:01.060 | I think that your level of English is certainly capable of doing this that you've described,
00:11:06.740 | but it may simply not result in the intimacy of relationship that you desire with your
00:11:11.740 | children.
00:11:12.740 | And to me, that's a perfectly valid reason not to use another language.
00:11:17.420 | I don't think it's necessary.
00:11:19.600 | So earlier I said, "Yes, is it effective?
00:11:21.800 | Is there a better way?"
00:11:23.100 | No.
00:11:24.100 | I don't think it's necessary for you to achieve excellent outcome with your children.
00:11:30.960 | I don't think it's necessary that you transform your relationship with them into English.
00:11:36.260 | What you should do is you should make sure they're surrounded by English from an early
00:11:40.660 | age.
00:11:41.660 | And so the best path, I would say, is simply make a habit of reading to your children in
00:11:46.660 | English, and then expose your children to appropriate English media when you choose
00:11:51.420 | to.
00:11:52.420 | English is the easiest language in the world to learn because there's the best materials
00:11:58.300 | available in English more than any other foreign language.
00:12:02.180 | And so people who become truly skilled in English and acquire a native-like accent,
00:12:07.340 | acquire a native-like ability, they do that reliably and consistently because of the abundance
00:12:13.340 | of English materials for them to learn with.
00:12:17.540 | And so what I would say is get yourself some storybooks and just read English language
00:12:22.020 | stories to your children from the beginning.
00:12:26.340 | Expose your children to English media when appropriate, videos, songs, all of those kinds
00:12:31.300 | of things.
00:12:32.500 | Your children will have some form of their education in English.
00:12:36.300 | And if I were in your shoes, I would make sure that a significant portion of their education
00:12:41.780 | was in English, either by substituting the English classes and training that they'll
00:12:46.100 | be receiving in the local government schools or by homeschooling in some way, shape, or
00:12:51.020 | form with English curriculum so that your children's education level is very, very high
00:12:56.500 | in English.
00:12:57.500 | And I think you can do that while simultaneously keeping Czech as your primary language, the
00:13:02.220 | primary family language, and the primary language of your relationship.
00:13:05.420 | So I don't think it's necessary to do this.
00:13:07.540 | And I have found that in many ways my children's foreign languages, because of academic practice,
00:13:16.220 | are ahead of some other native speakers.
00:13:19.300 | As one simple example, some time back, this was a good time back, I happened to meet a
00:13:27.620 | French-speaking family on an airline and I invited them over for lunch.
00:13:34.300 | And these people had moved to the United States.
00:13:36.060 | I met them on a flight from the United States.
00:13:38.980 | And they came over for lunch and we were chatting and we were visiting.
00:13:42.060 | And I found it so fascinating that my child's French ability was ahead of their child's
00:13:50.420 | French ability, even though French was their family language.
00:13:53.460 | And it has to do with exactly what I said in terms of academic ability.
00:13:57.020 | My child was at the time, had read five or six Jules Verne novels in French and was comfortably
00:14:02.980 | enjoying them because I placed a high degree on French academic ability.
00:14:08.560 | Their child was a native French speaker, but all of the content that their child was consuming
00:14:13.680 | was in English because they were now living in the United States and he wasn't getting
00:14:17.360 | any academic training in French.
00:14:20.320 | And so I don't see any reason why you can't maintain both of those tracks.
00:14:25.160 | And if you will simply have your children consume significant amounts of English-speaking
00:14:28.960 | media, which is easy, plenty of English movies, English TV shows, English programs, English
00:14:34.080 | YouTube, English Khan Academy, et cetera, and then supplement that with lots and lots
00:14:37.720 | of reading, then there's no reason at all why you should need to change your family
00:14:42.240 | language from Czech to English.
00:14:44.140 | And I wouldn't for those reasons.
00:14:48.840 | Thank you, Joshua.
00:14:49.840 | That's really helpful.
00:14:51.080 | And I think the example with French, that's really interesting.
00:14:57.320 | It's at the end of the day, all language skills need to be acquired based upon practice.
00:15:03.560 | And so while the ability to read, the ability to write, the ability to speak, and the ability
00:15:07.140 | to listen, while these are clearly all related, they are not the same.
00:15:11.240 | And they need to be trained systematically at each level.
00:15:14.720 | When you speak a language natively, you become very highly skilled at listening and you become
00:15:20.760 | skilled at speaking, but you don't automatically become skilled at reading and you definitely
00:15:26.880 | don't automatically become skilled at writing.
00:15:29.160 | So these are separate disciplines that have to be trained separately.
00:15:32.400 | But the good news is they can simply be trained separately.
00:15:35.720 | And you can, so for example, in my own children, where their abilities are inferior is with
00:15:42.200 | regard to listening ability.
00:15:44.320 | And that's because instead of being surrounded by the language in a colloquial fashion, where
00:15:49.320 | they learn to pick up on all of the slang, casual, slurred conversation, et cetera, all
00:15:56.160 | of their language exposure to foreign languages is basically academic.
00:15:59.880 | It comes from listening to audio books.
00:16:02.440 | It comes from reading books.
00:16:04.360 | And it comes from, in many cases, dubbed and translated TV shows or movies.
00:16:10.560 | And so what they don't have is they don't have the street colloquial listening skill.
00:16:15.440 | But as far as I'm concerned, that's one of the easiest and simplest skills to acquire.
00:16:19.920 | So that can be put off until a later time.
00:16:23.840 | The harder skills to acquire are the skills of academic level reading and academic level
00:16:29.120 | writing.
00:16:30.120 | And so it's impossible for me to believe, based upon the research and the experience
00:16:34.440 | that I've had, that somebody who is skilled with academic level reading, academic level
00:16:39.840 | writing, who is skilled with lots of high-level appropriate speaking abilities can't learn
00:16:49.400 | to understand easily enough a colloquial register of speech and can't relatively easily learn
00:16:56.560 | to speak in a colloquial lower-level register of conversation.
