RPF0225-Tom_Corley

00:00:00.000 | Today on the show I share with you an interview with Tom Corley.

00:00:04.320 | Tom is an accomplished accountant who is also a financial planner by trade.

00:00:10.720 | He became interested in the subject of wealth and performed a survey of his wealthy clients

00:00:16.780 | trying to elucidate what made them different from other people.

00:00:22.480 | Completed a survey of a number of wealthy people and also a number of poor people and

00:00:26.300 | from those surveys and from that research extracted some habits and some principles

00:00:32.680 | that were common to all of the wealthy people and were uncommon to the poor people.

00:00:38.640 | He went on to write a book called Rich Habits, the Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals.

00:00:46.240 | Find out how the rich get so rich, the secrets to financial success revealed.

00:00:49.820 | He followed that up with an additional book called Rich Kids, How to Raise Our Children

00:00:54.720 | to be Happy and Successful in Life.

00:00:59.100 | Kind of an important subject, don't you think?

00:01:17.240 | Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast.

00:01:19.120 | My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host, your guide and your fellow adventurer on the

00:01:23.920 | journey to financial independence.

00:01:25.420 | This is the show where we talk each and every day about all of the concepts and all of the

00:01:29.360 | content and all of the information required to construct a rich and successful life, day

00:01:35.340 | by day, working hard, doing all we can do to build and grow toward financial independence.

00:01:44.320 | I'm very much looking forward to hearing your feedback after this interview.

00:01:52.840 | I was thrilled to do it.

00:01:54.040 | It's one of the more enjoyable interviews that I have done with an author and it's enjoyable

00:01:57.480 | for a number of reasons.

00:01:58.480 | Number one, the content matter of this interview is a perfect fit for Radical Personal Finance.

00:02:03.640 | After all, this is exactly what we talk about.

00:02:06.520 | It's also in many ways a confirmation of many of the ideas that I've held for a long time

00:02:11.760 | and it's always exciting to see some of the ideas that you hold near and dear to your

00:02:15.560 | heart confirmed in the marketplace.

00:02:18.960 | Most importantly, I want you to pay attention to the story.

00:02:22.480 | During the course of this interview, I did not focus heavily on the content of Tom's

00:02:27.280 | books.

00:02:28.280 | I personally have found that authors are very challenging people to interview and one of

00:02:31.800 | the changes that I've made with my interviewing style, you can tell me if you like it or not,

00:02:36.960 | is not so much to focus on trying to get an author to go step by step through their book.

00:02:41.920 | That's a mistake that I made in earlier episodes of Radical Personal Finance and it doesn't,

00:02:45.760 | in my opinion, doesn't work well because they wrote a book for a reason.

00:02:49.440 | If you want to know what the rich habits are, read the book and obviously a good quick summary

00:02:54.200 | is very useful.

00:02:56.600 | But more than that, I was interested in Tom's story.

00:03:02.480 | So listen for that through the course of this interview.

00:03:04.800 | Listen for Tom's story and how he personally changed and the steps that he took because

00:03:12.160 | there's nothing that Tom has done that you or I can't do as well.

00:03:20.480 | Tom welcome to Radical Personal Finance.

00:03:22.000 | I've been looking forward to speaking with you.

00:03:24.320 | Tom Gjelten: Thanks for having me on your show Joshua.

00:03:27.160 | It's really an honor to be there.

00:03:28.720 | Tom Bilyeu: I've been wanting to talk with you because you have written extensively about

00:03:36.080 | success habits which is going to be the core of our show but you've also built a career

00:03:43.720 | in financial services.

00:03:45.760 | And so as a fellow financial planner, I've been looking forward to talking to you about

00:03:48.880 | the intersection of these things.

00:03:51.240 | Before we get into the meat and potatoes, I'd love it if you'd share a little bit about

00:03:53.880 | your background and your journey through the financial planning industry and the accounting

00:03:58.380 | industry and how that ultimately led to your creating the Rich Habits books.

00:04:02.920 | Tom Gjelten: Sure.

00:04:03.920 | Well, I'm a CPA and I'm also a certified financial planner.

00:04:08.200 | I also have a master's in tax and I mention that only because I spent a great deal of

00:04:12.300 | my career focused on large corporate tax and complicated individual tax areas like expatriates

00:04:21.520 | and things like that.

00:04:24.200 | What happened was the transition into what I'm doing here was really just by happenstance.

00:04:32.440 | I took over the reins of this CPA firm, Seraphus & Company in 2003 and sometime in the middle

00:04:41.800 | of 2004, one of our clients who was a business owner was struggling financially.

00:04:50.480 | They needed to have a meeting with me immediately.

00:04:53.720 | Their bank had shut down their line of credit and they couldn't make payroll and so they

00:05:00.160 | were basically coming to me looking for a Hail Mary pass with a couple of seconds on

00:05:06.800 | the clock and I told them I couldn't find a bank that quickly.

00:05:11.880 | Those things take time, building banking relationships.

00:05:15.280 | The guy just broke down and started crying.

00:05:18.360 | It was a family business he had inherited from his dad and because of, as I found out,

00:05:25.440 | because of certain bad habits that he had, he was basically taking all the cash flow

00:05:31.760 | out of the business.

00:05:35.640 | He started crying and he asked me what was he doing wrong, what are my successful clients

00:05:41.600 | doing.

00:05:43.760 | It affected me emotionally and so I started doing some initial research.

00:05:49.280 | I found some okay information, mainly it was the millionaire next door research, but it

00:05:56.120 | didn't really tell me what the guy was doing wrong and there wasn't a lot of information

00:06:00.920 | in there that was helpful, I thought.

00:06:04.760 | I started doing the research then.

00:06:09.120 | It took me about six months to develop what became my 20 question list, which is really

00:06:14.400 | 154 questions, but I broke it down into 20 categories.

00:06:22.840 | It took four years of interviewing.

00:06:27.640 | Initially I started out interviewing wealthy people and I stopped at 233.

00:06:33.760 | Don't ask me why, I just stopped.

00:06:35.280 | I thought I had enough.

00:06:37.040 | I didn't want to go above really 150, but I was just drawn into this.

00:06:42.000 | It was so compelling, the information I was gathering.

00:06:45.680 | Then I said, "Well, I know what wealthy people are doing, but what are poor people doing

00:06:52.920 | that are holding them back?"

00:06:55.380 | My goal was to just interview 100 poor people.

00:07:00.140 | My goal was actually 150 poor people, but I struggled, believe it or not, finding poor

00:07:04.780 | people to interview.

00:07:07.680 | I only got 128, but I thought it was relevant enough sampling for me.

00:07:14.800 | I wasn't doing this for Princeton.

00:07:17.520 | I was doing it to try and answer a question that I had, which is why are people rich and

00:07:22.280 | why are people poor?

00:07:24.360 | I took all of this information that I gathered through this 20 question list and I dumped

00:07:31.160 | it onto a bunch of Excel worksheets and I started categorizing it.

00:07:38.160 | It took about 18 months.

00:07:40.680 | Now I've got over 300 data points that I've tracked from my research that really tell

00:07:50.360 | the story, tell us a whole story about why you're rich and why you're poor.

00:07:55.960 | I started doing these learning sessions.

00:07:58.720 | I have a conference room here in my office and you could fit about 10 to 12 people in

00:08:03.360 | it at night.

00:08:04.360 | I had about a dozen of those learning sessions.

00:08:08.440 | Some of the people had real success with some of the training from my research.

00:08:16.280 | They asked me to write a book.

00:08:19.240 | I was reluctant because I'd never written a book before.

00:08:23.400 | I didn't know how to even go about it.

00:08:25.820 | That took another six months of research on how to write a book.

00:08:33.420 | That took me to Rich Habits.

00:08:35.520 | I ended up spending about a year writing Rich Habits.

00:08:39.480 | I stumbled in the beginning.

00:08:41.360 | I had two manuscripts that I ended up throwing out and I settled on a template that I used

00:08:50.480 | was Aguilino's Greatest Salesman in the World.

00:08:53.200 | It was a great book.

00:08:55.760 | My initial template was The Millionaire Next Door.

00:08:58.840 | I had about 350 pages of graphs and data.

00:09:04.800 | Someone whose opinion I value a great deal sent the manuscript back and said, "This

00:09:09.800 | is great for college students or postgraduate work, but you're not going to help anybody

00:09:16.160 | who really wants to change their life."

00:09:19.900 | He sent back the manuscript with a copy of Aguilino's book.

00:09:23.840 | I'd never read it before, so I read it and I realized, "Oh my God, this is what I

00:09:28.120 | really want to write."

00:09:30.760 | I kind of mirrored his book.

00:09:33.440 | I used it as the format and Rich Habits was the end result.

00:09:40.560 | It's a good format for those who haven't read Greatest Salesman in the World.

00:09:45.960 | It's kind of a combination of what you call a parable.

00:09:49.320 | It's almost a story with a bit of instruction and an overall narrative parable and then

00:09:53.680 | a focused parable within a parable somehow.

00:09:56.520 | I don't quite know how to name the genre, but it's a useful style.

00:10:01.080 | I think of even books similar in some ways to Richest Man in Babylon as a narrative format,

00:10:08.360 | but you're trying to use that to teach these certain steps.

00:10:11.280 | That's right.

00:10:12.280 | I wanted to tell a story and weave into the story the rich habits somehow and that's

00:10:21.120 | what I tried to do.

00:10:22.720 | It's accessible.

00:10:23.720 | I want to ask you a follow-up question on your research.

00:10:26.960 | The way that I first came across – by the way, I really enjoyed both of your books.

00:10:32.680 | The way that I came across your name, though, however, was after you gave an interview on

00:10:39.100 | Dave Ramsey's show.

00:10:40.680 | Then later he published a blog post that listed out some of the data from your research.

00:10:47.800 | Well, that blog post went on to become quite the controversial topic.

00:10:51.800 | That was when I came across it was after hearing about the controversy.

