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 Sheets. I'm your host. Today on the show, I'm going to share with you one of the biggest financial mistakes that I have made as part of this overall series.

I've got over half a dozen on my personal notes. I'm not sure that I'll share with you all of them, but I will choose some of them to share with you. I want to share one that's just simply timely because it actually came from a recent listener. The mistake is simply this.

One of the biggest financial mistakes that I have made is not selling aggressively enough. Not aggressively selling and marketing myself, my products and services, others' products and services. The impetus for today's show came, I was recently communicating with a listener of the show and he was saying, "Joshua, one of the things I really appreciate about you is that you have been successful without engaging in heavy marketing.

You haven't ever given yourself over to a lot of marketing. I really appreciate that." I responded back and I said, "Well, thank you that you appreciate it, but I consider that one of the biggest mistakes. It's a mistake that I regret making and it's a mistake that I don't intend to make in the future." While that may surprise you, I want to share with you because if that one listener thinks that perhaps you yourself might think that this is the case.

I do not think that the way that I have done things is the way that I should have done things. I do not intend that the way that I have done things in the past is the way that I will do things in the future. Let me share with you some background, some background ideas, and let me share with you some analysis on this subject, on the topic of selling aggressively, on the topic of should you focus on selling aggressively.

Because this is kind of a slippery argument to talk about and we often do appreciate things on multiple sides of the issue. Let me begin with my background and my story. First, if we went all the way back to my childhood, I was not raised in an environment in which I was taught to focus on money.

I didn't come from a wealthy family. My parents were ordinary, hardworking, virtuous, middle-class people. They were strong, devout Christians, and so because of that, never in their lives would they ever have imagined putting money as their number one priority. They of course did value thrift, frugality, stewardship of resources, but they never would have made a decision where money was the number one thing.

Never in my life have I ever seen my mom or my dad say, "Oh, look, money. I'm going to prioritize money over something else." If there was ever a list of things that had to be prioritized, if my dad was going to prioritize a relationship, if he had to choose between a relationship or making more money, he would choose the relationship every time.

If my mom was going to choose between helping somebody and having more money, she would help somebody every time. My parents modeled for me an example of selfless sacrifice, pouring out their lives for others through their entire lifetime. Every bit of everything I have ever seen has been, I have observed my parents being generous to others, helping others, sharing with others, serving others, loving others, completely selflessly with no expectation of gain or return.

And so I wasn't raised in an environment where money was the primary thing. I would say in addition to that, in and among Christian circles, the pursuit of money and the pursuit of wealth is often an uncomfortable subject for people to talk about. First, this is simply due to the reality of the various statements that exist in the Christian Bible and in Christian doctrine.

You have many seemingly paradoxical statements related to money. You can pick up the Bible and depending on which particular statements you choose to emphasize, you can use those biblical statements to justify really almost any position that you want to justify. From everything from God's going to bless you and make you a multimillionaire if you'll just serve him and love him.

It's all up to you. God helps those who help themselves. You shouldn't have any money. You shouldn't accumulate any kind of wealth. You should give it all away and go follow Jesus. You can, depending on which particular statements you want to emphasize, you can support all of those with scripture right there in black, white, and red.

And so there's a good deal of discomfort in many Christian circles of talking about money because of these paradoxes. In general though, virtually all branches of the Christian religion are united in the fact that they don't believe that the pursuit of money should be the primary goal of life.

You'll virtually never hear a knowledgeable Christian say, "Your number one primary goal of life should be to accumulate money." There's just simply overwhelming indications, overwhelming scriptural prohibition against that and an encouragement to focus on those things that are less ephemeral than great wealth. And so because of that, I was raised in that kind of culture.

And since I adopted consciously and intentionally that worldview for myself, I have never been one who has prioritized money over any other particular thing. I've never been one who says, "My number one goal in life is to become rich." In addition, due to the influences that I came to appreciate, the consultants and the people that I sought after their advice, I always came to appreciate things like experiences over stuff.

This is commonplace now. It was not perhaps in decades past, but today it's now commonplace that most people will say, "Oh, don't accumulate stuff, but accumulate experiences instead." I also have often gained inspiration from people who live well on little. I've always admired those who show, "Look, I can live a lifestyle that works really well on just a little bit of money." And so I came to think myself that, "You know what?

I don't need a lot of money. I don't need a lot of money. I can do well on less, and I'll focus on my passions and my interests and the experiences." Now, furthermore, my own journey through selling, especially in the context of something like radical personal finance, was made more difficult due to my background and the general suspicion that I've experienced from multiple angles towards things like financial advice or investment advice, etc.

When I was younger, I was very much on the consumer side of financial advice. And because I absorbed and consumed so much of that consumer-facing advice, the books about how to do it better yourself, how to do things cheaper, etc., I became suspicious of anybody who was involved in professional financial sales.

