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It's more than just a ticket. 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 Joshua. I'm your host.

Today, we're going to talk about part three of how to wrap up one year and start a better one as we come to the end of 2020 and plan for a better year in 2021. And step three is simply plan. That's what we're going to be talking about in today's show.

Step one was reflect. I talked to you about the value of simply reflecting on the year that was, gaining and harvesting some lessons. Then in step two, I talked about dreaming, tried to encourage you to never stop dreaming, to always maintain your ability to simply dream. Dream about a better future in any area that you would like to, any area that matters to you.

Just simply dream. But we know, and I tried to defend this thesis, dreaming is important. But at the end of the day, there's a reason why we differentiate dreaming from things like goal setting or dreaming from things like planning. I encourage you to dream with no absolute commitment to achieving your dreams.

I encourage you to simply to enjoy the practice of dreaming and to let yourself off the hook. Recognize that you don't have to do everything that you think would be fun. But then there comes a time at which you want to start to transform those dreams into reality. I'm not personally convinced that this has to be a structured program.

I think a lot of people succeed to an astonishingly high degree even without clear structured programs in their life. I've known many people who became wealthy somewhat haphazardly because they simply did the things that you do to become wealthy even though they didn't know that that's exactly what they were doing.

They didn't specifically have a plan. I've seen this when people have built large businesses. I've seen this when people have simply saved money out of even modest incomes and they did the things that lead to wealth even though they didn't have a clear wealth plan. Is that nice? Yeah, I'm glad that that happens, right?

I'm glad that that works that way. It's really nice. But I do think you can get far better results with planning or with an informed position, with an informed plan that actually you're much more likely to achieve it. So if you're put off by the idea of planning and you want to stop with part two, dreaming, I think you're probably going to get some results from that.

I really think you do. I think that when you dream, you kind of naturally start to notice things. Perhaps that's the most powerful thing of dreaming, the old red car syndrome where you think about buying a red sports car and all of a sudden you see a red sports car everywhere.

You go out with your buddy on, I don't know, you find out your buddy has bought a snow bike, right? A new sport. You're like, "Hey, my buddy's bought a snow bike." And all of a sudden, next thing you know, you're seeing snow biking stuff everywhere simply because you're tuned into it.

And so by dreaming, I think you'll often be tuned into the things that are around you. But give me two people, one person that simply dreams and the other person that dreams and plans, and I'll put my money on the person that dreams and plans every day. Now notice we're not yet to doing.

I'm just talking about planning. And again, I want to make this simple for you. I want to let you off the hook. I want to recognize that you don't have to do everything. Realistically, if you're like me, you'll probably be much better at planning than at doing. I'm very good at planning.

Large, grandiose plans, all kinds of things that I can do. And I say, "Oh, I'm going to do this." And I commit myself to this massive to-do list. I'm not so good at actually following through. But what I've learned over the years is that's okay. The act of planning and the act of taking a dream and transforming it into specific concrete steps, specific things I could do, things I could put on a to-do list, that moves me far down the road of success.

And even if I only get 50% of the way there, I'm usually a lot better off than I would have been otherwise. Let's use an example. I've been thinking a lot about my health. I've been analyzing this year. I had a lot of success with my health and my weight this year.

I had a lot of failure with my health and my weight this year. So I've been thinking about, "Okay, reflect. What worked? What didn't work? Where did things go wrong? Was it bad methodology? Was it me? What happened? What went wrong?" And just reflecting on that and making my plans for the year ahead.

So let's just pretend. I'm not saying this is just an example. Let's just pretend that you get to the end of the year and you say, "You know what? This next year, I want to improve my cardiovascular fitness. So right now, I'm not running, but this next year, I'm going to go out and I'm going to run a 5K every day.

I'm just going to run, what, 3.1 miles every day. I'm going to go and run this 5K every day." And you lay this big plan and you map out the mileage and you say, "Okay, there's 365 days in this next year. Let's see. That would be 365 times 5.

I'm going to run 1,825 kilometers in this next calendar year." And you buy some new running shoes and you get all ready to go. And then you start running. January 1, you're running. January 2, you're running. January 3, you're running. January 4. But all of a sudden, you start missing days.

