RPF0545-How_to_Protect_the_Experience_of_Your_Rich_Life_with_Good_Digital_Fences
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00:00:30.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:34.400 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while
00:00:38.920 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua. I am your
00:00:43.840 | host and I have a unique show today for you that is very current. And in this show, we're
00:00:50.520 | going to talk about living the rich life. I am preempting the show that I've just recorded
00:00:56.460 | and deleted, wherein I was answering more questions and continuing on the income theme
00:01:01.320 | because I think this is more timely. And I want to record some ideas here for you live
00:01:06.120 | in the moment. And I think you'll find these ideas to be helpful because they are related
00:01:11.400 | to living this rich life now. And it's about comparisons, comparing ourselves to others,
00:01:19.360 | specifically with social media. I need three quick minutes of announcements. So bear with
00:01:23.500 | me for three quick minutes as we go through it. Announcement number one. If you are a
00:01:26.760 | patron of Radical Personal Finance, my apologies that I have not been able to post in the Patreon
00:01:31.080 | page. I'm presently locked out of my own Patreon account. I'm working very diligently with
00:01:35.680 | Patreon to get back in. It's a moderate length story, but basically I'll skip the story because
00:01:42.600 | I want to do this in three minutes. I said there was a discount code in Patreon because
00:01:47.520 | I thought I would be able to get it in there by the time that that show where I said that
00:01:50.580 | was in there went live. Unfortunately, I haven't. So if you are a patron of mine, forgive me.
00:01:57.080 | I'm working diligently to get back into the account, but I don't have it right now. So
00:02:03.800 | email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com for that coupon code, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com,
00:02:11.080 | and I'll get this squared away as soon as I can, working hard to get it back in there.
00:02:14.960 | Thing number two, I was planning today to record a live Q&A show, but due to technical
00:02:19.880 | issues, I am pushing that to Monday. And here is what I want to do. I want to invite you
00:02:25.280 | to join me on Monday, all of you. Well, any of you who are interested. Monday, May 14
00:02:32.200 | at 3 o'clock PM Eastern, join me using this phone number, 561-440-7362 for a live call
00:02:41.800 | coaching. Again, this coming Monday, May 14, 3 PM Eastern, 561-440-7362. Specifically,
00:02:50.520 | and exclusively to talk with me about questions relating to your career and your income and
00:02:56.880 | how you can make more money. I want to turn this into, I guess, an AirSats coaching call
00:03:03.200 | to discuss with you some ideas and I'll, of course, release it as a public podcast, but
00:03:09.680 | join me on that call. Please don't call in if you just want to hear, I will release it
00:03:13.040 | as a podcast. Please only call in if you have a question. And if I get more than, say, a
00:03:18.400 | dozen callers, I'll lock the phone lines. If you call in and the phone lines are locked,
00:03:22.600 | it means I had too many callers. Join me though, Monday, May 14, 3 PM. A few questions on frequently
00:03:28.540 | asked questions for the course. Again, right now we are in the launch phase for the Radical
00:03:33.000 | Personal Finance Career and Income Guide, the increased income course that I have just
00:03:37.840 | polished off version two. Right now, until this coming Wednesday, May 15, is the lowest
00:03:44.640 | price. Go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/increaseincome to sign up. A couple of questions that have
00:03:49.160 | been coming in. People have been asking this question, "Will it always be available?" I've
00:03:54.600 | mentioned that I have a 12-week launch cycle here. Short answer is I intend to keep this
00:03:58.920 | open available to you who are buying it always, but I'm focused very much on providing a lot
00:04:05.800 | of service for you during the first 12 weeks. You don't have to complete it in the first
00:04:09.720 | 12 weeks. I'm just trying to provide a lot of service for you. There's a balance between
00:04:15.640 | courses and products and training products and things like that that are always available
00:04:20.400 | because the content is static versus sometimes available. And for this particular module,
00:04:25.480 | I feel that at least 50% of the benefit of the course is specific discussions around
00:04:33.200 | your specific needs. And I can't commit to doing that forever. But what I can commit
00:04:38.240 | to doing is doing that for the next 12 weeks. And so the course will be available on a launch
00:04:45.840 | cycle, but you don't have to complete the content in the next 12 weeks. So if your next
00:04:50.000 | 12 weeks are busy, that's fine. All of the calls and things will be recorded. All of
00:04:55.040 | the lessons are available for you to download the audio from, which is the most important
00:04:59.880 | thing. All of the notes are available. There's 56 pages of outline notes that you can download.
00:05:05.480 | So you don't have to complete this in the first 12 weeks. It'll be available for you
00:05:10.160 | to refer back to. And my operating philosophy is this. I want to always reward and incentivize
00:05:16.600 | my customers who have been with me from the beginning. I would not be speaking to you
00:05:20.960 | today if there had not been a core group of members who supported me a few months into
00:05:25.920 | the show. I wouldn't be speaking to you today if there weren't people who signed up to be
00:05:30.200 | patrons of the show. I wouldn't be speaking to you today if there were not a beta group
00:05:35.000 | of initial students who signed up for the course. They believed in me when, I don't
00:05:42.960 | know if you should have. I've done my best. But things have not been perfect. But people
00:05:47.960 | believed in me. And so for every one of you who shares your hard-earned money and spends
00:05:53.520 | it with me, I'm absolutely committed to giving you the best that I'm capable of. And so I
00:05:59.240 | want you to know that that's my operating philosophy, is to give you the best that I'm
00:06:03.040 | capable of and then to make it better in time. So my hope is, even with this course, to make
00:06:07.340 | it constantly better and better and better. And if the technology allows me to do it,
00:06:12.400 | I'll try very hard to keep you having access to even the better future versions that are
00:06:17.000 | even better and more on point, et cetera. So final announcement is that if you have
00:06:23.920 | been thinking about the course, you've been thinking about signing up as I've started
00:06:26.940 | promoting it over the last few days, but you're interested but not that interested, I would
00:06:32.960 | love to know what you're thinking. When I first released this beta version of the course,
00:06:42.600 | the initial response was super, super strong. The course sold out in the first week with
00:06:46.280 | a hundred students. This time it has been slower, slower than I expected. So I would
00:06:51.840 | love to know your feedback. If you're interested, but you're not quite sure about it, please
00:06:57.120 | email me at joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com and tell me why. You don't even have to say
00:07:02.560 | anything. I'm not going to try to put you into a new sales funnel. I would like to just
00:07:06.280 | know why, what your personal reservation is. Or if you are, just so I can know in the future
00:07:12.400 | as I continue to get better, I want to make things that are really, really serving you.
