The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. You could do a classic herb roasted turkey or spice it up and make turkey tacos. Serve up a go-to shrimp cocktail or use Simple Truth wild-caught shrimp for your first Cajun risotto. Make creamy mac and cheese or a spinach artichoke fondue from our selection of Murray's cheese.

No matter how you shop, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace all your holiday traditions. Ralph's, fresh for everyone. This coming January, I am co-hosting an event, an investment tour of Panama. And I would love for you to come and spend a week with me and with my friends Gabriel Custodiate and Mikkel Thorup in Panama City, Panama.

The dates of the event are January 22 to January 28, 2024. And during that week in Panama, we are going to do a fairly widespread comprehensive tour of Panama. We have a variety of conference presentations prepared, including specifics on the Panama lifestyle, on international banking, internationalization, taxation, etc. We're going to do some specific presentations on cryptocurrency.

As you know, my my co-host Gabriel Custodian, I have a course on that and he's almost finished with a book on it. In addition to that, we're going to tour real estate investment opportunities. We are going to tour a gold storage facility. We're going to discuss banking options, residency options, citizenship options, etc.

And at the end of the day, we're going to be hanging out. I'm going to be making myself completely available to those who are at the conference morning, noon and night for the entire week that we're there. And the conference attendees are limited to 40. And so there will be plenty of time for you to hang out with me and with all of our fellow conference attendees.

If that sounds interesting to you, please go to expatmoney.com/radical, link in the show notes, expatmoney.com/radical and check out all the information on our Panama investment tour in January of 2024. I'd love for you to come. Would love to see you there. There is a piece of financial advice as well as a corresponding mindset and philosophy that I myself have followed, have taught, and yet have now come to believe is not only wrong, misguided, but in many cases actually harmful.

I want to atone for my sins in this area by discussing it with you in the hopes that we can work together to avoid some of the problems that I see happening around the world of personal finance today. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with 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 going to begin today's episode by reading a short excerpt from a book. I'll tell you what book this is from in just a moment. The most fundamental of American questions is hard for me to answer these days, and luckily so. If it weren't, you wouldn't be holding this book in your hands.

So what do you do? Assuming you can find me, hard to do, and depending on when you ask me, I'd prefer you didn't. I could be racing motorcycles in Europe, scuba diving off a private island in Panama, resting under a palm tree between kickboxing sessions in Thailand, or dancing tango in Buenos Aires.

The beauty is I'm not a multimillionaire, nor do I particularly care to be. I've never enjoyed answering this cocktail question because it reflects an epidemic I was long part of, job descriptions as self-descriptions. If someone asks me now and is anything but absolutely sincere, I explain my lifestyle of mysterious means simply.

I'm a drug dealer, pretty much a conversation ender. It's only half true, besides the whole truth would take too long. How can I possibly explain that what I do with my time and what I do for money are completely different things? That I work less than four hours per week and make more per month than I used to make in a year?

For the first time, I'm going to tell you the real story. It involves a quiet subculture of people called the new rich. What does an igloo-dwelling millionaire do that a cubicle dweller doesn't? Follow an uncommon set of rules. How does a lifelong blue-chip employee escape to travel the world for a month without his boss even noticing?

He uses technology to hide the fact. Gold is getting old. The new rich, NR, are those who abandon the deferred life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present, using the currency of the new rich, time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as lifestyle design, LD.

I've spent the last three years traveling among those who live in worlds currently beyond your imagination. Rather than hating reality, I'll show you how to bend it to your will. It's easier than it sounds. My journey from grossly overworked and severely underpaid office worker to member of the NR is at once stranger than fiction.

And now that I've deciphered the code, simple to duplicate. There is a recipe. Life doesn't have to be so hard. It really doesn't. Most people, my past self included, have spent too much time convincing themselves that life has to be hard. A resignation to nine-to-five drudgery in exchange for, sometimes, relaxing weekends and the occasional keep it short or get fired vacation.

The truth, at least the truth I live and will share in this book, is quite different. From leveraging currency differences to outsourcing your life and disappearing, I'll show you how a small underground uses economic sleight of hand to do what most consider impossible. If you've picked up this book, chances are that you don't want to sit behind a desk until you're 62.

Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, real-life fantasy travel, long-term wandering, setting world records, or simply a dramatic career change, this book will give you all the tools you need to make it a reality in the here and now, instead of in the oft-elusive retirement. There is a way to get the rewards for a life of hard work without waiting until the end.

How? Begins with a simple distinction most people miss. One I missed for 25 years. And, dear audience, please pay attention, because these are the two paragraphs that I want to focus on. People don't want to be millionaires. They want to experience what they believe only millions can buy. Ski chalets, butlers, and exotic travel often enter the picture.

Perhaps rubbing cocoa butter on your belly in a hammock while you listen to waves rhythmically lapping against the deck of your thatched-roof bungalow. Sounds nice. A million dollars in the bank isn't the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows. The question is then, how can one achieve the millionaire lifestyle of complete freedom without first having one million dollars?

I first read those books, excuse me, I first read those words in the year 2007, sitting in a comfortable chair in Barnes & Noble bookstore in downtown West Palm Beach. Bookstore is now gone, as many bookstores are. I was browsing through the bookstore during college, and I stumbled across this book called "The Four-Hour Workweek" by author Tim Ferriss.

And I found it before it got big. I found it right when it had hit the shelves, and I found the title so attractive. I immediately opened up, read the introduction, and for what I would assume are fairly obvious reasons, was hooked. Ferriss is a phenomenal writer, and his hooks are fantastic.

And this hook of living like a millionaire without having to be a millionaire was something that immediately made sense to me as the goal worth pursuing. After all, if I can live like a millionaire within the next few years, then why waste 30 or 40 years becoming a millionaire?

What's the point? Why not just simply live like a millionaire? Well, it's a few years later now. I guess technically 16 was I record this podcast. And I've realized that while there's an element of this that I do like and do practice, there's also a great danger. The great danger is that if you get accustomed to living like a millionaire, and you lose your motivation to be a millionaire, you will never in fact become a millionaire because you did not become a millionaire.

Instead, you became somebody who thinks that they're cheating the system and living like a millionaire, and you never become a millionaire. One theme that has been very popular through all of my formative years has been the theme of hacking life. I used to read a website and blog called Life Hacker.

This came out of computer culture with the word hacking, meaning somebody who could go into a system and break all the rules and get in. And then it became something that was applied to life. We want to find little life hacks, which basically means clever little tricks that give you a little bit more bang for your buck.

But this was so omnipresent in my formative years that I kind of absorbed that this is obviously the right way to do it. We should look for hacks. We should look for ways to do things the fastest way possible. And Tim Ferriss is perhaps the paragon of this. He would write blog articles about how to learn a language in a tiny number of hours, how to accomplish this extraordinary feat of life in a very short period of time.

He had a whole TV show that was dedicated to demonstrating how he was able to deconstruct certain activities and show people how to accomplish those things faster and better. And to be clear, by the way, I hold no grudge against Tim Ferriss. I admire him enormously. We all of us go out in the world and share our message and our ideas.

And I would bet that today if Tim was going to go and write the four-hour work, he would probably write it very differently. That's what we do. And I like Tim. He's a very smart guy, very useful, etc. But this concept of hacking was so pervasive in my life.

And I didn't hear a voice of saying, "Hey, there's actually good reasons to do the opposite." There's actually good reasons to do things the long, laborious, difficult way. I first began to realize this when I started thinking about my own children. As a homeschooling father, I think an excessive amount, an inordinate amount, way too much about some of these topics.

I'm always looking for ideas. I'm looking for authors. I read books nonstop about it. I argue with anybody I can find with an opinion who's willing to defend that opinion. I take it home. I think about what they said. And I construct my counterarguments and refine and adapt my philosophy, etc.

And I've been doing this for years. One of the things that I realized in thinking about education was the futility of hacking education. Now, there are probably times and places in which hacking school is a good idea. Some months ago, I talked about getting a college degree fast, easy, and cheap.

And that's worthwhile. If you need a college degree, recognize you can go get one fast, easy, and cheap. Probably anybody of reasonable academic competence who recognizes that his life is hindered by not having a college degree could get one within a year using some of the strategies that I've outlined and discussed elsewhere.

But one thing that has always been clear to me is that all you're doing in that instance is printing yourself a degree, a diploma. You're hacking the system so that you have a degree and a diploma. And that can be useful because it may be a credential that opens something else up to you.

