RPF0709-Dont_Fight_the_Seas_Simply_Change_Your_Goals_Instead
00:00:00.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:03.360 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,
00:00:07.840 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua. I am your host.
00:00:12.000 | And today I'm going to talk with you about the power of changing your goals in the face of
00:00:17.040 | adversity. As I record this on Thursday, March 19, 2020, millions of us all around the world
00:00:27.280 | are facing the reality of complete and total financial destruction, complete and total
00:00:35.360 | devastation. Millions of us are finding out that we simply have no job to go to on Friday. Millions
00:00:42.720 | more tomorrow on Friday will find out that we have no job to go to on Monday. Millions of us
00:00:47.680 | are contemplating the loss of value in our investment portfolios. We're contemplating
00:00:54.800 | the destruction of our businesses. We're sitting down and we're picturing the faces of the people
00:00:59.520 | that we're going to have to lay off tomorrow or Monday or next week or in a month.
00:01:04.080 | We're contemplating the various scenarios foisted upon us by this current global pandemic
00:01:12.160 | and wishing desperately that things were different, but acknowledging that things are bad.
00:01:21.360 | I'm no exception to that. I've been considering it a lot over the last couple of days. I've been
00:01:26.000 | on the phone nonstop with clients working through adjustments to investments and working through
00:01:32.160 | adjustments to businesses and talking about how bad it's going to get and basically just giving
00:01:37.840 | my estimate on how long it's going to be until there's martial law and national guard troops
00:01:45.280 | in the streets or a police officer on the corner, and then how long this thing is going to go on.
00:01:50.480 | And of course I don't know, and I desperately hope that I'm wrong, but at this point in time,
00:01:53.840 | it's not going to be long. The national guard troops will probably be on your street,
00:01:59.200 | I don't know, Monday, if not before. You're going to be locked down in the next few days
00:02:05.440 | and probably for longer than any of us think and any of us want.
00:02:09.280 | And this event, although we're hoping desperately and there's some good news, there's news of
00:02:16.320 | potential treatments that might help people recover from the illness quicker. We're all
00:02:20.160 | hoping that this goes away quickly, but the reality is becoming increasingly sure that
00:02:26.400 | it's not going to be fast and it's not going to be easy. And the financial and economic
00:02:32.720 | repercussions of this are things that are going to be felt in our lives for years, if not decades.
00:02:38.720 | I've, I think it's healthy to think about these things. I spent yesterday morning in the shower
00:02:45.520 | contemplating bankruptcy. What happens if I go bankrupt? I was contemplating the complete and
00:02:51.360 | total failure of my businesses. What do I do if my businesses dissolve? Where do I go? What do
00:02:57.680 | I do next? What do I start next? What do I do if I lose all my money? What do I do if I make bad
00:03:03.040 | investments? What do I do if my money becomes worthless? And thinking through those scenarios.
00:03:08.000 | And I think that's healthy. At the end of it, I reflected on how blessed I am, how grateful
00:03:15.440 | I am to have people who love me and to have people who depend on me and so many options. I'm
00:03:21.520 | incredibly blessed. And I feel that really deeply, even especially in hard times. I'm well prepared
00:03:29.600 | for this storm. I've prepared for this storm for a very long time. I've tried to help thousands of
00:03:34.800 | other people get prepared. And yet still, the storm is bigger and rougher than I hoped it would be.
00:03:41.440 | But in the midst of that, I face the challenge of figuring out what do we do today?
00:03:45.840 | And today I want to talk to you about the value of changing your goals rather than fighting the
00:03:53.360 | seas. This comes directly from a book that I was reading. I was on an airplane last week and I was
00:03:58.000 | reading this book. It's called Get Real, Get Gone. How to Become a Modern Sea Gypsy and Sail Away
00:04:03.920 | Forever. The authors are Rick Page and Jasna Tutu. Again, Get Real, Get Gone. How to Become a
00:04:10.160 | Modern Sea Gypsy and Sail Away Forever. And it's a nice little book. The book is all about how you
00:04:16.240 | can actually achieve your dream of buying a sailboat and going to live the sailboat lifestyle,
00:04:23.280 | cruising around the world and anchoring in exotic locales and how really achievable it is. And I
00:04:28.480 | love this kind of book written by somebody who's actually doing it. I gain so much. I study the
00:04:32.960 | techniques. I try to understand the principles at hand. But in the midst of this book on sailing,
00:04:37.920 | I came across some comments and some statements that I thought were
00:04:40.720 | ineffably profound, just really, really profound. And I sat down and just pondered them for a
00:04:51.520 | little bit. And I was thinking about them in light of the madness that we're all facing today.
00:04:56.880 | And I want to share them with you because I really think they may help you. And then after I share
00:05:02.720 | the lessons from this book, I'm going to share with you some lessons that I've learned
00:05:06.560 | from other clients about other financial disasters and things that they have done
00:05:13.120 | to survive and weather and even thrive during those disasters.