00:10:57.520 | When I read the blog post, though, everything within me wanted to jump up and down and say,

00:11:02.360 | "Yes, this is awesome."

00:11:03.360 | Just to cite a few example statistics of how this data is presented, things like 80% of

00:11:11.640 | the wealthy are focused on accomplishing some single goal.

00:11:14.320 | Only 12% of the poor focus on a single goal.

00:11:17.280 | Or 63% of the wealthy listen to audio books during their commute to work versus 5% of

00:11:21.680 | poor people.

00:11:22.920 | Or 63% of wealthy parents make their children read two or more nonfiction books a month

00:11:26.880 | versus 3% of poor.

00:11:28.160 | There are many other data points that are cited.

00:11:31.600 | My reaction to that was as a lifelong self-learner and someone who's been focused for a very

00:11:37.840 | long time on my own personal development, I wanted to jump up and down and say, "Yes,

00:11:41.940 | this is the greatest thing of all time for the personal development industry.

00:11:46.120 | Here's the data."

00:11:47.440 | That immediately made me become suspicious because of the ability to actually trust the

00:11:53.120 | data because it almost seems like too perfect of a package.

00:11:56.760 | It feels more like you invented numbers to match a story rather than pulling a story

00:12:03.840 | out of the numbers.

00:12:04.840 | So, two questions for you.

00:12:06.480 | Number one, has anybody questioned or affirmed the statistical validity of your sample set?

00:12:15.760 | Secondly, did you go into it with a perception of thinking what you were going to find or

00:12:21.360 | did you approach it as a pure researcher?

00:12:25.360 | On the first question, I have sent some data to different people, particularly after that

00:12:32.360 | CNN article came out that lambasted me and Dave Ramsey.

00:12:37.680 | They got so much wrong in that article.

00:12:39.520 | Welcome to modern life.

00:12:41.720 | Including my name.

00:12:43.900 | My name is Tom Corley, not Tim Corley.

00:12:46.120 | My brother Tim is a top dog at the DEA, so he wasn't too happy about that.

00:12:57.560 | Anyway, it's hard for me to send the entire research because there's four -- I mean, it

00:13:05.760 | fills up an entire filing cabinet.

00:13:08.960 | What I was doing was sending out the research summary and some other information that I

00:13:12.480 | had that I knew would make it more accessible to people and easier to look at.

00:13:19.120 | And then they wanted to know my demographics.

00:13:22.040 | I've got a hundred questions that people ask me and I tried to respond to each one of them.

00:13:28.080 | How many were white?

00:13:29.620 | How many were black?

00:13:30.620 | How many were -- what were the nationalities?

00:13:33.240 | How many were male?

00:13:34.240 | How many were female?

00:13:35.240 | And I have all of that.

00:13:36.240 | And so, how much was their wealth?

00:13:39.560 | And I have all that.

00:13:41.040 | So, I sent all that stuff out as best as I could, which took a lot of time, but it was

00:13:46.280 | worth it.

00:13:47.280 | So, I did.

00:13:48.280 | There was a little bit of vetting going on there.

00:13:52.240 | And the second part of your question was -- just repeat that again, Joshua.

00:13:56.440 | I was just saying, like, in the book, you talk about it using the narrative that you

00:14:01.520 | tell in the book as from the perspective of, "Well, I was starting to do the research to

00:14:05.320 | figure out what was wrong in my life as the accountant, your protagonist.

00:14:10.480 | I was just curious if you were actually starting from that place yourself or if you were coming

00:14:15.120 | from a place of more experience and then kind of having an idea of what you would find and

00:14:19.360 | then actually digging into it."

00:14:21.000 | Well, you know, I think part of the problem is, one, I hated wealthy people when I started

00:14:28.840 | doing this research.

00:14:31.560 | You know, because my story was we were rich and then we were poor and I spent most of

00:14:35.600 | my life in poverty.

00:14:37.200 | So I had a real -- just from growing up, my mother was the homemaker.

00:14:41.960 | And, you know, some of the things that through my upbringing that I -- some of the beliefs

00:14:48.440 | that I held were not too favorable to wealthy people.

00:14:51.960 | I really didn't like them at all.

00:14:53.440 | So there was a prejudice there, which probably is contrary to what, like, CNN was thinking.

00:15:00.000 | So, you know, I think for sure that affected me.

00:15:05.760 | But what happened during this whole research project is I went from hating the wealthy

00:15:12.340 | people to admiring them.

00:15:16.340 | And it was sort of catharsis for me because then I said, "Wow, you know, I've got this

00:15:22.320 | all backwards."

00:15:23.320 | I mean, I really -- I really grew up in a way that we had most of these poverty habits

00:15:30.720 | and we didn't have a lot of the rich habits.

00:15:32.480 | And so I was -- I don't know if that makes me objective or subjective, but it is what

00:15:38.400 | it is.

00:15:39.400 | And the other part of it was I was a CPA and a financial planner, so I was in constant

00:15:43.560 | contact with wealthy people.

00:15:46.080 | And that part of it, you know, a lot of my best clients were my wealthy clients.

00:15:50.840 | You know, they were the nicest ones.

00:15:53.440 | They were the ones who were in constant contact with me, communication.

00:15:58.360 | They weren't -- you know, the ones that I struggled with were the people in the middle

00:16:01.240 | class or who were trying to get out of the middle class who were constantly complaining

00:16:05.440 | about their fees and the time I spent on stuff.

00:16:08.120 | They were the ones that gave me the heartache, not the wealthy people.

00:16:11.840 | So a lot of these things were kind of playing in my mind.

00:16:17.520 | And so when I wrote Rich Habits, I guess I had -- I was at that point where I had reached

00:16:22.800 | a conclusion that wealthy people weren't bad people after all and that this information

00:16:29.720 | needs to get out there because, you know, society, especially nowadays, everybody's

00:16:33.360 | beating up on the wealthy.

00:16:35.480 | And they're, you know, with all that happened in 2008 and 2009, it didn't help.

00:16:41.280 | So I said, well, you know, I'm going to write a book about this.

00:16:44.800 | I'm just going to lay it out there and, you know, I don't know if I'm going to sell

00:16:48.720 | one book or a million books, but I'm just going to try and write something that I think

00:16:52.880 | is truthful.

00:16:53.880 | But, you know, the other part of what you said is, you know, I have over 300 data points.

00:17:01.400 | And some of the data points, they don't fit the narrative necessarily that, you know,

00:17:08.960 | wealthy are this or poor are that.

00:17:12.080 | Some of them are pretty close.

00:17:15.700 | And so the only data points that the media picked up on or wanted to highlight were the

00:17:22.320 | ones that showed the big differences between the wealthy and the poor.

00:17:27.020 | So I don't know if that helps explain it.

00:17:28.840 | Yeah, it's useful.

00:17:29.840 | And I'm sorry to lead off with an aggressive question.

00:17:33.320 | But as we get into the habits, I love the material that you presented so much.

00:17:39.280 | But I'm, as I already said, I was so immediately fearful of, wait a second, I love it too much.

00:17:45.400 | I'm immediately suspicious of the objectiveness of it.

00:17:49.080 | Because all of the habits that you outline in the book are habits that I have learned

00:17:54.560 | over time from other people that I have been taught and that I've worked hard to implement.

00:17:58.520 | So it's easy to get into a position of confirmation bias of, well, I've already figured those

00:18:02.680 | out.

00:18:03.680 | So absolutely, this is exactly what I'm looking for.

00:18:06.400 | So let me outline the habits real quick just for those who obviously haven't read the book.

00:18:11.880 | And just a summary from early in the book.

00:18:14.640 | I'll read just one paragraph here as a summary.

00:18:18.640 | That the summary of the Rich Habits promises is that I will form good daily habits and

00:18:22.480 | follow these good daily habits each and every day.

00:18:25.240 | I will set goals for each day, for each month, for each year, and for the long term.

00:18:30.120 | I will focus on my goals each and every day.

00:18:33.080 | I will engage in self-improvement each and every day.

00:18:35.920 | I will devote part of each and every day in caring for my health.

00:18:39.280 | I will devote part of each and every day to forming lifelong relationships.

00:18:43.080 | I will live each and every day in a state of moderation.

00:18:45.960 | I will accomplish my daily tasks each and every day.

00:18:49.280 | I will adopt a do-it-now mindset.

00:18:51.320 | I will engage in rich thinking each and every day.

00:18:53.720 | I will save 10% of my gross income every paycheck.

00:18:56.640 | I will control my thoughts and emotions each and every day.

00:19:00.240 | Each of those is expanded in many chapters across the two books.

00:19:05.400 | But in looking at that list, it's certainly intuitive when you look at it and say, "Any

00:19:11.280 | person, starting from any place, if they would implement those habits consistently in the

00:19:16.560 | fullness of time, they're going to experience a massive change in their life."

00:19:21.760 | Yeah.

00:19:22.760 | This is really the core of my research.

00:19:27.040 | It's the little things that you do every single day that change your life or create the life

00:19:37.680 | that you have.

00:19:40.720 | These little things are habits.

00:19:42.760 | They're the little habits that we have.

00:19:45.560 | Habits are, because they're unconscious, for the most part, they're unconscious activity.

00:19:50.080 | In a book that I'm writing right now that's actually at the publisher, they're working

00:19:55.680 | on it, "Change Your Habits, Change Your Life," I get into a lot of neurogenesis, neuroplasticity,

00:20:02.160 | and how the brain works with respect to habits and how the habits can increase your intelligence

00:20:08.600 | and your IQ and things like that.

00:20:11.120 | There's a lot of cool stuff that I'm unearthing from my research that ties into science and

00:20:20.800 | neurology.

00:20:22.720 | I think that I've really stumbled onto something profound.

00:20:29.480 | I know it's my calling in life.

00:20:31.480 | I'm going to be doing this until the day I die, whether I make any money on it or not.

