2024-02-21_997-Choose_Your_Beliefs_About_Money
00:00:00.000 | Hey, Radicals, quick thank you before we begin today's podcast. Last week, I published the
00:00:05.280 | announcement for the inaugural Radical Family Camp happening in Indiana in April, and I put
00:00:11.280 | tickets on sale last week. As of today, all of the tickets are sold out for that event,
00:00:16.960 | which is just outstanding. For an inaugural event, to sell out all the tickets in a week just blows
00:00:21.920 | me away, and I'm really, really grateful to you for your response. I rented an entire church camp.
00:00:27.040 | I have 28 cabins, and they're pretty high capacity, but as of today, those have all been
00:00:32.240 | filled. And so I have created a wait list. I'm working to see if I can get access to a
00:00:37.760 | handful more cabins. I rented an entire complex of this large church camp that's there in Indiana,
00:00:43.920 | but there's a handful more cabins that I may be able to get next to the primary complex that I
00:00:49.680 | have there. So if you are interested, make sure you go to RadicalFamilyCamp.com, put your name
00:00:54.400 | on the wait list, and we'll see if we can increase that just a little bit. Otherwise,
00:00:58.320 | hopefully, this inaugural event will go swimmingly well, and hopefully, every attendee will be
00:01:03.040 | thrilled with the event, and hopefully, we can do them more in the future in other places around
00:01:07.840 | the country. But just a big, solid, hearty thank you from me. I really appreciate your response,
00:01:13.040 | and I'm excited to spend a really great time with you. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance,
00:01:17.920 | a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement
00:01:21.360 | you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in
00:01:25.280 | 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets, and today, I want to talk to you about mindset.
00:01:30.560 | Mindset is something that is clearly important in wealth building, and yet, it is something that has
00:01:36.000 | been difficult for me to talk about because I don't get into just kind of frou-frou, airy-fairy
00:01:41.200 | ideas. I want to really understand how my mind works in order to then harness it for my own
00:01:46.960 | purposes. And today, I'm ready to talk to you about one component of mindset. I want to begin
00:01:53.520 | with a tweet. This comes from some random Twitter user named John Lefevre, and he writes this.
00:01:58.800 | I'm not exactly sure what the date on this is, probably a month or two ago. I've been waiting
00:02:03.360 | on this. I had it in my files for a while, waiting to comment on it. "Could the outlook get any more
00:02:08.800 | bleak? Housing has never been more expensive. Transportation has never been more expensive.
00:02:14.560 | Food and energy have never been more expensive. Credit card debt has never been higher.
00:02:18.960 | Household savings have never been lower. Health insurance has never been more expensive.
00:02:23.520 | Americans have never been fatter. Inflation is here to stay. Higher rates are here to stay.
00:02:28.640 | The labor market is cooling. Government spending and our national debt have never been higher.
00:02:33.120 | Our nation is politically and culturally divided. Geopolitical instability is fermenting,"
00:02:37.840 | I think he meant fomenting, "is fermenting around the globe. Illegal immigration has never been
00:02:43.120 | higher. Crime is exploding. World War III is a legitimate possibility. The constitution is under
00:02:48.640 | attack. The justice system has been corrupted and broken. The party in power is weaponizing
00:02:53.200 | the judicial branch to silence its leading opponent and calling for the deprogramming
00:02:57.040 | of 75 million citizens." That's the tweet. Now, here's how we need to look at the world.
00:03:04.960 | We need to begin, before we ever go out into the world and look at things, we need to begin
00:03:11.440 | by consciously, excuse me, self-consciously examining our own perspective. As I approach
00:03:18.640 | my fifth decade of life, I am increasingly convinced that all of us go out into the world
00:03:25.280 | and we see exactly what we believe. We see what we believe. We do not believe what we see.
00:03:33.600 | On the contrary, we go out and we see what we believe. I want to give you a long list of proof
00:03:42.000 | for that statement. Words fail me. You test it for yourself and you see if you don't find evidence
00:03:47.440 | to confirm your belief in what I have said. But to me, this is something that I see all the time.
00:03:54.880 | And if true, that means that we need to be very careful about what we believe.
00:04:03.120 | The simplest example we can begin with is the classic discussion about the difference between
00:04:07.920 | a pessimist and an optimist. A pessimist is one who looks at the glass of water and says,
00:04:13.120 | "The glass is half empty." An optimist is one who looks at the glass of water and says,
00:04:17.520 | "The glass of water is half full." Now, the facts of the height of the level of the water column in
00:04:23.040 | the glass are not under dispute. There is 50% capacity, 50% of the glass's capacity is filled
00:04:29.120 | with water. But the way that you interpret those facts or that fact is very much dependent on
00:04:36.080 | you and on your belief and/or some practical application. This is goofy, but it's real.
