♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamaha Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamaha.com/palms to discover more. 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. - 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.

And in today's podcast, I would like to share with you a concept that has been extremely helpful to me throughout my life called the 1000% formula. This is something that I first learned in high school from Brian Tracy, who was one of my mentors that I listened to for many, many years.

And I found this to be such a practical and useful outline that I've just never been able to get away from it. I've mentioned this repeatedly in podcasts and sometimes I'll get a question from a listener saying, "Hey, what was that podcast that Joshua talked about, "the 1000% formula?" And in the past, I didn't have a standalone podcast for that.

It's buried in, I talk about it in many of my courses, I talk about it in various podcasts, but I wanted to create a standalone podcast for you to teach you the 1000% formula. Now, again, I learned this from Brian Tracy. His version was somewhat close to my version, but I've taken it, I've modified it and adapted it to my own needs over the years.

And I want to share it with you now. The basic idea of the 1000% formula is that small daily increases in productivity, repeated consistently, can lead to dramatic improvements over time. The way that Brian would ask the question would be to say, "Could you, if you really wanted to, "could you increase your productivity, "your performance, your output, "and your effectiveness and your work in business today "by a mere 1/10 of 1%?

"Could you get 1/10 of 1% better?" Well, I confess that I certainly could today get 1/10 of 1%. And I believe that you also could get 1/10 of 1% better, more productive, higher performance, more effective, et cetera in your work and in your business today if you wanted to.

And I think that that can be repeated over time. Well, if you do the math, 1/10 of 1% improvement per day leads to 1/2 of 1% improvement per week. Over time, that makes about a 2% improvement per month and winds up being about a 26% improvement over the year if we use four-week months.

And that's about 1,000% improvement in the course of a decade knowing how these things compound. Don't get too bogged down in the specific numbers. The idea is that 1/10 of 1% per day repeated over a five-day workweek consistently over the years allows you to be about 1,000% more productive, more effective in your work life.

Now, if you wind up being more effective, more productive, then in a capitalist system, in the fullness of time, your own personal effectiveness will be recognized by higher income. And so I think that if you're 1,000% better at your job and at your income, then there's a good chance that you'll be able to command a 10 times higher wage, 1,000% higher wage.

It's not automatic, it's not linear. You have to do some significant career advancement moves in order to fully realize the value of this plan. But the foundation is in what you do. If you wanna make more money, you have to begin by becoming more valuable. And so how do you do that?

Well, step one is reading. Every day, you get up at least two hours before you have to be somewhere every day, and you invest the first hour into yourself by reading something that is uplifting, educational, motivational, spiritual, something that's going to help you and improve you and give you ideas and concepts, inspiration in your life.

As Tracy puts it, "Reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body." Reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body. And so what's cool is that if you spend about one hour a day reading a book, by the way, this should include and can include reading a book with your ears, it doesn't only have to be with your eyes, but if you spend about an hour a day reading a book, then you'll read on average about a book a week.

If you read on average about a book a week, you'll read on average about 50 books per year. If you go and you look at the world of academia, a formal advanced degree, a doctoral degree, a master's degree, et cetera, will often require you to read and absorb and synthesize something around 30 to 50 books and then write a dissertation on those books.

And so if you do this per year, you're getting the equivalent of about a master's degree or a doctoral degree of information, training, et cetera, in your field every single year. Now, I think that you should have a deeper strategy, which I won't go into here, but the basic idea behind what you choose to read is that you should read in your field and read towards your goals.

So read anything that you want, but I think there should be a good variety in your reading materials. You want to choose books that are gonna move you in the direction that you want to go in life. This does not have to all be how to become a better manager, but if you are a manager, it should include some books on how to become a better manager, but it should also include books on other areas of goals that you have or directions that you want to take yourself.

Do not keep all of your reading light and fluffy. Instead, focus on learning the real meat of your industry. Study the textbooks, study the formal textbooks, the deep level content, the fundamental texts that are available in your field. I say this because in our modern day, we have access now to so much great information through podcasts, videos, et cetera, but this kind of information in any field is often the most surface level information.