I thought that financial advisors were largely a scam, insurance agents were going to rip you off. I became convinced that across the board, the whole industry was probably filled with charlatans and liars and cheats. And then I joined it. And so in 2008, when I first became a financial advisor, then I felt like I was wading into the lion's den, and I didn't really trust anybody.

And what was more difficult is that I started in the segment of the industry which is more maligned and impugned than perhaps any other segment of the industry, which is life insurance sales. Jokes exist forever about life insurance sales and aggressive life insurance agents. And because prior to becoming a life insurance agent, I was heavily steeped in the doctrines of "buy term insurance and invest the difference," and I was convinced that you should buy term and invest the difference, and that anybody who believed in whole life insurance or anybody who tried to sell universal life insurance was just a scammer and a crook who was trying to take more of your money away in the form of a bigger commission, a fat commission paycheck, and they didn't care about your long-term wealth and well-being.

And it was very difficult for me to overcome that. I was never, even my entire time in the insurance business, I was never an aggressive salesman of whole life insurance because of those lingering just years of indoctrination to the cult of "buy term and invest the difference." Now I did become an enthusiastic proponent of whole life insurance in appropriate situations, but I never became an aggressive salesman of it.

And that fits into even the conversation today. But along the way, being given the fact that I was earning my living based upon commissions from the sale of life insurance, from the sale of annuities, from the sale of mutual funds, and that I became a fee-based financial advisor and I started to earn fees based upon the management of money, I was always sensitive of the fact that I had conflicts of interest.

And I was always jealous of people that didn't have those perceived conflicts of interest. It bugged me when I was a financial advisor that someone would come into my office and they would say something to me and they would say, "Well, Clark Howard says such and such," or "Dave Ramsey says such and such," or "Susie Orman says such and such," or "Jim Kramer says such and such." And I always felt inferior to those people because I thought, "Well, those people are saying what they have to say and they're able to say it without any conflicts of interest." They don't have any conflicts of interest, so they might be able to be completely true and honest and transparent and right, whereas I have conflicts of interest.

I get paid based upon the sale of a product. And I worked the very best that I could to always manage those conflicts of interest and always represent the products that I represented honestly and forthrightly and give full disclosure and point out conflicts of interest. I did the best that I could, but I always knew there's a real truth to that saying, that it becomes—it's very difficult to get a man to see the truth if his salary depends upon it, right?

I just butchered that phrase, but you know what I'm referring to, right? That it's very hard to get a man to see the truth that's in front of his own eyes if his salary depends upon his not seeing it. And I wondered for years, "Am I really being honest?

Am I genuinely being honest and truthful in my understanding here, or am I experiencing this conflict of interest?" And so when in 2013 I saw an off-ramp from that industry into—meaning from the world of commission sales and fees for financial advice, and I saw an off-ramp into what I had always admired, right?

These titans of moral certitude, these men who have the ability to sit back and impartially judge the industry without any conflicts of interest, I found that amazingly attractive. So so attractive. Because I thought, "Wow, I could be that disconnected person. I could be that impartial observer, that knowledgeable financial advisor who can sit back and who can impassionately—excuse me, dispassionately judge the truth of various claims, etc." And so for me, when I became host of Radical Personal Finance, it felt like a tremendous relief.

And one of my big concerns in the beginning of my business was I didn't want to recreate conflicts of interest. And so I picked up this general belief. I said, "I'm going to be honest." I made one of my early commitments to myself and to my audience. I said, "I may not always know the answer.

I may not always get everything right. I'm going to make mistakes. But I'm going to be honest. That's what I can control. I can choose to be honest. I can choose to be impartial and honest." And that's a commitment that I have made and that I have worked hard to keep to, even as I'm telling you shows on my mistakes.

It's part of that early commitment to simply be honest. But in this case, I felt so relieved to be out of the world of those conflicts of interest that I reveled in my impartiality. It just felt so good. And it fit my personality. Now, combine that with the fact that I had fairly modest financial goals.

I never set out to build an eight or nine-figure business. I just wanted to make at the time, I just wanted to make $100,000 a year for my laptop. And I thought, "I can totally do that." And so I'll enjoy this total freedom, this total freedom from conflicts of interest.

And I'll just be able to be that impartial observer. And for me, it was largely an ego boost, right? It was pride. It was a matter of personal pride that I'm going to be more righteous than all those other people out there who are still making their living on commissions.

And I had this kind of self-righteous attitude about my ability to be impartial. And I loved it. I loved it. In addition, I had some strong questions about other people's opinions. And as I was watching this revolution in content and media content that I've been a part of with the growth of independent media, I'm watching this and I'm observing it and I'm saying, "You know what?