00:17:01.520 | So I think that's the least important thing, rather than the most important thing.
00:17:06.260 | And I think that's something that should happen.
00:17:09.680 | But it doesn't need to happen at the beginning.
00:17:11.640 | Anything else, Martin?
00:17:13.960 | No.
00:17:14.960 | Thank you so much.
00:17:17.600 | My pleasure.
00:17:18.600 | And I do think it's a great strategy, and absolutely, English has to be your primary
00:17:24.920 | second language.
00:17:25.920 | My only other comment would be that there should be no reason why you shouldn't add
00:17:28.920 | in other languages.
00:17:30.360 | As you can see from the experience of your friend, I think multilingualism is really
00:17:34.960 | only hard because it's hard for us the way that we learn in an academic fashion.
00:17:40.040 | But I have found that if you strip away the idea that multilingualism is hard and you
00:17:44.280 | simply find resources, then it's actually pretty easy.
00:17:48.320 | And I've watched this happen with two children.
00:17:50.720 | I've got a sample set growing and building.
00:17:53.200 | And I just watch the progression go through, where, for example, my eight-year-old daughter,
00:17:57.840 | a couple of years ago, she didn't want to learn any languages, and I taught her Spanish.
00:18:02.380 | She didn't like Spanish until I found some books that had girls and horses in them.
00:18:06.240 | And then three months later, she said, "Spanish is my favorite."
00:18:08.520 | She didn't like French at the time.
00:18:09.920 | Well, now she loves Spanish and French, as long as I can find books with girls and horses.
00:18:14.360 | She loves it.
00:18:15.360 | She's like, "You know, I just like it so much.
00:18:17.000 | These are my favorite languages."
00:18:18.360 | But she doesn't like German right now.
00:18:20.160 | But I tell her, "Give it three months, six months, and you'll like German, too."
00:18:24.440 | And then she's doing Latin, and it's just not hard.
00:18:28.280 | And that's the thing that took me a while to come to that belief, is I grew up thinking
00:18:32.480 | learning languages was hard.
00:18:34.360 | And then, again, I found research where linguists have found that there are certain places,
00:18:40.960 | there's a certain part of Africa where I think there's a valley where it's very normal that
00:18:44.760 | people in that valley speak five different languages.
00:18:48.000 | And so, for them, multilingualism is totally normal.
00:18:51.080 | And your experience as a European is much more like this.
00:18:54.120 | It's much more normal in your cultural context than in my cultural context to be multilingual.
00:18:58.520 | I was with a friend in Luxembourg a few months ago.
00:19:01.400 | And all Luxembourg students, all of them, speak four languages.
00:19:05.680 | They have Luxembourgish, English, French, and German.
00:19:08.400 | And they're all equally fluent in all of them.
00:19:10.640 | So multilingualism is not hard.
00:19:12.720 | It is harder to learn a language like English that has a vastly larger vocabulary than,
00:19:18.520 | say, a local tribal language of some kind that may have a vocabulary of some tens of
00:19:23.120 | thousands of words rather than hundreds of thousands of words.
00:19:26.040 | But generally speaking, most of that is just specialized knowledge and specialized content
00:19:30.120 | that comes in that is just not relevant on a day-to-day basis.
00:19:35.520 | All right.
00:19:36.520 | Let's see.
00:19:37.520 | Kevin dropped off, so we'll go to Tran.
00:19:39.880 | Tran, welcome to the show.
00:19:41.440 | How can I serve you today?
00:19:44.080 | Tran, you're up.
00:19:47.080 | Hello, Joshua.
00:19:48.920 | I'm a student from Germany, and I have a question that relates to Korea.
00:19:58.640 | So my goal is to become a financial planner.
00:20:03.800 | I'm inspired by a lot of people, including you.
00:20:07.320 | Currently, I'm 23, and I have already finished my second semester at a business school, business
00:20:16.120 | administration.
00:20:17.120 | I took it just because it was the best available choice at the time.
00:20:22.000 | I kind of regret it a little bit, but it is what it is.
00:20:28.400 | I'm also working, since I started university, as an auditor's assistant because I thought
00:20:34.200 | the best way to learn about finance is just reading about financial reports, and it was
00:20:40.200 | a great experience.
00:20:42.240 | But actually, I'm not a good office worker.
00:20:46.080 | I am not good at focusing on details and doing a very detailed job.
00:20:54.160 | I'm more of a big-picture guy, so I don't think this job really fits me.
00:20:59.260 | But then I heard about your podcast, and you said that maybe doing the hard work is better,
00:21:06.480 | so maybe it's better for me to try to fix that weakness for myself.
00:21:11.820 | But on the other side, I want to get into the world of financial planning and helping
00:21:18.340 | others plan their finance sooner.
00:21:22.440 | So I'm having a conflict here, like maybe achieving my goal sooner or trying to keep
00:21:32.140 | working here and fix my personal issues.
00:21:36.920 | When you say you have a goal of working as a financial planner, that would be a goal
00:21:40.860 | to work as a financial planner inside Germany, inside of the German financial system.
00:21:46.460 | Is that correct?
00:21:48.460 | Actually, no.
00:21:52.740 | My far-sighted goal is moving to the U.S.
00:21:56.460 | I really love the U.S.
00:21:57.940 | I lived in Vietnam and Germany, and it was always too constrained for me.
00:22:04.460 | So I want to move to Texas in the future, and that is also a problem for me.
00:22:12.220 | I want to have my certified financial planner certificate, but also want to try to figure
00:22:19.940 | out a way to move to the U.S., but that still has a long way to go, I think.
00:22:26.740 | Okay.
00:22:27.740 | Well, the Texans will welcome you.
00:22:28.740 | They'll give you a cowboy hat, give you a giant pickup truck, and they will welcome
00:22:32.740 | you when you're able to get there.
00:22:35.060 | So is your question – let me just make sure I answer the question that you're actually
00:22:39.700 | asking.