00:20:35.560 | How has your life changed since you started to understand the habits that your wealthy

00:20:39.360 | clients implemented and to implement them in your own life to a greater degree?

00:20:44.640 | I can tell you that there are two things that have changed dramatically for me.

00:20:51.960 | One is my weight.

00:20:56.840 | Some of the research had to do with health.

00:21:00.280 | I didn't understand why wealthy people were healthy people, but they are.

00:21:03.920 | I found out why, because if you're healthy, you can make more money.

00:21:09.000 | You're more productive.

00:21:10.120 | You have fewer sick days.

00:21:14.160 | You can't make money out of a hospital bed.

00:21:16.600 | A lot of the wealthy people take care of their health.

00:21:18.880 | Even before they're wealthy, they got into that habit.

00:21:22.200 | I was able to create something I call the tracking schedule.

00:21:27.920 | I call it my rich habits weight management system.

00:21:31.600 | I was able to go from 214 pounds in July of 2007 down to 174 pounds in February of 2008

00:21:41.040 | just by tracking my calories in, calories out, and the amount of exercise.

00:21:51.800 | That was one profound thing.

00:21:53.080 | I'm now very healthy.

00:21:54.400 | I'm at probably 185 to 190 pounds.

00:21:57.680 | I exercise every day.

00:21:58.760 | I watch what I eat.

00:22:00.320 | That's had a profound impact on me.

00:22:02.280 | The second thing is it shined a light on one of the things that wealthy people do, which

00:22:07.960 | is they create multiple streams of income.

00:22:13.200 | Almost all the wealthy people in my study had three streams of income.

00:22:18.840 | Some had four.

00:22:19.840 | Some had five or more.

00:22:22.800 | What I started doing was that was just about when I got into financial planning.

00:22:27.520 | I said, "I'm going to go."

00:22:29.480 | The research made me realize that I had to add multiple streams of income, and financial

00:22:34.120 | planning was the first stream I added.

00:22:37.000 | Then I started adding other streams.

00:22:41.680 | I started doing some of the training.

00:22:44.080 | That became an income stream.

00:22:45.760 | Some of the speaking engagements, that became an income stream.

00:22:47.960 | Of course, the royalties from the book, that's an income stream.

00:22:53.280 | Now I've got five streams of income, whereas before my research, I had one.

00:22:59.960 | I think those two things have—my income's doubled.

00:23:04.280 | It's not by accident.

00:23:05.720 | I have a whole one stream of income that gives me half of my income and four streams of income

00:23:11.440 | that give me my other half.

00:23:13.280 | I think that, to me, was really important.

00:23:16.600 | I didn't know that wealthy people had multiple streams of income.

00:23:20.320 | How has your personal self-development plan changed since this transformative research,

00:23:28.240 | since you started about seven, eight years ago?

00:23:31.240 | Now I wake up a quarter to five in the morning.

00:23:34.080 | I didn't before.

00:23:36.720 | I spend about an hour reading for learning.

00:23:41.200 | That was something I picked up in my research.

00:23:44.120 | In my business, I always had to do technical reading, but I never processed it, to be honest

00:23:48.720 | with you, Joshua.

00:23:50.120 | I did my reading in bursts.

00:23:52.760 | I'd spend a Saturday and read for five hours or something like that.

00:23:56.520 | Wealthy people process their learning every day.

00:24:01.080 | I found about 30 minutes a day is what the wealthy devoted to learning.

00:24:05.560 | I said, "Well, if I do 60, maybe I'll get wealthier quicker."

00:24:11.040 | I've been doing that since 2006, I guess.

00:24:15.880 | I read everything, anything and everything that has to do with learning.

00:24:20.160 | Right now, I'm reading books on history and on successful people.

00:24:27.680 | What I do is I read the books, and then I highlight the important sections.

00:24:32.640 | Then I sit down and I transcribe it onto a piece of paper, and I put it into a binder

00:24:37.320 | that I now call my fact binder.

00:24:40.720 | That is helping me learn more and become more knowledgeable.

00:24:44.480 | It does have a positive impact on my life because now I'm able to converse with people

00:24:52.240 | on many subjects that I wasn't able to before.

00:24:58.080 | The exercise, I always was pretty good at exercise, but again, I didn't process it.

00:25:04.880 | I was doing it in bursts.

00:25:06.880 | I'd do four months during the spring and the summer, and then I'd tail off and I wouldn't

00:25:13.640 | do it again.

00:25:15.400 | When I learned that wealthy people exercise every day, so now I do.

00:25:19.400 | The key is to do your exercise, not an enormous amount of exercise, but a little bit every

00:25:25.520 | day.

00:25:26.520 | If you do a little bit every day, for me it's 30 minutes to 60 minutes every day.

00:25:31.720 | If you do a little bit, you'll do it every day.

00:25:33.720 | If you do too much or you put too much of a—where you're obligated to do too many,

00:25:44.560 | too much minutes, you're going to fall off.

00:25:48.720 | There are days that I only do 25 minutes a day of aerobic exercise.

00:25:53.120 | There are days where I do an hour and a half that includes weightlifting now.

00:25:56.120 | I just incorporated that about a year and a half ago.

00:25:59.680 | I'm trying to stay as healthy as I can.

00:26:02.440 | I guess those are some of the benefits that I derive from the research.

00:26:07.200 | When you wrote the book, had you previously or when you started the research, prior to

00:26:13.720 | starting the research, had you been publishing within your industry within the accounting

00:26:17.880 | field?

00:26:18.880 | Yeah, that's an important point.

00:26:20.640 | Good point.

00:26:21.920 | Most of my writing was technical.

00:26:24.080 | I'd write about IRAs.

00:26:25.640 | I'd write about SPIAs.

00:26:27.160 | I'd write about tax issues, commodity traders, and all hosts of different things that were

00:26:33.240 | specifically related to my expertise.

00:26:37.640 | I guess I had the writing down in a sense that I knew how to write an article.

00:26:46.480 | It turns out I'm a pretty good writer.

00:26:50.400 | My grammar is good.

00:26:51.920 | I always knew that.

00:26:52.920 | Even when I was writing the technical articles, I knew I had some good grammatical skills.

00:26:57.560 | I didn't always.

00:26:59.080 | I had to read a couple of grammar books so I could understand where commas go and where

00:27:04.400 | parentheses go and where the apostrophes go and all that stuff, quotes, commas, and that

00:27:11.640 | stuff.

00:27:12.640 | But since I did my research and I started writing Rich Habits, I started doing more

00:27:18.960 | reading about grammar and writing skills.

00:27:23.920 | That's helped me.

00:27:26.440 | The reason I ask is what I was trying to figure out.

00:27:28.760 | Let me give you just my 30-second review of the books.

00:27:32.040 | I enjoyed both of them.

00:27:34.080 | I preferred actually your second book, Rich Kids.

00:27:37.320 | Although I thought Rich Habits was good, in Rich Kids you brought together all of the

00:27:42.620 | rich habits but with much greater granularity.

00:27:48.560 | It's a very pithy book with many, many things that can be highlighted and many valuable

00:27:54.840 | lessons.

00:27:56.040 | It's one of those things where I constantly found myself saying, "Ah, he's including

00:28:00.960 | one idea here.

00:28:02.340 | He just listed it in one sentence in the middle of a piece of dialogue, but this is a key

00:28:05.900 | idea that if somebody were to read this multiple times and they focused on this idea here brought

00:28:13.880 | artfully into the dialogue, just that idea alone is worth the price of admission times

00:28:18.040 | 100."

00:28:20.220 | I really thought it was extremely well-written.

00:28:22.600 | What I'm most interested in, as is probably apparent from my questions, because the audience

00:28:28.120 | can read the books, what I'm most interested in is the changes in your life.

00:28:33.720 | You had so much personal development material in Rich Kids.

00:28:40.160 | It's fascinating for me to try to figure out how much came from the wealthy people that

00:28:44.240 | you talked to and how much came from what talking to the wealthy people caused you to

00:28:49.160 | do which was to up your personal development regimen and then finding all of the many other

00:28:53.820 | ideas that have been well-written about by personal development authors.

00:28:57.360 | Do you have a sense as to the varying impact of the changes in your own personal habits

00:29:03.640 | versus the wealthy people's input?

00:29:06.240 | Yeah, I'll be honest with you.

00:29:10.880 | I would say probably 30% of the interviews that I did with the wealthy people were in-person

00:29:17.320 | interviews.

00:29:19.400 | The rest were either primarily on the phone, but the in-person interviews had more of an

00:29:25.480 | impact on me when I was sitting across from them.

00:29:30.160 | I guess a good example is this one individual who was 67 years old.

00:29:35.880 | He was worth about $17 million and he's still working, Joshua.

00:29:42.160 | I asked him the question, I said, "Why are you still working?

00:29:44.160 | You have $17 million.

00:29:48.740 | You could be traveling, you could be enjoying your life and doing fun things."

00:29:53.480 | He looked at me like I was crazy.

00:29:55.920 | You can only get that when you're sitting across from someone.

00:29:58.760 | They're body language, right?

00:30:00.440 | He looked at me like I was crazy.

00:30:02.560 | I'll be honest with you, I felt like I was an idiot for asking the question the way he

00:30:08.840 | looked at me.

00:30:09.840 | He said, "Look, I've been exercising for 45 years.

00:30:12.920 | I've been watching what I eat."

00:30:16.080 | He was probably 5'9" and 140 pounds or something.

00:30:20.760 | He said, "I did all of that because I knew at the end of my career, that would be when

00:30:27.720 | I made the most money.

00:30:30.600 | I was trying to squeeze an extra four or five years out of my career."

00:30:34.720 | The impact that that had on me was, "Oh my God, I've really got to exercise more and

00:30:41.480 | take care of my health more."

00:30:44.480 | Because he's right, I'm going to make more money at the end of my career than probably

00:30:49.880 | the last four years or five years of my career, I'll make more money than I made in my first

00:30:53.360 | 20 years.

00:30:54.360 | How old are you now?