00:07:16.000 | So if you have a question specifically, email me joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. Tell
00:07:19.120 | me your question. If you say, "Joshua, I'd love to work with you, but I just not interested
00:07:24.760 | in income. Most of my audience is already earning a very high income. Tell me what you
00:07:29.320 | would most like to ask me about. Just shoot me a quick note. Do it right now, please,
00:07:33.440 | if you would. Just pause and shoot me a quick note, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com and
00:07:38.280 | tell me, "Hey Joshua, if we were sitting down for lunch, here is what I would most like
00:07:42.120 | to ask you about. Here's what I'm most interested in. That will help me because this is just
00:07:46.520 | the tip of the iceberg." All right, announcement's over and let's get back to what I want to
00:07:51.480 | talk with you today. And that is exposure to others and comparing
00:07:56.000 | yourselves to others. My intention today was to record for you and I've recorded and dumped,
00:08:07.400 | I recorded, I was planning to record a show responding to your Q&A. And I, today for the
00:08:12.840 | first time on since February 22, today on May 11, I signed into my Facebook account.
00:08:19.520 | I had forced myself to stop going on Facebook back on February 22 because it was really
00:08:28.240 | damaging to my productivity. I was really struggling to figure out how do I get specifically
00:08:35.120 | the course finished? How do I get this done? I was months behind schedule, nothing was
00:08:40.080 | working, everything was locked up. I wasn't able to get things done and I was really frustrated
00:08:46.160 | as far as why. And so one of the things that I found myself doing is interacting with y'all
00:08:52.160 | in the Facebook group. But then at that time, this was right after the Parkland shooting
00:08:56.680 | and all of a sudden everybody's upset about guns and gun control, blah, blah, blah. And
00:09:01.160 | I found myself, I exercised a lot of discipline, I engaged with one, one person's thread. And
00:09:08.720 | I quickly found myself seven hours later having lost seven hours. And I just said, "That's
00:09:16.400 | it." So I closed out. I said, "I cannot come back here until I launch." And I told my wife,
00:09:20.880 | I said, "I'm not going back to social media until I launch." Well, it was a month and
00:09:25.360 | a half longer than I wanted it to be, but it was really interesting.
00:09:30.280 | Now this is in line with a number of other things in my life that I have done specifically
00:09:35.280 | to limit my own usage of my phone. I've over the years, maybe you find it easy to exercise
00:09:45.120 | self-control, but I don't. I find myself, I don't know if this is a thing, I've self-diagnosed
00:09:51.920 | myself, which is always, of course, brilliant. But I think I have something of an addictive
00:09:58.120 | personality if that's a thing. I just use it to describe the fact that when I get into
00:10:03.160 | something I usually get really into something. And I usually don't stay with it for all that
00:10:07.240 | long, but when I get into something I usually get really deep. If I'm interested in something,
00:10:12.760 | I'll go to the library and get 30 books and I'll go through all 30 of them. I'll read
00:10:16.120 | a dozen and go through all 30. If I'm interested in something, I'll watch hours of videos.
00:10:21.600 | I'll search out everything I can on it. Now this has been very useful to me throughout
00:10:25.960 | my lifetime, but it also can be a real problem because I tend to go kind of deep. And it
00:10:32.080 | means that I always have more input, more input, more input. Over the years, I've studied
00:10:38.840 | my own kind of successes and failures. And in some ways I feel more successful than I've
00:10:44.120 | ever felt. But in some ways I feel like I'm always trying to get back to who I was somewhere
00:10:50.640 | around a decade to 15 years ago. This has been expressed in a number of ways, specifically
00:10:57.120 | with my attention span. When I talk with my friends in person, I've often diagnosed my
00:11:04.300 | own personal problem with attention to go back to the invention of tabbed browsing.
00:11:10.680 | I remember the first time I had an internet browser that allowed you to open multiple
00:11:16.760 | tabs at once. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world because now instead of
00:11:24.000 | having to follow a thread through, you would click on a link, you would go forward, and
00:11:28.920 | if you wanted to go back, you had to go back, back, back. I could click on every link and
00:11:33.440 | open every thread. I thought it was wonderful. Now in this regard, I am in a very interesting
00:11:43.160 | position where in my current age bracket, I'm right on the transition between generations.
00:11:53.520 | I am essentially a digital native where I didn't have to learn as an adult some of the
00:11:59.720 | web skills, et cetera. I'm a digital native. But I remember the early days. So people who
00:12:05.520 | are a decade younger than me, they don't have any idea what it's like to not have a smartphone.
00:12:09.080 | They don't have any idea what it's like to not have tabbed browsing. They don't have
00:12:11.320 | any idea what it's like to not have fast access internet. And so they almost can't conceive
00:12:15.520 | of what that is like. Some people who are older than me certainly remember what it's
00:12:20.480 | like, but frequently, unless it's a part of your daily life, you're not as hardcore of
00:12:25.240 | a user as someone like me is, where it's native for me. I'm pretty current on most technological
00:12:32.160 | approaches. So I'm right on this really interesting generation where I have remembrance of both.