This is awesome. I love this lack of conflicts of interest." I wanted, from the very beginning, I wanted to keep that sense of impartiality. I wanted to keep the lack of conflicts. So I was heavily invested. I chose to be ideologically heavily invested into models like listener support. I came out and I said, "I'm going to do this with just total listener support.

I'm going to do everything for free." When I was a brand new host of Radical Personal Finance, my goal was, "I'm going to give away everything I know for free. That way, it can help the people who are the most disadvantaged." I've said again and again, I always had a vision.

Seventeen-year-old kid in the hood has a phone, finds my show. I'm going to teach that kid how to be rich. That's my goal. And I wanted to do it. And so I poured myself out. I tried very, very hard to try to do that. And then I tried to set up funding models for me to be able to make a living directly from that content.

For about the first eight months or so of Radical Personal Finance, I worked a side job which paid my bills while I built the show. Then my first goal was to build a member support system. So I launched in the early days, I launched a membership site where many of my listeners were so generous to join that.

And I quickly started being able to make money. It took me one year and after the first year, I've been able to generate all of my income directly from Radical Personal Finance. Then along the way, so the membership support thing, I really, really wanted it to work. And so I tried, worked at it, worked at it, worked at it.

I really wanted it to work because I wanted the sense of ideological purity. For my own ego and my own kind of sense of personal righteousness, I wanted to have this ideological purity of saying, "Yeah, I don't sell anything. Yeah, I don't sell anything, right? My listeners support me." And that fit my ego.

It was a goal that I had. And again, I did it, but I really tried at it. So then my membership site, it wasn't working. I eventually took that down and I turned to Patreon. At the time, Patreon had newly launched and I was like, "I'm going to make this Patreon thing work." I loved it.

I thought, "Oh, this would just be so wonderful, right? You'll build all this listener supported content and you'll be supported directly by your listeners. There's no conflicts of interest. It allows me to do what I love, which is to turn on a microphone and speak and teach." I just thought, "This is going to be awesome." And so I really invested heavily, a lot of time.

I promoted it heavily. I invested a lot of time into it. And year after year went by and I was deeply focused on the listener support model. Well, I consider the listener support model a total failure. A few years ago, I spoke at FinCon on the topic and I said, "Look, I've made..." I can't remember how much it was at the time, but six figures, multiple...

I can't remember. But I put all my earnings from Patreon up on the screen and I said, "Look, this is how much money I've made on Patreon." And I was in the top... At the time, I was in the top few percent of the top tier of anybody who was making any money on Patreon.

And I said, "So I have succeeded," if by success we mean here that at the time, I was among all financial podcasters and people out there who were making the most money on Patreon. I said, "Look, I've succeeded." And I said from the stage, I said, "I don't encourage you to do this.

It doesn't work." All right, you get this tiny, tiny percentage of the audience who actually supports you. And I said, "Forgive me, and I don't mean this sounding ungrateful. I'm just trying to be honest." But I told the people at FinCon, I said, "It's the worst possible way for you to try to monetize your work." I said, "It just doesn't work.

And it will hurt you if you go down this road." I was very conscious of the fact that I had wasted several years trying to maintain this sense of impartiality and trying to avoid these conflicts of interest. I had wasted several years. Now fast forward, then I started to make, I switched and I started, okay, well, I could do ads.

And there've been many times in radical personal finance where I did ads. But I really, again, wanted that sense of impartiality. I wanted to be able to make a personal endorsement of every advertiser that I brought on the show. And so people approached me to run ads and I would say, "Oh, no, I got to personally approve of it.

If it's going to go on my show, it's going to be a sense of personal endorsement." And so I did some ads and I made money with ads. But because of the standards of I'm going to personally endorse all this stuff, I walked away from so much stuff. I walked away, I did very few affiliate deals, right, where I promote somebody else's products or somebody else's services.

I did very few affiliate deals because I thought, well, I just want to be, I want that sense of purity. And to this day, right, most of the things that I have promoted here on radical personal finance have been my own products and my own services. And I'm thankful because those things have been profitable.

But along the way, I have not made nearly as much money as I could have made. It's been a very expensive financial mistake. Today, I can face it square on and say, you know what, doing that again, I would not do it. Let me just share with you something that you should know, though.

I'm trying to share my experiences, but if you're one who just simply rejects what I have to say and says, I've got to prove it out for myself, I understand that because that's largely my personality. I like to listen carefully to what other people say. But if I have a sense of conviction about something, a sense that this is something that I want to do, this is something that's right, then I have this kind of press where I got to learn this myself.

I don't consider that as character strength. I consider it something that should be managed, but it is something that is true about me. And so if you had told me all this years ago, I don't know that I would have been willing to not try what I did because at the time it seemed important to me.