But what that does not give you is what many people actually want, which is the education. And it's rather crazy that we live in a world in which we would ever make the choice to pursue the degree or the diploma rather than the education. And as I thought a lot about child training, child raising, education, you know, what's the principle of school, how do you know you're well-educated, etc., I came to the conclusion that in every area, you're better off pursuing the long, difficult path that results in your actually being genuinely, thoroughly educated rather than being somebody who is well-credentialed, somebody who hacked the system.

Now, my own education was not a total hack, but I've often reflected back and wished that I had done the harder work. I did well in school myself, past high school, no problem. I remember my GPA, but I was usually in the top of my class. Not the very top, didn't work that hard, but I was in the top ranks.

Did okay in college, depending on the year and how much I partied versus how much I actually studied. But when I thought back, I wished that I had done it. I wished that, and I still wish, I wish I had read all the textbooks I was given. I wish I had done all the homework.

I wish I had done more than I was assigned to do or required to do. Where I most noticed this myself was my senior year of college. The only year of my own schooling that I ever actually did all the work was my senior year of college. That was because it was a year of intense personal growth for me.

At the time, I was determined to get out of debt. I decided I wanted to pay off all my student loans before I graduated from college. I was doing my senior year of capstone courses, the hardest courses, and I was also working 40 hours a week. And the only way that I was able to make that work was to sit down with a calendar, chart out all of my classes.

It took 19 credit hours of class, and my work times, because I had to submit them to my boss. Here's the time that I'm going to be working in order to make this work. And in order to do that, I also had to put homework times and study times onto my calendar.

And I gave myself a little bit of free time. As I recall, I think I had two or three hours on Saturday evening. I had Sunday morning free, and then I had till about two o'clock on Sunday afternoon. That was when I started doing homework, was two o'clock on Sunday afternoon.

And during my entire senior year, because I actually had a schedule that had homework time, and I was committed to it, I was motivated for it, I actually started doing all of the readings for class. I read my textbooks. I was prepared every single time. And I had the most incredible year of college that I had ever had.

It changed everything. Not only was college immediately easy, never had to study for a test, because I just did the readings and just went and take the test, but I learned an enormous amount. The most amazing thing to me as a young man was that my teachers all of a sudden became very smart.

Previously, I had been very critical of my teachers, and I remember that in my senior year, when I came to class prepared, and I knew what was going to be discussed, all of a sudden my teachers got a lot smarter, and I gained a lot more from the classes.

And I got straight A's, not even an A-minus across the board, summer, fall, and spring of my graduating year of college. And it made me reflect back, and I thought, "Why did I waste so much time? Why did I just get by getting the grades that I needed to get a diploma?

Why didn't I actually study? Why didn't I actually learn this stuff?" And to this day, I look back, and don't worry, I'm not about to cry. It's just reality. You look back, and you think, "Man, if only I'd actually learned it when I had the time. If only I'd done it." Now, let's move to finance.

I think the same exact thing happens in finance, and I see it happening all around. I realized myself that by focusing on short-term wins, on living rich now, being a part of the new rich, frequently what happens is you don't lay the groundwork for an enduring level of wealth.

Another example from the book, "The Four-Hour Workweek." In a later part of the book, Tim Ferriss teaches people how to do what he calls "dreamlining." And dreamlining involves you laying out your dream ideal lifestyle, and then putting in place a budget for it. And if I went back through my old journals, I could find my own dreamlines of that time.

And Ferriss, being a young man and writing to what ended up being a lot of young men, was very consumeristic in his examples. He talked about how you don't have to be a millionaire to have a really great car. You can just determine the cost of these. So from this chapter on dreamlining, where you define your goals, then you lay out your dreams, etc.

And then you determine the costs of these dreams, and you calculate your target monthly income, your TMI, based upon your timelines. Here's his words. "If financeable, what is the cost per month for each of the four dreams—rent, mortgage, payment plan, installments, etc.? Start thinking of income and expense in terms of monthly cash flow, dollars in and dollars out, instead of grand totals.