00:04:42.960 | I have to consistently teach my children not to fill water glasses to the normal 80% capacity
00:04:49.040 | because then when they get knocked over at our dinner table, we have quite a mess.
00:04:52.720 | And so I teach them to fill our glasses to about 30% capacity so they're less top heavy and we have
00:04:57.840 | fewer messes at our dinner table. And so even the fact of the glass being 50% filled in and of
00:05:04.720 | itself can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on context. It's all dependent on
00:05:08.720 | your perspective. Life is not as simple as these "facts" that this particular Twitter user is
00:05:15.280 | writing about. Some of these facts are clearly correct, I would guess. I mean, World War III
00:05:23.840 | is a legitimate possibility, and it has been a legitimate possibility ever since the end of
00:05:28.960 | World War II. It is and will always be a legitimate possibility until it happens,
00:05:33.760 | and then World War IV will be a legitimate possibility. And it's up to us as human beings
00:05:40.240 | and what we do as to whether or not it will in fact happen and whether it happens in our lifetime.
00:05:45.120 | Similarly, some of these things are clearly incorrect, clearly false. Household savings
00:05:49.600 | have never been lower. Nonsense, right? We go back a couple hundred years and household savings
00:05:53.600 | didn't exist in a monetary form. Now, I'm not here to be the hyperbole police. I'm just simply
00:05:58.000 | pointing out to you that whether you accepted all those statements as facts or not has a lot to do
00:06:05.040 | with your mindset, with your preconceived ideas. And all of us do this. The problem that we need
00:06:11.760 | to face quite straightforwardly is that the way that we perceive the world about us impacts our
00:06:19.200 | actual lifestyle decisions. Here's another tweet from a user called SpaceBiker1488. Don't you love
00:06:25.760 | Twitter? "The worst part about political doomerism is that it encourages you to flee power. Get out
00:06:32.240 | of the cities. Don't invest. Don't start a business. Don't run for office. Just hide in
00:06:35.760 | the woods waiting to die." And I think that tweet is quite appropriate because this user really does
00:06:41.200 | point out the truthfulness that certain mindsets, you basically seal your fate if you adopt certain
00:06:50.320 | mindsets. And so what we need to be very consciously careful of is the kinds of beliefs that
00:06:56.560 | we have, the kinds of beliefs that we build into our mindsets, into our psyche, into our basic
00:07:03.360 | functioning paradigm. Here, I want to introduce a very valuable email from a listener of mine
00:07:08.880 | who wrote to me several weeks ago. And this listener wrote to me from Alabama. He says,
00:07:13.840 | "Hi, Joshua. I enjoyed your episode 993 about wealth and poverty being contagious
00:07:19.200 | and agree with your ideas. Nicely done. I've previously run across a philosophical term
00:07:24.080 | which relates to the idea you expressed toward the end of the episode that I thought you might
00:07:28.160 | enjoy knowing. Metaphorical truth versus literal truth. Metaphorical truth refers to an idea that's
00:07:36.400 | not literally true, but is so useful and advantageous to accept and follow that one should
00:07:43.440 | act as if it is literally true. A great example is all guns are loaded. It's not literally true,
00:07:52.000 | but it serves one well to act as if it were. Thank you for all your great work." And thank you,
00:07:58.240 | Wayne, for writing me the email because this is, I had not heard the term, but it perfectly
00:08:03.520 | encapsulates the point that I was driving at in that episode and the point that I want to drive
00:08:08.800 | at today. Metaphorical truth is something that you can choose to affirm as being true
00:08:17.520 | because of its usefulness to your life. As a lifelong gun user, gun owner, et cetera,
00:08:24.560 | I live by the truth of the statement that all guns are always loaded. I assume that all guns
00:08:32.240 | that I touch, all guns that I handle are always loaded. And it really doesn't matter if I've
00:08:39.520 | checked it once, I'm going to check it two more times. It doesn't really matter if there's a flag
00:08:45.200 | in the breach. I'm still going to check it myself. And I'm probably not going to look down the barrel
00:08:49.360 | of the gun until I've verified three or four times that this gun truly is unloaded. And so
00:08:55.680 | the point is to say that there are things that you can call to be true. You can say all guns are
00:09:00.640 | loaded. They are always loaded until you've proven about five or six times that they're not loaded.
