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 am your host. And today we're going to talk about how to lower the emotional risk of a new adventure. One of the things that I've observed being a financial planner is that risk management for individuals is crucial if you're going to achieve goals.

Now I'm not talking about doing a sharp ratio analysis or a Monte Carlo simulation. I'm not talking about anything financial. I'm talking about working with you and helping you to adjust your perceived risk. I'm personally convinced that even though I used to do all the technical financial planning stuff, I'm personally convinced that people like coaches, personal coaches, and performance people who seek to inspire others probably do more to help people build wealth than those of us who are formal financial planners do.

Because if you can help somebody learn how to overcome their perception of risk so that they'll go and take a new job or apply for a job that's double the amount of money or so that they can go and start a business, so they can go and move from one town to another town, I think you'll find that that's far more productive than just simply technical metrics on their portfolio.

So I want to talk to you about how to lower the emotional risk of a new adventure. I want to tell it to you because earlier today I did something that was a little bit cowardly, and I'll tell you about it here in a moment. But I'm using as a tool for teaching you about this one of my recent projects.

I have just this week started a new podcast called Radical Personal Finance en Español. As I record, this is not yet in the podcast feeds, but it will be soon. For right now, you can watch it on Facebook. Go to Facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinanceenespañol, and I'm live streaming this there as a video podcast, much like I've been taking most of Radical Personal Finance and adding in video.

And I have a number of reasons for doing this, but one of my reasons why I'm pursuing Radical Personal Finance en Español is to help me improve my language abilities. One of my goals is to be a better Spanish speaker, and yet I'm not nearly at the level of Spanish fluency that I really want to have.

I have a lot of progress that I'd like to make with regard to my ability to speak the language effectively, and the only way that I know how to actually have that progress and make progress in my ability is to focus and force myself to do it. And for me, I read a lot in Spanish, I listen a lot in Spanish, but what I don't do enough of is talk in Spanish.

And specifically, the kind of speaking that I want to do is to--I want to be able to be a professional public speaker in Spanish, which requires a high level of fluency, and I'm not there yet. So I set a goal this year, during 2020, I set a goal to pass a daily exam, which is a Spanish language exam, and to try to target the highest level of fluency that they offer.

And so I've been working towards that, but making slow progress. And I said, "You know what? Finally, I've been hemming and hawing, and I've wanted to do this for years, but I've always been too scared to start this thing. I'm just going to do it. I'm going to do it." Now, a couple weeks ago, I talked to you about the process, the Four C's formula.

I talked about how the first thing that you're going to do if you're going to make progress is you have to make a commitment. You have to actually commit yourself to doing something. And I talked about how most of the time we think that, "Well, when I'm confident, then I'll make the commitment." But I talked about how that's the wrong formula.

The formula is not confidence and then commitment. Rather, it is commitment first, and then courage to do something, to start something. And then after courage, you wind up building capability because you take action. And then in time, you wind up having confidence. But the confidence always comes much, much later.

And I talked about how valuable it can be to just focus on building that confidence, but you're going to have to exercise courage. And so I've been exercising courage with my new project. But along the way, it's not always been easy. And so earlier this afternoon, I recorded a show, and I had streamed it to my personal Facebook page.

And a bunch of people there were saying nice things about it, and I appreciated that. But then I just got embarrassed. I could hear the mistakes that I was making in Spanish myself. And I don't like to be bad at things. Just like you, I like to be good at things.

I like to do things effectively. I don't like to be bad. And it's really humbling when you do something that you're bad at, and you do it in public. And I just chickened out all of a sudden. I chickened out and was like, "That's it." And I clicked Delete, and I deleted the episode from my personal Facebook page.

And then I just caught myself, and I said, "Joshua, stop being a coward. Stop being a coward." And I thought, "I'm going to go ahead and talk about some of my strategies for handling emotional risk." Because one of the things that I have learned is that if I can handle my emotional risk effectively, then there's a lot of opportunity that I have to be able to do things that previously would have scared me, to be able to do things that I wouldn't have done before.

So I want to talk to you about how to lower your emotional risk, how to lower it so that you can take more risks and do more things that you're going to be genuinely excited about. So the first thing that you want to think about is you want to change your reference group.

You want to change your reference group. Whenever you're working on a new project, and you're starting to try something new, you want to be very careful who you actually tell about that project. You want to be thoughtful and consider even whose opinion you consider, whose opinion you think about when you're actually starting afresh.

