With Kroger Brand products from Ralphs, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season. Because Kroger Brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices. And with a money-back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite. ♪ These are a few of my favorite things ♪ Whether you shop delivery, pickup, or in-store, Kroger Brand has all your favorite things.

Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Roschitz. I am your host.

Today, we're going to continue part two of our series, "How to End a Year and Plan a Better One." In the previous part of this show, previous episode of this series, I talked about the power of reflection. Simply taking time to reflect upon the past. Taking time to reflect upon this past year.

And learn the lessons from it. Rejoice in the things that have gone well and smoothly for you. Learn from the lessons. Learn from the challenges, etc. But the next step, after you have reflected on the past, is simply this. Dream about the future. Dream about the future. Notice I'm not saying plan the future.

I'm not saying set goals. I'm saying dream. Dream about the future. Call it a daydream. Call it just a dream. Whatever you want. But dream about the future. What do you dream about happening in your future? What kind of lifestyle do you dream of? What kind of job do you dream of?

What kind of activities would you like to do? Who would you like to be with in the future? What would you like your year to look like? Just spend some time dreaming about the future. Now, what I've learned in my years of working as a financial advisor is that this exercise is easier for some of us than it is for others.

I don't know or understand all of the inputs, all of the reasons why some people have an easier time dreaming than others do. I think there may be certain inborn characteristics that we have where some of us think more easily about dreams and some of us are more present-oriented.

Maybe some of us are more future-oriented. Some of us are more present-oriented. Some of us have the ability to detach ourselves from the daily conditions in which we live and connect ourselves to the world of the imagination. Some of us don't. Maybe it's due to circumstances. Maybe if you grew up reading fantasy literature, then it's very easy for you to connect with your fantasy dreams.

On the other hand, if you grew up reading very tactile literature, maybe that influenced you. I think it's almost certain that our past experiences probably have a big influence on us in terms of the environment that we were raised in. If you were raised in a very harsh environment, perhaps the biggest dream that you could have is to graduate from college or something like that.

Whereas if you were raised in a very safe environment where you were encouraged as a young child to dream, perhaps it's very easy for you to have grandiose ambitions. Maybe there's something to do about the kinds of friends that we got around, the kinds of input that perhaps our parents gave to us.

Some people share a dream with another person and everybody around says, "That's awesome! You can do it!" On the other hand, some people share the same dream and other people want to put that person down. And I think we learn to be very careful about who we share our dreams with.

Maybe there's some series of past experiences where there are certain things in your life where you've just failed and failed and failed and failed and failed again and eventually you stop dreaming. I know for me, I've certainly experienced some of that, not as much as some people, but you just want to give up.

For me, it's always been being fat. I always dreamed of not being fat and it has felt for my entire lifetime. It's like, "Okay, I'm going to dream of not being fat." And then you get to a point and you're like, "Okay, I'll make some progress." And then right back down.

Over the last year, I lost a bunch of weight and then I've gained a bunch of it back. And it's frustrating. You think, "Man, I've been through this cycle 20 times. Come on, I thought I was past this." Well, you still got to dream, right? You still got to do it.

But we kind of put up walls is the point. We're just trying to say we put up walls around ourselves and we say, "Well, this is the thing that I dreamed and I'm just not going to dream this anymore. I'm going to put this aside." And so, again, I don't know the reasons.

There may be many, many reasons. What I do know is this. I'm convinced that dreaming about the future is a very, very healthy thing to do. It's a very, very hopeful thing to do and it's something that will help you to know what to do now. It's something that can give you a sense of purpose in your actions today.

I think it was usually ascribed to, I think the old success guru W. Clement Stone, where he talked about the definition of happiness and the definition of happiness that he used was that happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. The progressive realization of a worthy ideal. It's always stuck with me.

There's a real sense of truth, a real kernel of truth in that particular statement. That happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal because it points out some things that I think we often miss. Specifically, happiness is not a goal achieved. That's not happiness. The saying indicates that it's the realization, the progressive realization.

What I would simplify to simply say the doing, the act of achieving, the act of accomplishing, the act of working. That's part of the equation of personal happiness. But I think also importantly embedded in that statement is that word, a worthy ideal, a worthy goal, a worthy vision, an important objective.

All of these are different ways of describing the same thought. Something that matters to you. And then happiness is the systematic, step-by-step, progressive, right, the progressive realization, the progressive working towards, the progressive accomplishment, the progressive just daily slog towards that thing that matters to you. It's easier to feel happy when you're working towards something that matters to you than when you're just simply working.

We all know that there are plenty of psychological studies that would show that, and just from natural personal experience, we know that if we get in a situation where we're doing something that feels useless, that's a good way to kill the human spirit. Right, you want to drive a man insane, put him in that experiment where you say, "Your job today is to dig a ditch, and I want 20 feet from you, from here to there." And then bring that same man back the next day and say, "Your job today is to fill the ditch in." Bring him back the next day and say, "Your job is to dig this ditch, then fill the ditch in." Then the next day, "Dig this ditch, then fill the ditch in." I doubt that any man in the world would make it to the fourth day.

That's hell on Earth, doing something that has no purpose, no value whatsoever. As human beings, we're wired to create, we're wired to work, but it's work that has an outcome, a sense of purpose, and there's pleasure in that process. You can take the most difficult of work, from changing a baby's dirty diaper, there's pleasure in taking a baby who's crying and upset, cleaning him up, and seeing him happy and refreshed, and knowing, "I've attended to that child's needs." There's pleasure in that.

Cleaning up a kitchen full of dirty dishes, there's pleasure in transforming something that's in bad shape into something that's pleasant to be in. There's pleasure in building a multi-million dollar business. Start with nothing and create. There's pleasure in that accomplishment. From the most simple and mundane of tasks, to the most large and ambitious of tasks, there's pleasure in that day-by-day work, if we can see the worthy objective at the other end.