And there are many of us who consume that information and that's a great start, better than not consuming it. But if you don't go deeper, you're never gonna wind up being a thought leader. So when you consume information and education and learning in an area, you should go a little deeper and say, how can I get back to the core fundamental sources of this area?

So make sure that some of your reading is at a deep level. Make sure that you are looking up, again, the college textbooks that are in use, in the classes that are related to something that you want to improve at. Make sure that you're going back to the source materials.

Make sure you're reading the old books and the new books. Incidentally, this is one of the things that is most important about making sure that you have habits of reading with your eyes, as well as with your ears. For modern popular level texts, you can often find an audio book.

And so I find this a very convenient format to consume books in while I'm out walking, jogging, hiking, et cetera, doing exercise, doing dishes. I like to consume modern popular level texts in the form of an audio book. But when you go to your serious reading and you're reading a textbook, a college level textbook in your field, or you're going back to the primary sources and you're studying the doctoral dissertation that somebody wrote, or you're reading a book that was written in 1950 that continues to be the basic book that explains everything you need to know about a subject, it's unusual to find those books in an audio book format.

So you need to make sure that you have time to read with your ears, but also that you have a basic habit of reading with your eyes on a daily basis. Now, step number two of Tracy's 1000% formula is to make a list. You make a list of everything you have to do that day.

It's important to have a physical list of the things that you need to do. And then you take that list and you organize it and you prioritize it. You organize your list by priorities. You determine which task is of number one importance, number two importance, et cetera. As Tracy says, if you will simply plan and prioritize your activities every day in advance, you'll increase your productivity by 25% on your very first day.

This is a habit that's easy to know about. It's harder to do consistently. And yet it remains the fundamental action that you and I can take on a daily basis to improve our effectiveness. Prioritize the things that we need to do and always do the most important things first.

Step four, start on your most important task and work on it single-mindedly with concentration, focus, and discipline until your most important task is done. As Tracy says, if you will concentrate on your most important task, you will increase your productivity by 50%. So the point of combining these things together is that the reading provides you with creative fodder and information, but reading is never enough to advance and to be useful.

Productivity is the key. And so notice that listing out what you need to do, prioritizing it, starting on your most important task and working on it single-mindedly with concentration, focus, and discipline and until it's done, that's where you get action, action. Step number five, listen to educational audio in your car.

For most people, historically, I haven't seen this data updated in a very long time, but back in the '90s and the 2000s, it was said that the average person spends about the same amount of time in his or her car as the average college student spends in class. Let's say that's, and how you get there is, let's say that a full-time college load is considered to be 12 to 18 credit hours per week.

So 12 hours per week divided over seven days would be 1.7 hours per day of time in the car. That's probably not too far off of what many people commute. Frequently, people commute 35 minutes back and forth to work and then all the other little time, little trips here and there.

And so if you turn your drive time into learning time, you can spend about the same amount of time learning as a college student does while you're also doing other things. And of course, many of us have other activities as well, doing dishes, cleaning up, doing yard work, et cetera.

And so you wanna listen to educational audio. Now, my answer here is, or my suggestion, is that you choose your learning materials, again, based upon your goals and what is valuable to you in the moment. And so your content should include podcasts. Podcasts have a lot of benefits and some significant disadvantages.

A great benefit of a podcast is the access to current cutting edge ideas and conversations. The problem of podcasts is they're not all very content rich. There's a lot of time that can be lost due to the minimal preparation that is put into the production of many podcasts. And so you want your listening time to be efficient.

And so you want to consume the things that are gonna be the most efficient. Podcasts are most useful to you to dip your toe in something new. And that's how I tend to consume podcasts, is simply to take an area of interest of mine and go and look for a podcast on it.

Because there's no financial cost, I don't have to make a big commitment to it. I don't have to go and buy a bunch of books. I just, eh, here's a podcast on it. And then because of the way podcasts are often done, in an hour of podcast listening, you can get an overview of a subject that may be hard to get in an eight hour audio book that is trying to provide information in a more comprehensive manner.

So choose podcasts to listen to that fit your goals and that are based around things that are valuable to you in the moment. There are classic audio programs that are available. I've been a big consumer over the years of Nightingale Conant programs. They were a provider of audio programs, self-help programs.