00:30:55.360 | I'm 54.

00:30:56.360 | Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.

00:30:57.600 | Dr. Andrew Hill: So that's when I said I'm—I was all in after that.

00:31:02.720 | After he said that, that's when I started creating the Rich Habits Weight Management

00:31:06.800 | Program and I started processing my workout routine and started watching what I ate.

00:31:13.600 | I don't think I would have had the same impact if I was talking to him on the phone.

00:31:19.200 | So yeah, I would tell you that the face-to-face meetings, they had the most impact on me and

00:31:27.400 | they altered my behavior the most.

00:31:30.320 | And of course, they worked their way into my research but the impact was already there

00:31:33.640 | before the research was done.

00:31:35.360 | Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The lesson I'd like to focus on from what you just shared is there's

00:31:39.960 | nothing that you have done that any person listening to my voice can't do themselves.

00:31:46.480 | One of the success habits that I've tried to have over the years is to always invest

00:31:51.400 | a certain percentage of my income back into my own personal development.

00:31:54.360 | My numbers have fluctuated from anywhere from a few percent to 10%.

00:31:59.320 | But when you look and say, "Okay, if we use as a good example the 10% number and we

00:32:04.240 | say how can I invest 10% of my income back into myself which is in my opinion a far better

00:32:09.400 | investment to start with than buying mutual funds, then all of a sudden when you have

00:32:14.520 | a budget, it leads you to the question of what do I do.

00:32:17.040 | So in the early years, I might be reading a book.

00:32:20.400 | But one of the habits that I've tried to implement is consistently connecting with

00:32:25.400 | anybody that I admired, whether that was somebody that I admired for their financial success,

00:32:29.040 | I knew they were wealthy, whether it was somebody I admired their character, and just set aside

00:32:33.440 | a lunch budget and take that person out to lunch.

00:32:36.000 | And almost anybody will be happy to be invited out to a nice place for lunch and be asked

00:32:43.080 | to talk about themselves obviously if it's clear that there's no ulterior motive other

00:32:48.080 | than to learn.

00:32:49.560 | And what has emerged from my doing that is feeling like when I was reading your book,

00:32:56.280 | you had all the same conversations that I've had.

00:32:58.920 | You learned all the same things that I've learned from other people that I've talked

00:33:02.600 | to and the reality is success is simple.

00:33:05.840 | It's not easy but it's simple.

00:33:08.320 | It's a matter of implementing a systematic process, some core habits, some key ideas

00:33:15.000 | and then giving enough time for those actions to lead to the ultimate effect that you are

00:33:21.440 | expecting.

00:33:22.800 | And so I've zeroed in.

00:33:25.600 | I don't know if you've given I'm sure many interviews but I've zeroed in more on your

00:33:29.160 | story than the content of your books because what I perceived in reading your books was

00:33:35.520 | that this was a very transformative experience for you and it's something that every listener

00:33:41.320 | can model and repeat and duplicate themselves.

00:33:44.360 | Yeah, you know, that's a great point.

00:33:46.880 | I was just thinking about this over the last couple of months because my mindset now before

00:33:54.120 | I worried about everything.

00:33:57.400 | I worried about primarily my business.

00:34:00.200 | I worried about my family.

00:34:01.320 | I thought about these worries as a negative thinking, right?

00:34:06.160 | And when I started talking to all these wealthy people, Joshua was as if they didn't have

00:34:13.840 | a problem in the world and I thought, "My God, isn't it great to be wealthy where you

00:34:18.520 | have no problems?"

00:34:19.960 | But that wasn't the case.

00:34:21.040 | They had probably ten times the amount of things to worry about that I had because they

00:34:27.320 | had four or five streams of income.

00:34:29.880 | They had to worry about each of those streams, right?

00:34:33.000 | But what they got into the habit of doing was what now I call positive thinking or rich

00:34:38.800 | thinking.

00:34:41.360 | They stopped thinking negative thoughts.

00:34:45.240 | And I just wrote a great piece on that this morning.

00:34:47.560 | My tip of the morning to you was unhealthy thoughts.

00:34:51.160 | And it's with all the stuff that's going on in the news with Donald Trump and McCain and

00:34:56.840 | the Iraq, the Iran nuclear thing and all these murders going on, all these riots.

00:35:03.920 | You know, I see on social media all these people, you can tell that they're ticked off

00:35:09.880 | and they're going at each other.

00:35:11.640 | And that used to be me.

00:35:13.600 | And now I look at it and I said, "These people are just wasting their time.

00:35:16.760 | They're thinking about things that they can't possibly control."

00:35:19.840 | And I think that's the main point.

00:35:22.720 | What the wealthy people worried about, if they were worrying, was only about the things

00:35:27.720 | that were within their control.

00:35:31.680 | The things that the circumstances that they could have control over.

00:35:35.000 | They didn't worry about all these other things that all of us think about and that cause

00:35:40.560 | worry and that cause stress and that creates, you know, the cortisol production and unhealthy

00:35:46.240 | living.

00:35:48.080 | So I've been thinking about the last three months because my mindset right now is, I

00:35:53.400 | feel like I'm almost worry free.

00:35:55.720 | And I believe this is absolutely a byproduct of all this research and these people that

00:36:01.800 | I've been exposed to.

00:36:04.600 | I would say you have good reason, not only just from the mental perspective, but you

00:36:09.040 | have good reason to feel fewer worries.

00:36:13.240 | And certainly there are always going to be problems.

00:36:15.840 | The richer you get and the older you get, it seems to me, the bigger your problems get.

00:36:20.040 | But with regard to the worries, if you think about the transformation that's happened in

00:36:24.040 | your life and in your career, to go from a respected accountant to leading a larger financial

00:36:32.480 | planning firm with multiple areas of business to establishing a personal brand that goes

00:36:37.800 | beyond your professional capacity, that just gives you so many more backup options and

00:36:41.880 | backup plans that if your business fell apart, just even the personal network that you've

00:36:46.840 | developed from your publishing work gives you a whole host of opportunities that would

00:36:52.840 | not exist if you were a staff accountant at a large international tax firm.

00:36:58.360 | Yeah, I think that the important point to highlight here is, without me really knowing

00:37:04.760 | it, I was pursuing what is now my main purpose in life, teaching these rich habits and continuing

00:37:11.560 | this work that I'm doing.

00:37:13.640 | And I think that's part of the reason why I feel so mentally content.

00:37:19.320 | I found my calling in life.

00:37:21.960 | And I think when you find your calling in life, when you pursue that thing that you're

00:37:27.200 | passionate about, I really think it transforms your mind from negative to positive just almost

00:37:34.440 | by default because what you're doing is you're stoking the fires inside of you.

00:37:44.120 | The passion doesn't go away.

00:37:45.440 | It gets bigger when you pursue your main purpose in life.

00:37:49.320 | So I think that part of the reason I'm content is I now know I'm doing what I'm going to

00:37:55.240 | be doing until the day I die.

00:37:57.100 | How many of us can say that?

00:37:58.920 | Most of us, 95%, aren't crazy about their job.

00:38:04.040 | In fact, in my research, only 7% actually loved their job, even the wealthy, 7% of the

00:38:09.720 | wealthy, only 7% loved what they did for a living.

00:38:13.320 | But I'm telling you I love what I'm doing with this rich habits and I feel that that's

00:38:18.520 | because it's my main purpose and it's the reason I'm feeling worry-free right now because

00:38:24.600 | I'm doing what I was intended to do.

00:38:26.800 | How much is your personal vision?

00:38:29.440 | And we can think about this and you pick which of these you want to answer, but your personal

00:38:32.500 | vision, and let's talk about it in the context of your own personal financial plan, your

00:38:36.840 | own numbers on paper, what you project for your own life, or just think about it with

00:38:41.080 | your own future mirror letter to the 70-year-old you, the 80-year-old you, the 90-year-old

00:38:47.280 | you or your obituary.

00:38:49.040 | How much has your personal vision changed over the last 10 years?

00:38:52.080 | Oh, it's completely different.

00:38:54.720 | Prior to this, I felt, well, I was very good at taxes and I liked taxes, but it wasn't

00:39:03.220 | something I loved.

00:39:04.220 | I mean, let's be honest, you're preparing tax returns, you're dealing with usually stressful

00:39:09.540 | situations, so there's all of that that goes into the tax career.

00:39:16.100 | I think that because my whole mindset shifted when I started pursuing this, it's of course

00:39:27.200 | improved my life financially, and now what I'm thinking about is, okay, I'm going to

00:39:34.560 | make some moves in my life.

00:39:37.200 | Some of the things that I've always wanted to do, my wife and I used to live down by

00:39:41.600 | the shore, the Jersey Shore, so we're going to end up selling our house and we're going

00:39:46.040 | to move down by the Jersey Shore.

00:39:49.080 | That's something we always wanted to do.

00:39:50.160 | I could never afford to do it before.

00:39:51.600 | Now I'm having some success in life and I'm getting close to being able to afford to do

00:39:56.560 | that.

00:39:57.560 | I'm feeling that I'm going to have a retirement now.

00:40:02.400 | I didn't feel confident about that before.

00:40:04.960 | I feel confident about a lot of things, I guess is the main point that I wasn't confident

00:40:11.080 | about before because I know I'm on the right path.

00:40:15.680 | You just know it, Joshua.

00:40:16.840 | It's not something that if you have to ponder whether or not you're on the right path, you're

00:40:20.680 | not.

00:40:22.080 | I can tell you that because I don't think about it anymore.

00:40:24.800 | I know this is the right path and I know I'm going to benefit.

00:40:28.400 | When you help other people improve their lives, you derive a benefit from it.

00:40:36.120 | Oftentimes, it's financial.

00:40:38.400 | I'm confident now that this is just going to grow.

00:40:41.360 | I'm going to help more and more people.

00:40:42.560 | I'm going to make more and more money.

00:40:45.680 | My success is going to increase incrementally over the next 20 or 30 years.