00:05:16.160 | This particular section of the book is talking about the safety of sailing. Obviously,
00:05:23.520 | many people are concerned about the safety of sailing. After all, the sea can humble you in
00:05:29.120 | an instant. You can realize how small you really are when you set out across the ocean in a small
00:05:36.480 | sailboat. But in the context of answering some of those questions on safety, the author was talking
00:05:46.560 | about how we are the ones who actually cause many of the disasters that we face. And specifically,
00:05:54.000 | he was talking about the danger of having specific strict timelines and aggressive goals
00:06:00.960 | when you're sailing. And he was talking about how the vast majority of people who face shipwreck,
00:06:06.880 | who face danger, they often comes because they try to fight against the sea in some way,
00:06:14.560 | rather than simply going with the sea. Now, listen to this comment. The comment here when
00:06:23.600 | he talks about goal setting is how dangerous it can be to have sailing goals. You may have a
00:06:27.040 | sailing goal to say, "I've got to reach this island by this date because we have an international
00:06:31.680 | flight booked," or "We've got to finish our circumnavigation by June 1st, and so we need to go.
00:06:36.960 | If we're going to be on schedule, we got to go." And how dangerous those goals are to actually
00:06:41.920 | your being safe in your pursuit of sailing. And so here's what he talks about. And for me,
00:06:51.200 | this is particularly poignant because I am a goal setter. I'm a goal achiever. In fact,
00:06:58.000 | I do this weird little affirmation where one of the things that I tell myself every day is that
00:07:04.240 | I'm a goal achieving machine. I know how to set goals. And not only that, I know how to achieve
00:07:09.840 | goals. And I have found that to be very useful in my life. I'm a structured goal setter, goal
00:07:16.400 | achiever, et cetera. But with every positive character trait, there can come a negative side to
00:07:21.040 | it. Not everything that you do or that you engage in is perfect without constraints. And goal setting
00:07:28.320 | can have positive effects in your life, but it can also have negative effects in your life.
00:07:33.920 | Here's the excerpt. "Slow down, change direction. Later on in this book, we will see how the need
00:07:41.200 | for speed and recognition makes many racing sailors fairly poor sea captains. But for now,
00:07:46.560 | I'm referring to the common cultural habit of goal setting. It has become so common in our
00:07:51.600 | culture to set goals and then try to achieve them that the ridiculousness of this self-imposed
00:07:57.920 | charade goes almost unnoticed. If you cannot shake this rather ingrained Western attitude,
00:08:04.240 | not only will the sea frustrate you, but so will most developing world cultures who are
00:08:09.760 | generally more fatalistic. When I was in Kenya, I took an engine part to be fixed at a local
00:08:14.960 | workshop in Mombasa. I was told it would be ready, "Kesho." When I looked up "Kesho" in my Swahili
00:08:22.160 | dictionary, I discovered it means tomorrow. So feeling rather pleased with myself, I went back
00:08:27.840 | the following day and was told the same thing. The next day I was also told, "Kesho," and the next.
00:08:34.000 | Finally, I erupted and shouted, "You can't keep saying Kesho and not meaning it." Whereupon a
00:08:40.160 | very smiley face patiently explained to me, "I'm truly sorry, sir, but white people not understand
00:08:47.040 | Kesho. Kesho does not mean tomorrow. Kesho mean not today." That tickled me so much that it led
00:08:56.400 | to further discussions about the language, which as it was of course trying to learn. And it turns
00:09:00.560 | out that this guy, his name was Jenga, like the game with wooden blocks, was a fellow musician.
00:09:05.520 | And we ended up playing together a bit and I became good friends with his whole family,
00:09:09.760 | who loved nothing better than to teach me Swahili and hear me mispronounce things.
00:09:14.160 | I abandoned my goal of leaving Mombasa in the quickest time possible and changed my goal to
00:09:22.240 | what was actually happening in my life. In effect, I made my goal, meet great people,
00:09:28.720 | learn Swahili, and wait for my part to be fixed. I was able to achieve this goal very enjoyably,
00:09:35.360 | not because it was easier or less desirable than my previous one, but because it was what was
00:09:41.520 | actually happening in my life rather than what I hoped was happening in my life.
00:09:47.280 | I'm not suggesting that you lie down and allow yourself to be kicked around by the vagaries of
00:09:52.720 | chance. If we find ourselves in a rotten situation, then we must fight our way out of it.
00:09:58.320 | But as is so often true, the source of our unease is not usually the quality of any particular
00:10:03.920 | situation that we are in, but our fixation upon the idea that it should be otherwise,
00:10:11.760 | or that we should be somewhere else. Gotta cover those miles and achieve my goals.