So where do you start? Well, you don't start, again, by planning. You start by dreaming. You start by getting some sense of clarity on where you're going at the end of the day, where you're going at the end of the year, and where you are going at the end of a lifetime.

To steal the words of the much vaunted and respected Stephen Covey, "Begin with the end in mind." And to keep it simple, I would simply say, "You begin with the dream." What's the dream? What's the dream? I like that word "dream," and I'm choosing to use it here because a dream does not necessarily imply action.

I think there's legitimacy to the arguments that some people make that say you should set goals that are achievable, attainable. You want a goal that's not so far beyond. I think there's a lot of truth to that. Some guy walks into my office and says, "Joshua, I want to be a billionaire in a year's time." All right, well, how many millions do you have right now?

None, right? I got nothing. All right, well, I don't think that's a useful goal to set, to be a billionaire in a year's time. But I'm convinced that a lot of times we spend so much time making our goals achievable, attainable, within reach, that we forget to dream about where we'd actually like to go.

I'm all for achievability and attainability as long as it comes on the other side of dreaming. This is my opinion. I don't actually think we have the ability to dream a dream that we don't have the ability to achieve, personally. I don't actually think that any of us can dream a dream that we don't have the ability to achieve.

Even the most ambitious of dreams, the biggest of visions, I personally think that in the fullness of time, almost all of those things can be achieved. We don't know what that word, "the fullness of time" means. Some dreams will require decades and decades and decades to accomplish. But I think that if you have the ability to dream something, you have the ability to say, "This is something that I want," I think you also have the ability to achieve it.

And I've never come across an example that convinced me otherwise. I'm not scared of big dreams. I'm scared of big dreams on short timelines, but I'm not scared of big dreams. So what I do, or what I try to do, is dream big dreams and then put in enough time into it to make me comfortable.

Because I can manipulate either the size of the dream or the timeline, and I don't want to walk away from the big dream, so I just put more time in to make myself feel comfortable with it. For me, this has been useful, because I've learned that for me, the first step is to dream a dream, to conceive of a dream, to create a dream.

The second step of that dreaming process is to bring myself to a place of believing in the dream. I need to build a sense of belief into myself. I need to be convinced and persuaded that it's possible for me to achieve the dream. And if I give myself enough time, then I can build that belief more quickly.

And then once I've got the belief behind it, then I can shorten up the timeline without losing that belief. That's my personal trick. What do you do if you're not good at dreaming? My answer is, you start by recognizing you're not good at dreaming. Start by recognizing that for whatever reason, you don't think a lot about your dreams, you don't imagine a lot about the future, you don't do a lot.

Just admit it. And then move on and just simply do your best to forget the past. Do your best to forget all the reasons why it didn't work in the past. One thing that I've become more and more convinced of the older I get is simply this. The past is an illusion.

It does not exist. It does not exist. It's gone. It's gone forever and it does not exist. When you start to think about the philosophical concept of time, I'm fascinated by the philosophical concept of time. But just keep it simple. Like the past is gone. It's gone and it doesn't control your life unless you let it.

It doesn't affect you unless you let it. Today is a brand new day and any one of us can change and live an entirely different life today. Right? There's not a doctor in the world that would sit down with me and if I said, you know, Doc, you know, I'm fat.

I've been fat for whatever many years and man, I just don't know a doctor in the world that would say there's something wrong with you, right? There's nothing wrong with you. You just haven't found the right plan yet. You haven't figured out the right thing yet. You haven't solved the problem yet.

The past doesn't have to hold you back. There's not a financial advisor in the world that if you walked in and said you're broke, they would say, oh, you're just doomed to being broke. Brokenness is not a condition. It's not something that you have that you're stuck with. It's not a fact.

It's just something that where you're on the past and if you change your actions, then you can quickly become not broke. If you're fat and you change your actions, you can quickly become not fat. If you're stuck in a job that you hate, you can change your actions and you can quickly become not stuck in a job you hate.

If you're living in a place you don't like, you can change your actions and you can quickly become not stuck in a place you don't like. The past has no control other than what you give it. And so by recognizing that it's an illusion, it doesn't exist. It's just it's gone.

You can sever some of that control. Now, certainly, I'm not denying that there's scars that hurt you. There's not denying there's memories that you have or trauma that you've experienced. Of course, right? We all have that stuff. Just simply saying it's good to start by acknowledging that stuff doesn't exist.

And I can today chart a different course. I can today make a different decision. Starting point is can I today see a dream? Can I today dream a dream of a place I want to go? A thing I want to do? I don't personally struggle to dream. But I have observed and learned that a lot of people do.

And though I don't know all the reasons why, I want to give you just some ideas to possibly help you to dream. The first suggestion I would give to you is think about people that you admire. People that you look up to. There's often something about that person's life that you admire.

Something that you think is cool and that you want to... If you'll just recognize the person, associate it with a person. I'll give you just a couple examples from my life. Things that have made helpful to me. I've often associated with people more than I've associated with certain things.

And I've been able to see things in other people that I admire that, hey, that person could do that. So why can't I? It's one of the most valuable things to recognize. Anything that someone else has done, you can do too. Anything someone else has done, you can do too.

It's a very useful mindset to adopt. I'll give you an example. When I was younger, my favorite author was Tom Clancy. I loved his thrillers. I loved the Jack Ryan series. I just devoured the whole series when my high school Bible teacher turned me on to Tom Clancy. And I devoured the series and I loved everything about it.

And there was always this picture of Tom Clancy on the back cover. And I never saw a documentary on Tom Clancy's life. I never read about him. I never read a biography of him. All I ever had was his picture on the back of a dust jacket of his books and the little author blurb.

But I knew that I loved his books. And I imagined what the life of an author was like. And I always imagined Tom Clancy living in Baltimore, Maryland or wherever he lived. And I always imagined him sitting out by a pool. The thing I always loved about writing is I loved the concept that there weren't any constraints on time.

There weren't any meetings to attend. It was just you sitting and writing and creating. I know that not all writers write like this, but I always had a picture of just a writer sitting at their laptop. And I had this picture of a writer sitting there at their laptop, banging away at the keys.