00:40:54.040 | I'm tickled pink that I'm in the situation that I'm in right now.

00:40:58.160 | When I read Rich Kids, and the premise of the book is the narrative that you used is

00:41:03.480 | a father on his way to college with his son recounting some early childhood experiences

00:41:08.840 | that the father had had with his grandfather back in the early 1980s.

00:41:13.000 | It's this cross-generational narrative.

00:41:15.480 | When I was reading it, I had the distinct impression that you were writing the vision

00:41:19.680 | for your life at 67 years old and you were writing about the summer that you intend to

00:41:24.680 | have with your grandson.

00:41:27.240 | You were clearly identifying each of the personal goals and the personal lifestyle that you're

00:41:34.000 | interested in developing for yourself.

00:41:35.920 | Am I right?

00:41:37.000 | You are spot on.

00:41:38.000 | You hit the nail on the head.

00:41:40.120 | What's interesting about what you just mentioned is this.

00:41:46.320 | Most of us, we're kind of like leaves.

00:41:49.840 | I write about it in Rich Habits.

00:41:51.440 | We're kind of like leaves on a fall day, just kind of floating around.

00:41:55.400 | When I wrote Rich Habits, and also Rich Kids, but Rich Habits got me started on this, I

00:42:01.800 | said I'm going to write the main character.

00:42:05.200 | It's going to be a future version of me.

00:42:09.840 | J.C.

00:42:10.840 | Jobs is really the future version of me.

00:42:13.000 | When I wrote Rich Kids, you were exactly right.

00:42:15.440 | I was thinking about my grandkids and teaching them and instilling in them, mentoring them

00:42:22.360 | through all these habits and these strategies.

00:42:27.120 | It's much easier.

00:42:28.120 | Where I'm going with this is where you can benefit from this is if you just sit down

00:42:36.440 | and write a 500 to 1,000 word narrative on the future version of yourself, the ideal

00:42:42.640 | perfect future Joshua Sheets, it gets your subconscious mind working behind the scenes.

00:42:51.680 | It starts nudging you.

00:42:52.780 | We have this thing called intuition.

00:42:54.800 | It starts nudging you with intuition on, "Hey Joshua, you should do X or you should do Y

00:43:01.480 | or don't do this or don't do that."

00:43:06.480 | It's almost like a GPS.

00:43:07.880 | It starts moving you in a different direction, but it all starts with crafting a narrative

00:43:13.140 | of your ideal future life.

00:43:14.680 | I think that's the most important thing you can do.

00:43:18.280 | It's a beautiful, even just your vision is a beautiful vision.

00:43:23.000 | I found it's in many ways similar to some of my visions.

00:43:27.480 | I've never published them.

00:43:31.080 | What you describe is a grandfather being able to take an entire summer and just experience

00:43:35.880 | this incredible joy-filled summer with his grandson.

00:43:41.040 | That involves the grandfather showing his grandson and his grandson's friend around

00:43:45.680 | the country in an incredible lifestyle, able to easily afford all of these peak experiences.

00:43:53.800 | Everything is fully connected.

00:43:55.520 | It's the peak experiences of a helicopter ride over New York City or an RV trip through

00:44:00.880 | the Shenandoah Mountains to go and get the best burger in the world from New Orleans.

00:44:05.520 | All the time, it's done with health and vitality.

00:44:11.000 | It's one of those visions that's compelling.

00:44:13.480 | When I compare that to the vision that many people have, at least what I've worked with

00:44:16.640 | in financial planning, many people have a vision that's so boring, there's no ability

00:44:22.320 | for it to compel them to anything.

00:44:24.960 | With you have a small vision, there's small motivation to actually get up and do anything

00:44:29.960 | to put the vision into practice.

00:44:32.280 | I found it to be inspiring because in many ways, it mirrors some of my own vision.

00:44:36.880 | It's a retirement years that aren't retirement at all, but it's something that's worth looking

00:44:42.680 | forward to instead of this horrifying US-American archetype that we have of age being something

00:44:49.360 | to be feared and dreaded.

00:44:52.680 | Why is it that our end game is retirement and then doing nothing, when what it should

00:44:59.280 | be is pursuing something that you're passionate about until the day you die?

00:45:05.360 | That's what J.C.

00:45:06.360 | Jobs did.

00:45:07.360 | He was still at the age of 67 and teaching and educating, and he was doing it around

00:45:17.800 | the country.

00:45:19.800 | He was never going to stop.

00:45:21.280 | That's the way I feel.

00:45:22.600 | I think that when you create, most people, like you said, lack a vision of where they

00:45:29.360 | want to go.

00:45:30.880 | Their vision might be just that they're going to retire, but what happens after that?

00:45:35.680 | You die.

00:45:36.680 | If your vision is real enough to you, it's going to alter your behavior.

00:45:47.240 | It's going to change the course of your life, and I think you're spot on.

00:45:51.400 | Most people don't create a vision for their ideal perfect life, and as a result, their

00:45:57.520 | vision is limited to retiring.

00:45:59.520 | I'd like to dig deeper on one of the pieces of research, one of the wealth habits that

00:46:04.640 | you have listed in your book.

00:46:06.920 | In my experience, I personally began in the professional world of financial planning at

00:46:11.240 | the age of 23, following years and years of consuming personal finance suggestions.

00:46:18.200 | What I thought was the path to wealth was to save and invest heavily in my retirement

00:46:24.680 | accounts and to always put a portion of my money aside and to invest it appropriately

00:46:28.800 | in a diversified portfolio of mutual funds, because that was what the personal finance

00:46:34.120 | books recommended to me.

00:46:35.840 | When I started working as a financial planner and had the opportunity to be face-to-face

00:46:39.640 | over six years in the trenches with over a thousand people, many of whom were wealthy,

00:46:44.080 | I started to notice a trend, and the trend was the fact that none of my wealthy clients

00:46:49.440 | ever became wealthy because of saving 10% of their income.

00:46:53.480 | Rather, they actually became wealthy because they had built a business that was extremely

00:46:59.120 | valuable or they had developed an extremely high income so that when they naturally saved

00:47:04.600 | a percentage of their income, the compounding effect of 10% of a $400,000 income was so

00:47:10.000 | massive that they almost couldn't help but become wealthy.

00:47:14.200 | My question is I concur absolutely that saving is an important discipline because of who

00:47:22.600 | it can transform you to be and because it can provide the capital to be able to build

00:47:28.280 | future businesses, to invest in future opportunities.

00:47:31.400 | But in your research, did you ever find that anybody who is wealthy actually became wealthy

00:47:36.820 | through what's taught on the front page of Yahoo Finance or CNN Money, put 10% of

00:47:42.520 | your money into a Roth IRA, buy an index fund in it and leave it alone for 50 years?

00:47:46.240 | Or did you find that the majority of the wealthy had achieved it through private business and

00:47:52.280 | a very high income?

00:47:53.640 | >>John: Yeah, boy, that is a great question.

00:47:57.560 | Well, 51% of the wealthy in my study were business owners and 177 of them were self-made

00:48:10.120 | millionaires, meaning they came from nothing.

00:48:13.400 | But there were a good percentage that-- I'm thinking of one individual right now who was

00:48:22.120 | an attorney and he worked most of his life for the government, which you don't make a

00:48:29.120 | lot of money, right?

00:48:30.960 | But what he did that was different is he didn't invest in mutual funds and stuff like that.

00:48:35.960 | He invested in individual stocks.

00:48:38.980 | And then he would reinvest-- there were two individuals in my study who did this.

00:48:45.680 | And so he has now-- well, at the time, he had about $4 million in stock that he probably

00:48:53.880 | invested $400,000 in over the years just by living below his means and just investing

00:49:00.600 | in those stocks.

00:49:01.600 | The other guy was a little bit lower than $4 million.

00:49:06.400 | So they did it that way.

00:49:07.640 | But the vast majority of the individuals in my study who were wealthy, where the savings

00:49:13.560 | came into play was to give them just what you said, the seed capital to start a business

00:49:18.880 | and to do something with that money, whether it was start a business or real estate or

00:49:24.200 | invest it in some way that created a revenue stream before they were retired.

00:49:30.280 | So they were investing their savings and then doubling down on it, and they just built an

00:49:36.320 | empire essentially.

00:49:38.240 | So there's two ways.

00:49:39.920 | There's really three ways that you can become wealthy.

00:49:42.680 | This is really-- it boils down to three things, in my opinion.

00:49:46.200 | You either live below your means, you either expand your means, or you do both.

00:49:53.320 | And the ones that made the most money or had the most net worth of all the millionaires

00:49:58.320 | were the ones that were doing both.

00:50:00.720 | They had gotten into the habit of living below their means and saving.

00:50:05.340 | And then they expanded their means.

00:50:06.760 | They took their money and they invested it in something, and they just persistently pursued

00:50:12.080 | it until they were successful.

00:50:13.520 | So I think the savings is important, but if you really want to get rich, if you really

00:50:19.880 | want to be wealthy, you've got to deploy that savings in a way that's going to involve risk.

00:50:27.120 | I'll give you a-- I love-- I think that's a good model.

00:50:31.360 | I'll give you my model.

00:50:32.360 | I'm working on a manuscript of the Radical Personal Finance book.

00:50:36.600 | And I've boiled it down into three essential functions.

00:50:40.160 | And these are the functions that will ultimately guarantee, no question about it, determine

00:50:45.240 | how much wealth you have.

00:50:46.780 | Number one is the amount of your income.

00:50:49.340 | Number two is the amount of your expenses.

00:50:51.080 | And number three, the rate of return that you earn on the difference.

00:50:54.420 | And there are two more pieces to the model, but they don't-- they're not numerical components.

00:50:58.720 | If you look at each wealthy person, you can create a formula for wealth regardless of

00:51:05.080 | the numbers of theirs as long as the income are in excess of the-- as long as income is

00:51:09.840 | in excess of the expenses.