00:09:05.920 | And then you finally accept that, okay, this gun in this case, it's literally true that it's not
00:09:11.520 | loaded, but we are very slow to get there. Now, in most things in life, we're probably not going
00:09:18.240 | to be so precise about every single thing that we believe, but we should take a very careful
00:09:24.160 | inventory of the beliefs that we have because the beliefs that we have about life are going
00:09:30.000 | to basically serve up the life that we have. So for example, somebody takes that doomerism
00:09:36.400 | philosophy, everything is falling apart, get out of the cities, run away to the woods,
00:09:40.560 | it's the only place that you can go and just hide away. Well, as this user, SpaceBiker says,
00:09:45.600 | that really is going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of seeking to fight to change
00:09:51.760 | things, instead of going and becoming highly educated and forming a committee to change
00:09:58.560 | something or forming an organization to fight against something or becoming a judge or a lawyer
00:10:03.360 | or a businessman or whatever, you're just never going to do any of those things because you've got
00:10:07.360 | a doomerist fatalist mindset that's going to lead to your being impotent. And so because you believe
00:10:14.720 | that you're going to be impotent, you're actually going to be impotent. What you believe about
00:10:19.920 | yourself, what you believe about your life, what you believe about your opportunities is probably
00:10:24.240 | going to come true. There's many statements by many famous and successful men that whether you
00:10:30.240 | believe something to be true, it is true for you. If you don't believe it to be true, it's not true
00:10:34.400 | for you. And our world, sometimes we're just so awash in stories and examples of people who have
00:10:44.880 | created just incredible opportunities for themselves just simply due to the ferocity of
00:10:50.960 | their belief, when outside circumstances would lead none of us to say that somebody should believe
00:10:57.520 | something. I want to give you another example. And to be clear, I'm speaking in analogies,
00:11:02.320 | because I don't want you to resist what I'm saying by following your preconceived beliefs
00:11:08.960 | about the job market is terrible, I can't find an opportunity. That's why I'm speaking in analogies.
00:11:13.200 | But this example that I'm about to give you is rather poignant. It's a little bit uncouth,
00:11:18.320 | it's not excessively vulgar, but it's a little bit uncouth. This comes from
00:11:21.280 | John Morrow again on Twitter. And here is John Morrow's tweet. I always thought I would die a
00:11:28.480 | virgin. I'm in a wheelchair. I have less strength than a toddler. I need help eating, going to the
00:11:34.640 | bathroom, everything. Guys like me didn't get laid. It was just a fact of life. But a part of me
00:11:41.040 | wondered, what if I'm wrong? In my 30s, I decided to test it. I hired a dating coach and started
00:11:47.120 | asking 10 women a day to have coffee with me. 10 years later, I've been on over 500 dates,
00:11:52.720 | four relationships of two plus years, two marriage proposals. I said no both times.
00:11:59.040 | And my love life would make Hugh Hefner blush. Moral of the story, test your beliefs to find
00:12:05.120 | out if they are true. You might find the cage around you exists only in your mind.
00:12:12.560 | And from John's Twitter profile, the amazing guy, born paralyzed, hundreds of broken bones,
00:12:18.320 | pneumonia 16 times, built a business using a lip operated mouse, traveled the world. You have no
00:12:24.720 | excuses. And if you look at a picture of John on his Twitter profile, he is profoundly disabled.
00:12:32.080 | I don't need to make the point more obvious, but any male red pill dating coach would come along
00:12:40.560 | and say, "Yeah, this guy, he's got nothing. He's got nothing." And yet, John's experience
00:12:46.320 | demonstrates the opposite. Be very careful what you believe, because you're going to find in life
00:12:53.200 | whatever you believe. So, what can you and I do? Well, we can begin by systematically installing
00:13:00.400 | into our mindset appropriate beliefs. We can do that systematically, if not regularly. What I mean
00:13:09.040 | is that real belief takes an idea, a concept, and it looks for evidence of that. I have a belief
00:13:18.400 | system that says that almost anything is possible. But that belief system has been buttressed by
00:13:27.600 | many, many examples. And so, when I come across a post by a paralyzed man, John Morrow, on Twitter,
00:13:34.080 | the one I just read you, then I just see constant reinforcement of my beliefs, because I've
00:13:40.320 | cultivated these beliefs, and then I've found evidence for the beliefs. So, therefore, the
00:13:44.320 | beliefs get stronger and stronger and stronger. And the same thing happens the other side. If
00:13:48.960 | you cultivate a belief that is a negative belief, then all you see is constant and never-ending
00:13:54.560 | reinforcement of those beliefs. And I don't want to give you a lot of financial beliefs,
00:14:03.840 | but what I do want to give you is some mindset beliefs that will lead to your developing your
00:14:10.880 | own financial beliefs. Maybe in the future, we'll talk about specifics of money. But here are some
00:14:16.240 | beliefs that I think are very useful. I'm now drawing this list from a man named Dickie Bush.