And then a successful writer, of course, has money, has royalties coming in. And I imagined Tom Clancy sitting out on his pool deck. I have no idea if he had a pool. Just this was a picture in my head. I imagine him sitting out on his pool deck, sitting there on his laptop, smoking a cigar and working on his computer.

That was just always the picture. And I loved that picture. And I thought, I want to do that. That's what I want my life to be like. I don't want to have any meetings. I don't want to have to go anywhere. I want to be able to sit out on my pool deck with my laptop, smoke a cigar, and write and create.

And bring joy and pleasure to other people. Bring them stories. Bring them something interesting. And it was a simple personification of an ideal that clicked in my head. That was always a personal ambition of mine for many, many years. Now, I wouldn't call myself a writer. A writer is one who writes.

I struggle to write. Maybe someday I will be a writer. I don't know. Haven't decided to become one yet. But the vision of the kind of lifestyle is a dream that I had that I have accomplished. I'm not currently recording this podcast episode on my pool deck. Although I have recorded podcast episodes on pool decks.

But I am sitting in front of my computer. I'm not currently smoking a cigar. But I'm sitting in front of my computer. I don't have any schedule. I don't have any time constraints. And I have the ability to live wherever I want to live. But it was easier for me to imagine a person and visualize a person than it was for me to imagine the specific thing to do.

And so I have accomplished and I intend to continue to accomplish my personal dream of the kind of life that I wanted to live. But it started with seeing a person. Give another example. When I was younger, I worked for a guy named Warren. And I've interviewed him on the show several couple hundred episodes ago.

But I worked on his farm. And I would be out there on the farm. And Warren would bring out, he was learning to fly a helicopter at the time. And so he'd bring his helicopter out with his flight instructor. And he would bring his helicopter out and he would fly around the fields while I was driving a tractor down the fields mowing and doing the farm work on a tractor.

And I was just sitting there and I'd sit there and I would look at him and his helicopter and I would think like, I want to have the time that on a Wednesday morning I can go and fly a helicopter. And the other thing Warren loved to do is he loves to hunt.

So I would call him and I needed a question from him and I was like, "Oh, I'm in Texas bird hunting" or "I'm in the Dakotas, you know, doing this and that." He would just hunt all hunting season. And I thought, I want the ability to go hunt during hunting season.

Now, I don't want to buy a helicopter. Warren eventually sold his helicopter. He decided to get, I never asked him the story, but he didn't want to have his helicopter anymore. But I always wanted that time freedom and that location freedom. I always wanted a business that would function without me so that I could come and go.

Because I wanted to be able to hunt on a Tuesday morning. Now, these things are not unattainable, right? You don't have to have 30 million dollars to sit out by a pool deck and work or to go and hunt on a Tuesday morning. You can do it with far less.

But the dream that I had as far as what I wanted my work life to look like was a dream that was personified in certain people. Your dreams may vary, right? They certainly will. Your dreams are not my dreams. But look for a person that you admire or something that you wish you had.

And then bring that back. There's other people where I've admired their families, right? I've observed them with their children. I've seen the relationship that they had with their children. I've seen the joy and the pride that they were able to create when they built children that were successful. And I thought, "I want that.

I want that." And so what I try to do is I try to pick and choose people that I like and admire and try to pick and choose things that they do, ways that they live, that I like and admire and simply identify them. Simply notice them. Pay attention and notice.

I'd like to be able to do that. I'd like to be able to have this. I'd like to be able to live like that. And it starts by noticing them, paying attention. I personally have a long list of people in my notes. This guy, I admire this about him.

You know, that guy, I admire that. I want to have that. So pay attention to people that you observe. You don't have to know them. I never knew Tom Clancy. I never read anything about him. I just read his books and I imagined the kind of lifestyle that I thought a guy like him would probably live.

And it actually doesn't at all matter to me whether he actually lived that way or not. I care nothing about who he was or about the way he lived, other than obviously at some point I may read a biography of him. But I don't care about the person he was.

I care about the image that I created in my mind of the person I imagined him to be. And I wanted to live a life like I imagined that he lived. These things don't have to be real. The people don't even have to be real. There can be an image that you have of a novel, of a book, a character, someone that you admire.

Another example. I hate to give away all my personal things, but I like to give some personal things so you can connect. I keep enough stuff private, but an example. There was always... I also like Clive Cussler novels. Rather predictable, right? But Clive Cussler was a very, very prolific author of the very kind of simple mass market thriller approach.

And Clive Cussler created this character named Dirk Pitt. And the character Dirk Pitt was a man who had this swashbuckling lifestyle all around the world. I never was attracted to his lifestyle necessarily, but I was attracted to the way that he lived. And Cussler created this character who he owned an old airplane hanger on the backside of an airport in Baltimore.

And in that airplane hanger, on the outside it was this old dilapidated building. And on the interior he had an upstairs apartment. He had it full of all his classic cars. Cussler himself was a classic car collector and he wrote that into his protagonist. And then he had as an extra room, a guest bedroom, he had an old Pullman rail car in that hanger.

And I always loved that idea. I always loved that idea of living in kind of a weird way. I've never been attracted to the idea of living in a mansion. I was always attracted to living in a little apartment inside a dilapidated hanger, but living in total luxury. And having a railroad car parked in that hanger.

You can go to the Henry Flagler Museum on Palm Beach and they got a Henry Flagler railroad car sitting there on the property. So my answer is do this with an RV. I love this idea. You have an airplane hanger and you park your RV in the airplane hanger and you have a luxurious quarters, luxury living, but it's kind of tucked away, kind of hidden.

You have privacy about it. It's just a cool concept to me. So things like that, if there's something that you notice, it doesn't really matter whether anyone else cares about it or not. Like you pay attention to it and say, someday I want to have that. Maybe for you it's an airplane hanger with a train in it.