00:10:24.000 | So, when faced with two choices of fairly equal merit, take the one that is actually happening,
00:10:30.000 | not the one that you have fixated upon for no other reason than that is what you have fixated
00:10:35.360 | upon. This is a good skill to develop because the "C" is totally indifferent to your wishes,
00:10:42.080 | and whether you like it or not, she will often have very different ideas
00:10:47.440 | of where she would like you to go. Change course. Go there. Do not fixate on your
00:10:56.480 | "goals." Goals are inventions of the human mind, and unlike sea conditions or other geographical
00:11:05.680 | realities, can be changed in an instant. Wind not blowing from where you want it to?
00:11:13.840 | Why not change course and go somewhere else? I discovered the wonderful Percy Islands this way.
00:11:19.120 | Or go back the way you came and enjoy that place for a while longer. You can't possibly know what
00:11:25.520 | the results of your actions will be, so stop fixating on your goals as if they were fueled
00:11:30.160 | by anything more than the conceit that you know what the future holds. You don't. But if you think
00:11:39.360 | you do, you will push your boat and yourself into dangerous situations just to get there,
00:11:46.640 | which in reality does not hold any more promise than anywhere else.
00:11:50.400 | Some of the best experiences are unplanned, and this becomes quite common once you set off on the
00:11:56.800 | largely unpredictable path of a watery wanderer. The trick of course is to try and be aware of it
00:12:03.440 | at the time rather than becoming frustrated that the experience you are having
00:12:08.640 | is not the same as the one you imagined you would be having when you set your
00:12:12.240 | goals. I cannot list in this book the amount of great experiences I have had by adopting this
00:12:19.520 | attitude. Most of the great experiences of life happen when we let go. Sure, some things will
00:12:26.080 | stink. Into every life a little rain must fall. I don't think any attitude can totally eliminate
00:12:32.720 | that. But doesn't the success of any lifestyle lie in the ability to tilt the suck-fun ratio
00:12:39.600 | heavily in your favor? This is made a whole bunch easier if you can abandon the desire to achieve
00:12:46.160 | your arbitrary goals when wind and weather are against you. 99.9% of the time you will enjoy
00:12:54.320 | your new destination as much as, if not more than, the original plan. Some places will still suck,
00:13:01.200 | as would be the case if you doggedly stuck to your original itinerary. But at the very least,
00:13:06.480 | you will have arrived somewhere sucky, having had a good sail to get there with your body,
00:13:11.360 | nerves, and boat in one piece and still on speaking terms with the rest of your crew.
00:13:17.120 | Agendas and Schedules Again, this is in the context of sailing,
00:13:23.200 | but still relevant to our lives. I think you can already guess what I'm going to say about those.
00:13:29.680 | But rather than bore you with more ersatz eastern philosophies, I want you to conduct a little
00:13:35.120 | experiment. Every time you read of a yachting accident in the press, look for the "scheduling
00:13:40.960 | error." It is always there, largely overlooked, and is usually the root of all subsequent problems.
00:13:46.960 | Quite conveniently, it can normally be found at the beginning of the article.
00:13:50.800 | "The weather looked ominous, but I had to be at work on Monday, so we slipped our lines at 0800 and
00:13:59.040 | or we left Hamilton Island for the mainland despite the rudder problems as Freddie had a
00:14:03.040 | flight to catch or we wanted to overtake the yacht ahead, so we were flying full sails and 30 knots."
00:14:09.920 | The story then goes on to list the terrible events that unfolded,
00:14:14.400 | often with serious injury, loss of life, or boat, or all three.
00:14:18.560 | Quite often, the cause of the accident is given as heavy weather or rudder failure or some other
00:14:24.720 | engineering or technical culprit, when the root cause of the accident should be listed as
00:14:29.440 | "attitude problem." As I've said already, the sea is totally indifferent to your plans.
00:14:36.800 | She does not care that Claudia has a bikini wax appointment or Mark's karate class is graduating
00:14:42.160 | on Thursday and you have promised to go out for wontons. Put your agenda ahead of the sea,
00:14:47.120 | go up against it, and see who wins. I know this goes against the macho image of "man alone against
00:14:54.400 | the mighty sea," but that is all it is, an image. Getting real is about seeing things as they
00:15:01.200 | really are, not how we would like them to be or how they are portrayed in the media.
00:15:06.240 | The best way to do that without constant disappointment
00:15:10.560 | is to learn to appreciate what is actually happening around us,
00:15:15.360 | rather than constantly attempt to manipulate reality to fit our desires or satisfy our own
00:15:23.520 | image of ourselves. We have become so accustomed to getting what we want right now that immediate
00:15:30.640 | gratification often seems the norm. This is not just wishful thinking, but is also a dangerous
00:15:36.640 | attitude to take to sea. Sometimes you get pinned in an anchorage for two weeks due to bad weather.
00:15:42.080 | Enjoy it. Read a good book. Make love with your partner. Learn to speak Spanish. Wishing it were
00:15:49.440 | otherwise will do no good, nor will convincing yourself that it will be all right to leave,
00:15:55.360 | when clearly it is not, in order to self-justify your wish to catch the Kentucky Derby on ESPN.