00:14:23.360 | Once again, I've built this entire show on tweets, so I hope you enjoy
00:14:28.560 | my show built on tweets. But this comes from Dickie Bush. Dickie is a very popular writer.
00:14:34.480 | He left Wall Street Investment Banking, something like that, to build a writing business.
00:14:39.760 | And he's just a very wise and intelligent guy. I really enjoy his content. But he posted and
00:14:45.440 | shared nine core beliefs that shape the way that he sees the world. And I think this is a good
00:14:50.800 | example of beliefs that you should consider adopting for yourself. Because whether these
00:14:57.360 | beliefs are literally true or metaphorically true really doesn't matter. They're true enough
00:15:04.640 | that if you adopt them as true, you will get better results in your life, in your finances,
00:15:10.720 | in every aspect of your life by simply adopting these things to be true. Here's belief number one.
00:15:17.840 | Everything in this world is 100% rigged in your favor. I repeat, everything in this world
00:15:27.920 | is 100% rigged in your favor. When you go out into the world believing that there is
00:15:35.760 | a powerful force that is – I'm choosing to use non-Christian language for a moment. I don't know.
00:15:43.600 | I don't even know how you do it. I believe that there is a sovereign God who has divinely
00:15:49.120 | orchestrated every single event in my life for my good and for my well-being, every single one of
00:15:56.000 | them. Now, whether I experience those things as what we commonly call blessings or whether I
00:16:01.520 | experience those things as whether we commonly call trials to me is entirely immaterial. If it's
00:16:06.800 | a blessing, then I'm going to rejoice in the blessing. If it's a trial, I'm going to rejoice
00:16:10.880 | in the trial, and I'm going to let the trial have its work in me. So, this is something that,
00:16:14.720 | as a Christian, is very easy for me to accept because I consider it to be absolutely true.
00:16:20.960 | I consider it to be literally true and metaphorically true that everything in this
00:16:24.400 | world is 100% rigged in my favor and that everything is that I have, again, an omnipotent
00:16:30.880 | sovereign God who is manipulating world circumstances for my good. It's a powerful
00:16:36.880 | belief, and I submit it to you for your consideration. Everything in this world
00:16:40.800 | is 100% rigged in your favor. Number two, every circumstance is an opportunity for progress.
00:16:48.240 | Every circumstance is an opportunity for progress. Now, we appreciate the wins. We appreciate the
00:16:57.040 | things that we can boast about, the things that we can express joy over of our great wins. I'm
00:17:02.080 | rejoicing that my event sold out in less than a week. It's wonderful. It's fantastic. But let's
00:17:08.800 | say it hadn't. Could I have learned something? Was there an opportunity for progress?
00:17:14.160 | Enormous opportunities for progress. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you learn. But you have to
00:17:22.560 | build a big, strong stack of failures and learning events, etc., in order to ultimately win at the
00:17:29.440 | highest level. And so one of the things that we need to cultivate in ourselves is an appreciation
00:17:34.640 | that all circumstances are opportunities for progress. Number three, every outcome in your
00:17:41.840 | life is 100% your responsibility. Every outcome in your life is 100% your responsibility.
00:17:52.080 | Now, notice the words. People are quick to say, "Every outcome in life is not 100% my fault. It's
00:17:58.960 | not my fault." No, the word is not fault. I would not affirm the idea that every outcome in your
00:18:06.080 | life is 100% your fault. No, it's not true. All of us are subject to enormous outward circumstances.
00:18:16.000 | After all, if a sovereign god of the universe is ordering circumstances in my life, then clearly
00:18:20.400 | it's not my fault. It's not of my doing. But that doesn't make it not my responsibility.
00:18:26.480 | So by adopting the mentality that every outcome in my life is 100% my responsibility,
00:18:33.200 | I am now empowered to do things. I have the right mindset, and now I start taking action.
00:18:40.800 | And what's amazing is that people who do this in their life find enormous resources start
00:18:46.960 | flowing towards them. People who take responsibility for their life, who take
00:18:51.520 | responsibility for the outcomes, take responsibility for everything, wind up finding that they don't
00:18:58.720 | actually have to do it all. It's the attitude that changes everything. Every outcome in your life
00:19:05.840 | is 100% your responsibility. Next, number four. Everything you want, you must initiate yourself.
00:19:17.120 | Everything you want, you must initiate yourself. I love this one. I love this one.
00:19:24.400 | I love the choice of words. Initiate. Start. Take action. Do something for it. To start it.