Maybe for you it's a mansion on the water. Whatever you care about, pay attention to it and write that future. Pay attention to it and create the composite image. I find it simpler to do with people. And if you open your eyes and pay attention, you'll often find the kind of people that you're attracted to and notice the things that you're attracted to.

I encourage you, don't make this exclusively about money or material possessions. Money and material possessions are important, but they're not ultimate. They're important, but they're not ultimate. So I encourage you, don't just choose the people that you want to imagine something about because, well, they're rich. Okay, they're great.

They're rich. Fine. I told you about some rich people that have inspired me certain things. I want to be able to go hunting on a random Tuesday in the fall like my former boss Warren does. I want to be able to sit out on my pool deck and write on my laptop with a cigar in my mouth, like I always imagined Tom Clancy did.

It doesn't matter. So those are financial related things to a certain extent. So don't, but they're not ultimate, right? On the flip side, make sure you pay attention to character qualities, personalities, physicality, hobbies, right? Do you want to, what kind of person do you want to be when you're 90 years old?

There was a guy that inspired me when I was younger. I haven't yet been able to, you know, live up to it, but it's still a dream that I have. We don't have to apologize for things we're not accomplishing. It's a dream. I used to drive for a job.

I used to drive a ski boat and I would pool water skiers. That was my job. I usually taught summer camp and I taught kids to water ski and wakeboard. And but I would, we would have this, we had this client that came out. His name was Dick and he would come out and he would trick ski and he was in his late 80s and he would come out and he would trick ski with us several times a week.

And I'd pull the boat for Dick down the road, down the lake. And if you don't know anything, trick skiing is a really cool, like classic water ski sport, where you do all these tricks. You wear this little ski and do all these spinning around tricks, all these jumping tricks and whatnot.

And Dick would come out, he'd wear a Speedo and his little, I think he didn't bother with a life jacket or most water skiers wear these little really thin water skiing life jackets. And he'd come out at almost 90 years old and he'd do these amazing tricks on his water ski.

And there's, I can still see it in my picture. There's, you know, Dick going down the river in his Speedo, totally fit, totally strong, doing his Dick trick. He would take the, we called it the Dick trick. He would take the handle of the ski rope, put it around his neck, lean back and cross his arms at basically almost 90 years old.

I don't remember his exact age. And I'm, you know, we're all nervous as anything. You have a release on a ski boat when you're doing trick skiing and you have your hand on the emergency release and you're watching him like a hawk because you're thinking, this is the day that my 90-year-old client falls down and I ripped his head off his shoulders because he's got the water ski rope wrapped around his neck.

Super dangerous trick. But I just like, like this is the guy. And I read his autobiography. It was never published, but he wrote an autobiography and he was this really rich guy. He had made his money in the Texas oil business. And when I read his biography, sorry, his autobiography that he wrote about his experience, I just, I thought, this is such a cool guy.

When I'm 90 years old, I want to be like Dick, right? I want to be, I want to be water skiing behind a boat, trick skiing behind a boat in total health, totally happy, tanned in my Speedo, cruising down the boat at night, down the road, the river at 90 years old.

And, you know, this is a big focus for me because I still have this dream and I'm like, I'm not on track, right? I want to have that kind of health and strength at 90, but I'm not on track. How do I get back on track so I can work towards this dream?

But it comes from seeing somebody that I admire. Physical health, vitality, those things make all the difference. They're not financial, though finances can certainly help. But they make all the difference in the world. What about spirituality? Is there somebody that you know where you think, this person, I want to have a sense of calm in their spirit.

I want to have a relationship with God like they do. I want to experience the kind of life that they live. Picture that. Picture that person. Maybe a person that you've read about, maybe a person that you've admired from afar, maybe a person that you know. But when you admire somebody, pay attention to what you admire about them.

Pay attention to what you notice about them. Other life decisions. Some people admire, let's talk about family, for example. There are lots of people who will find somebody who is a single man about town, girlfriend in every country. If you admire that, pay attention to it. I've not ever been attracted in that direction.

I've always been attracted to having a family that I could see touch the world. I'll give you two examples of people that inspire me. The first is the Rothschild family. When I started kind of learning a little bit about the history of the Rothschild family, I became fascinated with that particular family.

You know, the patriarch of the Rothschild family, I think it was Meyer Rothschild, you know, here was this guy who started from extraordinarily humble origins. You know, the family was extremely humble. But then out of that incredibly humble family, he launched his five sons all over Europe and created a global empire from his five sons.

And I've often thought, you know, what is it about, what is it about, what was it, how on earth did Mr. and Mrs. Rothschild, how did they create this family that was so strong that they could send out these five boys who all, you know, started these banking operations all around Europe and yet brought in, brought in this, this, this built this incredible global dynasty that continues to this day.

How do they do it? One of the things I've, one of the reading projects I haven't done yet, but I've wanted to read more of the, the biographies of, to try to understand more of the story. But it's hard because they're very secretive and don't talk a lot publicly.

And then there's all the tons and tons of conspiracy theories about their influence behind the scenes and whatnot. But I'm just fascinated by the guy, right? I admire him. I admire what he was able to build, right? The classic, the coat of arms, right? He had the Rothschild coat of arms, where it was a clenched fist with five arrows in it, you know, basically saying, "Here are my arrows, my five sons," and then they send them out, right, to establish their family dynasty.

It harkens back and alludes, of course, to Psalm 127, like, "Arrows in the hands of a warrior, so are the children of one's youth." And so, you know, I'm fascinated by, by that. Like, here's a guy who, who, what did he do? And I look at my children and I think, you know, what, what would Mr.

Rothschild do? Like, what did he put into his children, the family identity and whatnot, that he was able to build this global empire? I admire that. Another guy in the family, years ago, before my wife and I had children, we started watching the TLC show on the Duggar family.

The, sorry, it's like 15 kids and counting, 16 kids, I guess they ended up, what, 19 kids and counting, I think, 18 or whatever. And we watched this show, story about the Duggar family. And I found so many things that I just thought were so cool. I liked how Jim Bob Duggar lived big, right?