The place that I learned this in my life was when I went from being homeschooled to working in the context of kind of a more mainstream private school in high school. And when I was homeschooled, I was accustomed to and used to being the only one who was involved in any of the work that I was doing.

And so the only standards that I set for myself were my standards. But I didn't have anybody to compare anything to. I didn't compare my skills to anybody else's. I had no peer group of my age. And so my standards were just the only ones that I thought of.

And I remember the first time in eighth grade, I did a science project. And I built a model. We were supposed to build a model for this physical science class that we had. And I built a model of the stratosphere. And I did this thing, and I worked on it all weekend.

And at the end of the weekend, I thought it was bad. I thought it was just really bad. And I came around, and I brought it into this class. And then I submitted it, and all of a sudden, I realized that my model was the best one in the class by far.

It wasn't even close. And yet, when I didn't have anything to compare it to, I thought mine was the worst. But it wasn't. It was really, really good. And so sometimes what you can do is you can change your reference group by getting rid of a reference group entirely.

So if there's a project or a goal that you have that you're working towards, sometimes just get rid of the reference group. Put yourself in a situation where you're not comparing yourself to others. We all know that we shouldn't compare ourselves to others, and of course, we all compare ourselves to others.

But sometimes that comparison can be really, really flawed. And sometimes what you have to do is you have to say, "I'm going to do what I'm capable of doing because I care about it." Let me tell you a couple of other things that I have done over the years in some of my work that you've heard.

One of the things I've had to do over the years is I've carefully not compared my podcast to anybody else's podcasts. It's not because I'm not capable of doing it. I could. But I'm hypercritical, as you are, of myself. I'm hypercritical of myself as you're hypercritical of yourself. And if all I do is spend time hearing what other people are doing that's just fantastic or seeing what other people are doing that's awesome, I would probably give up.

But if I just spend time trying to say, "What can I do and how can I get better?" then I can press forward. I can keep on pressing forward. Because you don't know where other people have started. I've had many people who have said kind things about me and my work, and they've said, "Joshua, you're a good broadcaster," etc.

And I say, "Thank you." But what people often don't understand is how hard I have worked over the years to develop skills that many other people simply don't have. It's not like I started at the place that many people do. I worked hard over the years. I did a lot of things that helped me to build skills.

And so other people have done that even more than me. And so one of the key things that you want to do is not focus on other people but focus on your own progress. I'm live streaming this, and Corey just wrote in. He said, "So true. Comparison with others is terrible.

Need to compare yourself to your yesterday self." Corey, you're stealing my thunder. Because what you want to do is not look at what other people are doing well. You don't want to look at what other people--at their progress. But compare yourself to your own progress. And as long as you're making progress, then you can be satisfied.

As long as you're making progress on something that you care about, you can be completely satisfied. There's no reason to go and focus on adjusting to somebody else. Now, how else can you adjust your reference group? We talked about getting rid of them entirely. That's one thing you can do.

Get rid of a reference group. The second thing that you can do to adjust your reference group is make them friendly rather than mean. And what I mean is find some friendly people to be around rather than mean people. Find a group of people who's going to build you up and encourage you rather than a group of people who are going to tear you down.

I have been an outspoken advocate of Toastmasters International as a way for people to build public speaking. I haven't been involved in Toastmasters in many years, but the first thing that I noticed when I went to a Toastmasters club meeting was how universally guaranteed positive the people in that group were.

There was no question that they weren't going to be nice. There was no question that they weren't going to be positive and kind and everything that they had to say. No matter what, they were going to be focused on being friendly. And it creates such a fun atmosphere that when new public speakers are coming into a Toastmasters club and they're in a place where they say, "I'm scared.

My knees are knocking together." They know they have a friendly crowd. Importantly, also, they know they have a friendly crowd who's been where they are. One of the things that Toastmasters always do is when they have a new speaker, they always tell their stories, which is one of the reasons why I try so hard in my media work to tell my stories.

I try to share how nervous I am or how difficult something is. I share the struggles, not because I want to bring you down, not because I want sympathy, but because I want to encourage you if you're feeling nervous, if you're feeling struggled, if you're feeling frustrated, that's common.

That's common to all of us. And I think this niceness thing is actually an area where we've made real progress as a society. I think there are some things that if we honestly analyze our society, there are some areas where you say, "You know what? There are some things that aren't as good as maybe 20 years ago." But there are a lot of things that we're a lot better at as a society.