00:19:31.920 | To initiate it. Everything you want, you must initiate yourself. If you want to get rid of any
00:19:38.480 | of that list of bad things happening for yourself that I started off with, the tweet, you have to
00:19:44.160 | start with someone. You have to start with yourself, and you have to start with doing
00:19:49.200 | something towards something. Now, the great paradox of modern life is while external circumstances,
00:20:00.880 | let me begin by stating it in a freedom context. It's hard for me to imagine a time in history in
00:20:08.240 | which our collective freedom has ever been lower, and yet our individual freedom has ever been
00:20:19.200 | higher. What I mean is Big Brother has more power and capability today than ever before in human
00:20:26.800 | history. So, Big Brother can know everything about you, and there's all kinds of powerful
00:20:31.840 | forces that are arrayed against you, and yet you as an individual have never had more power and
00:20:38.400 | freedom of choice than you have today. If you were to go back to the medieval era, okay, maybe
00:20:43.680 | the actual powers that controlled your life were much smaller. They were less centralized,
00:20:50.400 | but you had a lord of the manor, and you could just leave and walk away from the lord of the
00:20:54.960 | manor. You could get away from him more easily, but you as an individual had far fewer options
00:21:00.080 | because there just weren't as many opportunities in life. Whereas today, all right, Big Brother
00:21:04.640 | may be really big and powerful, but you as an individual have more freedom. Similarly,
00:21:08.960 | we could apply that same framework to almost any of the complaints on this list. Housing has never
00:21:14.000 | been more expensive, for example. Is that true? Well, to an extent, certainly, and yet your
00:21:20.400 | individual housing choices, you have more choice today than you've probably had ever before in
00:21:26.480 | human history, because you can choose at what level you want to access the housing market.
00:21:32.400 | If you want to live in a penthouse condo in downtown Vancouver, well, it's going to be
00:21:36.880 | expensive, and you better make sure that you earn the money. On the other hand, if you want to go
00:21:40.400 | live in a tent in the middle of some free land, you can go and do that. You can get a tent for
00:21:44.960 | 89 bucks at Walmart, or you can make your own out of animal skins like our ancestors did,
00:21:49.040 | and you can go live on free government land, and you can spend the rest of your life that way.
00:21:52.720 | And I'm not actually being facetious with this example. These truly are your choices, and you
00:21:58.720 | can choose anywhere along the scale that fits your imagined lifestyle of the way that you want to
00:22:04.000 | live. So in order for you to make change, though, you have to initiate it. You have to decide,
00:22:10.320 | "I want to be free of this problem," or "I want to access something." Everything you want,
00:22:15.360 | you must initiate yourself. You have to start, and when you start, your brain will immediately
00:22:22.000 | bring to you solutions as to how you can accomplish things in your life.
00:22:26.160 | One of the reasons I branded 10 years ago this show Radical Personal Finance is this very concept,
00:22:31.280 | that I was so enthusiastic about the idea that an individual can make a difference,
00:22:36.400 | and I just felt like the ideas of individual choice were dramatically underrepresented
00:22:41.120 | in personal finance circles. Years ago, back I think before the show started, I read a story
00:22:46.400 | about a young programmer who had a dream to build his own website, didn't have any money,
00:22:50.720 | took all his savings, bought a tent, figured out an internet signal, I guess, this was pre-satellite
00:22:56.080 | internet, and moved out to the woods, I think it was in Sweden or something, and spent an entire
00:23:01.360 | summer living in the woods programming, came back from the woods with his working programming
00:23:05.760 | project, and launched his technology startup. That's available to you. The barriers to that
00:23:12.320 | are all in your mind. They're all in a matter of lifestyle and what's normal, etc. If you want
00:23:18.160 | something, you can initiate it yourself, and that initiation will then start resources flowing
00:23:23.600 | towards you. Number five, every person you come across has something to teach you. Such a powerful
00:23:31.840 | way to interact with other people. Every person you come across has something to teach you.
00:23:37.360 | Your arch enemy, your arch rival, your biggest opponent has something to teach you, and if you
00:23:43.760 | go out and interact with people looking for the lessons that you can learn, you will make enormous
00:23:50.960 | accomplishments and strides in your life, and all of your relationships will be bettered. Your
00:23:56.560 | friendships will be bettered, because your friends will sense that expression of appreciation that
00:24:02.080 | comes to you when you listen carefully, and you look for the areas that they're really excellent
00:24:06.640 | in. Your enemies will ultimately be vanquished by you, because you learn from where your enemies
00:24:12.160 | are strong, and you figure out how to counter that. Number six, everything is learnable if
00:24:19.920 | you can find the ideal scene. Everything is learnable if you can find the ideal scene.
00:24:27.520 | We are living in a day and age in which access to information has never been more powerful.