If he was going to travel, he bought a bus for his family, right? Of course, he had to because he had so many children, but he bought a giant bus. He was the kind of guy who would go and buy a, he was a real estate guy. Okay, I need to, I need to dig something.

So I'll go and buy an excavator. I just, I thought he was cool. He lived, lived, lived big. And of course, with the financial success from his investments, and then, of course, is the TV show, which catapulted everything even bigger. Just a big guy, right? A guy who lived big.

But more importantly than that, and yet, by the way, on the big guy, I went, I read his autobiography where he wrote about his early life, right? He built, he built from nothing. He and his wife started with nothing. And he built a car, a towing business. Then he built a real estate business.

And just an astonishing guy, hard-working, astonishing guy. And then I watched his, I watched his family. And here he was, I don't remember what he was, probably almost 60 or 60 something. And they would do, show pictures on the show of the family reunions, right? They'd get the extended family and the young family.

And by the end of the show, they were, he was starting to have grandchildren. And I stopped watching before all the controversy stuff happened. And the show got pulled from the, from the, from TLC. And I haven't seen it in years. But I would see, you would see him with all his grandchildren.

And I thought, like, here's a guy who will never be lonely. Here's a guy who will always be surrounded by the joy of youth. Here's a guy who in his 50s, he's got, you know, sons in their 20s. And he's got, I think his little girl was, you know, a couple years old, or just born when I stopped watching.

And so here's a guy who will be surrounded, of course, by his own children and the joys and the trials and the, the, the, the euphoria and the sorrows that comes with that. But then of course his grandchildren. Here's a guy who will always have dozens of little fishing buddies to go through, to go, to go fishing with him and to help grandpa with his work.

I admired that, right? It's like, that's, I want, I want that kind of, when I'm an old man, I want to be surrounded by tons of grandchildren. I don't want to be a lonely old man. I want to be surrounded by tons of grandchildren. You know, I thought, just as a parallel, right?

I think it's useful to reflect on things you don't admire, things you don't like. Again, I used, I do this with people. You observe someone, you say, you know, I don't want to be like that person. I don't want to be someone like that. I don't admire that person.

I don't admire this thing that that person does. I don't want that to be any expression of my life. Or observe people where you think, you know, I don't have anything against the person, but they're experiencing something that I don't want to experience. When I was a boy, I had a neighbor who would take me fishing.

And things I admired about him were that he was kind enough to take me fishing, right? We'd go catfishing in the Orange Groves. He was, he was a country, he was a redneck guy, had no money. We'd drive his little thousand dollar car and drive out in the Orange Groves and go catfish fishing in the canals with a cane pole.

And we had a great time, right? He taught me to clean fish and he was very kind and I really enjoyed going with him. But, back to the children, he lived a very, he had a very lonely, he had a very lonely life. He and his wife, they had both come from big families, but he had one son.

They didn't have a close relationship with his son. He didn't have, he had a very kind of small life and he was lonely a lot. He didn't have a lot of friends and he was a wonderful guy. He was very, very kind and he did make friendships with that, but I could just see the loneliness and he died at a relatively young age.

I think because he didn't have anything to live for. Enough personal stories from me, right? You know who I am, you know kind of the things that I admire. My point in today's show is just to share with you that you can collect things that you admire about somebody.

And they can be things that you admire, they can be people that you know, right? My father is a hero of mine. I have a long list of things that I really want to be like my father in these certain ways. There are some things I don't want to be like him.

So, I noticed, like these are the things, ways I don't want to be like my dad. They can be people you know, they can be people that you don't know. They can be people that you've just read about. Never met Meyer Rothschild. Don't think I ever will. But I can admire and say, how is it that he's doing that?

How did he do that? What was it that built like this global empire? And then what are the pitfalls, right? Where was the danger of building that global empire? Where did things go wrong? But you can use and associate with people the things that you personally love, you personally dream about.

I think people are the most powerful, but they're not the only thing. Maybe you don't really associate with people. Well, I think in today's world, one of the benefits we have is to learn more about lifestyles than we've ever known before. So, how else can you dream? Well, expose yourself to diversity of lifestyles.

Some people simply don't have the ability to imagine earning their living with anything except a 40-hour week job. 40-hour week jobs are great. Awesome. They give you a really cool lifestyle. But they're not the only way to make a living. So, expose yourself to the ways that other people live.

To me, I think that this has been the most powerful thing that you see right now happening in the fire movement. You see that people are being exposed to other lifestyles, and they're saying, "Wait a second. I didn't know I could choose." The information has been out there for a long time.

I have books written back in the '70s about the conserver lifestyle and basically frugality, extreme frugality, etc. But those books were either on specialized mailing lists or maybe there was a copy at your local library. Many people would never go to a library. You would kind of have to come across it.

You have to get yourself a Lumpenamics catalog or something like that, where all of a sudden you find these weird books. And you had to be the kind of person who's willing to pay money and get the weird books and read them and think, "Wow, I could live this other lifestyle." But what's happening is discoverability of alternative lifestyles is much easier today than it has ever been before.

And so you see people who can come across information. I have a friend of mine who's talking about building a tiny house. You can go into any corner and all of a sudden, "Wow, wait a second. There's a whole tiny house community or a shed-to-house community or an RV-living community or a boat-living community." And it's so simple now to expose yourself to something that you're interested in and then to have really good, high-quality content that it can help you to make a picture of something.

It can help you to see something that you didn't previously imagine. Last couple years ago, my wife and I traveled full-time living in an RV. I've dreamed and been interested in weird, funky stuff for a long time. So for me, the concept of living in an RV was a totally normal concept.

My wife wasn't exactly on the same page. She didn't really—she'd never thought of going and living in an RV. They had an RV when they were little, went on short trips, and that was it. And so the idea of leaving your house and going full-time on the road and doing slow travel and whatnot was not something that she was accustomed to thinking about.