And lo and behold, running a 5K seven days a week was too much. But you kept on sort of doing it and you ran a 5K three days a week, sometimes four, every now and then five. And at the end of the year, you're tracking your total mileage for the year.

And all of a sudden, you find out that at the end of the year, you failed. You didn't run 1,825 kilometers. You failed spectacularly badly. You only ran 996 kilometers for that year. Now, was that really a bad thing? Was that really the end of the world? See, now you have two choices.

You can have a choice to say, "I failed. I didn't hit my goal." And that's absolutely true. Or you can look at it and say, "You know what? I ran 1,000 kilometers this year. That's stinking great. That's really awesome. And I probably ran, I don't know, 600 kilometers more than I would have run if I had not made this plan or not set out this idea." And what I want to impress upon you from my hard-won years of beating myself up is that there's almost never a reason to beat yourself up.

Goals that you miss, things that you fail on, the fact that you had the courage to dream and to set a plan and to set a goal probably means you're much closer to your goal than otherwise. And I've found so many times in my life that the failures of half-accomplished plans have moved me so far down the road of success that in the fullness of time, I can hardly recognize where I came from.

And so if you're somebody who naturally, like me, makes big plans, big aggressive plans, and then often fails at those plans, no problem. It's okay. I think it is valuable to reflect on that. And I'm not saying we should just set that as a matter of course and always "I'm going to shoot for the moon, shoot for the moon, shoot for the moon," and you never get off the ground, right?

There's a time in which you look down and say, "Why don't I try a more modest goal?" If you recognize that my actual problem is discipline and I committed myself to this big grandiose thing that was completely impossible, maybe it would have been more effective and next time I should just step back.

Totally fine, right? I agree. I agree. But it's not a problem to make plans and then only finish half of them. And I'm convinced that what I see around me is not an epidemic of people who have massive goals and massive plans of action that are organized and then they only get half of them done.

I see a lot of people who are timid, people who are shy, who pull back and they're scared to even dream, and then they're scared to even start planning. And they say things like, "I don't know where to start and I'm not sure that I could do that." Well, I'm not sure about anything.

But I know that if you're working towards something that you care about, something that's a dream, any forward action is important. And I wish, maybe someday I can honestly turn on a microphone and say, "I am the paragon of human discipline." Maybe someday I can say, "I made this commitment to myself that I was going to do X, Y, and Z and every single day I did X, Y, and Z.

Here's my perfect streak." Right? I filled all my activity circles on my Apple Watch for 365 days straight and look at me. But friends, I've never been able to say that. It just never worked for me. But I've still made massive progress because I've always kept pressing forward. I've never quit.

And years ago when I was thinking about some of this stuff, for me, these ideas brought me a tremendous degree of personal comfort and personal confidence to say, "I'm probably not ever going to be the smartest. I'm probably not ever going to be the fastest. I'm probably not ever going to be the most accomplished or the person with the most connections and the most ability, but I can be somebody who simply doesn't quit.

And I can always start a fresh new day and I can say, 'The past is gone. Today's a new day and I'm going to start again.'" And to me, that's a character quality that is worth developing, to be the person who doesn't quit. We teach our children this when we read them the story of the rabbit and the turtle, right?

The tortoise and the hare. We teach them these things and we try to help them to understand and see how they can, if they just keep pressing forward and then somehow we forget about it ourselves. We dream a dream and we say, "Well, I've always seen that so-and-so achieved that dream in one year and so I'm convinced I can do it too." And then three years in, we haven't dreamed it yet.

And that's why I talk so much when I talk about adding in time because I've never had, personally, I've never had a spectacular success story in anything I've done, really, of just, "Wow, look at me. I did it overnight. I did it in one year." I've never done it.

But yet I live a dream life. I'm so thankful for the blessings that I have every day. And a lot of them have just come from day by day, pressing forward, step by step and not quitting, not quitting on my dreams. I want you to not quit on your dreams.

So let's talk about how do you actually plan. I want to give you some simple things that will stick in your head. You're driving down the road, you're running down the road, you don't have a pen and paper. I'm going to give you these things and they're going to stick in your head so that you can do this without physically riding down some complex exercise.