And one of the things that I've come to really appreciate where I think we are a lot better as a society is in simply being nice to one another. Being nicer, maybe that was a little bit of an overstatement. As long as we're not talking about politics, it seems like we're developing the ability to be nicer to one another, at least to be nicer to the people who aren't great at something.

I follow a bunch of fat people Instagram accounts, and it's great because you'll have some super fat person that says, "I'm going to lose weight." And all of a sudden that person is surrounded by people just heaping on the positivity and the encouragement. You'll have people that share a goal, and all of a sudden you'll see people light up and say, "You can do it.

Go for it." And that's really great. I think it's really refreshing. Because the society that allows bullies, the society that allows people to be mean at those who are not better than them is not a fun society to live in. And so it's really nice to be in that.

And so you can build that for yourself. Make your group friendly rather than mean, and you'll start to make progress. Another tool in terms of changing your reference group is find people who have done what you want to do. And then they won't laugh at you. It's so, so important.

If you go, let's say you're fat and you want to lose weight, and you say to another fat person who's just a loser and has never lost weight, "Hey, you know what? I'm going to lose weight." They'll often laugh at you. They'll laugh at you and say, "Good try." Or maybe not.

They'll just be quiet. But if you go to a formerly fat person who's not fat anymore, and you talk to them and you say, "I want to lose weight," they'll say, "Go for it. You can do it. I've done it. You can do it too." Now, what about your money?

The same thing applies with financial goals. Years ago, I remember I was working in a corporate job. I didn't like my job, and I came across the idea of getting rich quick. Well, I wanted to be financially independent quickly. I'd read Michael Masterson's book called "Seven Years to Seven Figures." I had this goal of becoming a millionaire in seven years, seven years to seven figures.

He gave the case studies in there of how people had done it, but I still didn't really believe that it was actually possible. I remember going into a financial forum, and I wrote and I said-- I did it anonymously, which is another strategy we'll talk about in a moment.

But I went into this financial forum and I said, "How can I retire in seven years?" Everybody laughed at me. Now, I wasn't aware of the financial independence or the retirement movement. I wasn't in a friendly forum, but everybody laughed at me. I kind of tucked my tail between my legs and I went away trying to figure out-- I didn't give up on the idea.

I just said, "You know what? There's got to be a way to do it." Then a number of years later, I found the early retirement movement. All of a sudden, as I'm looking around the early retirement movement, you see people who have these crazy aggressive financial goals. All of a sudden, my goal of being financially independent in seven years was not so crazy.

Many people had that same goal. You go into an early retirement forum today and you start talking about it, and it's a totally different reception than what I got years ago when I first gave that. So, find the people who've done what you want to do, and then invite them to give you comments on what you're doing.

A simple example would be hanging out with millionaires. If you want to make progress and you want to be inspired, go hang out with people who are richer than you are. Go hang out with millionaires. Go hang out with multi-millionaires. All of a sudden, the stuff that you previously thought was impossible, now people don't think it's impossible.

You go to a group of wage slaves, people who have no idea of how they can get out from just simply working for wages, and you say, "I want to double my income and double my time off next year." You say, "I want to double both. I want to double my income, double my time off." Most people will laugh.

You go to a group of business people. You go to a group of millionaires. You go to a group of people who are aggressive about their goal setting, and you say, "I want to double my income and double my time off," and they'll say, "Let's talk about how, because we've done it," or, "I know this guy who would be a useful resource for you," and you get a totally different reception.

So, hang around people who have done what you have wanted to do, and hang around friendly people. A lot of times, you'll find that that will open up opportunities for you. In addition to hanging out with people who are friendly and trying to figure out how to work with friendly people, sometimes it makes sense to make your reference group a group of strangers.

This is one of those, I think, underutilized strategies. Make your reference group a group of strangers. The example I would give here is the idea of people who are comedy performances, comedians. One of the things that scares me to my core is the idea of trying to deliver some form of comedic routine.

I don't consider myself to be a naturally funny or witty person. I don't consider humor to be a strong suit of mine, and yet I've always been fascinated by how some people seem able to take the idea of comedy, the basic elements of comedy, and they are able to share that with other people in a really effective way.

But that's never been me. So, someday I have a goal. Someday I'm going to go and perform in some kind of stand-up comedy club. It scares me to my core, but someday I want to do that and try to figure out how to develop some comedic routines. But I'll tell you one thing I guarantee you.

I will not invite anybody that I know to come to that comedy routine. Now, I could have lots of friendly people who would come and cheer me on, but for me, it's hard for me to make myself that vulnerable. It's much easier to probably go to a group of strangers who won't know who I am, who don't know where I'm from, and just simply try it and then see what happens.