00:51:11.760 | But if you want a fast-- if you want a fast growth to wealth or if you want to achieve

00:51:16.240 | massive wealth, you need to really amp up one or more of those categories, ideally all

00:51:21.720 | three except that usually most people don't do all three.

00:51:26.080 | But if you could have the highest income possible and you could have the lowest expenses possible

00:51:31.800 | and you could invest at the highest rate of return that's ever been achieved, guaranteed

00:51:36.800 | you're going to achieve massive wealth quickly.

00:51:39.320 | Hard to do all three of those things well, which is often why you see people focusing

00:51:42.780 | on one or the other.

00:51:44.040 | And so the long, slow route to wealth, the people are taught, get a good job, earn $60,000

00:51:50.040 | a year, save $6,000 a year in your IRA from 25 to 65 and earn 8% annualized on your funds.

00:51:57.960 | Yes, that will make you a millionaire over the course of a 40-year process.

00:52:02.640 | But if you take the same $60,000 income and you drop it to $20,000 a year of expenses,

00:52:08.240 | so now you're able to invest $40,000 a year at the same 8%, now you move into the world

00:52:12.620 | of early retirees, of the extreme frugality folks of which this show speaks and we speak

00:52:20.040 | a lot of that language.

00:52:21.760 | Pretty reliable thing to do if you can discipline yourself to live on very low expenses.

00:52:26.620 | Or if you're more attracted to the business route, which is the main way, I want to emphasize

00:52:31.200 | 177 of the people that you – excuse me, 51% of the wealthy that you interviewed were

00:52:36.560 | business owners.

00:52:37.840 | If you go to the general population and you compare that 51% number to whatever the number

00:52:42.800 | percentage is in the population of actual business owners, you'll see that why the

00:52:48.520 | massive amounts of wealth are concentrated in the hands of entrepreneurs.

00:52:51.360 | But back to the model, you can also earn $60,000 a year and spend $50,000 a year and then you

00:52:59.240 | can create an app that grows at annualized returns of hundreds of percents a year.

00:53:05.240 | There you have a situation of a Mark Zuckerberg or those types of people or you can create

00:53:10.200 | a business that grows at say 30% to 50% a year and there you have your local car dealer

00:53:14.840 | and it takes a little longer than Mark Zuckerberg but over time that person is growing.

00:53:20.320 | So what I love about your books and that's a long-winded compliment to kind of further

00:53:24.720 | the discussion is that you brought together the personal development side and the business

00:53:31.000 | side with some of the financial concepts.

00:53:33.760 | I hope that in your future writing you continue that especially given your background as an

00:53:38.280 | accountant and a financial planner.

00:53:40.180 | We need more of that in the financial planning industry.

00:53:42.440 | We need a lot less here's how you choose between an IRA and a Roth IRA.

00:53:47.240 | When you look at the facts which are the vast majority of Americans are broke and they're

00:53:51.500 | never going to retire and we've been repeating the same tired problem for 30, 40, 50 years,

00:53:58.240 | we'll just invest money in the stock market into your IRA.

00:54:00.880 | The reality is it doesn't work.

00:54:02.480 | It's not that it can't work, it can work if you reliably do consistently do it but the

00:54:06.880 | vast majority of people have shown that they're not going to do it so therefore it doesn't

00:54:11.160 | work except for a very small percentage.

00:54:13.620 | But these other strategies put together when you combine personal development and strong

00:54:18.040 | personal habits and then you go ahead and say well what's a tax efficient and cost efficient

00:54:22.400 | way of investing and I'm going to allocate some of my investments over here into passive

00:54:26.640 | investments that aren't connected to whether or not my General Motors franchise succeeds

00:54:31.440 | or fails because GM has a massive recall, then you get into wise financial planning

00:54:35.840 | which is where we can really help and serve the public.

00:54:38.280 | Yeah, everything you said I agree with.

00:54:41.520 | I think that's why I'm really trying to get this information out there because having

00:54:49.080 | been rich as a kid and then grown up poor, it's clear to me that most people are doing

00:54:56.880 | it wrong.

00:54:57.880 | In fact, my mother, I just went to visit my mother who's in a rehabilitation facility

00:55:02.040 | on Sunday.

00:55:03.280 | She's reading my book Rich Kids and she said you know I feel bad because I didn't teach

00:55:08.280 | you any of this stuff and I said I know.

00:55:11.780 | That's why I struggled for so many years.

00:55:14.320 | I said I'm trying to help other families so that their kids don't have to struggle like

00:55:19.160 | I did and we did in my family.

00:55:21.560 | I said it's all about education, Joshua.

00:55:26.120 | It's actually what it boils down to is parenting.

00:55:29.280 | If parents take on the responsibility of even if they're non-millionaire parents, take on

00:55:35.760 | the responsibility of teaching their kids some of these good habits and these good strategies,

00:55:41.000 | they will put their kids ahead of the eight ball because their competition isn't learning

00:55:46.640 | this stuff.

00:55:48.720 | I'm seeing it right now with my son who just is into his third year working.

00:55:52.960 | He's knocking it out of the park.

00:55:54.240 | He's my guinea pig because while I was doing this research, I would come home and I would

00:55:59.160 | say, "Brendan, you got to do this," or "Brendan, you got to do that."

00:56:02.720 | He's the first one out of the gate.

00:56:04.400 | He's knocking it out of the park.

00:56:05.920 | I'm not kidding.

00:56:07.160 | He's doing so well.

00:56:08.440 | He's doing everything I told him to do because now when you get college kids, it's hard to

00:56:13.760 | teach them anything.

00:56:15.120 | When they get out in the work world, they realize, "Oh, it's not that easy.

00:56:20.160 | There are certain rules you got to follow."

00:56:23.080 | He's now realizing a lot of stuff that I taught him is going to help him in his professional

00:56:27.640 | career.

00:56:28.640 | He's using it and he's having success.

00:56:30.680 | I wish I could just get inside the head of every parent in this country and give them

00:56:38.360 | the same sense of importance that I feel that this stuff deserves.

00:56:43.080 | I think too many of them are too busy watching the Kardashians or Bruce Jenner or whatever

00:56:49.000 | you call them now, Caitlyn Jenner, and they're not interested in doing the things you need

00:56:55.400 | to do in order to succeed in life.

00:56:58.040 | Tom: Other than reading your book, I want to give you a couple of minutes and just share

00:57:02.840 | some ideas of where a parent listening who's looking at their son or daughter and saying,

00:57:07.920 | "I want to really help my son or daughter with some education that's helpful," what

00:57:11.360 | would be some of the core ideas that you would like them to teach to their kids and how would

00:57:15.720 | they go about doing that at a young age?

00:57:18.120 | Dr. Fauci: One of the great stories is Dr. Ben Carson.

00:57:23.160 | He grew up in the ghettos of Detroit and he had a brother and it was a single parent.

00:57:29.120 | His mom raised them.

00:57:31.180 | She used to clean the houses of wealthy people and she used to listen in on their conversations

00:57:35.500 | and watch what they did.

00:57:37.560 | One of the things she noticed is that they all read every single day they read.

00:57:42.160 | They read for education.

00:57:44.120 | She came back and she said, "No more TV," and in today's society that would mean cut

00:57:51.360 | back on social media and on your cell phone, watching YouTube and wasting your time, and

00:58:00.320 | start reading.

00:58:01.320 | Start reading to learn.

00:58:02.760 | She made her two sons read every single day.

00:58:06.560 | They were only allowed to watch an hour of TV a day and it was specific programming.

00:58:12.560 | Parents need to take a little bit more responsibility over the media that their kids are consuming.

00:58:19.080 | That's one thing.

00:58:20.080 | Then make their kids read every day for education.

00:58:23.540 | That's the second thing.

00:58:25.520 | We know what happened with Ben Carson.

00:58:26.840 | He became one of the top neurosurgeons in the world.

00:58:29.720 | His brother, by the way, is doing very well.

00:58:33.040 | He's an engineer with Boeing.

00:58:36.920 | He makes a good living and he's very successful.

00:58:40.380 | This stuff works, so parents need to really limit the consumption of TV and social media

00:58:47.280 | that the kids are taking in and force them to do a little bit more reading.

00:58:53.920 | One thought on the social media that ties into an earlier thread is if you, if anybody

00:58:59.280 | listening, if you're like me, where you want to get involved in online discussions, I can

00:59:05.600 | read just about anything and want to jump in and argue with somebody.

00:59:09.600 | I made a commitment with the exception I break it once a month or so and then I realized

00:59:14.000 | the futility of my ways.

00:59:15.440 | I made a commitment to say, "Instead of being a consumer of this stuff and arguing about

00:59:19.800 | it with other consumers, I'm going to be a producer of thought."

00:59:24.400 | It is not possible to argue in a Facebook comment thread and spend an hour on a political

00:59:31.620 | debate to actually change anybody else's mind.

00:59:34.000 | All you do is make yourself temporarily feel better because you got involved in an argument.

00:59:39.640 | But if you sit down and go ahead and take the time to do what Tom has done with his

00:59:43.700 | writing or do what I've done with my podcast and actually create some useful content, there

00:59:48.300 | you have the opportunity to actually influence people.

00:59:52.720 | That one will actually change your life over time.

00:59:56.480 | So that's what I'm going to be teaching my kids is let's work on your skills so you can

01:00:01.920 | create actual original thought.

01:00:04.480 | Tom, last question for you.

01:00:06.520 | At the end of your book Rich Kids, you talk about the eight core fears and those eight

01:00:12.760 | fears are number one, the fear of failure, number two, the fear of success, number three,

01:00:18.560 | the fear of rejection, number four, the fear of not being good enough, five, the fear of

01:00:23.840 | scarcity, six, the fear of being alone, seven, the fear of losing control and eight, the

01:00:28.320 | fear of being different or standing out.

01:00:32.000 | In your discussions with poor people, which of those fears stood out as being more dominant

01:00:38.600 | than others and what would be some strategies that you've learned to work against those

01:00:43.640 | to learn to overcome them?