They're still really good, a lot of the good old stuff. And this is where Tony Robbins got his start and Brian Tracy programs, et cetera. And there's lots of other programs that are available from places like that. I think audio books are in many ways a superior option to either of these options.

Because an audio book gives you superior quality and insights into a subject because of the nature of its creation and editing. When an author sits down and writes a book, unless it's just a quick $1.99 Kindle book, he generally will invest thousands of hours, definitely hundreds and generally thousands of hours into the actual creation of that book, a systemized research process, preparing for it, a very careful organization principle behind the book.

He will engage in very careful editing to make sure that all of the fluff is gone and the real meat is there. This is why books are such a superior option for your learning, because they are giants standing on the shoulders of giants, standing on the shoulders of giants, giving you their insights and education for a mere $10 or $15 or $20, et cetera.

And so here, your best options are an Audible subscription, as well as something through your local library, such as Hoopla, where you gain access to free books. So if you have a local library card, a lot of times most local libraries now have some kind of audio book service, Hoopla, there are others as well, but Hoopla seems to be the leading one at the moment, where now you can listen to audio books for free based on your library subscription.

It's a really great option. Next, I really love YouTube University. And by that, I just mean going to YouTube and looking for videos on things. I think that a YouTube premium subscription that allows you to skip all advertisements and to download videos so that they're always available is some of the best money that you can make.

YouTube is fantastic because of its cutting edge nature. You can often get some of the most current insights into a field, get involved with some of the current debates, current best practices, et cetera. The downside of YouTube is it can be time consuming and hard to filter for quality.

There's not a really great quality filter. And this is again why I think that something that has been vetted by trusted editors is of higher priority, but because that vetting process is so time consuming, you often don't get cutting edge information. So they should go together. And then in addition to YouTube University, of course, iTunes University quite literally leads into free online college courses.

So iTunes University or Coursera, all of the online courses available from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, et cetera, it's all available. You simply go to the website and you can consume the college courses. And I think this is really important to do for areas that you have interest in because you wanna make sure that your learning is not ignorant, that you are not ignorant of what is considered to be the general standard of knowledge in a subject.

You wanna make sure that you're not ignorant of the corpus of information that a skilled and trained person in that area would have. And so going and consuming college lectures and consuming all of the college lectures for courses will help you to make sure that your learning is not unduly influenced by the one book you found that you really liked or the author that you latched onto, but rather that you understand what is taught at the college level.

And college teachers are, by virtue of their screening process, they are experts in their domain. And they have a duty to their students to represent all of the different aspects of their particular course content. And so it's a really great way of making sure that your knowledge is compendious and that you yourself have a broad education that complements your deep education in the self-chosen materials.

So those are all things that are available to you to listen to in your car. I would encourage you also to make certain that not all of your learning is autodidactic. Consider engaging in formalized courses and credentialization in your field. While self-directed learning is the most powerful form of learning because of your engagement with it, self-directed learning is not always recognized immediately in the business world.

And so formalized learning that comes with credentials is a really important component of your overall package. It may be hip to despise a college degree or despise an MBA, but those formalized credentials and the achievement of those formalized credentials is still one of the most reliable way for individuals to raise salaries.

Pay attention and go ahead and get your formalized credentials as well. Now, Tracy's number six in his thousand percent formula is to ask yourself two questions after every activity. And these are two questions that I consider to be incredibly useful for self-coaching. Question number one is, what did I do right?

You can do this every day. What did I do right today? You can do this after every meeting. What did I do right in that meeting? You can do this after every date. What did I do right on that date? Do this after every trip. What did I do right on that trip?

What did I do right? It's important to take a moment and acknowledge the things that you do well, the things that went well and celebrate your successes. Question number two that you ask yourself after every activity is, what would I do differently next time? What would I do differently next time?

Notice the wonderful tone, not judgmental, but informed. What would I do differently next time if I had the chance? And if you just ask yourself those two questions after every activity that you're involved in, what did I do right? And what would I do differently next time? You can coach yourself in the direction of your goals and dreams.