00:12:39.240 | And I've often thought back to that tabbed browsing scenario. And to this day, I look
00:12:45.240 | and I say, "That was when my attention span started to fall." Before then, I have this
00:12:53.600 | impression, who knows if it's accurate, but I think it is. I have this impression of me
00:12:59.000 | with a very long attention span. I could sit and read difficult books. I could follow complex
00:13:06.760 | arguments. I could engage in extensive conversations. But when tabbed browsing came along, I developed
00:13:16.360 | a very much shortened attention span. And a few years after the invention of tabbed
00:13:23.600 | browsing, I remember sitting there watching myself not even able to finish a single article
00:13:30.360 | on a single page. I'm not exaggerating. I couldn't finish a single article on a single
00:13:39.400 | page because I would be interested in the next one. Click, follow, click, follow, click,
00:13:43.400 | follow. Oh, that looks like an interesting link. Click, follow, click, follow. A number
00:13:47.320 | of years back, I noticed that my attention span had evaporated. My ability to stay with
00:13:53.400 | something, stay with a hard job had evaporated. And so I've worked hard to pull back from
00:13:58.440 | it with varying levels of success. But it's been a continual challenge over the last five
00:14:06.240 | years to say, I need to make sure that I'm focused, focused, focused. And I've especially
00:14:16.320 | been working on that the last six months. Focused, focused, focused. I've also come
00:14:24.200 | to the point where I identified that there were a number of things that I liked that
00:14:27.560 | weren't helping me. And because they were easy, I was doing the easy things and not
00:14:34.360 | the hard things. So let me give you some examples of some things I've done as I tell you what
00:14:39.680 | happened today. Simple example, YouTube. I, as most men, I really enjoy videos, YouTube
00:14:50.720 | videos. I've never enjoyed broadcast TV. I've never really consumed broadcast TV, but it's
00:14:56.200 | not it just it's not me. I can't stand to hear a laugh track. I acknowledge that there
00:15:00.640 | are some very well done TV shows, but I generally have just avoided most of them. But individual
00:15:06.280 | created video is is is powerful for me. I really love it because I can exercise that
00:15:12.040 | interest that I have in weird, esoteric topics and I can follow that interest to its very
00:15:18.680 | end. But over the years, YouTube became deadly because I could just click subscribe and follow
00:15:27.520 | the recommended videos. And as YouTube has perfected their algorithms, there's always
00:15:32.720 | a list of things that I'm interested in and they're perfectly curated for me. I don't
00:15:37.000 | remember the exact timing, but maybe a year ago, I said, this is not helpful. I'm spending
00:15:42.360 | hours and hours every week on YouTube. This is not good. And I tried various things, fits
00:15:48.420 | and starts, but I wound up taking the step of actually completely deleting my YouTube
00:15:54.160 | account, completely deleted the Google account that was associated with it, completely deleted
00:15:58.400 | all the history. And I completely removed all of removed the YouTube app from my phone
00:16:04.160 | and I completely removed any saved cookies from YouTube. So today, when I actually if
00:16:10.840 | I log on to YouTube, it's been really good because if I log on to YouTube, there's never
00:16:15.560 | a search history of what I've watched, which is also good for privacy. I don't want to
00:16:19.680 | create a long extensive search history of what I'm watching, but it's also really good
00:16:24.080 | for me. I always see that front page of YouTube and it's never curated content. I was previously
00:16:30.480 | subscribed to hundreds and hundreds of channels. From time to time, I'll allow myself to go
00:16:36.040 | and watch video, but I make myself remember the channel name. If I can't remember it,
00:16:40.240 | it's obviously not that important. And my YouTube viewership collapsed in terms of time
00:16:46.800 | and I gained a huge amount of time back. It was really, really healthy for me, really
00:16:51.840 | helpful. It also helped me to not live in such an echo chamber because certainly as
00:16:56.340 | I would watch a video and then watch another video, then the algorithm would start to try
00:17:00.240 | to give me videos that I was interested in. But my entire experience wasn't curated just
00:17:07.160 | to myself. So I would see a more diverse array of videos. Well, that was good. But then it
00:17:18.000 | continued on and I'm going to skip giving you any kind of timeline because this is fits
00:17:21.520 | and starts over time. But other things that I did, I completely removed social media from
00:17:28.320 | my phone. I had an experience that really struck me because it was very visible. For
00:17:33.120 | me, my children and my wife are very important to me. And one of the basic structures of
00:17:39.320 | our lives that we have fully committed to is that our family eats together. And for
00:17:47.800 | the most part, we eat together at least two meals a day. Now, what I found is generally,
00:17:53.960 | even though I usually work from home, I skip lunch with my family because it's right in
00:17:59.760 | the middle of my most productive hours. But we would try to always have breakfast together
00:18:03.880 | and dinner together. And if something's going to fail, I want to make sure that we always
00:18:09.000 | have dinner together. That is deeply important to me. It's a priority for us. I remember
00:18:14.280 | I was arguing with somebody one time on Facebook and I remember sitting there and I had it
00:18:19.760 | on my phone and it was just so easy for me to get that phone and go and look. That I
00:18:24.640 | remember getting up from the table, didn't need to get up, but getting up from the table,
00:18:29.600 | going to the bathroom with my cell phone so I could look to see if somebody had responded
00:18:34.240 | to me on Facebook and if somebody had given my brilliant point back to me so I could figure
00:18:40.320 | out what's the next rebuttal that I could give them in their argument. Now, maybe you're
00:18:43.800 | not an arguer. I certainly am a debater. I enjoy interesting things and debating points
00:18:49.680 | and philosophy and principles, et cetera. That's me. Maybe yours is different. I don't
00:18:55.640 | guess that you would be like me. But I was really embarrassed and I'm embarrassed even
00:19:00.760 | to say that because here's my family. Here's my wife and my children who I love and I want
00:19:08.160 | to be with. But because it's easier for me to go and argue with someone online, I'm physically
00:19:13.680 | removing myself from the space with my family to go and check Facebook. Well, over time
00:19:21.400 | I completely removed all social media apps from my phone. That was really good. It brought
00:19:26.240 | me a lot of peace. I removed all work email from my phone. That was really good. So then
00:19:33.600 | instead of getting a nasty email from a listener, "Joshua, you said this hateful blah, blah,
00:19:38.240 | blah, blah," then I just wouldn't bother. I can go when I'm in work mode. I go to work
00:19:42.200 | mode, I open my email, I close it and I'm done. I don't all of a sudden pull out my
00:19:47.680 | phone while I'm with my family and we're going to go to the park and, "Oh, there's an email.