Things often cost much, much less than expected. For example, a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, fresh off the showroom floor at $260,000, can be had for $2,897.80 per month. I found my personal favorite, an Aston Martin DB9 with a thousand miles on it through eBay for $136,000, $2,003.10 per month. How about a round-the-world trip?

Los Angeles to Tokyo, Singapore, Bangkok, Delhi, or Bombay, London, Frankfurt, Los Angeles for $1,399. For some of these costs, the tools and tricks later in the chapter will help. Last, calculate your target monthly income for realizing these dreamlines. And you lay out your income and figure out what's the total.

And then he says this, "Chances are that the figure is lower than expected, and it often decreases over time as you trade more and more having for once in a lifetime doing." Now, I thought that was a really good way to handle life at the time. And I pursued that in many, many regards.

And I've lived well, and I'm grateful for living well because I made the best use of those years of my life. But here's the thing that I only realized later. If you pursue dreamlining and you go out and—you can hear he was talking about buying a Lamborghini, but let's just say you go out and you rent a Lamborghini, to make my point clear.

You may be able to afford the monthly rental payments, or lease payments, or whatever it is. But at the end of it, you're left with nothing. If you bought the car, you're left with an old, worn-out car that's not worth much. If you rented it, you're left with nothing, except the memories and the pictures and the experiences you had.

But if you went out and became wealthy first, you went out and became a multimillionaire, and then as a result, you bought yourself the car that you wanted. At the end, when that car is dusty and old and dilapidated, you're still a millionaire. And you can go buy another one or anything else that you want.

Sounds obvious when you say it, but here's what I later learned. Sometimes, the things that you do to pursue the Lamborghini lease payment on a target monthly income, results in you're not doing the things that you need to do to become a multimillionaire. Not always. Perhaps there are many people who can do both.

I've tried to do both, and I've learned to do both. But if you have to choose between them, don't choose the instant gratification. Choose the hard path. If you focus on becoming, in its fullest essence, the kind of person that you want to be, and if you focus on becoming the kind of person who has the dreams and the goals and the ambitions that you have, then it becomes easy for the rest of time.

Whereas if you play at being that person, you're basically, in many cases, dooming yourself to a lifetime of want. Let me give a different example. Also, when I was in college, I read a book called The Game by Neil Strauss. Neil Strauss is a very enjoyable author to read.

He wrote this book called The Game. The Game was a story of his experience of becoming a so-called "pickup artist." A pickup artist is defined as a man who goes out and interacts with lots of women with the goal of picking them up, engaging in normally a sexual relationship, may or may not be some romantic relationship involved.

But the ideal or the vision or the dream that is shared about somebody who is a successful pickup artist is a man who has a lot of women, many sexual partners, and has it easily without a lot of commitment, etc., and is constantly accumulating more and more sexual partners.

I was super interested in this. I read The Game. I read other books. I bought courses and whatnot. I was interested. I learned about all the things about how to become a pickup artist. As I was reading it, one of the things that I noticed is that there were a lot of tactics and techniques that were being taught.

Teaching tactics and techniques is not always wrong, but let me give a few examples from the world of pickup artistry. As pickup artists at the time, I have no idea. I have not followed this space. I have no idea what the pickup artists today are teaching. This is almost 15 years ago, 20 years ago.

But at the time, one of the things that was super common is they would talk about how you approach a woman. The thing that became very famous, because it really angered women when they would write about it, was what they would call at the time the "neg," the neg short for negative.

Basically, it was a technique that a man would use to throw a woman off her balance a little bit by engaging in a somewhat gentle insult when she wasn't the kind of woman who was used to being insulted or used to feeling self-conscious. In theory, this was supposed to open up the opportunity to make them, I can't remember, open up a conversation or whatever it wound up being.

I always think of this as like a technique. This is one of those things that you can practice. How can you give a backhanded compliment that actually turns out to be negative in order to throw a woman off of her balance a little bit? In hindsight, I look at this and I say, "What a stupid way to live.

What a stupid way to interact with life. To be a guy who's not successful with women and then go out and try to accumulate a set of tactics and techniques and then exercise those tactics and techniques." Now, I should hasten to mention that it's not all stupid. For example, one of the classic things of pickup artistry is that you have to approach a lot of women.