00:22:40.700 | It seems to me like you are asking a fairly broad question of essentially how do I think
00:22:47.860 | through these different options, being a 23-year-old, studying business administration, wanting
00:22:53.560 | to become a financial planner, wanting to move to the United States, how do I integrate
00:22:57.020 | all these things?
00:22:58.020 | Is that correct, or are you asking a more specific question?
00:23:02.660 | That's the broader issue, yes, but also the more minor problem that I have right now is
00:23:08.780 | do I keep trying to improve at this auditor job, or should I try to already get experience
00:23:18.780 | in the – maybe at the financial planning firm?
00:23:23.060 | Also, I have a side hustle to help people with their taxes, because you said just try
00:23:30.700 | to start your business by finding customers, and I already have 10.
00:23:37.380 | So that was like since a month ago.
00:23:40.340 | So working as – you are currently working as an auditor.
00:23:44.580 | Do you have any certifications related to auditing?
00:23:48.820 | No, I'm only an auditor's assistant.
00:23:52.460 | Okay, an assistant.
00:23:54.180 | And how long have you been doing that work now?
00:23:58.820 | One and a half years.
00:24:00.860 | After one and a half years experience, it sounds like you have learned with certainty
00:24:06.120 | that this is not a career path that you are interested in.
00:24:08.700 | Is that correct?
00:24:10.820 | Yes.
00:24:13.100 | So speaking to that issue specifically, when you are young – and I'm assuming you are
00:24:18.660 | unmarried and do not have children.
00:24:20.060 | Is that correct?
00:24:21.500 | Yes.
00:24:22.820 | Okay.
00:24:24.300 | So when you are young, I believe that your basic bias or your basic instinct should be
00:24:31.800 | to gain as much experience in as many different areas as possible, because the costs of switching,
00:24:39.720 | the costs of changing, are very low.
00:24:42.260 | Now I think there's probably a cultural distinction here between your native culture and my native
00:24:47.840 | culture.
00:24:49.360 | Coming from a U.S. American perspective, switching and changing things a lot, it used to be looked
00:24:56.400 | down on.
00:24:57.400 | Nobody looks down on it anymore.
00:24:59.640 | And there's certainly a bad thing if you're switching because you're getting fired every
00:25:03.140 | two months.
00:25:04.140 | Okay.
00:25:05.140 | That's going to be figured out.
00:25:06.140 | But if you've been working at something for a year and a half and you've discovered that
00:25:09.940 | this is not for me, then move on.
00:25:12.580 | Be done with that, because there's no point in investing more of your time and energy
00:25:18.020 | into something that you know is not for you unless it forms some strategic part of your
00:25:23.740 | overall plan, which the most obvious thing would be, is this specific skill something
00:25:29.940 | that could allow me to gain access to the United States?
00:25:33.600 | So setting that aside for a moment, just speaking broadly, at 23 years old, you should be switching,
00:25:40.460 | changing quickly from one thing to the next, and you should be analyzing your experience
00:25:46.460 | in each opportunity that you have in order to understand what do I like, what do I not
00:25:51.380 | like, where should I go with this, where could I go with this, do I want to go forward with
00:25:56.140 | this.
00:25:57.140 | But at the end of the day, if you look at a job such as working as an auditor, and you
00:26:02.580 | can imagine yourself being successful at that job, and then you look back and you recognize,
00:26:07.340 | but I don't want this, I don't want to be a successful auditor, then get out of there
00:26:12.020 | and go try something else.
00:26:13.980 | Go and do something else and get yourself exposure to some other aspect of the business.
00:26:19.500 | If you know that generally speaking your goal is to become a financial planner, then you
00:26:23.540 | should move as quickly as possible in the direction of financial planning.
00:26:28.340 | And so you should move in the direction, whatever is convenient to you.
00:26:32.240 | In the German system, that might be working at a bank, or working in banking, it would
00:26:37.060 | be much better for you at this stage of your career to be an assistant to a bank officer,
00:26:41.820 | or an assistant to a bank auditor, or assistant to a bank tax advisor, or something like that,
00:26:47.620 | then to work as an assistant to an auditor.
00:26:50.220 | So it might be a bank, it might be an insurance office, it could be a life insurance office,
00:26:55.860 | it could be a property and casualty insurance office, it could be a stock manager, some
00:27:01.620 | form of investment advisor, etc.
00:27:04.660 | But get yourself as quickly as possible, as close as you can to your long-term career
00:27:10.220 | ambition.
00:27:11.220 | So if you want to be a financial planner, get yourself close to working in financial
00:27:14.580 | planning.
00:27:15.580 | It's going to bring you down a path that you know you don't want to succeed at.
00:27:20.100 | Because time is your most precious thing.
00:27:24.500 | Everything except time can be managed artificially.
00:27:28.200 | If you needed money, you can get money.
00:27:30.060 | Money is pretty easy to get.
00:27:31.060 | If you need experience, you can get experience.
00:27:33.020 | If you need knowledge, you can get knowledge.
00:27:34.940 | If you need academic qualifications or certifications, etc.
00:27:38.300 | All of that stuff can be gotten very quickly.
00:27:40.500 | Time is the scarce resource.
00:27:42.600 | So at 23, you want to be pushing yourself consistently to get as close as you can to
00:27:48.860 | your goals and get basically around the environment that could lead to the accomplishment of your
00:27:54.780 | goal.
00:27:55.780 | It's much easier to make progress to be exactly where you want to go when you're around where
00:28:00.520 | you think you might want to go than when you're on the other side of the country.
00:28:03.900 | And time is very short because at 23 years old, you have a very narrow window of time
00:28:08.300 | where you need to build your career and you need to build your skills and build your foundation
00:28:13.020 | before you get married, before you have children, etc.
00:28:15.700 | So time should be the thing that is putting urgency on you.
00:28:19.700 | So that would be my comment on auditing.
00:28:22.980 | Now, if you know you want to go to the United States and that's something that you definitely
00:28:28.540 | want to do, then once again, you should chart and create the most direct, fastest path towards
00:28:37.900 | accomplishing that goal that you can come up with.