00:19:53.040 | There's another one. Another person mad at me on the internet. Great." Or another nasty
00:19:59.880 | review. "Joshua sucks at blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," for whatever reason. So that
00:20:05.880 | was a good move. Now, as time has gone by, I've taken it even farther. One of the things
00:20:12.800 | that I did is I learned that, okay, I'd removed the YouTube app from my phone. That was helpful.
00:20:21.320 | But then I still had the YouTube app, but I still had an internet browser. So I could,
00:20:27.280 | of course, go to YouTube and open up the internet browser and watch. Well, I had not set a rule
00:20:32.640 | that I wasn't going to do that. But in time, I realized that, "Wow, I'm now spending a
00:20:38.120 | lot of time on video still, again, even though I didn't have the app." So I went to the step
00:20:43.240 | of actually completely removing the internet from my phone. I totally deleted the...and
00:20:52.600 | if you're interested in how to do this, I don't know how to do it on Android, but on
00:20:55.120 | an iPhone, the browser that I...well, I usually would use a browser called Snow Haze, which
00:21:02.240 | gives you a little bit more granular control. If you're looking for a good browser to use
00:21:06.880 | that is a little bit better, Snow Haze is a good one. It does a good job. So I removed
00:21:10.880 | that. And then I removed Safari from the phone. Now, you can't actually remove Safari. If
00:21:14.600 | you're interested in doing this, as I tell you about it, feel free. But you can't actually
00:21:18.440 | fully remove Safari. But you can, in the Restrictions tab, go into the Parental Restrictions tab
00:21:26.520 | on your phone, and you can set up a code that is a four-digit PIN. And in that four-digit
00:21:33.160 | PIN, you can remove Safari. And that way, it's not available to you. You don't have
00:21:38.200 | the internet, the browser available to you. Now, of course, you still have to exercise
00:21:42.480 | your own...this is a self-restraint thing here that we're doing. But...and then for
00:21:49.560 | a time, I remembered the PIN. Now, my productivity went up, but then I would every now and then
00:21:54.760 | go ahead and just unlock the restrictions so I could use it. Finally, I just changed
00:22:00.120 | the PIN so I wouldn't even know what it was. And I kept on deleting apps. So I systematically
00:22:04.920 | deleted apps, deleted apps, deleted apps, deleted apps, deleted apps, deleted apps.
00:22:09.320 | And my phone usage shrank and shrank and shrank and shrank. And as I did that, my happiness
00:22:18.920 | and my ability to be present increased. I was able to make progress. I felt less stuck.
00:22:26.600 | And by consuming, instead of constantly consuming these little just hits of tiny little content,
00:22:32.720 | I increased my reading. I increased my reading in things that were helping my brain, ideas
00:22:38.560 | that were challenging to me, super, super helpful. I didn't really realize how good
00:22:45.040 | my mental state was. I observed some effects of it. And I look at life a lot through...as
00:22:53.080 | a father, I look at it and say, "Well, how would I advise my children?" And as I drive
00:22:58.240 | around sometimes I see children at bus stops and I look and I just observe that the vast
00:23:04.720 | majority of them usually, as they're standing at the bus stop, have their neck down, head
00:23:09.080 | in the phone. You go anywhere, head in the phone, head in the phone, head in the phone.
00:23:14.120 | And I know I sound like an old curmudgeon, but I'm like, "Man, this is not good." In
00:23:19.000 | my own experience, I can empathize with the addiction, but I can also empathize with the
00:23:24.120 | reality of it being better without it. So for weeks now, my phone has basically been
00:23:34.200 | totally useless in the sense of there's nothing on it. The only thing that's on it is a couple
00:23:41.320 | of simple communications apps for me to talk with the very few people that have my actual
00:23:46.800 | communications apps. And the piece increased. Now, it's a bad financial move. I got a
00:23:55.880 | thousand-dollar phone that thankfully it's not brand new, but my time on it basically
00:24:01.960 | has gone to nothing. And I didn't realize how good my mental state was until I logged
00:24:09.280 | into Facebook today. Now back to Facebook. I set myself a rule and I locked myself out.
00:24:16.720 | Now, over the last few years, I've deleted LinkedIn, I deleted Instagram, I deleted a
00:24:22.080 | bunch of other things as well. But I just said, "These things are not good. They're
00:24:25.360 | not helpful. They're not useful. All they are is noise and nonsense, and they don't
00:24:30.200 | actually help in anything that matters." I'm not denying that they can be useful for a
00:24:34.520 | few small places, a few small cases. I'm not denying that they can be exploited by certain
00:24:39.840 | people who are interesting to use them, but I don't want to play those games. So I've
00:24:43.680 | gotten rid of a lot, but the two that I still have are Facebook and Twitter. And so a while
00:24:50.520 | ago, on February 22, I closed out my Facebook account. I put a note in the Radical Personal
00:24:55.120 | Finance Facebook group and I said, "Guys, I can't. I got to get out of here. This is
00:24:59.160 | bad." And what's happening is that my being on Facebook, because it's easy, is causing
00:25:05.920 | me to miss my goals. I am six months behind schedule on everything that I had intended
00:25:12.000 | to do six months ago. I don't like being behind schedule. That hurts my pride. That hurts
00:25:18.280 | my self-image. That hurts my productivity. That hurts my ability to serve you when I
00:25:23.320 | can't get things done. And so I put a note in the Facebook group and said, "Sorry, I
00:25:28.520 | got to go." I haven't logged in since February 22. Did the same thing with Twitter, deleted
00:25:34.880 | all my tweets, and the only thing that was there for a while is just simply the show
00:25:41.640 | automatically publishing. When I publish, it goes to Twitter. And so I got out of that
00:25:50.320 | until today.