It sounded a little bit crazy. So what I did was I was like—we started watching YouTube videos, right? We found a couple of YouTube channels that we liked of people living that way. And she could start to see, "Okay, well, I see that these are kind of normal people.

They're not too weird. These are normal people that are living in this way. Okay, I guess some people do this. I guess it's not so weird." Now, it was never her dream. It wasn't something that she dreamed about, but it became something where she could see. She could believe it.

She could see that, okay, it's not too crazy to go and to do that, to live like that, and see it. So you can do the same thing with your dreams. If you think you have a dream in a certain direction, explore it a little bit, and then you'll start to see, "Maybe I do.

Maybe I don't. I'm kind of crossing over here into the planning." But my point is, if you can find somebody doing it on YouTube, you can find someone living in a certain way, talking about it, then you can consider whether that might be a dream for you. Might be a dream that you want, and then you pursue it more vigorously.

Might be a dream that you don't, and then you leave it and move on. I think one of the most valuable things about my using the term of dream is that there's no commitment to a dream, necessarily. At some point in time, if you take a dream and you say, "I'm going to commit to this," and start putting a plan and whatnot, now you have some accountability.

But with a dream, you don't have much accountability. Is that a bad thing? Maybe. But I'm more inclined to say, "Not really," because you can just let it go. It's fun to dream, but you don't have to accomplish all your dreams to get all the fun about them. And sometimes you just say, "I'd like to do this." You play around with it for a while in your head, and then you decide, "No, it was fun to think about, but I don't think I actually want to play around with it." So maybe there's not people that you associate with, but go and find a book that has inspired you.

Unwalled and Pond has inspired many, many people into a minimalist lifestyle long before becoming minimalist became a website. This is not new. This just has—we have newer ways of sharing the information, sharing the ideas. Charles Long was writing about the conserver lifestyle probably before Mr. Money Mustache was born.

It's not new. He didn't do anything new. Just popularized it with a different voice, different method of communication, different means of communication, etc. There's nothing fundamentally new about what I'm talking about here. It's just my voice, my take, and a slightly different slant on things. There's nothing new under the sun in any of this stuff.

Find people who inspire you. Find things that inspire you. Surround yourself with those things and work to see a dream in your head. Don't be scared to start where you are with what you care about. If you are inspired by a materialist consumption item, right? I used to think I had a dream to have a Harley-Davidson Road King.

I used to think that that was my dream, and I would put it on as a picture and look at the pictures. I'd put it as my screen saver on my computer so that I could have the images before me. I thought, "This is what I want." That was fine for a time.

It was totally fine. Then in time, I realized, "Okay, this is fun. I like riding." I went and rented a black Harley-Davidson Road King from the Harley dealership one time. I rode it all weekend with a buddy of mine. I was like, "That was awesome. That was really cool, and I love that bike.

I don't need to own one." Now my dreams are much more about freedom of time, but there will be a time, I don't know, 10 years from now, where they'll be totally different. In fact, they've already changed dramatically. That Tom Clancy dream, that vision of a guy with his laptop, I'll tell you the story of when the first time I achieved it.

A few years into a financial advisor, a friend of mine started a company. I didn't really love being a financial advisor. I was struggling with certain things about it. I was doing okay, but I hadn't kind of broken through. My friend started a company, and he wanted to hire me.

I saw an opportunity where I could help him and work for his company. I thought, "You know what? I'm going to go work for his company." I quit my company. I didn't actually fully finish the paperwork, but I told my boss I was quitting, and my boss was like, "All right, let's just see." I disappeared.

I didn't come into the office for a couple weeks, basically. I went, and I started working for my friend. I remember I would sit in front of my laptop, and I would go to Starbucks, and I would go to his house. I was single at the time, and I would sit in front of my laptop.

I thought, "Oh, here's this dream. I don't have to go to meetings anymore. I don't have to go to meetings anymore. I don't have to go anywhere. All I need to do is be right here and work from my laptop." I quickly realized, "I don't like this. This is lonely." This is no fun.

All around the world, there are millions of people who've always dreamed about working from home, who are finding out that it's not as great as I thought it was going to be. I miss the office. I miss my friends. I miss the water-cooler conversation. So, you can have a dream, and then you take steps towards it, and you realize, "This wasn't quite right." And that's valuable.

That's healthy. And so, continuing the point, I went back to the financial advisor business. Then, later on, I wound up closing that business, and I started Radical Personal Finance. One of the things I've learned about Radical Personal Finance is I miss the contact with the physical world. I miss the physical office.

I miss the employees. I miss having co-workers. I miss having that structure. I miss it a lot. I love having the freedom, but I miss a lot of things about that. And so, in the future, I think I'll give up some of the freedom that I currently enjoy because I've lived that, right?

I don't mind a structure. I work a very structured day. I work on a structured hour and whatnot. A four-hour workweek was a dream at one point. It's not anymore. And so, things will change. And so, stay open to it is my point. Stay open to it. Remember, you're just dreaming.

You don't have to be committed to anything. You don't have to set it as a goal. You don't have to be scared of anything. If you want to toss one dream out and change, you can do it on the fly. These things are not set in stone. At the beginning of the year, 2020, one of my goals was to—one of the goals was I wanted to pass a Spanish exam.

I wanted to sit for the DELE C2 Spanish exam. It was just basically a way to force myself to study my Spanish and get myself to a really high level and pass this exam. I didn't need the exam. I didn't need the certification for anything. Just, I was like, "Okay, this will give me external proof, and it'll keep me focused." So, I got six months into the year, and then, you know, COVID was happening.

And then, all the exams got canceled. And it just—everything got canceled. So, I quit. I quit studying Spanish, and I started studying French instead. And I've had so much fun studying French. It's been awesome. It's been really, really fun. What's the point? The point is that you can toss a goal out at any point in time.

A goal is just a way to articulate something that, "Hey, I think this would be fun. I want to work in this direction." And you can pivot on a dime. You can change. You don't have to justify it to anybody. You don't have to tell anybody that you've done it.