Now, Tracy's point seven of his thousand percent formula is treat everyone you meet and interact with like a million dollar customer. Treat everybody with respect, with kindness, with esteem. Treat everyone you meet and interact with like a million dollar customer. And if you do that, you go around through the world surrounded by a pleasant haze of happiness and respect and appreciation, 'cause it comes from you.

Now, over the years, I've taken those seven points, which are Tracy's original seven points, and I've just added just a few things to them. So again, Tracy's are read two hours a day, sorry, one hour a day, or first thing in the morning, list what you need to do that day, prioritize your list, start on your most important task, work on it single-mindedly, listen to educational audio programs in your car, ask yourself two questions after every activity, and then treat everyone you meet and interact with like a million dollar customer.

That was Tracy's. As I've modified it over the year, I have a tendency to divide it into education and action. And so for education, I've always added a couple of things. Number one, you have reading and listening, but I've always recommended to people that they also attend conferences. I think that having a goal of attending four conferences per year in your field is a really useful goal.

And I've benefited from this so much. I have not done this myself over the last few years because of having a bunch of babies in the house, hard for my wife for me to be away, and so I actively avoid being away very much. Of course, today we can do online conferences, which are a great option.

But the point of a conference is that you can have in one single conference, a very concentrated exposure to all of the activity in your field. You can not only meet the movers and shakers, not only harvest the current cutting edge ideas, but get a broad overview of the topics that are of interest.

I love to take a brochure from a conference and read through the titles for the talks and the presentations. And that'll give me an idea of what are the current areas of focus for this particular industry or this particular movement. You also, of course, have access to an expo hall.

You can go and you can find out who all the companies are and the vendors that are involved in your industry. And these things are the threads that you can pull on to start to push yourself in the direction of new opportunities. Conferences are wonderful ways for you to make connections with people, to start to build friendships.

They are the best way for you to dig your well of friendships before you're thirsty. You always wanna dig your well before you're thirsty and you wanna dig your well of contacts and connections and friendships in your industry or in an industry that you aspire to join long before you need them.

It's difficult to go to a conference with a folder full of resumes and go booth to booth and pass them out. That's difficult. Not impossible, not a bad idea, but difficult. It's much more effective for you to go to an annual industry conference for two or three years in a row, making connections, making friends intentionally while at that conference.

And then three years from now, let it be known that you're looking for more opportunities. But in order to have the best opportunities, you have to have been digging that well of connection and contact, et cetera. I have a whole class that I teach some people on how to maximize conferences.

They're very under used by many people in today's world. And yet as we increasingly are isolated physically, their importance of industry conferences is only rising. And so making good use of them is really important. I want to give you just a hint though. One of the best things that you can do at a conference is use it as a way to gain access to all of the people who were involved in that industry.

And so your best friend in making good use of conferences is for you to take the brochure and systematically write down the speakers of the conference, their names, connect with them in some format, write down the companies that those speakers work for, get familiar with their work, and then go through the vendor list and be connected with all the people who are supplying that industry.

And if you do that and you start systematically making connections at a conference, all you need is one conference to give you your connection roadmap, which can be in a tremendous roadmap for your opportunities. Now, another thing that I urge people to do is to learn how to be an effective public speaker.

I really love still to recommend Toastmasters International as the single best, most available organization for you to practice and polish both your public speaking skills and your leadership skills in a structured, safe, risk-free environment. And if you do that, then conferences will ultimately become one of the most important ways for you to gain exposure for yourself and your ideas.

After all, think of what we've said. You've read, if you've read 500 books in your field over the next decade, and you develop polished public speaking skills, how is it possible that anyone at that conference is going to know more than you? And why wouldn't you be one of the most sought-after speakers in that field?

If you're doing the hard work of genuinely preparing yourself and you're implementing on a daily basis these ideas into your actual work, thus building a resume of success on a daily basis, why wouldn't you yourself be one of the sought-after speakers on the industry conference circuit? That's the 25-minute version of the 1000% formula.

Brian Tracy taught that to me in high school. I have implemented it pretty decently over the years, and the formula has worked pretty decently. And I think that this can be repeated multiple times during somebody's career. I think that it's very reasonable for somebody to start off as a young adult, early 20s, mid 20s, make a 10x increase in income over the first decade of his or her career.