00:16:02.640 | Chapter ends there.
00:16:12.160 | I hope that you can see the power and the applicability of those comments to our current
00:16:20.000 | scenario. Goals matter, but you can change your goals in an instant. Goals are entirely in our
00:16:30.080 | heads, and it's much easier to change our goals than it is to change the sea. It's much easier
00:16:36.480 | to change your goals than it is to change the economy. Couldn't resist.
00:16:42.480 | Goals are inventions of the human mind, and unlike sea conditions or economic fairings or
00:16:52.480 | monetary policy or fiscal policy or the success of your local business or the lockdown that you
00:16:58.960 | may or may not be living under, goals are inventions of the human mind. And unlike those
00:17:04.560 | things, goals can be changed in an instant. Are the economic winds not blowing where you want them to?
00:17:12.400 | Why not change course and go somewhere else?
00:17:17.200 | It's hard for me to imagine any of us who will be able to achieve our goals
00:17:28.320 | as previously defined. Perhaps you, like me, sat down in December and charted out your year,
00:17:34.880 | charted out your 2020. I've got my travel planned. I've got my lifestyle planned. I've got my
00:17:42.640 | achievements planned. And I'm sitting here in quarantine at my house with my family,
00:17:52.720 | going nowhere, doing nothing. And I have no idea how long I will be right here.
00:17:59.280 | But is that necessarily a bad thing? If I change my goals and I stop to look around and understand
00:18:10.640 | what is actually here, understand what's actually right around me, there are so many wonderful
00:18:17.120 | things at hand. My children are begging me to come and read to them. I have more time. I'm not
00:18:27.200 | leaving the house, going to all my obligations, going and doing all my things. I can go and I can
00:18:31.680 | spend time reading to my children. There are lots of things that I can do right now.
00:18:36.240 | And so whether the sea itself has you stuck in a harbor or in an anchorage for two weeks
00:18:45.120 | unexpectedly, or whether COVID-19 has you stuck in your house for two to four to six to 20 weeks
00:18:54.000 | unexpectedly, there are lots of things that you can do in the middle of it.
00:19:01.120 | I find that context, that concept, that goals can be changed in an instant to be incredibly
00:19:10.560 | empowering. Share with you a story. In 2008, I became a financial advisor. And at the time,
00:19:18.480 | I was 23 years old. And I had a little bit of experience, a little bit of book knowledge,
00:19:24.480 | but I didn't have a lot of practical experience. And as I was out all over town,
00:19:29.600 | and I started in the middle of the recession, I remember when I first got one of my
00:19:34.000 | insurance license, I remember driving up, the insurance class was in Miami,
00:19:39.040 | and I was driving up from Miami, back up north of Miami. And I was driving there, listening to NPR,
00:19:46.560 | listening to the conversation about the votes on the TARP legislation, Troubled Asset Relief
00:19:51.440 | Program. That was when I started work as a financial advisor. And all during the beginning
00:20:00.400 | years of my business, I was working in the middle of a recession, which showed me that first of all,
00:20:08.560 | you can still make money in a recession. I will record an episode, probably the next one of this
00:20:15.440 | podcast, that will seem like the exact contradiction of today's show. Title will be
00:20:22.320 | How to Ignore the Coming Recession. And basically something like that, how to ignore the coming
00:20:28.160 | recession. Because I think a lot of times you can ignore things that are going on,
00:20:33.360 | but not everybody, and not all the time. And I think it would be incredibly,
00:20:37.360 | at the very least tone deaf, but incredibly foolish of me to say something so silly as
00:20:46.960 | ignore the coming recession. You might have that opportunity, but you might not. Depends on your
00:20:51.840 | business, depends on your career. We don't get to choose how these things affect us.
00:20:56.800 | I'm going to do my best to ignore the recession. At the end of the day, I can't
00:21:01.840 | I don't get to choose which way the winds blow. I don't get to choose what the sea is doing. I
00:21:06.160 | don't get to choose what happens. All I get to choose is how I set my sails in the midst of it.
00:21:11.760 | And sometimes you set your sails and you go with the wind. Sometimes you drop your sails and you
00:21:15.760 | you sit at anchorage. I beat that sailing metaphor to death. But
00:21:22.480 | I remember distinctly meeting this guy, kind of an older guy,
00:21:30.480 | mid-60s, and he'd run a very successful construction company.
00:21:35.440 | And the first thing that was weird about the meeting when I first got referred to him,
00:21:41.280 | because the way I did my business was I would meet everybody based on referrals.
00:21:44.880 | And so when I got referred to him and I called him, he said, "Jer, come on out and see me."
00:21:49.120 | And I tried to set an appointment. He's like, "Whatever, any day." And so I nailed him down.
00:21:54.080 | "Okay, I'll be there at two o'clock on Tuesday." So I show up at two o'clock on Tuesday.