00:24:38.400 | If you can put access to information together with access to people – also, by the way,
00:24:44.240 | I feel I affirm the access to people has never been easier today than it is today – then you
00:24:50.720 | can learn anything that you want to learn. It will take time, undoubtedly take enormous amounts
00:24:55.280 | of effort, etc., but everything is learnable. Number seven, everything you want will stand
00:25:02.160 | on the other side of a limiting fear. Everything you want will stand on the other side of a limiting
00:25:11.520 | fear. I'm afraid to talk too much about this one, because I would have to expose my fears.
00:25:16.240 | And my base fear is usually wanting to look good in front of other people. For whatever reason,
00:25:23.680 | I'm sure it's a common human thing, but one of the themes of my life has generally been that
00:25:28.160 | I like to look good, I like to have a good reputation, etc., and I can identify specifically
00:25:34.080 | in that particular fear how many times that fear has held me back. I have podcast episodes about it,
00:25:40.000 | a practical application of it, but wanting to look good in front of other people has limited
00:25:46.000 | me in many ways. Now, your fears may be different, but everything you want will stand on the other
00:25:50.480 | side of a limiting fear. That's such a powerful concept, a powerful belief to install in your mind,
00:25:56.080 | so then you can tackle the fears that are limiting you from going after things.
00:26:00.800 | Just this week, in my own thinking, I was listening to a motivational video while I was
00:26:06.080 | exercising, and I enjoy these because they're kind of a hodgepodge. There's tons of them on
00:26:11.600 | YouTube. Go to YouTube, search "motivation," and there's all kinds of dudes out there that are
00:26:15.520 | cutting up all these interesting clips, etc. And I heard some speaker make the comment of,
00:26:21.360 | basically, a variation of, "What is that thing that you dare to dream if you knew you could not
00:26:28.160 | fail?" I can't tell you how many dozens and dozens and dozens of times I've heard that question. I
00:26:33.280 | can't tell you how many dozens of times I've carefully considered it. But then I realized
00:26:37.600 | afresh, "Wait, I know what that thing is. I know what that thing is. Now I know why I'm afraid of
00:26:47.200 | it." And it laid out for me kind of a clear vision of something that I was missing. So,
00:26:53.200 | adopt the belief that everything you want will stand on the other side of a limiting fear.
00:26:57.200 | Number eight, every investment you make can have positive returns if you choose so.
00:27:04.560 | Every investment you make can have positive returns if you choose so. Isn't that powerful?
00:27:14.800 | Especially in a financial context. Sometimes your investments compound and make you enormous
00:27:20.320 | amounts of money. Sometimes you lose your shirt. You know which lessons you're going to remember
00:27:27.280 | the most keenly? It's the ones in which you lost. I was recently talking about learning.
00:27:35.280 | One of the things that I have come across, I've done a really deep dive into learning science.
00:27:42.400 | And one of the things that's fascinating to me is that getting wrong answers is actually one of the
00:27:49.200 | most effective ways to learn something. Getting wrong answers on a test especially
00:27:54.400 | is one of the most effective ways to learn something. And I figured this out myself just
00:28:00.000 | through introspection before I heard the external research for it because I remember very specifically
00:28:07.040 | a test question that I got wrong in first grade. This is how deep a failure can go.
00:28:13.360 | In first grade, my brother and I were being homeschooled by my grandmother. So,
00:28:18.240 | we would get up every day and we ride our bikes a couple miles down the road to my
00:28:21.760 | grandmother's house and we would do school underneath my grandmother. My family was all
00:28:26.960 | teachers. My grandmother was a teacher in her career. My mother was a teacher, etc.
00:28:32.320 | And so, we had a very traditional structure because of this teaching background. And I remember that
00:28:39.840 | my grandmother gave me a test. And one of the questions on this test was, "How many digits
00:28:45.200 | are there?" First grade test. "How many digits are there?" And I sat there and I very carefully
00:28:52.160 | thought and I said, "Well, I know that there's not 10 digits because 10 is two digits put together.
00:28:59.840 | So, I know that I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. There's 9 digits because I know
00:29:06.160 | that 10 is two numbers put together." So, I confidently wrote 9 on my paper. And I felt
00:29:11.280 | so proud of myself in first grade. I don't know why, but this emotion of pride is just written.