I think it's very reasonable to make another 10x jump over the second decade. At that point in time, your selection of an industry seems to make a much bigger difference than some other factors, and your willingness to do the hard work. So let's put some numbers on this to get an idea.

Let's say you come out of, let's say that you're 25 years old and you're making $60,000. Well, going from 60 to $600,000 is very doable in a decade in many industries. Again, there's a lot of strategic shuffling that has to happen. You need to be good at promoting yourself and your ideas.

You need to be good at moving for opportunities. You need to be good at choosing companies that are on the upswing, choosing industries that are on the upswing, et cetera. It's not automatic, but I think that's a very reliable path. I've seen it done again and again. Making another jump from $600,000 a year to $6 million a year is very doable, very doable.

But in order for it to be done, you need to be in an industry where you are directly rewarded for your great effectiveness. And so you're either gonna be in upper levels of management at a company where you have good bonus compensation, et cetera, or you are gonna be in a place where you have a direct connection between your impact and your effectiveness.

And that's only possible in certain highly compensated areas. So if you are involved in sales, you're involved in marketing, and you have a piece of the action, so to speak, then you can definitely justify excellent multi-seven figure salaries. To go by another 1,000% jump from $6 million to $60 million is certainly possible, but it becomes very difficult to predict the exact pathway.

So eventually this formula does, I think, break down in terms of its predictability. I can't promise this four times over, but there are definitely many people who over the course of three decades have been able to repeat the formula three times over. There are a shockingly high number of businessmen earning $60 million a year after a three-decade career, a shockingly high number.

There's a shockingly high number of people making $600 million a year on the end of a four-decade career. But again, this has to do with your willingness to do the work, your willingness to take the risk, et cetera. So I don't present this to you as a perfect description of what you can expect, but I think it's a useful and compelling mental model, which when combined with other ways of making sure that you're moving in the direction of highly valuable skills, you're working at the highest levels of value, et cetera, I think it's a very useful model.

And at the end of the day, it helps you and me to focus on what we can control. We can control what time we go to bed today so that we can get up tomorrow and read for 30 to 60 minutes in our field. We can control the list that we make today of everything that we need to do tomorrow.

We can take a moment and we can prioritize that list based upon those things that are of the highest priority and those that are lowest priority. Tomorrow, we can start on our most important task and we can work on it single-mindedly with concentration, focus, and discipline until it's done.

Today and tomorrow, when we have time, we can line up some useful and helpful educational audio to put in our ears and in our car when we're driving, walking, et cetera. Today and tomorrow, you can ask yourself those two questions after every activity. And today and tomorrow, you can start treating everyone you meet and interact with like a million dollar customer.

Hope these ideas in one specific place are useful to you and I hope that you experience great success from the application of them. As I close down today's podcast, I want to remind you of the event that I am hosting in January of 2024 in Panama City, Panama. And I would love to extend to you a personal invitation for you to come to that event.

I've teamed up with my friends, Gabriel Custodiate and Mikkel Thorup to do a one-week, we're calling it an investment tour, an expat exploration and investment tour of Panama. And this will be a one-week tour. We're gonna have events in Panama City. We've got conference presentations on various aspects of investing, internationalization, banking, taxation, cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, et cetera, wealth protection, family foundations, offshore planning.

We have several tours planned of a couple of different communities as well as like a gold storage vault that we're gonna be visiting, et cetera. It's gonna be an amazing time. And not only will it be full of information, inspiration, education, but it's gonna be full of fun. I'll be there hanging out with you the whole time as well as 39 of your fellow listeners.

If that sounds interesting to you, please go to expatmoney.com/radical, sign up now. We're about 50% sold out at the moment. So I'm working hard to fill the rest of the slots and I would love for you to claim one of the remaining slots. Go to expatmoney.com/radical, sign up today, expatmoney.com/radical.

Look forward to hanging out with you in Panama. - The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions, old and new. Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp cocktail or your first Cajun risotto, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions.

Ralph's, fresh for everyone. - Choose from a great selection of digital coupons and use them up to five times in one transaction. Check our app for details. Ralph's, fresh for everyone. (upbeat music)