00:28:41.060 | Don't spend 10 years building a life in Germany if you know you want to move to the United
00:28:46.780 | States.
00:28:48.100 | If you know you want to move to the United States, then go as quickly as you possibly
00:28:52.620 | can.
00:28:53.620 | Because every year that you spend in the United States will be so valuable for you in terms
00:28:58.500 | of the connections made, the skills learned, all of the abilities learned, the year ticking
00:29:04.760 | forward on a visa, the year ticking forward towards permanent residency, towards citizenship,
00:29:09.900 | etc.
00:29:10.900 | And so you need to focus first on that.
00:29:14.900 | That's more important and determinative for you than is being a financial planner.
00:29:20.700 | Because once you have the ability to be in the United States and the ability to live
00:29:24.740 | in the United States, to work in the United States, etc., then you can go in any number
00:29:29.060 | of directions.
00:29:30.180 | You can go from insurance to investment management, you can go from investment management to banking,
00:29:33.980 | you can go from banking to taxes, you can go in any number of directions.
00:29:38.020 | But you can only do that when you have access to the United States.
00:29:42.140 | Now I'm not an expert on immigrating to the United States for obvious reasons.
00:29:46.540 | And quite frankly, I don't have a clue what to say to you about U.S. immigration.
00:29:51.780 | It is the most screwed up system I can possibly imagine.
00:29:55.400 | Just today as we record this, the state of Texas is barring an area on the American border
00:30:02.880 | with Mexico, keeping out U.S. federal border patrol agents because the border patrol agents
00:30:09.420 | are not enforcing immigration laws.
00:30:11.420 | I don't know what to tell you about anything involved with immigration.
00:30:15.440 | It is an absolute nightmare system.
00:30:17.460 | And on behalf of all of my people, I apologize to you dramatically because it's an absurd
00:30:23.900 | system.
00:30:25.380 | Quite frankly, sometimes I wonder if a guy like you shouldn't just simply fly to Mexico
00:30:29.340 | and come across the border with everyone else.
00:30:31.500 | I recently was interacting with a friend of mine who had some extended family who came
00:30:38.500 | across the border using the current asylum system.
00:30:42.460 | The guy was given a court date in 2027.
00:30:46.100 | And so for the next four years, he came across the border, applied for asylum, and he has
00:30:51.080 | the ability to stay in the United States for four years until he gets a court date, something
00:30:57.560 | like that.
00:30:58.600 | I don't know what to say.
00:30:59.600 | It's the craziest system I've ever seen, and I don't know what to say.
00:31:05.540 | Other than if I were you and I were a young professional, I would not try to go down that
00:31:10.420 | path, but I would try to get to the United States as quickly as possible.
00:31:14.100 | So you need to become an expert first and foremost on how to immigrate to the United
00:31:18.760 | States.
00:31:19.900 | My French acquaintances that I met on an airplane that I just described, they were kind of in
00:31:25.180 | a similar situation.
00:31:26.340 | What had happened was they decided they definitely had to get out of France because, quite honestly,
00:31:31.600 | the woman got attacked in her apartment by a guy with a machete.
00:31:36.360 | And he got offended at something he said because he's from the religion of peace, and he went
00:31:42.340 | into her apartment and he attacked her with a machete.
00:31:44.880 | Her entire body was covered with these scars.
00:31:47.560 | She barely escaped with her life because her husband came at that moment and fought the
00:31:52.840 | guy off physically in the apartment.
00:31:54.880 | They were like, "We're getting out of France.
00:31:56.840 | We're not living this anymore."
00:31:58.720 | They applied for the lottery, and the first drawing, they got a lottery slot in the United
00:32:04.480 | States.
00:32:05.480 | And so you should definitely put in an application to the lottery slot because you could win
00:32:09.600 | the lottery.
00:32:10.600 | It does happen.
00:32:11.840 | On the other hand, there are other pathways.
00:32:16.160 | And so probably there's something related to either education or sponsorship, and those
00:32:22.400 | will probably go together.
00:32:23.880 | And so if you want to move to the United States and you want to pursue financial planning,
00:32:28.320 | then you should look for some pathway to study financial planning as a component of your
00:32:32.960 | education.
00:32:33.960 | And increasingly, the field of financial planning is an official academic subject with degrees
00:32:38.320 | granted, et cetera, for it, and that might be one pathway.
00:32:41.840 | Alternatively, you might need to get some form of sponsorship.
00:32:45.280 | And if you wanted to work as a day-to-day financial planner, generally speaking, you'll
00:32:49.440 | have a very hard time finding a company that will sponsor you for that work.
00:32:54.840 | That's not the kind of industry that sponsors people, generally speaking.
00:32:59.320 | But there may be something related to it, and so this may be some form of investment
00:33:03.680 | analysis that can work, or you might try to find some multinational corporation to work
00:33:08.680 | for.
00:33:09.680 | And that's why I talked about banking.
00:33:11.100 | If you worked for JPMorgan Chase or some other corporation and you work in Frankfurt at their
00:33:17.000 | office in Frankfurt, and then later you apply for an international transfer, something like
00:33:21.400 | that may work out for you.
00:33:22.600 | I don't know.
00:33:23.600 | I'm just giving you ideas.
00:33:24.640 | But if you know that I want to go to the United States, then getting to the United States,
00:33:30.040 | getting there with a sponsorship visa so that it allows you to work, and then working your
00:33:35.300 | way towards your green card, your permanent residency, that then would allow you to not
00:33:38.960 | need sponsorship, that should be your highest priority, and you should basically take any
00:33:44.160 | job that gets you in that direction.
00:33:46.360 | Because then if four years from now you knew that I don't need sponsorship anymore, I have
00:33:50.840 | a permanent residency, I can work here, et cetera, you can go in any direction.
00:33:55.780 | So to me that's a more relevant focus for you than is specifically things like getting
00:34:01.800 | a CFP certification, et cetera.