A lot of times, the guys who are struggling in this area are those who lack self-confidence. Over time, you build self-confidence and it can lead to you becoming a more confident person. But there's another way. The other way is you could just simply ignore women. You could build yourself into the kind of man that women want to be with and then you don't need much technique at all as long as you're the kind of person that women want to be with because you become the guy that they want to be with.

And then you don't have to bother with any tactics or techniques. And this is true in so many areas of life. And as I've developed my work here at Radical Personal Finance over the years, I realized this is what annoys me about what I used to be into with finance.

Is that by looking and focusing for the tip or the technique or the little thing, you wind up missing out on the big picture. And in reality, I feel often like frustrated. It's like, "Joshua, why do you talk so much about making more money or meaning income? Why do you talk so much about savings rates and whatnot?" Well, it's because that's what we need to spend 80% of our time on.

And we need to not look for the technique or the tactic, the super mega backdoor Roth IRA or any of that stuff. We need to focus on first, you're becoming the kind of guy who can have the money to fully fund a mega backdoor Roth IRA. But I used to be obsessed with the tips and the techniques and the tactics.

And then I realized that if you just do the hard work, everything's simple. If you just make $400,000 a year, everything is simple. How do you make $400,000 a year? Well, if you develop highly valuable skills in the marketplace and you do it the hard way by building those skills, learning them, exercising them, having a proven game plan and track record, etc., then you become a guy who's worth $400,000.

And once you're worth $400,000 genuinely in the marketplace, then you're kind of worth that forever. And then your financial problems are solved. So I don't mean to sound insulting or something, but I just look back and I think of my foolishness. How did I not see that? Why did I not understand that the hard way is actually the better way?

If I reflect back, getting things fast and easy in many cases actually kept me from doing the real work that was necessary. Let me use another few examples to put this into more of current day focus. I've watched, super interesting to me, over the last, I would say, two years, we have developed a language around the brain chemical of dopamine.

People talk about doing a dopamine detox. People talk about having a dopamine addiction. And I'm no brain scientist. I'm happy to concede that this is a perfectly useful way of going through life. But one of the things that a lot of guys realize is that they have a dopamine addiction and the addiction is to cheap fixes or cheap dopamine, unearned dopamine.

And so the classic examples is our phone. We pull out our phone, we get a dopamine hit going on social media. Men get a dopamine hit from pornography. You get a dopamine hit from doing some like cheap and easy, easy thing that makes you feel good all of a sudden.

But then when you close the cheap and easy thing down, you're left without any real lasting dopamine and you didn't do anything to earn it. And so you wind up just going back to that place for the hit and you're like any other drug addict, you're a dopamine addict and you just need another hit, need another hit, need another hit, need another hit.

And you don't ever wind up with anything that endures. You don't wind up with a lifestyle that endures. And on basically every level, unearned dopamine, meaning where you got it because it was easy and cheap, you consumed fast food, you used pornography, you stared at YouTube unceasingly. You get the dopamine hit, but it ruins the rest of your life.

And if you flip it around and you do it the hard way and you go and you say, I'm going to earn my dopamine. You do a dopamine detox and then you earn your dopamine through effort. Then you create a virtuous cycle in the other direction where you start to train your brain to hit that experience, hit that chemical off of genuine love and connection, genuine hard work, genuine exercise high, whatever the expression of it is.

And the cool thing about it is you get the feelings that you want in the here and now, but then you get the lifetime of feelings ahead of you. So, I no longer embrace the thinking of how can I get this fast and easy? But I guess let me be honest.

It is my ambition to not be the kind of guy who embraces the thinking of how can I get this fast and easy? It is my ambition to be the kind of guy who thoroughly and genuinely says, how can I do something the hard way? How can I do something the real way?

The hard way is the right way. The hard way works reliably. Hacks, shortcuts don't always work. When they work, they don't always keep working. Whereas the hard way works reliably. Just the simple comments I've said so far in this podcast. If you become the kind of person who is worth a high salary because you bring very valuable skills to the marketplace, it's going to be relatively easy for you to command a high salary because you will have people who want you.

Whereas if you're not the kind of person who is worth a high salary, then when you get one, you feel like you're an imposter. It affects your productivity and your output. And if you can't bring results, then pretty quickly your salary goes away and it's damaging to you. So, it's in the other way.