00:29:18.240 | Actually, I didn't know why because I got it wrong. But I was so proud of my right answer
00:29:24.000 | that I figured out they were trying to trick me because they thought, because I had studied 1
00:29:28.080 | through 10, they thought I would put 10, that there's 10 digits and I know there's 9 digits
00:29:33.200 | because I know that 10 is not. So, I turned in my paper and I got it marked wrong because zero
00:29:40.160 | is a digit. I felt so humiliated. Here, I thought I was the smartest guy in the world. And here,
00:29:48.880 | I thought that I had beat the test and they were trying to trick me. And it turns out that if I
00:29:53.360 | just put 10, I would have been right. However many years later from first grade, I still remember
00:30:00.560 | that one test question because I got it wrong. And to this day, I have always known that there
00:30:08.480 | are 10 digits in the world. That's it in our system anyway. This is life. We always remember
00:30:15.920 | the wrong questions. And so, one of the things that we need to do to learn effectively is basically
00:30:21.360 | start piling up as many wrong questions as possible. In language acquisition, one of the
00:30:25.840 | most valuable things about going out and speaking the language and using the language is you very
00:30:30.800 | quickly figure out which words you forgot, which words you don't know. And so, you're out in the
00:30:35.600 | world and you're trying to come up with a word and you say, "I should know what that is. How do
00:30:38.640 | I not know what the word for shoe is or door handle or whatever this is?" But you need it and
00:30:43.840 | you don't have it. Well, you go back, you look it up, you study it, you'll never forget it again
00:30:50.080 | because you got it wrong. And so, lessons come to us this way. And it's such a powerful belief
00:30:55.920 | to install in ourselves and to install in our children that every investment you make
00:31:00.640 | can have positive returns if you choose so. Number nine, every person you come across
00:31:07.680 | has a strong desire to feel validated. Every person you come across has a strong desire
00:31:15.360 | to feel validated. Again, magic key to interpersonal relationships. We're all
00:31:22.800 | longing for appreciation, for validation. And if you go out in the world offering that to people,
00:31:28.160 | appreciation, validation, you'll have friends everywhere. Now, I don't think that's a
00:31:34.480 | comprehensive list of all the belief systems that you need. I'm specifically avoiding giving you
00:31:41.280 | specific financial ones because I want you to create them for yourself. There are some very
00:31:48.240 | clearly financial belief systems that you can install. And if you let your mind go through
00:31:52.800 | the areas of income generation, expense reduction, investment returns, avoiding catastrophe,
00:31:59.280 | investing wisely, etc., excuse me, optimizing lifestyle, then you will discover how to build
00:32:06.880 | those beliefs. As you install into your operating system high-quality empowered beliefs,
00:32:17.360 | you will see nothing but opportunities. You'll see nothing but evidence to reinforce those beliefs.
00:32:27.360 | I will give you one financial example. If you are ever offered a promotion at your work,
00:32:36.720 | if you're ever offered a significant increase in pay, you probably should take it.
00:32:42.240 | Even if you don't stay in the job for a long time, you probably should take it
00:32:49.280 | because that promotion, that paycheck that you get will fundamentally transform how you view yourself.
00:33:01.760 | Years ago, probably a Zig Ziglar tape, I don't know. I heard a motivational speaker that cited
00:33:07.440 | a study that someone had done, and they had taken a job description, a job offering,
00:33:15.280 | and they had put an ad in the newspaper, and they chose two comparable metro areas. I don't know,
00:33:23.520 | Chicago and New York. Who knows? Denver and Miami. I don't know. They ran this ad in two
00:33:29.760 | different cities. The actual words of the advertisement were identical. The job description,
00:33:38.000 | the necessary qualifications, etc., identical for these two ads. The only thing that was different
00:33:45.120 | between them was the pay scale. For the sake of example, one was offering $120,000 and the other
00:33:51.360 | was offering $60,000. They received massive numbers of responses to the $60,000 ad,
00:34:02.160 | and they received many fewer responses to the $120,000 ad. The idea is that this little
00:34:11.120 | experiment demonstrated that people judge themselves not by their job qualifications,
00:34:18.720 | but by their salary level. The job qualifications were all the same. The description was the same.
00:34:24.800 | The necessary qualifications were the same. The only thing was that there were a lot fewer people
00:34:28.800 | that saw themselves as $120,000-a-year earners as compared to $60,000-a-year earners.
00:34:33.920 | And I've seen this again and again and again in business, that it's very difficult to go and make
00:34:40.000 | an enormous jump in your income. It's very difficult to go from a $50,000-a-year job to
00:34:45.040 | a $250,000-a-year job, because when you're a $50,000-a-year earner, you see yourself as a
00:34:50.240 | $50,000-a-year earner. And if all of a sudden you make this enormous jump, your financial thermostat
00:34:55.200 | breaks. And in many ways, you look around and, "How do I sabotage myself quickly to get out of
00:35:01.120 | this because it's uncomfortable? I don't fit here." But once you become a $250,000-a-year earner,
00:35:10.080 | you now are that person, and you see yourself that way. And a $250,000-a-year earner doesn't
00:35:15.840 | often wake up and say, "Let me go and apply for a $50,000-a-year job."
00:35:18.880 | The financial thermostat model has always been very powerful to me.