00:34:04.280 | Now should you do that?
00:34:05.560 | Sure.
00:34:06.560 | But generally speaking, I wouldn't worry about any classes for that at this point in time.
00:34:11.880 | I would just simply focus on building knowledge, studying the content, reading the books, but
00:34:18.080 | mainly focusing on what job pathway would get me close to the financial planning industry
00:34:23.640 | and also get me into the United States, and then just go from there to the next step.
00:34:28.840 | Thank you for setting my priorities right.
00:34:38.640 | Anything else?
00:34:39.640 | No, that's all.
00:34:43.000 | And then of course, just keep working on making connections.
00:34:46.840 | So one of the things that you need is you need connections, and so especially coming
00:34:52.280 | from abroad, that should be your first goal.
00:34:54.240 | So if you want to go to Texas, then what I would do, the first thing I would do is I
00:34:59.240 | would find a Texas group of financial planners, I would find a financial planning conference
00:35:03.800 | of some kind that's going to be in Texas or close to Texas, and then go to that conference
00:35:08.640 | as a German and start getting advice from people who are around there.
00:35:12.600 | Reach out to them obviously online, you don't have to physically go there, but reach out
00:35:15.680 | to people online, find out is there a company that will sponsor me, what should I be studying,
00:35:19.960 | et cetera, and start to get some subject matter experts who can help you and connect you.
00:35:24.280 | But probably you'll need to qualify yourself for an employment opportunity in a large company
00:35:28.680 | that can sponsor you in order to get you there quickly, and then once you have sponsorship,
00:35:32.720 | once you eventually can create, get permanent residency, get your green card, then you'll
00:35:37.720 | be free of the need to work for any particular company and you can work for anyone else that
00:35:41.640 | you want.
00:35:42.640 | But that's where you'll only know that by speaking to recruiters at firms and find out
00:35:45.960 | what they'll actually do.
00:35:47.560 | We go to the great state of Washington, welcome to the show, how can I serve you today?
00:35:51.560 | Is this my number?
00:35:53.600 | That's you, whoever you are, that's you.
00:35:56.040 | Excellent.
00:35:57.040 | All right, great.
00:35:58.040 | So going back to, I think it was a great family podcast series you did, you made an offhand
00:36:03.920 | comment about the so-called social sciences, knowing how we can get happiness.
00:36:10.720 | I would love to hear your take on that and any books you have.
00:36:14.600 | Is this kind of like the happiness advantage or ... Anyway, I'd love to hear your thinking.
00:36:21.840 | So my offhand comment was, first of all, that I was a little critical of social sciences
00:36:26.600 | because I'm frustrated with the replication crisis right now in "social sciences," and
00:36:33.440 | I think basically ... I used to, in my own mind, equate somebody who was a chemist and
00:36:39.520 | somebody who was a psychologist with somehow being on the same par scientifically speaking.
00:36:44.640 | And I've come to since believe that most social sciences, we should find some other name to
00:36:50.160 | rebrand them to create kind of a hard distinction between real, replicatable, consistent, verifiable
00:37:00.480 | science and observations and theories about how the human brain works, et cetera.
00:37:09.520 | With regard to kind of what we know, certainly there are books that talk about happiness.
00:37:17.320 | I don't have any record ... I've flipped through a couple here and there, but I have not made
00:37:21.640 | a deep search for it.
00:37:23.960 | Probably just from kind of an a priori religious conviction that I don't think that happiness
00:37:30.840 | is a goal that really can ever be achieved or is a worthwhile goal.
00:37:37.040 | In my own thinking, my own ideology, my own mental ease, I draw a distinction between
00:37:43.760 | happiness and joy and contentment, and I define those as distinct things.
00:37:51.600 | And I believe that happiness is the least important of those, and happiness is a fickle
00:37:58.440 | and elusive thing that probably can't be achieved when focused on, but rather is more of a general
00:38:07.920 | outcome from a set of actions.
00:38:13.460 | And so I myself don't have any commentary to make on happiness, because I don't believe
00:38:18.760 | that happiness is something particularly worth pursuing.
00:38:24.120 | That's not to say that I'm not happy.
00:38:25.600 | I am happy.
00:38:26.600 | But if I'm not happy, if I wake up one day and I'm happy, and I wake up the next day
00:38:30.080 | and I'm not happy, I don't see why I should give any weight to the presence of the emotions
00:38:39.760 | of happiness or the lack of presence of emotions of happiness, except in just a general observational
00:38:45.480 | form so I can notice how I'm feeling.
00:38:48.480 | But there can be any number of reasons why I may or may not feel happy on a daily basis.
00:38:53.240 | And so I've avoided a lot of that literature myself, like in terms of just trying to dig
00:39:00.440 | into it, other than just a passing interest.
00:39:02.800 | I've taken interest in the research on income levels and the self-reported happiness of
00:39:09.240 | people who earn a certain amount of money, which definitely shows that you want to earn
00:39:13.440 | a good amount of money to get yourself out of poverty, but there's significant diminishing
00:39:18.680 | returns after that point in time.
00:39:22.240 | The social science I'm most aware of has to do with basically stability in life and connectedness
00:39:27.780 | with other people.
00:39:29.080 | And so I'm primarily interested in that as I have tested my own religious convictions.
00:39:37.080 | And what you find, for example, is that people who are married report consistently higher
00:39:43.520 | experiences of generalized happiness than people who are unmarried.
00:39:47.440 | And I'm inclined to predispose to want to believe that because I have chosen the path
00:39:51.720 | of marriage.
00:39:54.440 | People who have children generally find that they're a great source of children.
00:39:58.120 | People who are connected in a close social community, a religious community, report much
00:40:03.480 | more happiness, etc.
00:40:05.320 | So I don't have any more of a detailed answer than that, other than to say that these things
00:40:09.560 | are studied and I have not found any research from the scientific space that has ever led
00:40:16.120 | me to question the decisions that I have made in life.