You just say, "All right, that's it." All I did, I pulled open my goals list. I stopped writing it when I write my goals down, and I pulled open my goals list. I highlighted, you know, "Pass Spanish C2 exam," and I hit delete. Goal gone. New exam. Learn French.

Read a million words in French. Right? That was my goal. Read a million words in French. New goal. Done. You can pivot on a dime. So the relationship between dreams and goals, a little bit funny, right? A little bit hazy. You can do the same thing with your dreams.

You can say, "That's no longer my dream. That's not what I want to do." For me, I find this incredibly liberating. The dreams that you had at 13 years old, you should pay attention to. But you should not be imprisoned to. You don't have to fulfill your childhood dreams.

They may have been things that you thought were cool as a child, that you now recognize, "Those things aren't important to me. I've changed." You should pay attention to them, but not be imprisoned to them. And your dreams today should probably not be your dreams 10 years from now, because you're going to change.

But that process of changing systematically is a process that will keep you excited and enthusiastic with life. If I come up to you and say, "What are you dreaming about right now? What are you working towards?" I think you should have something that you say. It doesn't have to be impressive to me.

One guy says, "Well, I'm working towards being a millionaire." Great. Another guy says, "I'm working on, you know, running more per week." I've always struggled personally with like the hobby question. People say, "What do you like to do for a hobby?" I'm like, "Well, I got boring hobbies, right?

I read." That's my hobby. It doesn't sound as cool as I do, you know, horseback art, Japanese archery where I hang upside down on a horse and shoot an arrow. Maybe that's cooler than reading, but that's not my hobby. I read. So, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you choose and what I choose.

The only thing is that you have some idea about where you're going towards. So, you feel like you're getting, you have some purpose, some direction, some vision. 51 minutes and 50 seconds in and I haven't said anything about money. Why is this on a financial show? Well, partly because it's important, but most importantly because it guides your finances.

It directs your finances. It gives you a vision and it allows you to connect what you're doing now versus what you do later. Traveling to the United States next week. When I go to the United States, I buy stuff because it's cheap in the United States. So, I buy stuff.

So, I like, I sit down and I make all these orders. I just bought about $500 or $550 worth of books for my children, French books. Because one of my dreams, like I want my children to be multilingual. I've shared on this show a little bit about, a little bit about kind of the success we've had teaching our children Spanish.

Now, I think, man, I think I've got a really good system here. This really worked. It wasn't particularly painful and we had phenomenal results. So, now like maybe I can do this again. Maybe I can, maybe I can repeat the process. I'm not trying to turn my children into internet sensations, but I want them to be, I want them to have a lot of capabilities.

I'd like them to be multilingual. I think I stumbled upon a pretty decent methodology and now I'm thinking, well, let me test it again and see if it works. Maybe there is, maybe I could do it better the second time around. So, I bought like $550 worth of graded readers for French that I'm going to use with my children and teach them French.

I think, you know, maybe I'll toss it out in a couple months, but that's my plan. That's a lot of money to spend on books. That's a lot of money to spend on books all at once. Why did I do it? Well, because I popped open my goals list, my dream list.

I don't distinguish much. I do set goals with specific times, but I just write down like here are my goals. I have a list of, in my notes, I have a list of language goals for me and then for my children. And one of them says, you know, here are the languages I want my children to be fluent and literate in.

And I made a list of those languages. And so to justify my financial decisions today, I go to my dreams, to my goals. And I say these are my goals and dreams. And here's how it connects to today's money. If my dream is to travel to every country in the world, maybe that's my dream.

I love to travel. I'm like, I want to travel to every country in the world. Then when I have a $30,000 credit card bill for a few months of airfares or whatever I've booked or whatever the certain thing is, I don't feel bad about it. Oh, I just wish I'd put more money in my 401k.

I look and I say, do these expenses reflect a personal dream? And it gives you direction for your money. If you have a goal of giving away a million dollars and you open your checkbook and you realize you don't have much money, you ask yourself, is it because I gave it all away?

Or is it because I spent it all on stuff I didn't care about? If your dream is to give away the million dollars and you open up your checkbook and you have no money because you gave it all away, you're happy. If your dream is to give away a million dollars and you open up your checkbook and you have no money because you spent it without paying attention to it, now we got trouble.

And so the purpose of goals and dreams is to guide your actions in the present so that you're not driven by some guy on the internet telling you, you shouldn't do that. You shouldn't spend so much money on travel. Well, this is my dream. This is what I want to do.

If you've decided that you want to travel to every country in the world and that's your dream and you don't put any money in your 401k and you spend money on that, I personally am totally okay with it. You should count the cost of not having much money in your 401k, but I think it's fine.

If your dream is to work outside on a ranch as a cowboy and you leave your $150,000 a year job in New York City and you go get a job making $40,000 a year as a cowboy, I think that's fine. If your dream is to make a million dollars a year and work on Wall Street and you leave your job as a cowboy in Wyoming and you move to New York City, I think that's fine.

What makes it fine? What makes it fine is, this is what you want to do. This is what you're working towards. This is what's exciting for you. There's no external constraint. There's nobody coming, there shouldn't be anybody coming in saying, you can or can't do that. It's a free world, you're a free man.

Live the way you want to live. Do what you want to do and make sure that the things you're doing on a daily basis are connected to the things you want to be doing. Because then you can get up and go to work every day with a sense of joy, a spring in your step, right?

A sense of purpose, here, now, today. And you can feel good about it. Do you get it? Do you get it? Well, you start paying attention to your dreams. It's all you got to do. Pay attention. Cool if you write them down, awesome, right? Cool if you whip out that notes app in your phone and you stick them in there.

That's what I do. Just pull out your phone, hit notes, keep a list. I keep one pinned. Joshua's goals and dreams, that's what it's called. Pinned at the top of my notes. Use your Apple notes or your Google notes or your standard notes or whatever you want, right? I use standard notes.