And I think that that can be used a lot of times. People who are artists often, they make something, they paint something, they create something. They're scared to give it to their friends because they don't really believe their friends when their friends say nice things to them. One of the things that is kind of a flip side of developing a positive community is it's often easy for a positive community to lose any sense of honesty.

You know, there's the joke that goes around online. If your wife says, "Do these pants make my butt look fat?" Well, sometimes pants make a woman's butt look fat, and you probably should say so. And the person who should say so is probably the person who's kindest and closest, and yet is your wife ever going to believe you if she actually asks that question because she knows that you're conditioned to lie?

It's kind of an interesting conundrum. So the same thing comes in when you're doing something that's hard for you. And so I appreciate people who are kind. I appreciate people who say nice things. A lot of times, though, I know that they're not honest. And so if you want honest feedback, you often have to go to a group of strangers, and that may be easier because you're not emotionally invested in those people.

So change the reference group. And in those cases, you can often, by going to a place where you don't know anybody or doing something in a place where you don't know anyone, you can really dramatically make things easier for you to do. Now, how do you do this with some of the projects that you're involved in?

Some are obvious. But let's say that you want to be a writer. There's a time-honored tradition of writing under a pen name, publish under a pseudonym. There's no reason why your business or your media company or your writing has to be done under your legally given name that everybody knows you as.

You work under a nickname, work under a pseudonym. And now all of a sudden, you can go in a direction where you have much more emotional safety because, you know, these people don't know who I am. It's just a bunch of strangers. And so by changing the group and working with strangers, you can often bring yourself into a situation where you feel more emotionally safe.

And when you feel emotionally safe, you're more likely to take action, those crucial few first steps that need courage until the capability comes and the confidence comes in time. Next, sometimes you can change your exposure. Change your exposure. And what I mean by change your exposure, it's kind of just similar and related to change your reference group.

But work in a way that is going to limit the exposure that you're uncomfortable of. So figure out how do I go into a situation where instead of doing what's difficult for me, I can start where I'm more comfortable. Maybe that is the working under a pen name or pseudonym that we just discussed.

Maybe you create an entirely different alternative identity, an alter ego. Maybe you say, "I want to be this Internet marketing hotshot. That's my dream of how I'm going to make a fortune. I'm going to go and be an Internet marketing hotshot." But the problem is all my friends don't see me that way.

So you go and you buy a new computer and you create a persona for yourself. When you say, "I'm in front of this computer," then I'm this guy and you practice this. I know for me in my own personal development when I was younger, I was socially awkward when I was younger.

And one of the things that I did when I was socially awkward, I decided I was going to stop being socially awkward, but I just caught somebody that I thought was pretty--acted the way that I wanted to act. It was a guy that I knew, and we weren't close, but he was a guy that I knew who I thought was kind.

He was positive. He was popular. But he wasn't a jerk. He wasn't just that alpha jock jerk that I personally didn't look up to. He was kind. He was genuinely kind. And I just started modeling myself after him. I started pretending to behave like him. I would watch him move, and I would say, "Okay, if he does that, then I'm going to do-- I'm going to kind of copy that." And then in time, that practicing to be that person eventually changed my ability to be comfortable in social situations.

And I've employed that a number of times. I was reading a book on language acquisition recently, and the author of the book was talking about the value of developing a persona. If you're going to study the language, you're going to learn Spanish, right? Develop a Spanish name for yourself and a whole persona of exactly who you are.

And whenever you're speaking Spanish, you become that person. You develop a whole legend to your life. It seems to be an effective technique for some people. So try it out. If you're uncomfortable talking Spanish, then go ahead and try it out. See if it works for you. But you can do that in many other things as well.

Maybe it comes down to the way you dress or the car you drive or the computer you use. But if I were trying to change my life, I would genuinely change my circumstances in order to put myself in a different frame of mind than what I usually am like.

So again, different computer. When I sit at this computer, I am an Internet marketing expert, or I am a writer. This is my writing machine, and this is how I see myself. And it starts to be fairly automatic. Over time, when you do things again and again and again, they grow, and they become fairly automatic.

So work under a pseudonym. Put yourself in a different situation. Work in a medium that is comfortable for you. Work on a medium that's comfortable for you. I'm going to use media production, but you translate for yourself. But I'll give you an example. I started with podcasting, audio podcasting, because I felt like that played to my strengths, and it was more comfortable for me than video.