00:21:57.920 | And it was weird because his office was in the backside of this old,
00:22:03.440 | I can't remember if it was abandoned or just kind of rundown looking gas station.
00:22:08.480 | Kind of poked my head in the door and I'd been told he was a pretty successful guy. And
00:22:13.120 | yet this is rundown, beat up office in a weird spot. There was no gleaming office tower. There
00:22:20.080 | was no beautiful sign. It was just a weird door on the back of a gas station building.
00:22:25.280 | And I sit down and start talking with him. And along the way, as I'm getting to know him,
00:22:30.080 | he says, "Joshua," he says something like, "This is my third recession." He said,
00:22:34.480 | "Let me explain to you what I'm doing." He said, "This recession has destroyed my business."
00:22:42.640 | He said, "I went from X number of dollars, big numbers to nothing." He said, "We got nothing,
00:22:51.040 | no business whatsoever." He said, "So I've laid off all my staff." He said, "I've tried hard over
00:22:59.040 | the years to make most of them contractors instead of employees, because that's given me some more
00:23:04.720 | leeway to trim staff when I've needed to. But I laid off all my staff. We parked all our trucks.
00:23:09.920 | We dropped all the insurance. They're just sitting out there in the parking lot." Now,
00:23:12.800 | and I realized, okay, look, there's a line of company vehicles out there. He said, "I come
00:23:17.840 | into the office a couple of days a week. I said, we look around, see if there's anything we can do.
00:23:21.360 | And if not, I go fishing." And he tells me he bought a boat. And one of his buddies was going
00:23:28.080 | broke. One of his buddies had gotten big. And I don't remember the exact numbers, but he bought a
00:23:32.720 | $85,000 boat. And this guy had bought them out for $32,000, bailed them out. And he had a nice,
00:23:39.440 | fancy fishing boat. He said, "We go fishing four days a week, five days a week, whatever it was."
00:23:43.920 | He said, "Because there's nothing I can do. There's just no business. It doesn't matter how
00:23:48.160 | good I am or how hard I try. There isn't any business right now. And so I'm not going to
00:23:53.120 | sit around and worry about it." He said, "I'm going fishing." Now, in his case, he shared with
00:24:02.160 | me that it was his third recession. He said the first recession ate him alive. He was stressed
00:24:06.560 | all the time and he promised himself, he said, "I'm not going to run my business that way in
00:24:09.840 | the future." So he never borrowed money. He had no debt. He had a bunch of money in savings and
00:24:15.040 | he was spending money that he had in savings. He knew he'd need to get his business going again,
00:24:18.640 | but he wasn't fighting day after day. He wasn't scrambling. He wasn't freaking out.
00:24:25.360 | Now, later on, he, through the recession, as things started to come back, he started to scramble for
00:24:32.400 | more business again and things picked up and construction came back and he was back in
00:24:36.800 | business. But it made a profound impact on me because there I was, a young, scared, 23-year-old
00:24:42.640 | financial advisor trying to figure out what to do. And I thought, "This is the way to handle
00:24:48.640 | a recession." At the time, it was the exact opposite of anything that I could imagine,
00:24:55.120 | because I was this goal-setting guy. I'm going to make it no matter what. I'm going to keep on
00:24:58.560 | fighting. And I thought, "Why fight the economic wins? Why not just go with them?"
00:25:06.800 | Why not take advantage of the rising tides in your business so that you're making more money
00:25:13.280 | during those times? Why do you always have to fight it and say, "No matter what, I'm going to
00:25:16.800 | grow." Why not just grow and shrink with the economy? It just seems like an easier way to do it.
00:25:21.520 | Now, in order to actually do that, you've got to have some prior planning.
00:25:30.240 | Got to have some money. Got to have some margin. You got to have some flexibility.
00:25:37.920 | And no matter how well-prepared you are, it's not without cost. It was a heavy burden on this guy
00:25:44.960 | to lay off all his workers. They had families too, and they probably weren't as well-prepared
00:25:50.240 | as he was. But that particular lesson went deep with me. I'll share it with you now in case it's
00:25:58.880 | helpful. Now, a lot of us are going to be fighting in the coming months against the sea
00:26:07.280 | because of the people that depend on us. I don't know a business owner that doesn't go to sleep at
00:26:14.160 | night not thinking about the responsibility that he has for his staff, for his employees,
00:26:22.160 | for the families. It's brutal to lay off staff. It's brutal. And we're in the middle of it. You
00:26:29.280 | can't always fight it, but lots of people will go to the end fighting to do the best for their team.
00:26:36.000 | I intend to work hard in the coming recession. I intend to give it my all. And I'm doing that
00:26:46.240 | because I feel a sense of service. I want to serve people and to help people because it's scary.
00:26:52.960 | Being out in a big storm on a little sailboat is scary, even for the most experienced people,
00:27:00.240 | but especially for people who aren't accustomed to it. And being in the middle of a big financial
00:27:04.880 | storm in a very little sailboat with a very little savings account is scary. And so, I want to help
00:27:12.800 | people in the middle of it. But along the way, I'm going to constantly remind myself that I can
00:27:18.080 | change my goals in an instant. Goals are all in your head. They're all right there in your head.