I have it triple encrypted so no one can get into it and steal your dreams, right? If you're worried about other people knowing, use standard notes on your device and then you have it triple, you know, it's encrypted all across the board and zero knowledge encryption and you're good to go, right?

No one will ever find out about your goals and dreams. Just pay attention to them yourself. That's the point. So all you got to do is pay attention. You don't even have to write them down. Better if you do, but just pay attention. So imagine I come along and I chat with you and I say, "What are your goals and dreams?" Tell me a little bit about some of the things you dream about doing in the future.

If you lack for inspiration with anything we've talked about, let me close just a couple of journaling exercises. I'll give you two. These are my two favorite... three. I'll give you three. These are my three favorite exercises. I do these regularly. I encourage you to do them. When I say do them, pick a way that works for you.

If you're a leather journal and a fountain pen and a coffee shop kind of guy, go for it. If you're an Apple notes app on your iPhone while you sit in the cigar shop, go for it. If you're a sit out by the ocean and speak into your voice recorder, go for it.

If you're a make a video for yourself and post it on YouTube, go for it. Right? Whatever your thing is. I personally like to take myself to a nice restaurant with a nice view, sit down with a journal, a piece of paper, and sit and write. That's what I like to do.

Your mileage may vary, but here are three exercises. Number one, make a list of 30 things you want to do, 30 things you want to be, and 30 things you want to have before you die. 30 things you want to be, do, and have before you die. 90 things total.

Make a list of 30 things you want to be, 30 things you want to do, 30 things you want to have before you die. Don't judge them. Don't criticize them. Don't ask yourself if they're feasible. Just write them down. That's the first thing. The beauty of this one is it's a lot.

You got to stretch. Right? Things you want to be. I want to be an accountant. Well, that's good for the first few. I want to be in good shape. That's good. But by the time you get to about number 27, 28, you got to think, right? I want to be compassionate.

I want to be generous. I want to be kind. I want to be rich. Whatever, right? 30 things you want to be, do, and have. Make those lists. Do it regularly. Second exercise. Design your perfect day. Perfect day. Right? Lie down in the middle of your bed. Close your eyes.

Turn on your voice dictation. And imagine yourself waking up in the morning. Just dictate to yourself everything that you would want your day to look like. You know, what's out the window? What kind of room are you in? What's out the window? Are there a beautiful sandy beach out the way?

Is there a beautiful sandy beach out the window? Or are there beautiful snow-capped mountains? Big difference there. What do you do all day? What do you accomplish? What does your daily structure look like? Do you leave your house and go to an office to do something? Do you stay at home?

What do you do? For me, this has always been the most powerful. I live almost every day today, my perfect ideal day. It's cool. It's really cool. Exactly what I close my eyes and dictate into my phone is basically almost exactly the way that I live every day. And I love it.

It's awesome. That one has always been really easy for me because a lot of things that I wanted to be and do and have have to do with the kind of feeling that I want to have on a daily basis. The structure I want in my schedule. The, just the feelings on a daily basis.

Final thing is always the ten. I'll give you my last two with money. Ten million dollar question, right? Your rich aunt Sally dies, leaves you ten million bucks tax-free. You take the money, you squeal like a little child, you start spending left and right, and you do all of the cool hedonistic stuff that you've always wanted to do.

You buy a Ferrari, you go to Hawaii, you pay off your mom's mortgage, you go ahead and give away a hundred thousand dollars to the SPCA. Great. Done. All that stuff, done. Fast forward a year. Pretend you've got a bunch of money in the bank paying you a bunch of money every month in passive income.

You don't have to work. It's now Monday, a day late, a year later. What are you going to do on that Monday? What would you do? Spend a whole year in your mind doing all the stuff. Gambling in the greatest casinos in Macau, you know, water skiing on Lake Mead, hiking all the great hikes that you want to do, do all your hedonistic stuff that you want to really do.

Now come back. It's Monday, a year or two or whatever later. You've gotten all that stuff out of your system. What do you want to do on a daily basis? Imagine that Monday when you design your perfect day. Last one just simply comes down to always, what would you do if you knew you could never retire?

How would you live if you knew you could never retire? If I said, the way that you're living now is the way that you're going to be living for the rest of your life. How would you live? It's always been so productive for me to think about because it causes me to pull back a little bit from the extremism, to focus on soaking up each day and building the kind of life that I don't want to retire from before I ever put a dime in a 401k.

None of us are guaranteed tomorrow. Tomorrow literally does not exist. Yesterday literally does not exist. Today is all we know, this very moment, this very time. So anything that helps you to be more present now, to be more focused now, to be more energetic now, to be more connected now, to have a greater sense of purpose now, those are things that should be very, very high on your to-do list.

Hope it's useful for you. We'll continue the series very soon. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being part of Radical Personal Finance. I'm so grateful for your being here. In closing, let me just say that I do a good amount of private consulting.

I had a bunch of people take me up on my offer here for the end of the year. Booked out through February, but if you would like to talk with me, let's do some private consulting, you can book a call with me at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult. I'm not going to talk a lot in this particular series about how to make dreams a reality, although we'll talk a little bit about it next time.

But what I do want to talk about is just say that I have yet to find a single dream that someone has been able to articulate to me that I couldn't help design a plan to accomplish in a very reasonable amount of time. I think that's where external input is so valuable.

I can't dream for you and you can't dream for me. Our dreams are different. But what other people can do is they can help us to design plans that make those dreams a reality. And I have found again and again and again that I'm very good at helping people do that and that at some of the best time and money, people say that they invest in their lives.

I want to encourage you very strongly to please consider that. If you'd like to book a consultation with me, go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult and you can do it there. Thank you very much. Hey there wine lovers elevate your holiday wine time with wineenthusiast.com. Wine Enthusiast has everything you need to transform your entertaining space into the ultimate wine spectacle of the season.

From wine storage to glassware, personalized accessories, furniture, and more. Uncork a little joy this year with Wine Enthusiast.