The hard way works reliably in anything. If you're the kind of guy who is attractive to a woman, genuinely, thoroughly on every dimension, you have the personality characteristics and traits. You have the character that is attractive to her. You have the looks that are attractive to her. You have the features, the money, the status, the position, whatever it is that's attractive to her.

If you develop those things the hard way, you don't need any tricks. Straightforward. And it's you. It's authentically, genuinely you. So, you don't have a sense of being an imposter. The hard way works reliably. In addition, the hard way scales and compounds. Hacks don't. What happens is you have to trade them in one for another.

Give you a current day example. I have been a proponent of the concepts of internationalization. The idea being that choose different countries that serve your goals, your lifestyles, your needs, etc. I continue to be a proponent of that. One of the things that I've observed by being around this space is there is a subset of guys.

Mostly I follow guys and I watch the guys do it. There's a subset of guys who are living in a place like the United States or a place like the United Kingdom, etc. And all of a sudden they realize, you know what? I could live well and live cheaper somewhere else.

I don't need to live on $4,000 or $5,000 or $7,000 a month in New York or Miami or Orlando or Nashville or wherever they happen to be. Instead, I can go to Latin America and I can live like a king on $1,500 a month in Colombia or Panama or wherever.

And so they quickly go and do that. Some of them use that kind of activity as a launching pad. They use the fact that they can live now on $1,500 a month to allow, and previously they needed $6,000 a month. Now it allows them to save $4,500 a month and they keep on going.

But it feels to me from watching and listening to a lot of guys, there's a significant percentage of people who do that, who then become the kind of guy who just makes $1,500 a month because I can live on $1,500 a month and I can live the good life.

After all, here I am having the barbecue on the beach, living well. I don't need much money. I'm just living well. Life's good, man. Life is life. Life's good. But what can frequently happen is the guy left when he was 23, goes and does it for 10 years. At 33, he's completely fallen behind and he finds himself frozen out of all the things that his peers are doing.

He's missed out on a decade of compounding skills, compounding certifications, compounding usefulness in the workplace. He's missed out on a decade of compounding money from his investments growing and his income growing, etc. And so now he's worried about inflation. All of a sudden, his particular country that he chose is going through an inflationary spiral and he's all upset.

What about the ratio of the Mexican peso to the dollar and all the rest of this stuff? Where if he had just been a bit patient or been thoughtful about how he applied these things and done things the hard way, then he wouldn't need that. He wouldn't need to be worried about the inflation rate.

Because he did it the real way and his investments and his income are far exceeding the pace of inflation. Now notice, I'm not trying to be prescriptive of what any one person should or should not do. I'm not saying that he shouldn't leave New York and move to Bogota or that he should leave New York and go to Bogota.

Again, it can be either way. But the mindset of the guy doing it is what matters. Is he looking for an opportunity to get ahead faster, but he's still doing the hard work or he's looking for a hack? Because the hard way scales and compounds and hacks don't. You have to go from one country and then you got to go for a cheaper country.

Next thing you know, you're in a place that you don't want to be. You wake up and you're looking at your friend who's living in a mansion and you're saying, "How did you do that?" Well, this stuff compounds. The hard way, doing things the hard way, allows you to become a different person in the fullness of time.

You become a different person. Whereas sometimes hacks transform you into the wrong kind of different person. They transform you into the kind of guy who looks for a hack. The hard way leads to your having pride, satisfaction, and real self-confidence. Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County.

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Visit Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County in Santa Ana and get yours. Offer in soon. See dealer for details. It's funny to me that in the English language we have multiple uses and meanings of the word hack. And some of them, like other interesting English words, are the completely opposite meaning.

So for example, if I say, "He's a hacker," or "He hacks life," or "He's a life hacker," or "He's got a great hack," that has a completely wildly different meaning from my saying, "He's a total hack," or "He just hacked that job." And yet, is it really so different?

Is there not a reason why we have the term, "He's a total hack," and it uses the same meaning? So here's my summary. Choose carefully the things that you commit to doing. Choose them because they're important to you. Choose them because they represent your ambitions, your goals. Choose carefully the things that you want to do.