And these are things, none of these are original to me. I've learned them from other people, stolen them without credit, but they've all been helpful to me. So let me explain. Number one, the most powerful thing that I do to plan is simply this. If I can get a dream clear enough in my head, this is my dream.

I want to buy a sailboat and sail the world for five years straight. Or this is my dream. I want to start my own internet business where my money is not tied to my time. Or this is my dream. I want to have you know, 10 children. Or this is my dream.

Whatever your dream is, this is my dream. I want to speak 10 languages. This is my dream. I want to have 10 million dollars. Doesn't really matter. If you can get a dream in your head, then as I said in the show on dreaming, I'm convinced that you have the ability to achieve it.

And I'm convinced that you already know enough to get started on that dream. So here's my first piece of advice. Number one, pretend to yourself that you have already achieved the dream. If it's something that you can close your eyes and see, awesome. If it's something you can write down on a paper, great.

But just pretend to yourself and put yourself into a mental state where you think, I've already achieved this. Imagine it with as much texture and vivid imagery as you can. I've already achieved this. And then once you're in that mental space, ask yourself this question. How did I do it?

What did I do to get here? If you'll do that exercise, imagine a dream is achieved and then close your eyes and say, what did I do to get here? And imagine how you got here. Your brain will fill in the steps. Maybe your dream is, I imagined myself with a six pack, right?

It's been a dream of mine for years, never achieved it. Okay. Imagine myself with a six pack. Okay. Imagine it. Okay. That's what I look like now. How did I get here? If you ask yourself that question, your brain will quickly point out all of the stuff that's personal to you.

Your brain will tell you, well, you didn't eat these foods. You did eat those foods. You didn't live this kind of lifestyle. You did live that kind of lifestyle. And what's amazing about this exercise is your brain will fill in all of that stuff in a customized way. So for example, for me personally, if I imagine that, I don't ever imagine that I got there by doing boring exercises every day in the gym.

I find a lot of just the gym rat stuff really boring. And so my brain quickly points, shuts that down. But what I see is I see I did more sports, right? Maybe I, my plan as soon as I can find one open, I joined a boxing gym, right?

Or I went stand up paddle boarding three times a week. Or I found the, you know, this, I joined a local soccer league or whatever the thing is, the thing that your brain puts in. Your brain automatically customizes it for yourself. And if you say, Joshua, did you, you know, did you get ripped abs because of this other thing?

I say, no, because look, I failed at this, this, this, this, this, this didn't work. That didn't work. This didn't work. That didn't work. So let me tell you all the things that didn't work. So none of those worked, but here are some things that might work. Or let's say it's about your money and you imagine, how did I get here?

Well, people's brains will fill in dramatically different plans. One person's brain will fill in a job, right? I got a good job. I saved money and I got here because that was what spoke to me. Maybe I did extreme savings and that spoke to me and I achieved my five at 45 because that was, that was the plan.

And I liked the job and I didn't want to go out and start a business. That's just not me, but I have this good job. And if I just control my expenses and find great pleasure and frugal things, I'll hit that financial independence number. That's probably a really good plan for you.

On the other hand, there's a guy out there who says he imagines his dreams, he imagines all his plans, and he can't even conceive of a job that he would do, but he conceives of a business or a brand or intellectual property or real estate or some other path.

So what I've always found is my brain always fills in the path for me. And if I could just simply imagine that dream and ask myself, how did I get here? I can start to fill in some of the steps. And as human beings, we're good at rational thinking like this, most of us, because you can quickly see what did and didn't work.

Imagine you're doing this exercise and you say, you know, my dream is to have a $10 million mansion on Palm Beach, a $3 million villa in Italy and, you know, $50 million in the bank. Well, if I say, how did you get there? And you say, I got a good job.

We quickly know that that's not going to work. And I say, no, really, no, really, how'd you get there? And you have the ability, even if you don't know anything technical, even if you don't know anything with planning, you have the ability just to fill it in. Now, back to what I talked about last time with dreams.

In my experience, a lot of times I always fill this in by watching an example of someone else. And that leads me to suggestion number two. If you can pretend that you had the dream achieved, and if there's often somebody that you've seen who's done that dream, then you can go and ask them, how did you get there?