I wasn't comfortable doing video. I also didn't think that I had the technical capacity, but I wasn't really comfortable doing video. But I was comfortable doing audio. Some people would be comfortable writing. If I were in this Spanish project and my Spanish language abilities were smaller, I probably wouldn't start with what I'm trying to do, which is extemporaneous live video.

It's a lot of pressure to do that in a foreign language. I would start with writing, because you can write and you can edit when you're writing. This may be the case if you are going to be doing something that is a little bit flashy in the marketplace. Maybe you're going to tackle a certain area of politics or philosophy or religion or raising children or something that's a little bit difficult, and you want to make sure you get it just right so that you're heard, so that you feel confident in what you're doing.

Well, don't do extemporaneous speaking. Do something where you can write and edit and write and edit and carefully think about it. And then, when you're really sure of those ideas, then you can put them out into the marketplace. Give yourself some safety by having those release valves. Start small.

And then remember that the benefit of starting small is often that your mistakes are small. I'll tell you, if you start to gain any kind of notoriety or any kind of public place, when you make a mistake, you feel like everybody sees that mistake. So it's important that you give yourself the safety of knowing that's not actually true.

Strategies that I've employed over the years. A lot of times I've just tried to silo my life. I have my work life and I have my personal life. And I don't really mix the two. I don't go around trying to say to people, "Oh, you should listen to my podcast," or "Oh, you should do my thing." They're separate, right?

So that way I can just kind of go throughout the world without worrying about them interacting. But then when there are mistakes, I just look at them and I honestly say, "This is small." For example, unfortunately, my email inbox is often filled with things that I'm not proud of, commitments that I've made but then not delivered on as high of a level, a request that somebody makes something for me and I really want to sit and respond back to them, or something I've said that's made somebody angry or upset or somebody-- it's a mixture of things.

And I often just encourage myself with the fact that I care about this person and I care about what they're saying, but at the end of the day, this is small. This is one person. If you think about an athlete who plays over a sports career, almost any high-level athlete has missed tons of shots.

We all love the quote by Michael Jordan, "I've missed 142 game-winning shots. I've been counted on to take the shot and I missed it. And I failed and I failed and I failed and I failed and I failed, and this is why I'm successful." It's great and it's true.

It really is true. But still, failure doesn't feel good. It stinks. It really does. But if you'll put yourself in that position and you'll recognize that this failure, in the grand scheme of my life, is fairly small, it'll make all the difference in the world, I think there's a real benefit that comes with age.

And I actually have a significant level of concern, personally, for the amount of notoriety that a young person can gain in today's world. I think this is a fundamentally new development in human history where a young person, a teenager, someone in their early 20s can develop a global platform.

Now, I love the potential of that. I think it's awesome because it means the best ideas can get out to the world regardless of somebody's age or somebody's exposure. It's an awesome, awesome platform, ability about the modern age. But that can also have a crushing result on the individual.

And you see, I care deeply about the subject of teen suicide. And we live in many ways a suicide epidemic among young people. And if you study the subject, one thing you see is how teenagers often lack the perspective to put things--they lack perspective. They say something that makes somebody angry or they get piled on with a social media mob and it's so painful, the next thing you know they're hanging from a noose.

It's devastating. And yet, it really is true. I said something a couple of months ago on Twitter and I had the unique experience of having a tweet go viral. And I have never experienced so much abuse in such a short period of time. And I had to--I didn't really laugh.

I mean, it hurt. I took a bunch of screenshots and I just thought, "Here I am. I'm a mature man. I'm a father. I'm independent. I'm financially comfortable. I don't have anybody to report to. I don't have a boss that's watching me. I have a wife and children that love me.

I'm a pretty stable guy." And yet still, the emotional pain of just being piled on was really intense. And it changed my perspective and I realized how dangerous this stuff really can be. But at the end of the day, what you, I think, have to look at is say, no matter what it feels like at the moment, these mistakes are small.

My video today that I did that I chickened out over, number one, of course, I know that most people would say, "Good for you, Joshua. Good for you for trying something new." So I'm my own harshest critic. But still, my mistakes, I can just tell myself, they're small and you're getting better.

Don't compare yourself to others. Compare yourself to yourself, Joshua. The mistakes are small and you'll get better. But I know that that exercise of courage builds. So whether you think of a mistake as small in the context of, "Well, it's just one person in my email inbox that I made angry," or "It's just the people on my Facebook profile that I made angry," or maybe thinking small as just saying, "This is one day in the course of a whole life.