Choose carefully the things that you commit to doing. And then commit to them all the way. Don't just say, "I'm going to dabble in them," but commit to them. If you want to live a wealthy lifestyle, commit to becoming wealthy. And when you see the opportunity to live well now, I don't think that's harmful, as long as you maintain that commitment to becoming wealthy.

If you want to learn another language, don't try to do a hack. Commit to learning the language. Now, when you have the opportunity to speed up your learning curve, certainly. There's not generally anything wrong with it, but don't look for the hack. Look for the genuine acquisition of it.

So I, for example, you've heard me in public comment, people ask me how to learn a language. First thing I say is, "It's a multi-thousand hour project, so don't think it's anything else. It's a multi-thousand hour project. Commit to, 'How can I get those thousands of hours?'" And then at the other end, you'll have so much self-confidence, because you know, "This ability that I have is earned." And if you've chosen carefully the things that you commit to doing, and you're committed to them, does it really matter how quickly you learn?

Why? What do you have in life except time? Why do you want the results so fast? What's the point? You have the time, and something worth doing is worth doing because it's important to you. So go ahead and just do it. And if it takes you more time, do it.

I think often one of the reasons we try to do things fast is we don't understand that the balance of time that's necessary is not that— meaning the amount of time that's necessary to genuinely do something well is not that much more for a much higher level. Let me use the language example.

Let's say that you're choosing a language, and let's say that it'll take you a thousand hours to genuinely be competent and comfortable in that language, to have very high levels of understanding. Obviously, any language, in the fullness of time, you're going to need thousands and thousands of hours to have the highest expression of it.

But let's assume that it's a thousand-hour project. Having learned some languages, having taught some languages, having studied this out very deeply, what's interesting to me is there's just an overwhelming difference between your skills and ability at, say, four or five hundred hours in a language as compared to your skills and ability at, say, a thousand hours in a language.

There's an overwhelming difference in your confidence, your comfort, your fluency, just your ability. There's a huge difference between those. Now, the guy who's hacking the language is going to look at it and say, "If I can achieve this, speaking this language and call myself fluent in 500 hours, why would I want to do a thousand hours in it?

Why not just go on to something else?" My answer would be, number one, there's an overwhelming difference between being the kind of guy who can get by with 500 hours of work versus genuinely being comfortable and confident and fluent in a thousand hours of work. There's a huge difference.

But in the fullness of time, the difference in time between your 500 hours of investment and a thousand hours of investment is not actually that much time. So if you've decided to learn Spanish and you put in 500 hours over the course of, say, two years, well, another two years will bring you to a much higher level of fluency.

And if you start learning Spanish when you're 21 years old and you've reached that very high level of fluency at the age of 25, you may have another 75 years in which you can enjoy that level of fluency. And what's amazing about something like language is that once you reach that high upper intermediate, low advanced stage of language learning, it pretty well sticks with you for life, even if you have minimal use of it.

And so the 25-year-old who really invests the time and reaches a high level of fluency in the language may just stop for a decade. And then he comes back and says, "You know what? I'm going to brush up my Spanish." And in a few years, sorry, a few hours, a few tens of hours, very quickly, it's back in place.

But if you stop at that lower level of language acquisition, you put in 300 hours, you got through it, you kind of packed your way through it and figured it out, then you quit for a decade and come back, you're going to be starting from a much further back place.

Now with wealth, this is even more clear. It is even more powerful. When you sit down with a chart and you chart out your income, you chart out your investments, if you put in that decade, that two decades of hard work and wealth accumulation, etc., and you're committed to being the person who is a multi-millionaire, not just running out and renting a Lamborghini, then you get to enjoy it for life.

And even if you have a setback, you have a bad investment, you suffer some kind of significant setback, and you have to rebuild from nothing, you can rebuild it much faster, better from scratch because you became the different kind of person. Back to school, which is where I started.

It's not the grades that ultimately count, it's the learning. Learn the work well and the grades come automatically. It's not the grades that count, it's the learning. If you just learn the work well, the grades come automatically. On the other hand, if you focus on the grades, the inverse is not necessarily true.

Having spent a lot of time thinking about education and knowing that that's a common thing for all of us, this is something that I just see so clearly. And what's amazing about it is I never thought about it when I was in school. But I pointed this out to you.