And that'll often fill in a lot of stories. There's this funny thing that people do on social media. They go to people who drive supercars and they go up in a gas station and they say, you know, what do you do, excuse me, what do you do for a living?

And one guy gets out of his big Mercedes and says, you know, I invest in real estate or I trade stocks or I started a business. It was a great one. A couple of days ago, I saw one, there was a lady and I think it was one of the Arab Emirates states and he's a Muslim lady and she gets out of her Lamborghini and the guy says, excuse me, what do you do for a living?

And she said, I'm my husband's second wife. Worked for her, right? She got herself a Lamborghini out of the deal. And so like, these are all paths that people have used. And so you can find this if you go looking for it. It's ideal if it's someone that you know that you can ask and say, hey, you did this.

How can I get there? What can I do? How did you do it? But in today's world, you don't even have to know anybody. In today's world, you can find those people virtually. You find a guy like Tai Lopez, right? You find a guy like Tai Lopez. Tai has helped thousands and thousands and thousands of clueless boys become wealthy because he's laid out all of the stuff and says, here's how you do it.

And these are boys who never would have had contact with somebody who was wealthy. They never would have had the guts to go up and ask somebody, but Tai laid it out for them in a YouTube video and courses and products, etc. And boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, what do you know?

All of a sudden, now they're in that club and they never met him personally. That's the power of the world that we live in. You can go and you can find any community, any dream, you can go and find people working towards it. And you can say, how do you do it?

Now, you do want to be careful that you find the right community because what I have observed from a lot of time online is that almost any different community develops its doctrine. And that doctrine is generally inclusive of a certain set of ideas and exclusive of another set. I see this again and again in the personal finance space and all the Facebook groups and whatnot that I watch and watch the conversations.

And you'll see somebody ask a question and I can predict. If I see the question without any comments, I can predict. Okay, this community, here are the five responses that you're going to get. And sure enough, they're all variations of those five things or those 10 things. And so one of the things that you should do is ask questions because when you have a community that develops a certain set of answers, that means that those are probably pretty good answers, pretty tried and true.

A lot of evidence, a lot of weight, you should take those very seriously. But you should also go and look in other places and find other ideas. And then at the end of the day, make your own decision. But if you can find someone, either personally or virtually, who's achieved something that's something like your dream, then you have the ability to move closer to it by getting their input on how they did it.

I've always found that it's helpful for me to do this even across the space of time. And that's where I personally try to spend a lot of time. I don't think you need to. But let's say you're talking to some world-class person, right, who's extraordinarily healthy. Extraordinarily healthy personally, tremendous physical health, they're in great shape.

I'm convinced that somebody like that, who wasn't just genetics, where, you know, I've known people who they just had dream genetics, but I'm talking about normal people who have to work for that. I'm convinced that you could pick those people up from almost any corner of the planet, and you could drop them out into another corner of the planet, and they would, because they understand the principles of their life, they understand the principles of what they're doing, they would quickly figure out a way to maintain their physical health, their physical, their good shape, etc., and improve it, even if they were dropped in dramatically different circumstances.

If you think about money, you could take a successful, experienced business person, pick them up from one corner of the planet, drop them into a totally different corner of the planet. They may not even speak the language, but give them a little bit of time, and the vast majority of time, they would be able to replicate their success.

Why? Because you start to absorb the principles over time. But in the beginning stage, you don't need that. You just need some basic ideas of how you could move yourself closer. So, pretend that you've achieved the dream. Get yourself in that mental space, then ask yourself, "How did I get here?" And then write down all the things that you did to get there.

Make a comprehensive list. Then, put that list in order. I did this first, then I did that, then I did this, then I did that. And when you do that, you have the outline of a plan. And that's what you need, because now you could start doing things. You may still decide, "You know what?

I don't want to do that." Totally fine. I think it's still worth planning. I've done this many times. I'll have a dream, and I'll sit down and make a plan, and the act of making the plan satisfies that little itch. Helps me to say, "You know what? I don't think I really want to do that." Or, "I'm not sure that I really want to do that right now." This is last year, I was thinking about doing a cargo trailer conversion.