It was what I wanted to do, and I wanted to have that sense of impartiality that for me was very important to my ego. So I understand if you want to do this, but I'll tell you today that I consider this one of the biggest mistakes. Going forward, I will change.

Now it's hard for me to change. It's always hard for all of us, but it's hard for me to go from somebody who was never aggressive, who was never kind of an aggressive, pushy salesman. It's hard for me to change my personality and my character to become the kind of strong, pressing, aggressive marketer that I desire to be.

And I'll tell you why I can say without fear of error that I desire to be that person. The reason is this. If you think that a sense of impartiality is what you want, what I want to tell you is that the reason that I desired that objective impartiality, that lack of conflicts of interest, was because I wanted to help people.

I genuinely, desperately want to help people. I want the world to be a richer place. I want to make an impact on the finances of the world so that many millions of people are wealthier in years to come than they are today. Now I want that in a non-financial context, but I also very much want it in a financial context.

And I do not believe in a world of limited resources. I believe that there is no reason why in decades to come, tens of millions of us cannot be enjoying a much more wealthy lifestyle. And I want to be part of that. Genuinely want to help bring wealth to the world.

If you look back over the last century and you see how many advances we have made as a human population in the world, it is absolutely staggering. And I'm excited to see what things will look like a century from now. And so I want to be part of that.

I want to be a catalyst for that kind of change. I thought that by removing my conflicts of interest I could be a more effective catalyst. But what has actually been true is I have been dramatically less effective because I have never had the financial resources to expand my influence and reach the people that I most want to reach.

See in order for a business to work, the business has to make profit. A business has to make profit in order for it to work. And I understand that quickly your brain goes, "Well Joshua, what about a non-profit?" We'll come back to those in a moment. But I am convinced that one of the most important things is that any activity make a sufficient profit for it to be worth it doing for the owners.

A business that doesn't bring in enough profit to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue its operation will always close. And I came many times very close to closing my business because it didn't make enough profit. And looking back when I reflect on eight years of work, I should be miles ahead of where I am today in terms of the number of people that are on my team, in terms of the number of people that we impact on a daily basis, in terms of the teaching that we're able to bring to people who need it the most.

And along the way, one of the most important reasons that I'm not having that kind of impact yet is that I did not prioritize maximum profit. If I had prioritized maximum profit, I would have been able to serve many, many more people than I have up until this date.

So why didn't I prioritize maximum profit? I didn't focus on marketing. I didn't focus on selling. I always thought, "Well, if you build it good enough, they'll come." And it is true. But if you'll build it good enough and then market it like crazy, more and more will come.

And if you have something good, you owe it to people to do your very best to market it. Now, here's what I've learned. I have often used lack of marketing desire, a lack of push for desire, to allow me to get away with more mediocrity than I'm capable of.

Meaning that a lot of times, if I had dedicated myself and said, "You know what? I'm going to build something that's truly outstanding, truly outstanding, and I'm going to market it like crazy," then that puts within you a higher expectation of desire to do better, to create something better, because your name is behind it.

Whereas if you kind of give yourself the permission to say, "I'm going to create something, but I'm not going to really market it all that much," then you're kind of okay with failure and you don't put yourself out there. You don't risk it as much as you should. And so, along the way, I just see again and again how I've been hurt by this lack of marketing.

And then the lack of revenue, because you don't market as hard and as aggressively as you can, the lack of revenue causes you to not be able to expand, not be able to expand your abilities, not be able to expand your operations, not to be able to impact people with better, higher quality advice, better, higher quality services.

I recommend that you market hard. Now, there are a lot of people just like me who were never comfortable with marketing hard. I've always been a little bit jealous of people who just had the self-confidence and the ability just to market hard, to sell aggressively. I was never that guy who I could walk over and say, "Hey, how are you?

Who are you? Do you want any life insurance?" That was never me. I was always more timid. But what I have learned is if you market hard, you have the ability to help people. And the people that you're going to help are actually going to appreciate that marketing. Now, what I observe in personal finance circles is there are a whole lot of people who are dedicated to frugality, which I appreciate and have appreciated.

I think it's overwrought, overstated, but I've appreciated that. But I've also come to realize that a lot of them are dedicated to poverty. I don't say that lightly. A lot of people who I used to think were just dedicated to frugality, I actually believe are dedicated to poverty. They're dedicated to poverty and they don't appreciate money-making.

So they're caught in this existential crisis where they want to be wealthy, they want to be financially independent, but they don't want to actually buy anything or they don't want to actually sell anything. And I think this leads to this really bad personality disorder where you wind up becoming a hoarder, you wind up becoming a miser.