01:00:44.960 | Yeah, I think the fear of standing out is one of the things that is the worst.

01:00:51.480 | It's the one of the worst fears, in my opinion, because it stops you dead in your tracks.

01:00:56.320 | And I talk a lot about this and I write a lot about it.

01:00:58.680 | I call it the herd doctrine.

01:01:00.900 | We are all as human beings.

01:01:03.860 | We have this, I guess, this evolutionary need to herd and it's built in.

01:01:11.440 | It's hardwired into all of us.

01:01:13.640 | There's safety in numbers.

01:01:15.280 | So what I found that the wealthy people, what the most successful wealthy people, what they

01:01:20.220 | did is they separated themselves from the herd somehow.

01:01:24.240 | Mark Zuckerberg did this.

01:01:25.560 | The guys from Google did it.

01:01:27.840 | So did Steve Jobs.

01:01:30.680 | They put themselves out there and usually they're all alone for some period of time

01:01:35.560 | while they're investing their time and trying to be successful.

01:01:39.640 | And while they're doing that, they are separated from the herd and they're vulnerable.

01:01:44.120 | And it's a very real fear.

01:01:47.520 | And in fact, there was a candid camera episode where they did this, the prank, where four

01:01:55.680 | people entered an elevator and one person was a stranger and four people were candid

01:02:00.240 | camera pranksters.

01:02:01.920 | And they would turn around periodically and eventually the stranger would turn around

01:02:05.400 | with them.

01:02:06.600 | There's this need to follow the herd that we need to, this fear of being alone and not

01:02:12.240 | being part of the herd that we need to break free of if we want to take ourselves to the

01:02:17.440 | next level.

01:02:18.440 | When you separate yourself from the herd, that's when you grow into a completely different

01:02:23.400 | person.

01:02:24.400 | So what you really want to do is try and find some product or service that's unique, that

01:02:30.080 | not everybody else is pursuing.

01:02:33.200 | And if you believe in it, pursue it, you're going to be on your own for a little while.

01:02:37.440 | But eventually, if you're persistent, you're going to draw some people into your herd and

01:02:42.920 | then you'll create your own herd and have enormous success.

01:02:47.520 | I forgot I had one more topic and question I wanted to ask you about.

01:02:51.080 | So this is going to be the actual last question.

01:02:54.240 | I heard through the grapevine and some mutual acquaintances that when you had written Rich

01:02:59.120 | Habits, you had done a lot of work, but then it was just really struggling and you had

01:03:05.160 | gotten to a point where you thought about kind of throwing in the towel to some degree

01:03:08.660 | or another.

01:03:09.660 | And then a few things happened and then all of a sudden some events occurred and it was

01:03:15.320 | a large success.

01:03:17.480 | What was the story behind that when you were facing dark days and it felt like it simply

01:03:21.640 | wasn't working?

01:03:23.320 | And what happened that changed that for you?

01:03:25.880 | Well, you know, this book business, this author business, it's a business first and foremost.

01:03:31.560 | I mean, it's like you're starting a new business.

01:03:35.400 | And as in many cases, when you're starting a new business, when it's something that you've

01:03:41.040 | never done before, you don't know what you don't know.

01:03:45.960 | And one of the things that I learned about the author business is that 99 percent of

01:03:50.760 | the business is about promoting yourself.

01:03:53.640 | It's about getting media attention.

01:03:56.000 | I didn't know that.

01:03:57.240 | It took me a while to figure that out.

01:03:59.100 | I thought you put out something great and people will automatically through grassroots

01:04:03.600 | or whatever, start buying your books.

01:04:06.400 | That's not how it happens.

01:04:08.040 | That's a very rare instance.

01:04:09.680 | So I started to when I realized that somebody pointed it out to me, a famous author.

01:04:16.160 | And so I started pursuing the media.

01:04:18.480 | And I honestly, Joshua, I hate pitching the media.

01:04:21.560 | I love doing media interviews like what we're doing right now.

01:04:24.520 | I love this.

01:04:25.600 | This is my sweet spot.

01:04:27.320 | But I hate pitching them and I hate pursuing it.

01:04:31.840 | So but it's one of these things that in life, when you're pursuing something you're passionate

01:04:40.160 | about.

01:04:41.720 | You know, 75 percent of what you're going to do, you're not going to like.

01:04:45.860 | But it's the 25 percent that really gives you that passion that keeps you in the game.

01:04:51.740 | And so I was almost fed up in 2000 and 11 and 12.

01:04:58.780 | I was really at the point where I was going to quit and stop promoting rich habits.

01:05:04.140 | And I wasn't going to stop writing books.

01:05:05.500 | I was just going to not promote it anymore because I didn't know what I was doing and

01:05:09.260 | it was too hard.

01:05:11.780 | But I couldn't stop myself.

01:05:14.180 | And I kept persisting.

01:05:16.780 | And I think it was because I was that 25 percent just kept me going.

01:05:22.740 | And then all of a sudden it was like a watershed event, you know, three years of nothing and

01:05:27.580 | then two years of nothing but media attention.

01:05:33.620 | And it all started because of being persistent and tweeting.

01:05:37.500 | I did it every day like I was brushing my teeth.

01:05:39.900 | I hated every minute of it.

01:05:41.420 | I did it an hour every day.

01:05:42.620 | I tweeted.

01:05:43.620 | I wrote a book.

01:05:44.620 | I wrote articles.

01:05:45.620 | I pitched it to the media through email.

01:05:47.300 | I call it my daily five.

01:05:48.540 | I did five pitches a day.

01:05:51.100 | Hated every minute of it.

01:05:52.460 | And then after a couple of years, I got somebody to respond.

01:05:57.060 | Farnoosh Torabe from Yahoo Finance.

01:06:00.140 | They did an interview with me here in 2013.

01:06:04.500 | It went viral.

01:06:07.020 | We had two million hits on the video in 24 hours.

01:06:10.860 | They never had more than 400,000 hits ever on this show.

01:06:17.740 | And then Dave Ramsey picked it up.

01:06:19.260 | Next thing I know, I'm on Dave Ramsey's show.

01:06:21.060 | Next thing I know, CBS is interviewing me.

01:06:23.420 | MSN is interested in me.

01:06:24.900 | It just went on and on.

01:06:26.140 | It hasn't stopped.

01:06:28.220 | But it all happened because I did not quit.

01:06:31.100 | I did not quit on my dream, even though I wanted to and I came close to it.

01:06:35.260 | I persisted.

01:06:36.780 | And this is an important point.

01:06:39.700 | The people who succeed in life, they never quit.

01:06:42.940 | They will go bankrupt before they quit.

01:06:46.540 | And I think that's an important line to draw in the sand.

01:06:49.700 | If you're really dedicated to what you're doing, it means you're willing to risk everything

01:06:55.740 | for it.

01:06:56.740 | And I'm at that point right now that it doesn't matter what happens with the rest of my life.

01:07:02.500 | I'm going to be doing this to the day I die, even if it forces me into bankruptcy, which

01:07:06.900 | it won't.

01:07:07.940 | But I'm going to be doing it because I realize this is my passion and that's what I learned

01:07:15.100 | from wealthy people.

01:07:16.100 | They just don't quit on their dreams.

01:07:18.060 | Lewis: I love it.

01:07:20.260 | The two books are Rich Habits and Rich Kids.

01:07:23.900 | The website is richhabits.net.

01:07:26.740 | You write a tip of the day and then a tip of the week.

01:07:29.940 | And so I'd encourage people to consider going over and subscribing there.

01:07:33.220 | And then when does the third book come out?

01:07:35.500 | Fischer: It's going to come out the end of October, early November.

01:07:39.700 | And it's called Change Your Habits, Change Your Life.

01:07:42.860 | And in it, I talk about habit change, but also I get more into the rich habits, particularly

01:07:50.700 | with respect to the 177 self-made millionaires.

01:07:54.740 | Lewis: Awesome.

01:07:58.180 | Put me on the publicity list if you like when you get ready for pre-orders and we'll try

01:08:03.260 | to help you get a little bit of publicity when it's closer to launch date.

01:08:07.860 | That would be awesome.

01:08:08.860 | Tom, thank you so much for coming on.

01:08:09.860 | I really appreciate the time.

01:08:11.340 | It's been a joy to talk with you.

01:08:13.300 | Fischer: Thanks for having me on.

01:08:14.820 | And there were great questions and I really enjoyed the interview, Joshua.

01:08:17.820 | Lewis: I told you it was a cool story, huh?

01:08:21.500 | So now, here's the reading recommendations for you.

01:08:24.100 | Get Tom's books.

01:08:25.340 | They're available on Kindle.

01:08:26.340 | That's how I read them.

01:08:27.620 | You can get the hardback if you want.

01:08:28.900 | But these, well, actually, you know what?

01:08:30.540 | These are good hardbacks to get.

01:08:32.460 | The Rich Kids, especially.

01:08:34.460 | And if you're going to read one of the two, if you're trying to figure out which of these

01:08:36.940 | two to read, read Rich Kids.

01:08:38.900 | That's the one that I preferred more.

01:08:40.900 | But both of them are useful.

01:08:43.140 | They're just a little bit different.

01:08:45.080 | So check out the books.

01:08:46.900 | They're very pithy.

01:08:47.900 | Rich Kids, especially, extremely pithy.

01:08:50.400 | And I think that if you're a parent, this is definitely one of those that would be valuable

01:08:54.340 | for you to read to think about, "How do I guide my children?"

01:08:59.820 | Success habits are not an accident.

01:09:02.260 | They are learnable and teachable.

01:09:07.100 | And if you learn them later in life, don't you think it might be worthwhile to focus

01:09:11.680 | on how you learn them and then teach them consciously to your children at a young age?

01:09:16.700 | I think it's a worthwhile pursuit.

01:09:20.060 | As we go today, before I kick off the music, I want to recognize the sponsor of the day.