00:27:28.800 | And because they're in your head, they can be changed in an instant.
00:27:33.440 | So today, as you sit down and you think about your goals, and tomorrow when you sit down and
00:27:40.800 | write out your goals, set some goals that relate to the reality of where you are right now.
00:27:46.800 | If you're going to be at your house, quarantine for the next two, three, four weeks, whatever,
00:27:52.960 | set some goals for what you can do while you're there. Maybe your piano is dusty in the corner.
00:28:00.000 | YouTube is your friend. You have a chance to be with your children. It's incredible. The
00:28:07.840 | opportunity that we have just to spend time with our children. Your children are out of school,
00:28:11.040 | they're home. Do some cool stuff. Change your goals. And change your goals from making millions
00:28:18.880 | to just surviving. See, throughout human history, survival has not always been quite so easy as we
00:28:27.040 | have it today. Throughout human history, survival has been the goal. And there are hundreds of
00:28:33.520 | millions of people around the world today for whom survival is their goal. You and I are incredibly
00:28:40.800 | fortunate that we don't think much about our survival. It's only in these times when all of
00:28:44.080 | a sudden the cut walls or the shelves are bare that we start to wonder, well, where's the food
00:28:48.400 | going to come from? And what happens if the trucks stop flowing? And what happens if all the power
00:28:53.040 | workers are sick or don't go to work and I can't get my hot water? That's pretty sobering for a
00:29:02.960 | lot of us. Probably a good reminder to appreciate how comfortable our lives usually are. But set
00:29:13.120 | some goals that you can achieve. This may not be the year to have your best biggest year ever.
00:29:19.040 | This may not be the year that you make a million bucks. May not be the year that you make 42% on
00:29:24.720 | your investments. Maybe the year that one of your properties goes into foreclosure. Maybe the year
00:29:32.160 | that your whole portfolio goes into foreclosure. Maybe the year that your whole portfolio goes
00:29:36.720 | down 50%. Maybe the year you lose your job. Maybe the year you declare bankruptcy.
00:29:41.600 | Stinks. That's the reality that a lot of us are in. So in the midst of this year though,
00:29:50.000 | set some goals that you can achieve. For example, this may be the year
00:30:01.040 | that you lose 50% in the market value of your investments.
00:30:04.720 | But can you learn some lessons in the middle of it? Can you learn some lessons about the
00:30:10.800 | investment markets? Can you learn some lessons about yourself? Can you study
00:30:14.480 | your portfolio? Can you really become engaged with it? Can you understand why it's happening
00:30:21.280 | so that you can be better prepared for next time? This may be the year that your property goes into
00:30:27.040 | foreclosure or your whole portfolio goes into foreclosure. But can you study why you're facing
00:30:34.560 | these issues so that you can be better prepared next time? Can you think about what went right?
00:30:39.680 | What went wrong? This may be the year that you go into bankruptcy, but can you seek to go into it
00:30:47.840 | honorably? Can you seek to be communicative? Can you fight all the way through, communicate with
00:30:53.760 | your creditors and then settle your accounts honorably? This may be the year that your
00:30:59.200 | business shuts down, but can you treat your employees the way that you would want to be
00:31:03.040 | treated? Can you treat your creditors the way that you would want to be treated as a creditor?
00:31:06.880 | We all know that there are legion of examples of people who have made their start in the middle
00:31:18.720 | of disaster. Probably in the finance space, the best example would be Dave Ramsey. Dave Ramsey
00:31:24.400 | went totally broke, bankrupt, and made an entire fortune and massive empire upon what he learned
00:31:32.960 | through that experience. If I go broke and bankrupt, I will make an entire fortune and empire
00:31:41.120 | off of what I learned through that experience. I don't intend to. I tried really hard to be
00:31:44.880 | prepared for it, tried to be really conservative, really prudent, but at the end of the day,
00:31:50.160 | don't get to control it all sometimes.
00:31:51.760 | I always think of Dan Sullivan. Dan Sullivan went bankrupt and was divorced. He's a business coach,
00:32:02.960 | if you're not familiar with a strategic coach. He was bankrupt and divorced on the same day.
00:32:06.720 | I think he said he got divorced in the morning, then he went to lunch, put it on a credit card,
00:32:13.200 | and went bankrupt in the afternoon, same day. That was his lesson, that what he was doing
00:32:17.840 | was not working. He went on to build an empire based upon the life changes that he made
00:32:25.520 | in the wake of it. Now, I'm going to be here with you fighting. I'm going to be here to fight with
00:32:30.800 | you. I'm going to be sharing with you ideas, tactics, strategies. I'm very good at fighting,
00:32:35.440 | and I'm very good at helping people fight. I know a lot of little tricks. I know a lot of
00:32:39.280 | little strategies. I know a lot of things you can do to fight. I'm a fighter. I want you to
00:32:43.280 | be a fighter too, because if you fight, at the very least, if you go down fighting, you're going
00:32:47.280 | to be proud of yourself. If you go down because you gave up, it's hard to look yourself in the
00:32:52.000 | mirror, but if you can go down fighting, it's what we tell our children, right? It's okay to lose.