And what I have realized is I don't want to be that. I want to be someone through whom money flows dramatically. I don't want to be someone for whom money comes in and then it just gets stuck aside. And I find this interesting because as I observe even political debates and political arguments, I observe that I think there's more—and I'm just speaking here from a perspective of reading in some personal finance conversations, fret threads, public posts, groups, etc.—but there are more progressive, liberal, left-leaning people who are more miserly with their investments than so many billionaires are.

There are more people who are liberal progressives who believe in spreading the wealth around, who believe that the accumulation of wealth is morally not a good thing, and yet all they do is collect as much money as they possibly can and then put it in their 401(k) so they can become financially independent.

They don't build anything, they don't invest anything, they just put it aside in their 401(k), put it in their bank account, put it in their house, and they don't grow. Meanwhile you turn—and I study billionaires a lot of times—and you look and you say, "What is so-and-so doing?" And you're looking and you're like, "This guy doesn't have a thing in his stock account, he doesn't have a 401(k)." Everything is invested back into a business over here, creating something there.

I'm not trying to argue this too deeply, I'm saying that what shocked me is I realized that while I personally identify as a capitalist and I believe that capitalism is single-handedly the most effective tool that we have ever discovered for bringing billions of people around the world out of total abject poverty, I've been an awful capitalist.

And that pisses me off. It angers me to find myself having been in a situation where I didn't pursue the things that I thought I believed in. I always believed in the power of capitalism, but I didn't actually demonstrate my belief by my actions. I said that I had faith in the power of capitalism, but I didn't demonstrate my faith by my actions.

Rather, by my actions I looked and acted as though wealth was something to be shunned, wealth was something to be eschewed, wealth was something that you just simply went out and got a little bit and then hoarded it all up a side because after all it might end. And when I've realized that, it's like, no, that is not me.

I will not live that way. I will not be that frugal man who goes out and says, "Oh, you know what? Something's going to end and after all this could just all fall apart." I want to be somebody not to whom money flows and stays there like dead stinking water.

I want to be somebody through whom money flows. And I found myself again and again and again over the last few years finding situations where I'm like, "If I could just, if I could write a check and invest a six or seven figure sum into this particular thing, it could make a difference in the world." And I find myself unable to do that.

And that pisses me off. Forgive the vulgar speech, but it really does. And there's no excuse for it. Absolutely no excuse for it, except that I was committed to this self-righteous sense of impartiality, objectivity, no conflicts of interest. It's not healthy. It's not healthy. Self-righteousness is ugly. It's really ugly.

And it's not healthy. It's not a healthy place to live. It's not a healthy place to be. It's not. I don't believe that... And one more comment on kind of conflicts of interest. It took me years to the point where I could really trust my instincts and trust my perspectives.

Because I do think that the... I mean, there's a reason why we have that term "conflict of interest," right? You're involved in a certain area of the marketplace. You're involved in something. And if you stand to make a good deal of money, it can be a real temptation to do that.

But I think that probably the majority of people... I don't know what percentage to put on it, right? There are sociopaths who just don't understand how their actions are going to influence other people. I think most people are actually more honest than they're often given credit for. That was what surprised me when I went into the life insurance business.

I went into the life insurance business expecting to meet a whole bunch of crooks and charlatans and people who were just out to make more money on commissions. And I met a whole lot of people that really loved making commissions. But they genuinely believed that what they were doing was good.

They genuinely believed that what they were doing was right. And I realized that so many of the arguments that people would have about things are just academic things where it's about to make themselves feel good, right? You tell somebody, "Oh, you shouldn't invest in such and such because there's something else theoretically that's better." And maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

But here's what's funny. Earlier I said the "buy, term, invest, the difference" argument. This is one of the most popular arguments in personal finance. What should you do? Buy, term, invest, the difference. I would say that anybody who's ever said to somebody they shouldn't buy whole life insurance and instead should buy stocks owes an apology for ever having advised anybody to buy stocks when they could have bought Bitcoin.

If you've ever told someone what you should do is you should not buy whole life insurance. Rather what you should do is you should buy this stock market index fund over here because you'll come out better. So buy, term, and invest, the difference in stocks. Well, you better go back to every person you've ever said that to and apologize for not having told them to buy Bitcoin because you did them a huge disservice, as did I, right?

I did a show on why I missed Bitcoin. So I've apologized for that. If you've ever said that you owe every person you've said that an apology to. Now if you reject that, if you bristle at that, if you say, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on a second.

Bitcoin is not equivalent to the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund. These are not equivalent investments." Then you've just found the answer to the classic argument over should you buy whole life insurance or term insurance. These are not equivalent investments. They are different things. They're fundamentally different, unique things. It's not a matter of right or wrong.

It's a matter of fit. It's a matter of understanding what's appropriate in a situation. And when I finally understood that and I went back and realized, I looked at it and said, "You know what? You do have people of different conviction." My conviction when I was a life insurance agent and I sold disability insurance and life insurance, long-term care insurance, my conviction level changed about insurance products because of the experiences that I had.