As a homeschooler, I don't keep letter grades, I don't keep performance grades. I have embraced testing as a learning methodology. I used to say I didn't embrace testing and I have changed that. I have come to believe that testing is in of itself a learning tool because it seems from all the memory researchers and scientists, it seems that testing yourself allows your brain to actually record things more effectively.

Some super interesting studies that have been publicized and talked about where it's actually like they did a study one time where they had a certain set of people reread content multiple times and they had another set of people read the content one time and then test multiple times, whether through the use of free active recall or some other testing methodology.

And just by being tested multiple times, the people who were just tested and only read the material one time had a higher rate of retention and learning than the people who just read the material multiple times. So I have embraced, I have come to embrace testing. What I have not come to embrace is the concept of intense grading, especially not for young children.

It's a waste of time. The grade is primarily just a marker. And what's interesting about it, and again, this is not a revelation to anybody except me, because I, but the idea is that if you do poorly in something, all that's a sign for is that you need to repeat it.

That's it. If you do poorly in something, it's just a sign you don't know well, don't know it well enough. And so just do the class again. Get another book, read the book again, go through the class again, try a different teacher, just keep going until you learn something.

And when you think back and you reflect on so many students who do poorly in school, and you think, wouldn't it be better if we just slowed everything down? And wouldn't it be better if instead of advancing you mindlessly through a set of classes based upon your age, we advanced you through a set of classes based upon your mastery of the material?

And you simply repeated the material using new inputs, fresh books, fresh concepts, fresh presentation to try to take advantage of unfired synapses in your brain, and just repeat things until you're an A student. In every class. Well, now all of a sudden, wouldn't that be transformative? Because instead of just struggling through and doing just enough to get a C and pass the class and move on, you just went through the class again, twice, three times, whatever it takes until you're an A, then it'll stick with you for life.

And when you think about education being such a powerful short set of years, and yet how important that educational foundation is, it's amazing. So it's not the grades that ultimately count. It's the learning. Learn the work well and the grades come automatically. Focus on the grades. The opposite is not true necessarily.

Become a man of value in the world and the salary and riches will come automatically. Focus on the salary and riches and the inverse is not true. You have to become a man of value. If I were rewriting Tim's book, I would today talk about the fact that you absolutely can enjoy a Lamborghini lifestyle now, but that all of your consumption goals should be specific rewards that are connected to performance, enduring, lasting performance.

So for example, if you make for yourself the commitment that I'm always going to live on 50% of my income, and you just automatically at the top say 50% of your income, then you can spend significantly with the other side. And by the way, Tim did talk about that in the book.

Again, I'm not mad at Tim. Just pointing out that I wasn't smart enough to grasp it, of the importance of it being a very small amount. Use consumption-related goals to encourage you and cause you to move forward, but make sure that those consumption goals are not of primary importance.

Make sure that those consumption goals are of very, very modest importance. Think back to the way that I teach this, when I just talk about how much should you spend on a car. A lot of people are shocked when I say 10%, but if you follow the 10% rule, it doesn't mean you have to always drive an old car, meaning you should buy a car if you're really interested in wealth building.

You should buy a car that's not worth, or own vehicles and other stuff that's not worth more than 10% of your annual income. And a guy making $100,000 says, "I'm not driving a $10,000 car." Okay, you want to drive a $50,000 car? Want to drive a $100,000 car? Change the income.

And if you change that metric, and you use the car as a driver, a motivating force, then you get the car and you get so much more. But if you just go out with $100,000 income, you buy a $100,000 car just because you can, you're probably going to come to regret it in life.

I'm going to wind this down there. Don't seek for the easy hack. Take the hard way. Take the difficult way. Become a different person. That is the better path. And it doesn't take as long as you think. If you're the kind of person who's motivated to live the lifestyle of the new rich, if you're the kind of person who is motivated to learn a language, it doesn't require that much more for you to do it the genuine way, the hard way, but you get a lot more benefit for it.

Don't look for the hacks. Look for the real deal. The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. You could do a classic herb roasted turkey or spice it up and make turkey tacos. Serve up a go-to shrimp cocktail or use simple truth wild-caught shrimp for your first Cajun risotto.

Make creamy mac and cheese or a spinach artichoke fondue from our selection of Murray's cheese. No matter how you shop, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace all your holiday traditions. Ralph's fresh for everyone.