00:32:56.480 | I'm not going to tell my kids they got to win. It's okay to lose, but you better lose giving it
00:33:00.320 | your all. With finances, if you're in the middle of it, if you got laid off this week, if you're
00:33:03.760 | getting laid off next week, it's time to fight, and I'm going to work with you. But I want you
00:33:09.840 | to start by recognizing that in the middle of the fight, you can change your goals, and you can
00:33:15.120 | change them in an instant. So perhaps it's time, instead of setting goals around how much money
00:33:20.640 | you're going to make this year, set goals about how you're going to behave this year, the kind
00:33:25.600 | of honor that you're going to show in your affairs, the kind of person you're going to be,
00:33:29.440 | the kind of neighbor you're going to be, the kind of father you're going to be. Set those kinds of
00:33:34.080 | goals. Don't fight against the sea. Don't fight against the economic winds. We have no idea what's
00:33:40.560 | coming next week, but focus on the things that you can adjust and set goals that are going to make a
00:33:51.840 | long-term difference in your life. If you are in the worst situation of anyone else in the world,
00:33:59.920 | and you set a goal of saying, "I am doomed, but I'm going to learn from this situation. I'm going
00:34:07.280 | to share those lessons with others." I promise you that could be the foundation of your next empire.
00:34:12.960 | Bankruptcy is bad. It's not that bad. We're blessed to live in a modern society with bankruptcy
00:34:21.440 | relief. We're blessed to have the ability to discharge debts. We're blessed to have friends
00:34:28.160 | who love us, neighbors who care about us, parents who support us. We're blessed to have the ability
00:34:33.840 | to work. We're blessed to have so many things. Count your blessings in the middle of it, and I
00:34:39.600 | promise you it'll help you change your attitude. I hope this has been helpful for you. I hope it's
00:34:43.920 | been a useful bit of positivity, but realistic positivity. I don't care for the optimistic
00:34:53.840 | mumbo jumbo myself. I want realistic. Realistically, if you're going to be in a tough spot,
00:35:01.760 | 2020 is the best time in human history to be in that tough spot. I mean that.
00:35:07.280 | Thank you for listening to today's show. If you need help, I'm here to help. I have been this week
00:35:17.440 | nonstop working with individuals. I have a number of consulting clients that I work with on an
00:35:24.800 | ongoing basis. I don't talk much about that publicly simply because I'm not interested in
00:35:30.000 | it. It's high level stuff, and it's hard to... If you have to ask, it's the kind of thing where I
00:35:42.080 | don't really publish it because it's not a big part of my business. My major business is creating
00:35:46.800 | products and courses, but I do a little bit of high level consulting. If that's interesting for
00:35:51.440 | you, feel free to reach out to me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. I also do some
00:35:55.360 | hourly consulting. I'm running a March Madness sale on that. Usually my hourly consulting is $400
00:36:01.120 | an hour. I've discounted that for the month of March to $250 an hour. I have not yet had a
00:36:08.800 | dissatisfied client, ever. So if you'd like to talk to me personally about your situation privately,
00:36:14.880 | reach out to me. Send me an email joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. I'd be glad to
00:36:19.120 | reach out to you and give you the details on that. Do it and make sure you reference March Madness,
00:36:24.240 | and I'll give you a discount from $400 an hour to $250 an hour. Unconditional money back guaranteed.
00:36:30.000 | Guaranteed. If you don't think you got value, if you didn't think I helped you, then don't pay me.
00:36:34.880 | It's as simple as that. I've helped a number of people for free even. Please don't reach out to
00:36:40.880 | me. Best thing, if you need free advice or if you need inexpensive advice, you need to reach me,
00:36:45.120 | join the Patreon program. Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance and join me for a
00:36:50.400 | Friday Q&A call. We're going to be doing a lot of these Q&A calls, be doing a lot of live shows,
00:36:54.480 | answering your questions. I'll help you walk through the disaster that we're walking into
00:36:59.360 | here. Joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com if you want to get in touch with me. If you only have
00:37:03.520 | a few bucks, again, join Patreon. Patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. That's the best
00:37:07.680 | way to get my attention. Remember also that I have some courses available at radicalpersonalfinance.com/store
00:37:12.480 | including a course that's been out for a couple of years called How to Survive and Thrive During
00:37:17.040 | the Coming Economic Crisis. All those strategies work. Running a 20% off sale right now,
00:37:24.160 | coupon code coronavirus. That's also valid till the end of March. 20% off on all of my courses,
00:37:29.040 | including my basic prepping course at radicalpreparedness.com. Again, use coupon code
00:37:34.400 | coronavirus to get 20% off. That was 29 bucks. Super great deal. We're doing a lot on physical
00:37:39.760 | preparedness. If you are not prepared, I understand that you say, "Well, it's been rough last week."