When you sell life insurance, you tend to wind up paying more attention when people die. When you sell life insurance, you wind up understanding how much people screw up their own investments. And so you wind up having a sense of conviction about it. And that changed me over time where I realized, "You know what?

80% of these people that I work with are not crooks. I thought they were, but they're not. They're just ordinary men and women doing their very best to give good advice based upon the way that they see the world. Just like you and just like me." So those conflicts of interest that we're all trying to seek to avoid, those conflicts of interest are not something that can ever be avoided.

There's always going to be conflicts of interest. And I don't know any way to handle them other than to acknowledge them, verbalize them, disclose them, and try to manage them. We all have conflicts of interest. And what do you do? I don't like dishonesty. I'm the guy who... One version of jokes.

Don't ever tell Joshua Sheets a joke about... Never mind. The point is that you're never going to escape those conflicts of interest. And what I have learned is if you want genuinely the ability to ignore those conflicts of interest, it helps a whole lot to be rich. The brand new salesman for whatever product has a hard time walking away from potential money, but the wealthy salesman has an easier time of saying, "Yeah, this is a situation in which it's a good fit is where it's not a good fit." And so if you want to help yourself avoid those conflicts of interest, poverty is not the way to do it.

Rather, wealth is the way to do it. And you can become wealthy and you can sell hard without fear if you understand that. Now what about aggressive sales? Here's what I have realized from not doing aggressive sales. You do aggressive sales if you actually genuinely want to move people to action.

I think all of us have found people who were too aggressive for us at a certain point in time. Somebody who pushed us to make a decision. Somebody who pushed us to say yes to something, to buy something, to sign up for that. And we've often felt like, "Oh, that guy was just too aggressive for me." But then probably all of us have experienced a time where we felt like, "You know what?

I'm really glad that I acted. I'm really glad that I made the decision." And what I've discovered is that fear of being forcefully sold to is another poverty character trait by background. I remember when I was a new financial advisor, I was scared to talk to rich people. And I thought that rich people were going to be the hardest people to reach.

I thought that they were going to be the people who didn't want to talk to me, who weren't interested in what I had to say. I was scared of talking to rich people. And I thought that poor people were going to be easier to talk to because poor people needed money.

Well, I learned pretty quickly that it was the exact opposite. Poor people were often the most difficult people to talk to, whereas rich people were often the easiest. To this day, I could go back and I could give list after list of wealthy person who I would pick them up, pick up the phone, call them, say, "Hey, can I come and tell you what I do and what I have to share and blah, blah, blah?" And they would say, "Yeah, come on in." And what I learned is, right, they might only give me five minutes, but they say, "Hey, listen, Joshua, what do you got?

I'm really interested. Show me what you got. Tell me about it." Whereas poor people, "No, no, no, no, no, I've got a guy," right? Or, "I'm not interested in any of that," or, "I don't need that right now." And I've come to believe that there is a dramatic reason why this is the case.

And I don't know whether it's causation or correlation, right? Is a wealthy person open to hearing what people have to say about money because he has a lot of money, or did a wealthy person become wealthy because he was open to hearing from a lot of people what they had to say about money?

I don't know, but I think my bet is that it's probably more causation than correlation. And I've realized, if you go back, right, think about, I was talking about Bitcoin, right? It's the most amazing example, astonishing example that we have right now of dramatic wealth change. The people who have become wealthy on Bitcoin became so because they were open to hearing new ideas and they were open to thinking about things and they were open to trying things.

The people who didn't become wealthy were closed-minded. Now, I raise my hand and confess, I have many, many times been closed-minded. Closed-mindedness has not served me. Open-mindedness has. Now, what about buying things? I remember a number of years ago, I went to a gym. I went to an LA Fitness in the United States and I wanted to sign up and I wanted to go and buy a gym membership.

And so, like many people, I walked into the gym planning to sign up for their 1495, whatever it was, LA Fitness membership. And I walked in and told them to do that and they started to take my information and one of the personal trainers started a sales process and wound up trying very aggressively to sell me a personal training package.

And I remember sitting in the sales presentation and my instinct was to run away from the personal training package because after all, I'm Mr. Frugal, right? Why would I spend, whatever it was, $250 a month or $300 a month? Why would I spend that when I could avoid that and just spend $14.95 a month?

But I realized, I said, "Which is more expensive? The personal training package for $300 a month that I show up to or the 1495 gym membership that I never go to?" And in my lifetime, I'd signed up for so many 1495 or 2995 gym memberships that I never went to that it was just a total waste.

But I showed up when I hired a personal trainer and had a lesson. Like, this is how life is. That 1495 is far more expensive. And the older I get, the more I realize the value and the importance of paying for things. The value and the importance of paying people for advice.