01:09:26.100 | And the sponsor of today is Audible.

01:09:28.220 | Now you're very familiar with Audible.

01:09:30.980 | They're everywhere in terms of their marketing footprint.

01:09:34.300 | And here is no exception.

01:09:35.300 | I've done an exhaustive study of the audiobook marketplace and Audible is, in my opinion,

01:09:40.680 | the best audiobook provider.

01:09:42.940 | If you're interested in details on that, check out episode 219 of the show for a survey of

01:09:49.620 | the marketplace.

01:09:51.480 | But here's one thing I want to emphasize.

01:09:53.540 | And in Tom Corley's book, Rich Habits, he talks about rich habit number three, which

01:09:59.100 | is I will engage in self-improvement every day.

01:10:02.500 | And let me read you an excerpt from the book.

01:10:05.540 | Successful people engage in the process of self-improvement every day.

01:10:08.940 | They read industry periodicals and technical material specific to their profession or trade.

01:10:14.140 | They become students of their industry, profession, or trade and keep current with changes that

01:10:17.980 | occur.

01:10:18.980 | They do not spend excessive amounts of non-work time watching television or surfing the internet.

01:10:24.220 | Successful people read for self-improvement.

01:10:26.380 | They are perpetual students.

01:10:28.220 | Each day, they devote blocks of time to better themselves by studying subject matter that

01:10:32.820 | will improve them in some way and better enable them to perform their jobs.

01:10:37.580 | Time is too valuable to be wasted on matters with no tangible value.

01:10:41.420 | They coordinate their goals with self-improvement and set specific goals.

01:10:45.940 | This may involve obtaining an additional license, a degree, or developing a new niche for their

01:10:49.500 | business.

01:10:50.500 | They are continuously engaged in some constructive project to increase their skill sets, promote

01:10:56.040 | their business or careers, keep their minds sharp, or expand their business prospects.

01:11:02.420 | Unsuccessful people are not students of their industry, profession, or trade.

01:11:05.780 | They do not routinely follow their industry.

01:11:07.540 | They do not regularly read industry periodicals.

01:11:11.140 | They would rather spend hours each day watching television or engaged in junk reading.

01:11:16.300 | They use rationalization to justify their negligence in improving themselves.

01:11:22.040 | It involves engaging in some activity every day that will improve your mind and expand

01:11:26.940 | your knowledge to better your career.

01:11:31.140 | This is one of the core habits of wealth and success, and it's a habit that I believe that

01:11:36.340 | throughout our entire lifetimes, we need to continue to implement and develop and perfect.

01:11:42.960 | But you need a strategy because there is so much material that you need to learn and study,

01:11:50.260 | and it's impossible to learn and read and consume it all.

01:11:53.820 | So we need a strategy.

01:11:54.820 | Let's say that you're going to set aside 30 minutes a day for reading.

01:11:57.300 | Well, 30 minutes a day for reading comes out to three hours a week.

01:12:00.340 | That's pretty good.

01:12:01.340 | You could read, book a week at that rate, depending on your reading speed, book every

01:12:05.260 | week or two weeks.

01:12:06.860 | But is that the best use of that 30 minutes of focused self-development time?

01:12:10.820 | It might be.

01:12:12.540 | But remember that there are many materials that you should keep current on that are simply

01:12:17.160 | not available in an audio format, and so you'll want to choose those materials to consume

01:12:23.660 | during that morning time.

01:12:26.960 | That would be things like your industry trade journals, your industry publications, keeping

01:12:30.780 | current on the latest research that's being published in your industry.

01:12:36.140 | Now some of that might be available in an audio format.

01:12:38.780 | There might be an industry podcast.

01:12:40.660 | If there's not, you should have started one by now.

01:12:45.860 | If there is, you might be able to consume it in the industry podcast format.

01:12:50.140 | However, that's going to be good material for reading.

01:12:52.660 | If you're pursuing an additional license or degree, that's going to be good material for

01:12:55.660 | reading.

01:12:56.660 | So take some of the books that you would ordinarily read and move them over to audiobooks.

01:13:01.180 | Now unfortunately, I wish that Rich Habits and Rich Kids were available in an audiobook

01:13:05.060 | format, but they're not.

01:13:06.220 | So Tom Corley, what are you doing?

01:13:08.500 | Get your audiobooks published.

01:13:09.700 | I'm sure there's some story to it for the reason that they're not there.

01:13:12.100 | If they aren't, then those would be excellent books.

01:13:14.180 | But audiobook, Audible recommendation of the day today is get the book The Richest

01:13:19.580 | Man in Babylon in audiobook format.

01:13:22.340 | And this is a good one to own.

01:13:23.740 | The other book that Tom mentioned, The Greatest Salesman in the World, is also excellent.

01:13:27.580 | I've listened to the audiobook version of that, but it's not available on Audible.

01:13:30.620 | You might be able to find it somewhere else.

01:13:32.860 | Believe I listened to it years ago from the library.

01:13:35.360 | And when I was an initial sales—no, I own it.

01:13:38.020 | I have it somewhere in my files.

01:13:40.340 | So I bought it at some point.

01:13:41.340 | It's just not available now.

01:13:42.820 | When I was early in my sales career with Northwestern Mutual, I would listen to that book over and

01:13:48.100 | over and over again.

01:13:49.260 | And if you've ever heard the book, you'd know why.

01:13:50.900 | If you're a salesperson, it's very encouraging and motivating.

01:13:54.860 | But get the book The Richest Man in Babylon.

01:13:56.580 | And this is a good one to buy.

01:13:58.580 | Pick a narrator that you like.

01:14:00.060 | There are about four different narrators available on Audible.

01:14:03.300 | Pick a narrator whose voice you like and whose style you enjoy.

01:14:07.060 | And then use it and burn CDs for all the young people in your life.

01:14:12.220 | The Richest Man in Babylon is a fable.

01:14:14.020 | It's a parable.

01:14:15.020 | It's not a fable.

01:14:16.020 | It's a parable.

01:14:17.060 | And it's a story that's very digestible.

01:14:19.380 | Now, it's a bit old-fashioned in style.

01:14:21.740 | I personally enjoy that.

01:14:23.440 | You might run across people who don't.

01:14:24.740 | So that's why we need newer versions of this type of literature.

01:14:29.300 | But I think this is a good one to give to people to start them off with personal finance.

01:14:33.980 | So buy a copy of The Richest Man in Babylon with your Audible subscription.

01:14:38.280 | Burn it on a CD and share that with the young people in your life.

01:14:41.380 | And hopefully, you'll be able to set them on the right path.

01:14:43.980 | If you'd like to support the show, I would appreciate it if you would use the website

01:14:49.100 | RadicalAudioBooks.com.

01:14:51.420 | Go to RadicalAudioBooks.com, "books" with an "s" on the end, RadicalAudioBooks.com.

01:14:57.380 | You can get a free month on Audible and you'll be able to get a free audiobook of your choice

01:15:03.140 | with your one-month trial subscription.

01:15:04.980 | If you choose to continue, it's $14.95 a month and you get a book a month with that price.

01:15:09.260 | You can get a free audiobook at RadicalAudioBooks.com.

01:15:12.180 | So consider making Richest Man in Babylon your choice.

01:15:15.140 | Thank you all so much for listening today.

01:15:18.100 | I appreciate your time and attention.

01:15:19.900 | I hope this content was interesting to you.

01:15:22.260 | As we go, I'm going to again point your attention to Tom's story.

01:15:28.980 | Recognize that there's nothing that he did that I can't do and there's nothing that he

01:15:33.700 | did that you can't do and there's nothing that he's doing now that you and I can't do.

01:15:40.560 | You can interview all the rich people in your life and you should.

01:15:43.540 | Take some of your education budget which you have established in your budget and use it

01:15:47.700 | on taking rich people out to lunch.

01:15:50.300 | Take anybody out to lunch that you admire for some reason.

01:15:54.580 | Financial riches are one component of a life of success but there are many other components.

01:15:59.980 | If there's somebody that you admire how they treat other people or you admire their heart

01:16:04.540 | and their generous attitude or you admire their relationship with their spouse or you

01:16:08.020 | admire for their parenting ability or you admire for their academic accomplishment and

01:16:12.420 | achievements or you admire for their place of respect in the community or you admire

01:16:16.380 | for their spiritual vitality and insight, it doesn't matter.

01:16:20.320 | If there's somebody that you admire, invite them out for lunch.

01:16:24.300 | Just tell them I'm interested in asking you some questions and learning about this.

01:16:28.260 | A couple appetizers, a couple meals, a couple of drinks and maybe some dessert, always a

01:16:33.900 | good idea to stretch those meetings as long as you can reasonably do it to get as much

01:16:37.780 | out of a person as you can.

01:16:39.700 | It's a good use of your education dollars and essentially that's what Tom Corley did.

01:16:43.600 | Take good notes and you might find yourself writing a book.

01:16:46.300 | You might find yourself writing a book which would then expand your career, get you featured

01:16:50.000 | all around in the world, can allow you to be an encouragement and help to many other

01:16:54.020 | people.

01:16:55.460 | So consider copying him.

01:16:57.540 | The other thing is read Rich Kids and look at Tom's vision for his life as a grandfather.

01:17:04.820 | That vision is powerful, a lot more powerful than this idea of I'm going to drop out of

01:17:08.300 | life at 65 and sit around and be a hermit and play shuffleboard in Florida.

01:17:12.820 | Don't do that.

01:17:13.820 | Thank you all so much for listening.

01:17:16.300 | If you'd like to support the show, please also in addition to going to RadicalAudioBooks.com

01:17:20.260 | and signing up for an Audible trial subscription, please go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.

01:17:26.460 | That's where you can directly patronize the show and send me money in exchange for the

01:17:32.140 | work.

01:17:33.140 | If you've received value, consider sending me some money.

01:17:34.140 | I'd appreciate it very much.

01:17:35.140 | RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.

01:17:36.140 | Cheers, y'all.

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