I've become really interested in this. I'd like to get another RV, but I don't want to own a traditional RV. I just can't stand the cheapness and the junk, the way that they're built, etc. After having owned two of them now, I thought, "You know what? Maybe I'll do a cargo trailer conversion." I sat down, I sketched it all out, I started putting together the plan, and I was super into it for a couple of weeks.

Then I decided, "You know what? I don't love this all that much right now." I just laid it aside. Now, that's obviously a simple thing. It's not a big dream. It's just a simple thing. But I find that happens a lot. Scratch the itch, and then sometimes that's enough.

You can move on to something else, and you don't have to have that thing cluttering up your life. But if I had never sat down and sketched it out, if I'd never sat down and priced it out, if I'd never sat down and imagined it very clearly, it would probably still be there as something I really thought I wanted to do.

I really thought I wanted to do right now. I would continue to obsess about it. It works. Take that and apply it to any big or small thing that you want to do. Now, let's say that you're having trouble with this. Perhaps you say, "Joshua, it just doesn't work for me." Then let me make it a little bit simpler.

Here's the next question. If I have a dream in mind, and I don't know how to achieve it, then let me just simply ask this. What could I do that might move me a little bit closer to that dream? What could I do today that might move me a bit closer?

Hopefully, you hear I'm just pulling certainty back. For me, this is helpful. I don't have to be confident that this will work. I don't have to be confident that this did work. I just need something that could work. In my experience, answering that question of what could I do that might have some small possibility of moving me a little bit further ahead, then now I get some simple things that I'm probably overlooking.

What could I do that might move me a bit closer to a robust physical health and a stronger body this year, make me harder to kill? I could go out my front door, turn left, and walk around the block. Seems really simple, but I tell you what, if I did that today, that would probably be a good thing.

I could do that regularly. I could do that every day. Maybe I'm scared and maybe it's not smart for me to go and run a 5K every day, but I could walk around the block or walk around a couple of blocks every day and people have literally walked off hundreds of pounds.

People have literally walked on tremendously strong, healthy hearts and bodies just through the simple act of walking. What could I do that might move me a bit closer to my wealth goals? I don't have to promise it. What could I do? I could go to local investors meetup group.

I could, I don't know, I could go and save some money, put it into my freedom fund jar. I could go and trim one of my bills. I could go and look at job listings for a better job. These are all things I could do and they might move me a bit closer.

So list those things out because if you're looking for a place to start, your plan might have some spectacularly big leaps on it. I want to have $10 million and you start a $10 million business that I can sell for $10 million. Great. But what could I do today?

Well, I could go to the library or go to Amazon and I could search for stories of people who've done something like that and start checking out some books. It's not guaranteed to move me there, but it might move me a bit closer. Could make a difference. I don't think you need anything more than what I've said so far, but in the spirit of over delivering as a Christmas bonus, I want to just give you a few more questions that have always been helpful for me.

And they all relate around improving your skills. So here's the first one. What could I learn this year that might move me a little bit closer to this dream? What could I learn about this year that might move me a little bit closer to this dream? I've tried to emphasize that you probably don't need to learn more, but I find learning to be useful.

If learning keeps you from action, it's not useful. But I think most of the time learning naturally leads to action. Because if you're learning and advancing in your knowledge, it's probably impossible for you not to be applying at least something. The brain is a learning machine and when you learn things, learn a new way of thinking, learn that there are new options available, learn that other people have transformed their lives.

When you learn that stuff and you learn how they've done it, you start to just naturally, I think, move yourself in the direction of what other people have done. So what could I learn this year that might move me a bit closer? And then how could I learn about it?

What could I learn and how could I learn? If you can take a goal or a dream or a goal, dream a little bit fuzzier, goal clearer, more defined is kind of how I think about the difference between those things. If you could take that and you say, "What are the kinds of things that I could learn that would help me to achieve that?" Then just being aware of it and then starting to learn about it will give you the tools.

I have a dream to be a multimillionaire. What could I learn? I could learn how to manage money. I could learn how to earn money. I could learn how to invest money. I could learn how to save money. All these are things that you could learn. Then you ask, "How could I learn about them?" And you know the answers.

They're rather simple. I could start with a Google search. How to save money. Bunch of articles written about that. How to make more money. Bunch of articles written about that. A lot of people start there. I could start with a YouTube search. Lots of good stuff there. No cost for either of those resources.