00:35:23.440 | The example that I give is quite simply this. Let's imagine that, you know, my listener base
00:35:32.560 | varies enormously in terms of wealth and income, etc. But let's use a pretty good number.
00:35:40.800 | Let's imagine that you woke up and you look in your bank account or your investment account,
00:35:46.880 | you look at your net worth statement, and you discover that you have a net worth today of
00:35:51.200 | $20 million. $20 million. How would you feel if you woke up and you looked in your bank
00:36:04.960 | statements and you discovered you had a net worth of $20 million?
00:36:08.400 | Now, most people would feel pretty good. They would say, "That'd be amazing to have $20 million."
00:36:16.480 | Now, I want you to imagine something different. I want you to imagine that—what name do I use?
00:36:23.680 | Donald Trump. I want you to imagine that Donald Trump wakes up today,
00:36:29.920 | and he has a meeting with his accountant. And the accountant says, "Mr. Trump,
00:36:36.560 | you're worth $20 million. That's your net worth, $20 million."
00:36:41.760 | How do you think Donald J. Trump would respond to that?
00:36:50.160 | Would he feel happy? Or would he freak out?
00:37:00.400 | You know the answer. How is it that two men could have
00:37:04.480 | very opposite reactions to the same facts? A $20 million net worth
00:37:12.320 | comes down to their belief system. If some guy's got a million-dollar net worth or a
00:37:20.400 | $500,000 net worth, and he wakes up with $20 million, he's going to feel great,
00:37:24.880 | because his belief system is, "Okay, I deserve $500,000 or a million dollars in net worth."
00:37:30.320 | But if a guy's got a belief system that, "I'm a billionaire, and I deserve to be a billionaire,"
00:37:34.160 | and he wakes up, and he's a multi-deca-millionaire—did I get my
00:37:39.120 | prefixes right?—20-millionaire, whatever, simplify it, then he's going to have a very different
00:37:44.960 | response. The point is simply to secure in your mind that your beliefs about yourself matter.
00:37:55.600 | Now, I don't know if it is possible to make enormous changes in belief overnight.
00:38:01.920 | I don't know if you can believe the secret, and you can just tell yourself, "I'm a billionaire,
00:38:08.240 | I'm a billionaire, I'm a billionaire," and somehow that's going to do something for you.
00:38:12.000 | I don't think it does anything. I don't think it's possible, because I think that you could
00:38:16.560 | repeat every day, "I'm a billionaire, I'm a billionaire, I'm a billionaire," and you're
00:38:19.120 | not going to believe it, because you know you're not a billionaire. You're not even a millionaire.
00:38:24.000 | I don't think it's possible to make enormous jumps, but I think it's possible to make modest
00:38:29.840 | and significant jumps. If you're earning $80,000 a year, then I think it's very believable that
00:38:37.440 | you could earn $105,000 a year, and then once you're earning $105,000 a year, I think it's
00:38:42.880 | very believable you could convince yourself that you're worth $140,000 a year, and once you're
00:38:48.720 | earning $140,000 a year, I think you can convince yourself that you're worth $200,000 a year.
00:38:54.080 | And then once you're worth $200,000 a year, I think you can convince yourself you're worth
00:38:56.960 | $300,000 a year, and so on and so forth. So look for those things. You may not believe,
00:39:06.160 | for example, if you have a habit of yelling at people, you may not believe that you can
00:39:10.080 | become a non-yeller, but I think you can believe that you could yell less.
00:39:15.520 | You may not believe that every person you come across has something to teach you,
00:39:21.440 | but you could believe that most people you come across have something to teach you.
00:39:26.560 | And the list goes on. The point is, go with what you can believe, but recognize that your
00:39:34.000 | beliefs are malleable, and it's up to you to set them, to establish them, to determine them,
00:39:40.400 | and then to follow through. Be careful what you believe, because you're going to see,
00:39:49.520 | in the world around, all of the things that you believe.
00:39:53.200 | Be very, very careful with your beliefs.
00:39:58.960 | Choose to adopt a set of beliefs that will serve you. And even if they're not guaranteed
00:40:08.880 | to give you the life that you want to live, choose a set of beliefs that are more likely
00:40:15.520 | to give you the life that you want to live. And what will happen is, in the fullness of time,
00:40:21.440 | your beliefs will determine your reality. So, choose wisely.
00:40:28.480 | We all know that words have power, but there's one word that stands out, because when people say it,
00:40:35.600 | lives are changed. It's not a big word, but when you say it, the life of a kid like me can be
00:40:44.400 | changed. It's yes. Yes. Yes. Yes to becoming a monthly supporter of Shriners Hospitals for
00:40:52.240 | Children. Please go to loveshriners.org to say yes right away.