One of the very best investments you could ever make with money is pay people for advice. Pay people for their time. If somebody's got something that you want, pay them money and get in where you can get it. It's the best thing you can do. Paying people for results.

Buying things right. Again and again, I have come to just be convinced every time I make the so-called frugal decision, every time I cheap out on something, I lose. I lose. And I especially lose one of those most valuable things that I have, which is time. I've come to be convinced that people who bristle at being sold to, people who bristle at being marketed to, are generally losers who don't understand that quality things, quality life, quality services, quality products are worth having.

They really are. Now there is a very clear dividing point as to should I be in this place or not. If you've got a $15 an hour job and you walk into a Rolls Royce dealership, that Rolls Royce dealer is not going to put on you an aggressive sales technique.

He's not going to do it because it's going to be obvious to him, this guy can't buy a Rolls Royce. He's going to let you walk around, look at the cars and you're going to be on your way. But if you're the kind of guy who genuinely wants a Rolls Royce and whatever, it's going to cost you $400,000, but you're thinking about cheaping out and buying the $200,000 car when you really want the $400,000 car, if he believes in his product, he's going to say you're going to be happier with the Rolls Royce and he's going to try his best to sell it to you in the very best way possible.

And you, if you want the Rolls Royce, you should go for it because we don't live in a world in which money is limited. Money is literally unlimited. There's an unlimited amount of money that exists. There's an unlimited amount of money that's available to you. There is no limit whatsoever to the amount of wealth that we can create in the world and the amount of wealth that you can have in your life.

And if you genuinely understand that, then it should transform your decisions. People who are parsimonious, they're losers, right? They don't win in the long run. And so what I've realized is I spent too much of my life being that guy who didn't believe in himself and believe in his own stuff and thus would pull back.

And then because I knew I didn't believe in my own stuff and believe in what I was doing and believe in the value, I didn't sell it as aggressive as I should have, as I could have. And then because of that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I believe in honesty.

If you don't have something worth spending money on, the solution to that is go out and develop something worth spending money on. Do the hard work. Do the study. Do the R&D. Do the development. Practice the engineering. But what you'll discover if you do that is that people want answers.

I spend a lot of money on advice because I want answers. I have limited time and I want very fast results, which means that I need expertise. I need the answers. And every tentative step that I have taken in that direction in my life, it has always paid off.

It has always paid off. Wish I could have snapped my fingers years ago and just automatically become that kind of person, that aggressive person. But I tell you, more and more I want to do it. And here's what happens. The people who can't afford something always ride on the coattails of those who can.

In almost any industry, in almost any place, my free podcast does not pay me to create it. If I did this podcast for free, I probably would have welched on my bet to myself to do a thousand. I don't know. Maybe I would have had the confidence and self-determination to do it, but I probably would have welched.

It's my high-paying clients who have provided me with the bandwidth to keep giving away the information for free. And in virtually every field it works like that. Right now, very wealthy men and women are pouring billions and billions of dollars into interesting areas of research, pouring billions and billions of dollars into space travel, pouring billions of dollars into anti-aging technologies.

They're just pouring money into these spaces. And all the poor people are going to win because of it. They're going to be the benefactor or the beneficiary a decade from now of all of the money that Jeff Bezos is investing into anti-aging research. Because they're going to make the—at the curve, they're going to make the discoveries and you're going to get that information practically for free.

So poor people, people who won't pay for stuff, always ride on the coattails of the rich people who will pay for stuff. So you should not be ashamed and embarrassed about selling something, about developing something. It's a poverty scarcity mindset that keeps you in that place. I wish I had a clearer way of resolving this show, but that is one of my biggest mistakes, is believing that progressive crap that somehow the accumulation of resources was a was a downside.

And again, I don't mean to be offensive, but it is the fact, right? There are so many people who are super frugal, super money conscious, don't want to sell anything, don't like to be sold to. And what happens is there are leeches upon society. The money comes in, comes in, comes in.

It gets piled up, piled up, piled up like that old miser and nothing ever happens because they haven't changed. And again, I've been there. I don't want that to be the case. I want to be someone who grows and who changes and who I want to be someone who changes the world.

In order to do that, you got to sell, you got to have something worth selling, and then you got to sell it. Because if you're going to help someone, you're going to sell it. If you truly believe, and this was the thing about life insurance sales, it came to be convinced.

All right, when I was before I became a life insurance agent, I read a book and I decided I was going to do it. And I read a book called How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling. I forget the author now, but it's a classic kind of motivational book.

And the author talked a lot about how he learned to do what was at that time called a one-call close, a one-call close. And at the time I was scared to do that because I thought this is going to be, this is going to, for me to do a one-call close, meaning one visit and tell the person, buy the insurance, then I'm going to have to be aggressive.