I could start with a podcast directory search. Tremendous wealth of information. I could start with an Amazon.com search. I could go to my library and start with a search on my library website. Whatever your local library is. Do a search there. Reserve 30 books on it. And if you just do some of those things with any of your personal topics, you'll probably be quickly flooded with ideas.

Flooded with stories of what other people have done. Flooded with ways that you could progress forward if you wanted to. So what could I learn that would move me a bit closer? Who could I meet who would help me with this? Now in our current world, I like to use this word "meet" in a very broad sense.

Meaning a physical relationship where we've met one another, we've sat down, we've broken bread together, we know each other. But you could also just simply adjust this and say, "Who could I surround myself with this year?" I've spoken in previous episodes of Radical Personal Finance about the value of social media.

What I think you should do with social media is you should use your social media to surround yourself with people who are at least seeming to be like the kind of person that you want to be. We can never know, of course, who's behind it. But if you surround yourself with people who are seeming to be like the kind of person that you want to be, that's a powerful thing.

It's a way of surrounding yourself with winners. If you fill up your Twitter feed with right-wing, left-wing commentators, people who are always angry about the state of politics, you're going to be angry about the state of politics. In my opinion, it's unavoidable because that's what you're feeding yourself with.

That's what your brain will be thinking about. On the other hand, if you surround yourself with money Twitter, people who are making money and investing money and have nothing but positive outlooks on the future, you can't help but be filled with money-making ideas. The people that you follow on Twitter are going to literally lead you into the future.

And you can insert any other social media. When you sit down and decide who to follow on social media, you're creating your future whether you know it or not. So I would suggest to you as you end up the year, one of the very useful things that you can do is do a social media purge.

Get rid of all the people that you don't want to be like. Mute them, block them, unfollow them, de-friend them, whatever you want to do, but get rid of the people that you don't want to be like and fill your phone with the people that you do want to be like.

I've got some advanced strategies for these. Maybe I'll save them for a standalone show at some point in time. But it's one of the most powerful things you can do is use these platforms to surround yourself with what you want to be like. Maybe just start fresh. I've done this.

I have multiple accounts across the board, but maybe your current Instagram is full of personal friends. Fine, just add another one and make this your dream life and just follow people that you admire. Start a new Twitter profile. Start a new YouTube profile so you can retrain the algorithm and train all your algorithms to simply feed you content that helps you to surround yourself with people who encourage you, inspire you, motivate you, etc.

It doesn't have to be what other people would admire. It can be you personally and it should be you personally. That's one of the things that's I think most powerful. Just a personal example. I just found this guy recently. I wish I knew his name. I can't remember his handle, but I found him on Instagram.

He's a teenager. He's got cerebral palsy and pretty severe case. Although he's not wheelchair bound, he walks awkwardly. But he posts a lot of pictures of him in the gym. He's in the gym weightlifting. I find him so inspiring. Here's a teenage boy. He's got cerebral palsy. He's got physical challenges that I've never in my life faced.

As he puts his head on a swivel, he's got his head shaking back, shaking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I'm always scared he's going to fall down, but there he goes doing his squats, doing his deadlifts, doing his exercises. He can't stop moving. He can't stop the effects of cerebral palsy.

But every time I see him, a tear comes to my eye and I'm like, "That's the kind of guy that I want to be, right? I want to be someone who when I'm faced with massive problems and massive obstacles and massive disadvantages, I want to be the guy that presses forward and says, 'Let me use what I've got and got stronger.'" What excuse do I have for not being in the gym if this guy can be there?

Now you may find your own thing. I'm just trying to share a little bit of me, but I don't find bodybuilders and people who... I don't find perfect people particularly inspiring. I find flawed people. I find people who... failures of people who keep pressing forward. For me, I find those people inspiring.

And so when I fill my social media feeds with those kinds of people, it keeps me motivated to press forward. So who could I meet this next year? And now let's move on to physical meeting. Literally, who could I meet this next year? Not just surround myself with, but who could I meet?

If we know that our lives generally reflect the lives of the people that we spend the most... the people that we spend the most time with, then one of the ways that we can really automatically change our lives is by surrounding ourselves with different people. And step one is simply meeting somebody.