00:25:52.440 | Now, generally, when you're part of something every day, you don't really realize how it
00:25:59.480 | affects you. Think about it in terms of your own house. Have you ever noticed that other
00:26:05.240 | people's houses smell but your own doesn't? I go to other people's houses and it's like,
00:26:12.160 | "That's weird." I come to my own and, "Ah, it smells great." But I know that other people
00:26:17.720 | come into my house, especially we have dogs and old carpet, and I'm kind of embarrassed
00:26:21.400 | about how my house sometimes probably doesn't smell great, but I can't smell it. And the
00:26:29.600 | point is, when you're in it, you can't smell it. When you're in something, you can't really
00:26:34.840 | feel it.
00:26:36.560 | So I logged into Facebook today and I started answering listener questions. And I didn't
00:26:41.240 | go and look at my newsfeed. It wasn't a matter of the newsfeed, but I started just checking
00:26:45.360 | a little bit here, checking a little bit there. All of a sudden, I started seeing this personal
00:26:49.640 | finance conversation and that personal finance conversation. I see this group and that group.
00:26:55.840 | About an hour ago, I'm sitting here just feeling utterly worthless. I'm thinking, "Yeah, I've
00:27:05.040 | been out of Facebook, but man, everyone's doing better than I am." I'm looking at all
00:27:09.440 | of my other friends who have financial podcasts and financial communities, and I'm thinking,
00:27:13.960 | "They're doing better than I am. They have bigger communities than I have. Look at how
00:27:19.160 | fancy their stuff is, and my stuff stinks."
00:27:26.760 | This morning, the Joshua of early this morning, Friday, when I got up this morning, I was
00:27:33.680 | feeling great. When I got to work, I was feeling great. I was confident. I was focused. I've
00:27:44.080 | got a plan. I'm working on it. I was feeling great. I didn't spend that much time on Facebook.
00:27:55.440 | I pulled up my Twitter account, answered a few people. An hour ago, I realized self-confidence
00:28:04.000 | shot. Everyone's better than me. Poor little old me. What's wrong with me? Why can't I
00:28:12.640 | do what other people are doing? Why does their stuff work? Why is my stuff not? Why don't
00:28:18.840 | I have 50,000 people who've signed up for my course? Everyone else did. Everyone else
00:28:23.760 | has had this. What's wrong with me? Poor little old me.
00:28:29.040 | I say this to you because it took me a little while, and I just figured out. That's what
00:28:38.160 | happened. Now, we talk about comparing ourselves to the Joneses, and there's all kinds of people
00:28:45.200 | who've written about this issue. If you haven't read about this as far as the comparing ourselves
00:28:49.680 | to other people, you're living under a rock. I'm not trying to repeat all of those articles
00:28:55.160 | that you've read. People have said, "Well, when we compare ourselves to others online
00:28:58.720 | and we're seeing this carefully curated, perfect life that everyone else, which is all lies,
00:29:04.600 | tiny little moments carefully edited to post online, it just makes us feel down about ourselves
00:29:10.720 | because my life doesn't look like that." Now, I'm not a beauty blogger, vlogger. I'm not
00:29:17.280 | a beauty Instagrammer. I don't follow things to talk about how you look, but some people
00:29:24.360 | do. But it took the person who's posting the perfect, candid 87 tries to get it right.
00:29:39.200 | And then you look in the mirror and you say, "I don't look so good." Their outfit was months
00:29:44.640 | of work. You look in the mirror and say, "I don't look so good." Or maybe that's not your
00:29:49.000 | thing. You look at their perfect family photo, but you can't hear the audio of how that was
00:29:55.480 | the only family photo in an evening of frustration. Or maybe you're like me with your business
00:30:05.200 | and it looks like everybody has it so easy. What's wrong with me? Poor little old me.
00:30:13.520 | It was funny because what reminded me of this was somebody's post in my Facebook group.
00:30:20.960 | Way back in the Radical Personal Finance archives, I recorded a show and it was about not comparing
00:30:32.660 | yourself to other people. And on that show, I had just seen, I had been working hard.
00:30:39.760 | I think it was episode 135. It was called Be Confident in Your Unique Offering and then
00:30:46.400 | Stick to Your Knitting, January 15, 2015. And what had happened in that show was the
00:30:59.440 | lady who has the podcast, a really good podcast, Farnoosh. Farnoosh Tarabi had just published
00:31:03.880 | her show. And I had been before Farnoosh, I'd been interested in personal finance and
00:31:08.840 | I was struggling with radical personal finance. I was struggling. And all of a sudden, Farnoosh
00:31:14.440 | launches her podcast and here's Farnoosh, Miss Public Media Creator extraordinaire,
00:31:23.000 | and she has Tony Robbins for her inaugural episode. And I just felt worthless. I sat
00:31:30.600 | down and I thought, what's wrong with me? Everyone else is better than me. And I recorded
00:31:35.120 | that show saying that, I said, be confident in your unique offering and then just stick
00:31:39.600 | with what you can do. Like you can't be everyone else. I don't want to be Farnoosh. She's wonderful,
00:31:44.620 | but I'm sure she has all kinds of problems. That's not me. It's not what I want to do.