And I'm not aggressive. I'm not confrontational. I don't, I don't push people to do that because after all, I don't make decisions quickly. After all, I think on it, right? I always take my time to make a good decision and think on it. I don't act impulsively with my money.

And so how could I ask someone else to be, to act impulsively with their money? Right? How could I do that? And so I was scared of that. Well, I quickly found out in training, I was like, we don't, I don't do that anymore. That was, they did the one-call close and it was here, buy $5,000 of life insurance.

Well, in the modern world, I don't, I never met an insurance agent who would ever sell someone life insurance on the first, on the first call. But what I came to realize is that with life insurance, like if you actually understand life insurance, there's literally, and when I say literally, I mean literally, there's literally no reason if you think you might want some life insurance at some point in the future, there's literally never a reason not to act now in the way that insurance law in the United States works.

Right? All you do is you fill out an application, you give somebody their first month premium, you do your medical exam and you're insured on a conditional basis. And while it's very uncommon, obviously, that someone would die when their policy is an underwriting, it does happen. And there's literally no reason why a week later, you can't say, you know what?

I don't want the insurance. There's no, there's no reason why the insurance agent can't bring you your insurance policy. And you usually have a two week free look period, 30 days sometimes where you can return the policy and get all your money back. And so I realized like if you actually care about people, you owe it to them to actually make them say like, do the application and give me money and at the very least get free insurance.

It's not a sales gimmick. It's a matter of care. Right? If you genuinely believe that somebody, you're leaving a party and you genuinely believe that somebody is possibly endangering his life or the lives of others by driving drunk, you owe it to him to stop him. If you genuinely believe that somebody's actions are going to take him to hell, you owe it to him to preach the gospel.

If you genuinely believe that somebody is doing something that's going to harm their family, you owe it to them to point it out to them. You owe somebody honesty. If you actually care about people, you owe them a duty of honesty. And honesty means that if you have something that you genuinely believe is good for somebody, then you had better sell it to them and tell them why they should buy it and do it aggressively so that they'll want to buy it.

And then those who do, right? Stand behind your work. It's easy to offer a refund if somebody is dissatisfied. You're not going to please everybody, but you owe it to people to do it and to do it to your best of your ability. I wish I could have grasped that 15 years ago.

I wish I could have grasped it. But I think I grasp it today. And 15 years hence, I predict it will transform my life and I want it to transform yours as well. Don't be a loser who doesn't believe in what you do and believe in what you sell.

If you can't sell something with passion, get out, go somewhere else and find something you can sell with passion. But if you're creating something, if you're building something, sell with passion. Sell to people who need it, right? The classic thing that became very clear to me is that there was never a reason to be concerned about selling aggressively in the insurance world because the only mistake that you could make was not choosing the correct advice for somebody.

And so this classic argument over buy term and invest the difference that I like to harp on, it was just a classic error of identification. Meaning the kind of person who is a good fit for term life insurance is fairly obvious. And the kind of person for whom a whole life insurance policy is a good fit is also fairly obvious.

And you only have a problem when you mix those up. You only have a problem if you're sitting in front of somebody who makes $50,000 a year and has young kids and you're trying to tell them, "Oh, what you really need is $50,000 a whole life insurance." Like, that's your problem, right?

No, he doesn't need it. He needs $500,000 a term life insurance. But for the vast majority of people, and I think insurance agents, although they've never been able to prove it, right? People have horror stories, they've been treated badly. I know that stuff is out there. But at least in my experience, I think the vast majority of insurance agents always understood that.

And I very rarely, in my work with any agents, I very rarely came across a situation in which they did the wrong thing. It's obvious. Now, there are, in a very small number of situations, times where you're like, "Well, you could go either way here." And in my experience, most of the people that I worked with in the financial industry pointed it out.

They said, "This is what we do." And so a lot of it just comes down to identification. And so these conflicts that we think are conflicts are not a problem. You're not going to... Nobody's going to be... No $15 an hour worker is going to be pressured into buying a Rolls Royce.

It's not going to happen. And while you might think, "Oh, that $15 an hour worker got pressured into buying the new Kia," and you might think it would have been smarter for them to go and buy a three-year-old Toyota, you can always look at it another way and just say, "Hey, make the best of what you've got." Right?

New Kia with a seven-year powertrain warranty, whatever it used to be, 10-year powertrain warranty. Just drive the car and go about other things. You may sense kind of overloading with that same thing with frugality, but a lot of times I just discovered I've been wrong on a lot of stuff.

And this is one of those things, right? The frugality, the trying to save money and whatnot, the opportunity cost of that has been high. But that, my friends, is a show for another day. Thank you for listening. And while I don't have anything to promote right here, stay tuned because I will be starting to promote some stuff pretty soon.

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