00:37:45.040 | As far as I can tell, there's a good chance that it gets tougher. Right now, what you need to be
00:37:50.960 | working on is security. If there's anything you can do to increase the security of your home,
00:37:58.960 | to increase the security of your business, to increase the security of your person,
00:38:03.520 | you need to be thinking about that. Simple, literally, as things like if you're out in the
00:38:09.120 | street, this is not a time to go out in the street wearing expensive equipment. This is not the time
00:38:14.800 | to go out wearing expensive jewelry. This is the time to be thinking carefully about the security
00:38:20.560 | for your home, for your estate, for your business. You can expect as economic turmoil continues to
00:38:26.400 | increase, you can expect that the next stage is that crime is going to continue to increase.
00:38:34.480 | That's where we're going next. Now, some of that will be allayed based upon the curfews that are
00:38:40.880 | now being established all around the United States and probably increasingly in the rest of the world
00:38:46.320 | as well. Curfews are coming. The lockdown itself will temporarily at least increase security,
00:38:52.160 | but right now you have public announcements by many police departments that they are
00:38:57.680 | intentionally not prosecuting and not arresting people for certain crimes, what they consider to
00:39:04.480 | be the less serious crimes. There are even calls for the release of prisoners right now. Now,
00:39:10.640 | that's an issue that's complicated. I personally think the United States has
00:39:14.000 | insane amount of prisoners, which is, it's not morally right, but if that starts to happen,
00:39:21.360 | it's happening in other places, in Iran, where they've been very hard hit. They released,
00:39:25.200 | I think, 80,000 prisoners on temporary release, and the same thing can happen in the United States
00:39:30.320 | as well. I've seen calls for that from the ACLU. We'll see what happens in the coming days.
00:39:35.920 | The point is that when in times of economic desperation, crime goes up. So, think carefully
00:39:43.120 | about how you're going to interact with your neighbors. Think about how you're going to
00:39:46.800 | establish security. If you don't know your neighbors, this is a good time to get to know them.
00:39:51.600 | There are tools available. I don't like it, but a lot of people use the tool Nextdoor. I think it's
00:39:58.160 | an insanely invasive tool, and I'm not going to participate in Nextdoor, but if you are participating
00:40:03.520 | in Nextdoor, start talking with your neighbors about security. You could simply start talking
00:40:08.640 | to your neighbors and set up something as simple as a local WhatsApp group or a private Facebook
00:40:14.080 | group or some version of that, a signal group or whatever you want to do, just a text messaging.
00:40:20.640 | Just start to talk to your neighbors so that you can keep an eye out for crime.
00:40:24.480 | This is a really important time, practically speaking. If you go on your local police website,
00:40:29.200 | they probably have information on how to start a neighborhood watch. This is an important time for
00:40:34.480 | you to start doing that. You can start a neighborhood watch. You can do this and start
00:40:40.320 | to really help and support one another. That would be a good thing for you to do. If your
00:40:45.440 | property is not well lit. Here I am doing a whole episode on security. If your property is not well
00:40:53.280 | lit, this is a good time to change that. You can still do Amazon orders for motion detecting
00:40:58.480 | floodlights. Things like that are important. If your home is not well locked, order some
00:41:06.160 | door bracing hardware and increase the stability of your home so that your door is harder to kick
00:41:11.920 | in. Or at the very least, install deadbolts. Think through your security plans in terms of
00:41:16.720 | a multi-phase approach so that you have multiple layers to stop people. If you have unkempt bushes
00:41:24.400 | around your home that limit the sight lines of your neighbors for your neighbor's ability to see
00:41:28.800 | your home, trim the bushes. Get out there and make sure that there's no place for a criminal to hide.
00:41:36.960 | If you're not in the habit of closing your blinds, close your binds. If you're not in the
00:41:42.400 | habit of making sure that your house always appears occupied, make sure that your house
00:41:45.840 | always appears occupied. There are lots and lots and lots of things that you can do. Just think
00:41:49.760 | through security plans for your home and security plans for your person. This is not a good time to
00:41:55.760 | go to stupid places with stupid people to do stupid things. Obviously, most of those things are shut
00:42:02.880 | down right now due to the social distancing and the laws, which is good. But be very prudent. Be
00:42:09.040 | very cautious. That's going to be the next phase. So as long as things are still going, it's going
00:42:17.360 | to be fine. But if shortages continue to increase, you're going to see increased criminal activity.
00:42:22.320 | So to be forewarned is to be forearmed. And I hope that you will take action on some of
00:42:28.480 | those suggestions. Thank you for listening to today's show. I'll be back with you very soon.