00:31:50.440 | And then finding this Facebook comment from my listener posted to my group saying, I just
00:31:55.200 | found your episode 135 and it really was so helpful for me. I couldn't even remember what
00:32:01.000 | I was talking about. But when I thought it back through, I realized, you know what? For
00:32:06.520 | the last few hours, I have been in the same mental state that I was on January 15, 2015,
00:32:16.600 | because I was comparing myself to others because I'm on Facebook. Now, somebody who tries to
00:32:24.080 | practice what I preach, I try to mean what I say and say what I mean. I try to always
00:32:32.440 | tell the truth. I try to be clear and to not say something that I don't believe, but to
00:32:39.480 | say the things I do believe. That's embarrassing. To look back almost three years later and
00:32:45.880 | say the same emotion I was dealing with three years ago, I still have that. But it was the
00:32:52.120 | clarity of me recognizing I haven't had that until I turned on Facebook. Now, my
00:33:01.160 | relationship with Facebook is somewhat unique because as someone who makes their living
00:33:06.360 | online, it's very hard to just say, well, I'm anti-Facebook. I'm anti-Facebook. And for a
00:33:12.680 | long time, I have been fully intending to be completely out of Facebook. I see no benefit
00:33:17.360 | from it. I could give the business case and I'm not going to do that here. But basically,
00:33:22.360 | I've lost any trust I ever had in any of these companies to actually to not change in the
00:33:30.400 | middle of what they think. I've lost any trust. But I certainly see how I could use
00:33:35.600 | Facebook to grow my business. But you know what? If me growing my business on Facebook
00:33:44.120 | causes me to constantly be engaged in comparing myself to people, and it causes me to
00:33:50.760 | lose my self-confidence, and it causes me to think poor little old me, no chance. It's not
00:34:00.720 | worth it.
00:34:05.880 | Now for you, I share my thoughts not to tell you what to do. But I will say this. This show is
00:34:15.000 | dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, today's insight, and
00:34:22.680 | encouragement, today's encouragement, that you need to live a rich and meaningful life now. My
00:34:34.600 | question for you is, is your phone and your computer keeping you from living a rich and
00:34:43.400 | meaningful life now? I know for me, mine sure has. Now I've shared some of my
00:34:50.960 | successes, and I've had a lot of success in this. Tell you what, I like not caring about my
00:34:57.920 | phone. I leave it behind more and more, don't use it. I'm down to exactly 11 apps, 11 apps at
00:35:09.760 | the moment. Not a single one of them is interesting. They're purely utility. I could
00:35:17.200 | probably cut out even those. At this point in time, the only reason that I could make for
00:35:27.320 | having a smartphone for me right now, based upon how much better my life has been by not using the
00:35:33.440 | smartphone, is simply that I value secure private communication. I can't do that with a flip
00:35:42.720 | phone, but blah, blah, blah. I can't, you know, I can't do that with a phone. I work hard to get all my
00:35:48.200 | friends off of phone lines. I work hard to get all my friends off of unencrypted email. I work hard to get
00:35:54.520 | all my friends to use secure messengers and to use encrypted email, and I can't do that with a feature
00:36:00.360 | phone. But I'll tell you this, there's not a chance in the world I'd buy this phone again. I loved it when I
00:36:08.760 | bought it. I was so excited. There's not a chance in the world I'd buy it again, at least not right now, in my
00:36:15.920 | current needs structure. So consider trying it. If you want to live in rich and meaningful life now,
00:36:23.400 | consider trying it. Frankly, I don't even have service on the phone right now. I completely quit cell
00:36:33.760 | phone connection. I have an emergency phone that I sometimes carry so that my wife can get ahold of me if
00:36:41.040 | necessary, but we're together most of the time. I don't even have cell phone service on the phone. It just
00:36:45.520 | lives on Wi-Fi, and I only use it for a few messaging apps, just so I don't have to communicate in text
00:36:53.880 | messages and email. It has been awesome. My life has been measurably, measurably improved. My
00:37:09.080 | self-confidence has been high. My productivity has been high. My interest has been strong. I've been
00:37:15.960 | actually able to get stuff done. I've actually been able to learn things and read weird books that interest
00:37:23.160 | me, that don't, they're so much more rewarding than mindlessly flipping and flipping and flicking and flicking.
00:37:34.640 | My relationship with my family is better. Now I'm not sitting at the dinner table wondering what's on my
00:37:39.600 | phone. I know there's nothing on my phone because my phone doesn't even work. It's just, yeah, just has some
00:37:43.800 | apps on there. And since nobody talks to me on those, you know, I only have, you know, how often do you
00:37:48.960 | actually interact with close friends? Maybe you're more than me, but it's not that big a deal. In every way,
00:38:00.080 | I've had a visceral experience of things being better without the phone, without social media, without some
00:38:10.240 | of those other things. Now, you're listening to me right now on a podcast, probably on your phone. One of the
00:38:18.000 | very few apps that I have, still have as a podcast app. It's kind of, would be a little bit hypocritical for me to
00:38:27.200 | have a podcast app and then, or to have a podcast and then not have a podcast app, wouldn't it? But you know what?
00:38:35.760 | I've got a client of mine I've worked with for a long time. This client is very, very successful. A lot of
00:38:47.400 | businesses, a lot of money, does very well. Month ago, this client, very successful person, was just frustrated
00:38:58.840 | with their own troubles. Lack of ability to execute on their to-do list. And we're sitting going over the same
00:39:08.640 | things month after month after month. No progress. His solution? He deleted his podcast app, started playing
00:39:19.880 | classical music instead. Immediately reported to me a significant increase in productivity. Making major
00:39:28.920 | progress again. So if my podcast is causing you to not make progress towards your goals, I recommend -- this is a
00:39:39.760 | client that found me through my podcast. He doesn't listen to my podcast anymore, because he's done with podcasts. I
00:39:48.440 | recommend to you, listen, your life is what matters. Your goals are what matter. Your priorities are what matter.