00:40:19.860 | Every time that I've questioned a decision, so for example, years ago I had a friend of
00:40:24.800 | mine who was a player and he had pursued a very different path than mine.
00:40:30.660 | I've been with one woman, he'd been with a bazillion.
00:40:33.760 | I'm married, he's not, and we have a good relationship and talked it through, etc.
00:40:39.960 | And those kinds of things I always test.
00:40:41.880 | I always test my own decisions, my own things, and just try to get a sense.
00:40:47.000 | And as an example, we're going through it, and his answer was, "None of this has paid
00:40:54.800 | off for me.
00:40:55.800 | I thought that it was something that I wanted.
00:40:57.700 | It seemed like the pathway to happiness, pure hedonistic fulfillment, sexual adventures
00:41:02.300 | left, right, and center, etc., and it hasn't turned out.
00:41:06.080 | It hasn't turned out."
00:41:07.640 | And so things like that are things that I think that we should understand and then teach
00:41:14.580 | to our children because we know that they're true.
00:41:19.760 | Other things, like things like pornography.
00:41:22.200 | When I was younger, my generation, our parents were caught completely unaware by the rise
00:41:27.060 | of internet pornography.
00:41:29.120 | And I was addicted to internet pornography for years, and as a component of that, I studied
00:41:33.580 | the topic out.
00:41:35.080 | And what's so interesting to me is the thing that seems like it's going to bring happiness,
00:41:41.720 | meaning immediate sexual gratification, is the thing that ultimately destroys happiness.
00:41:47.440 | And so I am very well equipped in my conversation with my children, I am very well equipped
00:41:53.520 | today to have a very careful conversation about pornography because of the clear, not
00:42:03.880 | only a religious conviction and a moral and ethical conviction about mistreatment of women,
00:42:10.800 | etc., but also just from a clear psychological perspective and a physiological perspective.
00:42:15.940 | And so when I talk to teens about pornography, I just say, "Do you want erectile dysfunction?
00:42:20.560 | If so, this is your pathway."
00:42:22.400 | And so if you want to be on Viagra when you're 20 years old, then use pornography.
00:42:26.480 | And so things like that, to me, are an important component of what we should know and what
00:42:31.160 | we should be studying and what we should be equipped for to teach our children the truth
00:42:35.080 | about these things.
00:42:36.480 | And so those are the things that mostly interest me.
00:42:39.080 | Family, religious community, a sense of purpose in the world, those physical, physiological
00:42:45.360 | things that result in our experiencing greater daily levels of happiness, sunshine, exercise,
00:42:52.880 | water, good food, good relationships, a sense of purpose, etc.
00:42:56.880 | That's as far as I could go.
00:42:58.000 | And from there, I'll refer you to, I don't know, Andrew Huberman.
00:43:00.840 | Call him and ask him.
00:43:02.600 | Okay.
00:43:03.600 | Sounds good.
00:43:04.600 | Anything else?
00:43:05.600 | Thank you.
00:43:06.600 | Yeah.
00:43:07.600 | Pushing, well, on this topic, do you have more callers?
00:43:11.680 | How many more do you have?
00:43:12.680 | Go ahead.
00:43:13.680 | Go ahead.
00:43:14.680 | Pushing back a little bit, maybe a year or two ago, you had a very helpful podcast on
00:43:20.280 | what you do on down days and how you reset your mind and so on.
00:43:24.680 | It seems like happiness isn't necessarily a good goal, but happiness is definitely impactful
00:43:31.000 | when I have a bleak day and I don't see color.
00:43:34.360 | Everything is gray and black or gray and white, and it does really impact things.
00:43:39.160 | So it's not necessarily a goal, but it seems like it's more than just, "Oh, am I happy?
00:43:44.040 | Am I not happy?"
00:43:45.240 | Yeah.
00:43:46.240 | No, you're right.
00:43:47.240 | You're right.
00:43:48.240 | And I have a lot of black days.
00:43:49.640 | And so part of my, I have learned over the years that I'm an extremely emotional guy.
00:44:01.960 | I've always admired people who were just steady state all the time, et cetera.
00:44:05.880 | I'm not that way.
00:44:07.360 | And so like many emotional people, I experienced the euphoric highs and I experienced the black
00:44:12.920 | lows.
00:44:14.720 | And when I was younger, I thought that there was going to be some kind of like, "If only
00:44:20.640 | if I can just achieve this thing, then all the blackness will go away.
00:44:23.720 | I won't have any black days."
00:44:25.640 | That was what I expected when I was younger.
00:44:28.960 | I don't expect that anymore.
00:44:33.240 | And so part of what I said about happiness is just part of my own personal philosophy,
00:44:38.240 | where when I question the idea that should the way that I feel make any difference in
00:44:44.200 | what I do, I believe that I'm master of my mind and I can make the choice that the way
00:44:50.480 | that I feel doesn't need to affect what I do.
00:44:55.640 | And I find that where I'm most capable of this is in how I treat other people.
00:45:01.400 | So for example, I'm married, I have children.
00:45:03.780 | And so how I feel on a today should not affect how I treat those that I love.
00:45:11.720 | They're not responsible for how I feel.
00:45:13.560 | And so there's no question that it may affect me if I'm tired, if I'm cranky, if I'm having
00:45:18.700 | a black day or a black week or a black month.
00:45:21.880 | I have had some black months this year, last year, sorry, 2023 was for me an extremely
00:45:27.560 | difficult year.
00:45:29.080 | And you talk about it and you're like, "Why should it be difficult?
00:45:33.000 | It shouldn't be difficult."
00:45:34.000 | I had a lot of peak experiences, but I had months of blackness, just feeling like imprisoned
00:45:41.960 | in the black cell.
00:45:45.080 | And it was hard, right?
00:45:48.400 | But at the end of the day, I believe that I still have to control how I act.