So do you have a list of people that you would like to meet? People that encourage you, that inspire you, people that you look up to, people that you would like to be like? Cultivate that list and then start doing things to move yourself in that direction. Could be the neighbor two roads down that you find out about and you think you admire him.

Could be some rich, famous, well-known person in your industry that if you just met them at a conference or something like that would make a big difference. Who could you meet this next year? These kinds of questions could go on and on and I'm going to wrap up. I simply want you to think about what could I do?

And those are the two thought experiments for you to keep in your mind. If you have a dream, picture that dream and ask yourself, what did I do? And write down everything that comes to your mind. What did I do to accomplish this? Put yourself, imagine yourself in that future state and say, what did I do that led me to this path?

How did I meet this woman of my dreams? How did I build this $10 million company? How did I do it? And if that's a productive thinking exercise for you, use it. If you're intimidated by even that, then ask yourself this, what could I do that might, just might, move me a bit closer in the direction of where I want to go?

Now, I'm not going to do the show right now on step four, which is simply start doing. And I'm not going to do it primarily because in one hour and 45 minutes, I'm going to go get on an airplane with my family and fly home for the holidays. We're looking forward to that.

I don't have the time to finish it right now. But honestly, I don't know if it's really all that important that I even finish it by talking about doing it. Because at the end of the day, we all know that we've got to do it. It's not enough to just write stuff down unless it leads to action.

But I think that process is pretty well automatic, at least in my experience. I've experienced that just the process of dreaming about something and then planning how I could do it pretty well automatically leads me to some action. Is it better if you make a plan and put all the actions down and then start systematically creating a feedback system and a system of accountability where you start doing all of the things?

Probably so. But I don't want to scare you with that right now, because I never seem to follow through on all of the things. But you do need to start doing, start taking action, start taking action. And so resolve that if you've got some stuff that you could do that might help you to move in the direction of your dreams, just resolve that you're going to be the kind of person who does the things that might make a difference in your life.

Looking for a good New Year's resolution, that would probably be a good one. I resolve that I will be the kind of person who does the things that might lead me in the direction of my dreams. Now, if you're ready for a more robust commitment than that, go for it.

But at the very least, I think that would be a good place to start. I want to close out today with simply this. Thank you for listening to Radical Personal Finance during this year. In some ways, it has been a very, very difficult year for me personally and it has certainly been a memorable year for all of us.

A lot of things happening in this year. And I continue to be filled with concern. In many ways, I have a heavy heart. There's so many businesses around the world really struggling right now. So many people being shut down by heavy-handed government decrees and things like that. That stuff is rather obvious.

And so, it's been a - and in my life, we've faced some significant challenges this year and I'm sure that you have too. If all of us sat down and started telling our stories, we could probably put all of each other in tears. But on the other hand, it's also been a very beautiful year.

It's been a great year. I'm very happy with this past year in my life personally, the lives of my family, etc. And I'm excited about the future. And I just want to say that let - as we go into Christmas season and New Year's and whatnot, let these things just enjoy.

Enjoy the turning of the seasons. Enjoy the chance to - enjoy the chance to get a fresh start. We talk about New Year's resolutions because it's a time of year in which we understand more vigorously on an emotional level that the past is gone and that it can't be changed.

We understand that, hey, the past is the past and I can't change it, but it's a brand new year and it's a fresh start. And you're going to see a wealth of articles talking about, oh, New Year's resolutions don't work. It's basically become very hip and expected to dump on New Year's resolutions now.

I'm sure that trend will change soon enough. But I love New Year's resolutions. I love dreaming about the year ahead. And if you - if that works for you, go for it. If it doesn't work for you, you know, don't do it. But I love - I love the new year.

It's always exciting. It gives me a chance to dream and say, what can I do? And I got thrown off on a lot of stuff. I got thrown off on a lot of my dreams this past year. But it's a brand new year and I'm going to keep on working and you are a major part of that and I'm so grateful for your being here.

I wish you a peaceful and a joy-filled Christmas and a very, very happy new year. I'll be back with you on Monday, January 11, 2021. Monday, January 11, 2021. Have a great day. With Kroger brand products from Ralph's, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season. Because Kroger brands proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices.

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