00:39:57.680 | It's your life. It's your family. These are your children. My children are never going to be where they're at
00:40:05.880 | right now. I am not going to miss their life because I'm staring at the screen on my phone. I still have my
00:40:13.720 | podcast app, but you know what I don't have? I deleted my Kindle app. I deleted my iBooks. And just in case
00:40:24.080 | you're curious why, it's not that I don't like to read. It's not that I don't read digital books. But it's that
00:40:28.280 | ability to focus. I really quit reading on the phone because with the phone, it's so easy to see the next
00:40:34.920 | notification. It's so easy to click over and say, "Oh, I'll just research that interesting thing." So I have a
00:40:40.760 | standalone Kindle and I have a standalone -- well, I have a standalone e-readers and Kindles that aren't
00:40:47.600 | connected to anything. They don't have data. They don't have anything. I put the book on them and that way I'm
00:40:50.920 | actually just sitting and reading the book and building that attention span. So I wrap this up to say, I'm not
00:40:59.240 | going to let my life be stolen because Facebook and YouTube and Twitter want to sell me. Not going to do it.
00:41:14.240 | I've threatened for a long time to totally delete, get out of Facebook, even radical personal finance off it and
00:41:21.800 | everything. That's kind of a business discussion. I think social media marketing is wildly overblown in terms of
00:41:30.600 | its impact. Wildly overblown. I see that it can be used by people for certain ends, but those ends are more
00:41:39.920 | specific. Wildly overblown. So I am 99% sure that -- and we've worked hard. We've got a forum that's built behind
00:41:50.280 | the scenes with radical personal finance where I can interact with you in a specific forum that's not on social
00:41:55.320 | media, etc. It's not quite ready to publish yet. Right now, still working on this course launch, but hopefully
00:42:01.360 | next couple of weeks it should be published on the site and I'll share with you more about that. But I'm not
00:42:06.840 | going to let my life be stolen by Facebook, let alone the data and all that stuff. One of the things I don't
00:42:11.360 | like is I don't like coming out when everyone else is on the delete Facebook bandwagon. I prefer not to be
00:42:15.760 | normal. But it's true. Constantly assess -- as I close, I share this stream of consciousness. This is real. Right
00:42:30.360 | now it's 4/11 in the afternoon on Friday afternoon. When I got up at 5 o'clock this morning, I was feeling
00:42:40.080 | great. When I was working, I was feeling great. About 11 o'clock, I signed on to Facebook. At 2 o'clock, I
00:42:49.720 | realized how my mental state was impacted from the fact that I had signed on to Facebook, started looking
00:42:58.640 | around, I had signed on to Twitter. And I'm telling you about it now. At the very least, give yourself a break.
00:43:09.240 | Try it if you haven't tried it. Fasting is really important. You know, most religious traditions, the
00:43:17.320 | Christian tradition certainly does have this. Many religious traditions have this. In some religious
00:43:22.120 | traditions, fasting is kind of a farce, where, yeah, we fast, but we feast at the same time. But fasting is
00:43:28.280 | really valuable. When you fast, whether that's from food, or with, of course, many people fast from other
00:43:35.480 | things and have their thing that they give up. But fasting allows you to appreciate something more. And if
00:43:43.840 | you haven't done it, try putting yourself on a fast. And try to figure out a way to so that you don't have to
00:43:51.000 | rely on your willpower. If anything that I've said, if you want to try it for yourself and see if it helps you or
00:43:57.160 | doesn't help you, then just try it. But here's some ideas of how to do it. I don't ever want to be addicted to
00:44:08.000 | something. I don't ever want something to be in control of me. So from time to time, you know, over the last few
00:44:14.760 | years, from time to time, I'll quit coffee. I enjoy drinking coffee every day. I really enjoy getting up and
00:44:19.400 | having a cup of coffee. That is a valuable part of my life. But I don't want to be addicted to coffee. So from time to
00:44:24.480 | time, I stop completely. And I always appreciate it when I go back to it. And I say, No, I really value having that
00:44:29.840 | cup of coffee. I really like to have a cup of coffee in the morning. It really is nice. So when I go back to it, I know
00:44:36.280 | that I value it. But other things that I've given up, I don't value. I've learned, Oh, you know what, I don't actually
00:44:41.920 | value it. So here's what I would do. If any of this sparks anything for you, here's what I'll just share as far as my
00:44:48.000 | experience. In our modern world, it is almost impossible to keep up with, it is impossible to keep up with
00:44:55.400 | everything. So don't try sometimes. Here are some ideas you take and pick. I've tried these all in different
00:45:03.640 | contexts. If you have a bunch of subscriptions, start over. If you're listening to me right now on a podcast app, and
00:45:12.720 | you have 70 podcasts, or 30 podcasts, just for fun, just delete the app. Or delete all your podcasts. Go a week with
00:45:23.280 | no podcast and then think which of those do I really want to listen to? And resubscribe to the ones that you really
00:45:29.960 | want to listen to. You probably won't resubscribe to 30 or 70, you probably resubscribe to a handful. Try it. Same
00:45:41.080 | thing with YouTube. Most of my audience is male. Most men are heavily oriented towards video. We spend a lot of
00:45:49.120 | time on things like YouTube. Try my thing. Consider deleting your YouTube account. You can always get another
00:45:56.560 | one. But delete the Google account that's associated with your YouTube. Clear all your history. That's good for
00:46:01.120 | your privacy as well. So delete all your comments. Google doesn't need that. They're selling you. Delete your
00:46:06.520 | YouTube account. And try what I did. Yeah, give yourself the permission to still go on YouTube. But instead of
00:46:12.360 | being subscribed everywhere, you got to actually remember and go check those people's subscriptions. Or consider
00:46:18.320 | doing that on social media. I've done that. At one point, I actually completely unfollowed thousands of people on
00:46:26.080 | Facebook. Then what I learned is I actually missed being able to find people at that time. That was a couple years
00:46:33.880 | ago. I missed being able to get a sense of what's happening. I went back and re-followed everyone. This stuff's
00:46:38.280 | not permanent. But same thing on Twitter. I completely unfollowed everyone on Twitter. Now if I want to check
00:46:43.720 | someone on Twitter, and this has been for a long time, but now if I want to check someone on Twitter, I have to go
00:46:47.440 | and actually look at their feed. So that way it's just my brain working instead of the algorithms controlling
00:46:53.920 | me. I'm thinking proactively, "Oh, you know what? I want to go and see what this person is saying." Instead of
00:47:01.160 | the algorithm saying, "Here, here, here, come see me." Give it a try. See if it works. Try deleting it from your
00:47:09.080 | phone. I see nothing good from social media on your phone. The routine that most people seem to make, roll up in
00:47:18.880 | bed before you even get out of bed, checking social media. Before you go to sleep, checking social media.