00:45:54.440 | And so I may not, when I'm experiencing that, I may not as naturally as I would like to
00:46:00.760 | express those, like, I mean, it may not be as easy for me to laugh with my children and
00:46:07.840 | to treat my wife with gentleness and kindness and be effusive, et cetera.
00:46:13.160 | When I'm feeling black, then it's hard to do that.
00:46:16.240 | But the fact that it's hard to do that doesn't mean that I have an option, I still need to
00:46:19.760 | treat them.
00:46:20.760 | I can't raise my voice, I can't raise my hands, I can't do something that's going to cause
00:46:25.440 | that.
00:46:26.440 | All I know from having lived for a while is that the blackness comes and go.
00:46:30.400 | We have good days and bad days, and they come and go, and that I can make a choice each
00:46:34.800 | and every day in what I do to a significant degree.
00:46:39.040 | So definitely all that stuff matters.
00:46:40.880 | The thing that I said in that old podcast of the basic things are things that I try
00:46:44.840 | to do.
00:46:45.840 | So I'll just reprise them very quickly.
00:46:48.560 | Here are some of the things that I try to pay attention to.
00:46:50.520 | Number one, am I sleeping?
00:46:52.300 | And so sleep is sacrosanct.
00:46:55.960 | And sleep is driven by, I have to go to bed.
00:46:58.900 | That is the key decision.
00:47:00.560 | So I do not stay up late, I never stay up late, I'm not allowed to stay up late, I have
00:47:07.160 | to turn everything off, and I have to go to bed, and I need to be in bed no matter what.
00:47:11.880 | Because if I go to bed and I get to bed by 10 o'clock, I shoot for 9 o'clock, then I'll
00:47:16.240 | naturally wake up at 5 o'clock, I don't have an alarm clock, I have a few minutes before
00:47:20.120 | the day gets started, and that forms the foundation.
00:47:23.280 | Movement is another thing.
00:47:24.680 | I have to move.
00:47:25.680 | If I don't move, if I don't get my 10,000 steps, if I don't walk, if I don't exercise,
00:47:29.520 | then I don't feel good.
00:47:31.600 | And movement is a way of changing state.
00:47:34.280 | I despise with a passion doing Tony Robbins exercises of changing your physical state
00:47:39.040 | by some jumping around, but there's no question in my mind that it works.
00:47:44.160 | So I just don't want to do it, because sometimes I don't want to do it, but there's no question
00:47:48.180 | that you can change your physical state, your emotional state by your body.
00:47:52.440 | And so knowing that we can control our emotions by our body is really important.
00:47:56.380 | Sunshine is a really important thing, vitamin D, et cetera, getting sunshine exposure, and
00:48:01.560 | then making sure that we're eating well and that we have good relationships, that we have
00:48:06.240 | a sense of purpose.
00:48:07.620 | And then I've tried to do my best to overcome the blackness by having some productive things
00:48:15.680 | that I can do when I don't feel like doing anything.
00:48:18.880 | And so I look at it as basically a gradation of choices.
00:48:22.800 | So maybe choice, here's the optimal choice if I were a man of iron discipline would be
00:48:31.020 | to do thing A, but if I can't do thing A, let me have a thing B that's not quite so
00:48:35.560 | hard to do, but it's still going to give me positive outcomes.
00:48:38.320 | So instead of sitting around and sitting on the couch and, I don't know, watching Netflix
00:48:43.320 | or something, let me go for a walk, because at least walking is pretty easy.
00:48:46.960 | And if I go for a walk, even if I just waste the time or listen to something that's educational,
00:48:53.040 | if I come back in an hour, I'll probably feel better when I come back in an hour than not.
00:48:56.520 | So maybe I was too strong in saying I don't happiness.
00:48:59.840 | I aspire to ignore how I feel, because I don't think that how I feel, looking to that as
00:49:06.280 | some kind of ongoing cue is a smart way to live.
00:49:10.240 | I shouldn't love my wife because I'd feel loving towards her.
00:49:14.600 | I love my wife because it's an act of the will, not based upon how I feel.
00:49:19.920 | And so I aspire to do the same thing with happiness, which is why I gave that macho
00:49:23.200 | answer to begin with.
00:49:24.200 | What do you think?
00:49:25.200 | What's your perspective on it?
00:49:26.880 | Nope.
00:49:27.880 | That makes sense.
00:49:28.880 | As far as how I feel is important for how I experience things, but how I feel should
00:49:33.880 | not impact how I live going forward.
00:49:36.000 | As you said, how I love my wife and my daughter shouldn't be impacted by how I'm feeling.
00:49:43.800 | I do those because it's right.
00:49:46.040 | So yeah, that makes sense.
00:49:49.120 | Just this morning, I think there's more things that we can learn.
00:49:51.760 | So here's one.
00:49:52.760 | Here's a book I haven't read, but I took some notes on it from a book summary.
00:49:55.960 | But there was a book called The Winner Effect, and this was just this morning I was looking
00:50:01.120 | into this.
00:50:02.120 | And one of the things that I think is really interesting that evidently is talked about
00:50:06.840 | in that book is how early wins that someone has makes a big difference in their long-term
00:50:19.480 | performance.
00:50:20.560 | So we know, for example, that professional athletes have a very strong skew towards being
00:50:26.820 | born in January, February, March, et cetera, because that means that they were always the
00:50:31.080 | biggest and the fastest players on the team just because they were the biggest and fastest
00:50:34.960 | players on the team.
00:50:36.620 | That led to them doing things they felt good about, having wins, racking up those wins,
00:50:40.880 | has some influence on who they ultimately become.
00:50:44.080 | And what's really interesting about that is the guy I was listening to made the comment.
00:50:49.720 | And he said this, "Is it ever effective to feel like you lost?"
00:50:58.600 | And I've tried for years to embrace the idea of sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.
00:51:03.440 | I have embraced that to a high degree.
00:51:06.380 | But one of the things that I have thought about, even just this morning, is that is
00:51:11.680 | there any point in negative feelings?
00:51:14.600 | I was talking with a friend of mine, friends of mine who are parents, and we're talking
00:51:18.760 | about shame.
00:51:19.760 | We weren't talking about it with regard to children, although it affects children.
00:51:22.840 | We were talking about it in relationships.
00:51:24.840 | And the conversation that we're having is, is it ever appropriate to try to inflict shame
00:51:32.220 | on somebody?
00:51:34.480 | And I don't know the answer to that.
00:51:38.280 | I'm still thinking about that.
00:51:40.320 | And so as an outlay of that, just this morning, I was thinking about, is it ever effective
00:51:45.600 | to feel like you lost in some way or to feel like a loser?
00:51:50.760 | Does that matter?
00:51:52.120 | And I guess if I were to try to answer that question, I would say that, sure, there are
00:51:55.640 | some people who thrive on the hatred that they determine from losing.
00:52:00.200 | But you yourself, like, don't beat yourself up about things.
00:52:05.760 | And so I do wonder, and this is a question that you're inspiring, and I'm rambling a
00:52:09.520 | little bit, so I'm going to wrap it up.
00:52:10.700 | But I do wonder, like, how many of the black days are just due to our beating ourselves
00:52:16.920 | up over things?
00:52:18.160 | And the older I get, the more I realize the worthlessness of negative emotions or of really
00:52:23.280 | assigning any kind of weight to certain things.
00:52:25.920 | An example, like dieting, right?
00:52:27.840 | I've been fat for years.
00:52:29.720 | And so dieters, people who are yo-yo dieters, as I have been, you get this, there's just
00:52:34.360 | this strange tendency that someone says, "Well, I cheated on my diet because I went to a party
00:52:39.520 | and I wasn't supposed to eat carbohydrates and ate carbohydrates at the party."
00:52:43.080 | And then two weeks later, they're chowing down pizza every day.
00:52:46.820 | And what I've realized over the years with lots of failures where I assigned all kinds
00:52:51.280 | of negative emotions to that is there's just no point to any of those negative emotions.
00:52:55.840 | So I screwed it up.
00:52:56.840 | All right, no big deal.
00:52:58.480 | If I just brush that off and say, "I'm human, and so what?
00:53:02.520 | It was a party and I felt like eating carbohydrates," and then the next day, I don't have any of
00:53:05.960 | the negative emotions associated with it, then I can just go right back on, I'm right
00:53:09.480 | back on the wagon, and no one ever dies.
00:53:11.640 | No one's diet is ever destroyed by one meal of eating something that wasn't on your diet
00:53:16.800 | plan.
00:53:17.800 | And so that is something that I am thinking about.
00:53:20.640 | And I do wonder the effect of those negative emotions, the things, the stories we tell
00:53:26.280 | ourselves where we tell ourselves we've failed or we've lost or we could have done better
00:53:30.200 | or should have done better, all the shoulda, shoulda, shoulda stuff, I do wonder the impact
00:53:34.040 | of that on happiness, but I don't have any answers.
00:53:36.120 | So there we should look to social science and try to understand some of those answers
00:53:39.760 | from them.
00:53:40.760 | Interesting.
00:53:41.760 | Thank you.
00:53:42.760 | Yeah, my pleasure.
00:53:43.760 | Thank you for calling, and I feel like I gave you two answers.
00:53:48.440 | The macho one is what I aspire to.
00:53:50.160 | The real one is that, you know, we all face it, but I do think that we should try to,
00:53:57.480 | there's no reason, if we can do something that's going to improve our mental state,
00:54:00.280 | why not?
00:54:01.280 | But at the end of the day, it shouldn't be something that drives us.
00:54:06.040 | I think I'm picking up the right- I gotcha.
00:54:09.240 | Okay.
00:54:10.240 | Well, let's just, I want to make sure I got this right.
00:54:14.160 | All right.
00:54:16.320 | That caller is on the other line, so we'll just hang on one second and see if she can
00:54:19.800 | get finished up.
00:54:22.200 | Okay.
00:54:23.760 | Robin, thank you so much for your help.
00:54:28.520 | I really appreciate it.
00:54:29.520 | I'll go ahead and get this set right over.
00:54:33.600 | Have a great day.
00:54:34.600 | You're welcome.
00:54:35.600 | Thank you.
00:54:36.600 | Bye-bye.
00:54:37.600 | Are you with us now, ma'am?
00:54:40.080 | Did you- Ma'am, are you there from Washington State?
00:54:43.600 | That's you.
00:54:44.600 | I don't know your name.
00:54:47.840 | We go to Washington State.
00:54:51.960 | Are you there, ma'am?
00:54:55.360 | All right, well, 360 Area Code, are you there?
00:55:05.760 | Our previous caller was from Washington, but it sounds like she's not going to be able
00:55:08.920 | to be there.
00:55:09.920 | All right.
00:55:10.920 | So that concludes our podcast for today.
00:55:12.720 | Thank you so much, everyone, for being here.
00:55:15.120 | Thank you for your interesting questions.
00:55:16.880 | I guess Josh was becoming, I don't know, some form of life coach and career coach because
00:55:21.320 | he didn't give me any hard financial questions.
00:55:23.840 | It makes it easy for me, but I got to keep my chops up as a financial planner, et cetera.
00:55:30.360 | So don't forget that if you've got a financial planning question or something, I always do
00:55:33.900 | my shows with my calculator right here, so I'm ready to go.
00:55:37.000 | You don't have to just give me these softball questions, although, of course, I do enjoy
00:55:41.800 | talking about this stuff and I think it does matter.
00:55:43.720 | Thank you so much for listening to today's show.
00:55:45.600 | If you'd like to join me next week, remember, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance,
00:55:51.640 | and we will look forward to...
00:55:53.040 | Actually, hold on.
00:55:54.040 | Hold on.
00:55:55.040 | No.
00:55:56.040 | I'll just skip that question for now.
00:55:57.040 | Thank you so much.
00:55:57.700 | (upbeat music)