00:47:24.760 | Friends, it's not healthy. It's very bad for relationships. I don't have any research data that I can present on
00:47:32.400 | this. But in most of the people that I've talked to over the last few years, who have been going through
00:47:40.960 | divorce, personal friends, family, people I interact with, I often have taken to asking this question, "Tell me
00:47:52.600 | about Facebook." Frequently, Facebook is involved. Now, it's not always involved in infidelity. But man, I can
00:48:06.560 | sure see how it frequently is. I was talking with my wife about it the other day. There was a girl that I'm
00:48:16.040 | friends with on Facebook from years and years ago. I had a major crush on the girl for a long time. And of
00:48:23.560 | course, in the world of Facebook, it's always interesting to say, "Oh, let me go and see what that girl's up to.
00:48:28.600 | Go and look at her profile and see what's up." You've done it. Of course you have. We all do. And I was
00:48:36.800 | thinking about it. I was talking to my wife and I was saying, "You know, I don't have any romantic feelings for
00:48:42.360 | that girl. It was a long time ago." Honestly, I don't know what I was thinking at the time, but I guess I
00:48:49.000 | wasn't. It was all unthinking. But I was talking to my wife and I said, "You know, I can see how it starts right
00:48:59.920 | there. If my wife and I were having a tough time and our relationship were not warm and fun at the moment, how
00:49:10.520 | easy would it be for me to go and obsess on that other girl? How easy would it be for me to just say, 'Oh, hey,
00:49:17.320 | how you doing?' To all of a sudden start talking. The talking continues. And one thing leads to another.
00:49:27.880 | Happens all the time. I spoke with a man a couple years ago. He'd just gotten divorced from his wife. We were
00:49:36.600 | talking about it and he said, "You know, it was not so bad that during dinner, I'd be there at the dinner table
00:49:42.560 | with the children, two little girls. She'd be over on the couch in the living room on Facebook. I didn't know what
00:49:48.320 | she was doing. But come to find out, she was developing a relationship with another man. This is bad. That's an
00:49:58.680 | expensive thing to go through a divorce. So let me just simply say, you can come up with your own reasons. I've
00:50:04.800 | got all kinds of them. I think I'll go ahead and in today's site, I'll post a pretty good couple of articles in the
00:50:12.800 | comments on the sorry, in the notes for today's show on just reasons to consider picking on Facebook. It's not part
00:50:21.320 | of it is specifically Facebook's fault. I hate to beat up on someone when they're being beaten up on. It's just that
00:50:25.840 | Facebook is they bought everybody else and they're the giant thing, the giant force. But it's not just them. For
00:50:33.200 | some people, it's Facebook. For some people, it's YouTube. For some people, it's something else. But you assess
00:50:39.680 | your own life, be an adult and think about your own consideration. But that's my experience. My enjoyment, my
00:50:49.800 | rich life today has been measurably improved by my smartphone basically becoming a stupid phone. Just a
00:51:00.320 | little bit of communication apps on it. And my computer and online experience being free of videos and free of
00:51:09.680 | social media accounts. And in three hours, after almost three months of absence and three hours, my productivity
00:51:18.760 | dropped, I wasted time, my self-image dropped, my self-confidence dropped. I started comparing myself to other
00:51:26.200 | people. People that if I said, and specifically, I'm talking about friends who have mine who are fellow
00:51:33.080 | podcasters, fellow financial people, started comparing myself to them, I started to feel worthless. If I were
00:51:42.880 | physically with these people, I would feel great. I would be thrilled about their success. They would be
00:51:49.960 | thrilled with mine. We'd have a great conversation. We all have unique things to offer. We're all pursuing unique
00:51:55.040 | things. And they would say, "Hey, here's what's working. Here's what's not working." They would share their
00:51:58.120 | struggles. I would share my struggles. We would, in person, or when talking, we would build each other up.
00:52:05.520 | Whereas Facebook fueled my jealousy. That is not a good emotion. Happy Friday, everybody. Remember, launch
00:52:18.120 | window right now, radicalpersonalfinance.com/increaseincome. I would love to have you sign up
00:52:23.000 | there. If you have any questions about the course, if you want to know if it's right for you, email me,
00:52:27.040 | joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. If you're interested or just vaguely interested, but you have your own
00:52:32.520 | reasons, "Joshua, I appreciate what you're doing. I want to support you, but it's not really for me." I'd love
00:52:37.480 | to know. Just shoot me a note. No hard sales pitch. I'll just say, "Thank you very much," and I'll make notes
00:52:42.600 | of it. That'll help me to organize what's going on. And then also, if you have something you say, "My
00:52:47.000 | income's doing really well, but here's what, if I would really love you to talk about, what questions I
00:52:52.320 | really have, what I'd really love to see you do," this particular course is 104 videos. My next one, I
00:52:58.520 | think it's going to be 60 minutes total, but it's going to be packed. So if you wanted me to give you a 60
00:53:04.080 | minute presentation or a 30 minute presentation on something, let me know what that is. Correspond with
00:53:08.040 | me via email, please. joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. And have a great rest of your weekend.
00:53:12.800 | Remember, Monday at three o'clock, Monday at three o'clock, call in for the Q&A show.
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