This is one game in the course of a season, one season in the course of a career." Recognize that most things in life that really bum us out emotionally are in the long run going to turn out to be fairly small. And so it's worth just keeping that in mind.

Change your exposure. Next thing you can do is change your level of preparation. Now, this is not going to be applicable to all risks that you're going to take. But a lot of times, if you just change your level of preparation and commit yourself to a different strategy that will work for you, then you'll be able to push through the emotionally risky time.

I'll use some examples from my life. Let's say that I were really going to be very nervous for the long term about my Spanish language ability, and I was going to be broadcasting in Spanish, but I'm really nervous. What would I do to improve that? Well, the obvious answer is write a script.

So my goal is to be able to speak at a highly educated, literate level with a high level of fluency in the Spanish language and to be able to speak extemporaneously and intelligently as I do in English. But that's a tall goal. And so what I would need to do is just simply change my level of preparation.

And maybe I write a script. And maybe I write a script every day for a year until I finally start to develop the skill set necessary to do what I'm going to do. And so I've done this repeatedly throughout the course of Radical Personal Finance. Anytime I start to get sloppy, anytime I start to feel like the quality goes down, then I just change and I go back and I start writing more detailed notes to keep myself on track, to make sure my ideas are better, my delivery is crisper, and I build things up.

So change your level of preparation. Sometimes that means being in the gym late at night, working on those foul shots or whatever the version is for you. There have been many times where in sales presentations, when I used to do sales presentations, I would basically memorize almost every word of the presentation.

Not because I needed to memorize the word, but because in order for me to be effective as a salesman and actually able to engage with somebody, I needed to not be thinking about what I was saying. And so I would carefully develop the scripts, carefully develop the notes, and keep them and know them and study them.

In time, that becomes repetitive, but it's effective. And so if you're going to do something that's difficult for you, change your level of preparation. This is especially important when it comes to some area that is difficult for you. For me, it was always getting referrals, right, asking for referrals.

Or maybe it's asking for the order and actually doing it. And you just practice, practice, practice, memorize, memorize, memorize, and then all of a sudden you're in it and you ask for the order or you ask for referrals or whatever it is that is appropriate for what you're doing.

Change your level of preparation. Go hard and deep. Memorize it. Do whatever you need to do in order to feel confident about that so that you can exercise the courage and have a higher expectation of feeling like you can come through that difficult place. Next, I would tell you--this is one that I do regularly-- is find an expert's early efforts.

Find an expert's early efforts. And this is one of my favorite things that I love about the world that we live in today is the fact that many times you can actually now find somebody's early attempts. You can go and you can find somebody who's a movie star, but you can uncover the home video of their high school play and you can see how bad they were and yet how hard they worked.

For me, I always think about what would it be like-- how could I go and find maybe a Howard Stern's first radio appearance or a Rush Limbaugh or a Paul Harvey or some broadcaster who's just fantastic and you think, "I want to go and find their early stuff so I can see their progression and so I can be confident that, yes, I can go through the same progression." So go and find that.

Go and find some early writing, some short stories of J.K. Rowling's early short stories or something like that and let it encourage you. It's so encouraging to know that other people have made progress because then you can confidently tell yourself, "Hey, I'm not the only one. What other people have done, I can do too." And you'll build and build and build and make progress over time.

So go and find the early experts of somebody else and let their experience encourage you. Next, find a reason to do it. Find a reason to do it. A reason that matters to you deeply. If you have a reason that matters to you and you are committed to it, you'll find enough ways to do it.

The best example that I know of this, and I've used this for years, but years ago I was a young personal finance aficionado and I taught Dave Ramsey's course, his Financial Peace University. And years ago, I don't know if he still does it, but years ago in that Financial Peace University course, he put himself in the situation where he said, "I could guarantee you that you could save money." And he said, "Let's pretend that your son or daughter was in a situation where they desperately needed medicine to cure them." And he said, "Now the medicine is available.

You can buy it, but it costs $10,000. And if you don't have it, your son or your daughter or your nephew or niece, somebody that you love is going to die. And yet if you can save the $10,000 and you can give it to them, then you can save their life.

And so at some way over the next year, you have to figure out a way to earn and save the $10,000 in order to save your son's life. Could you do it?" And I use that question again and again and again with financial planning clients. I would use it as an example.

And of course, all of us, we say, "I absolutely could do it. I absolutely would do it no matter what. I'd figure out a way." Because if the reason that you need something is so important, you'll figure out the how. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to know how you would do it.

All you know is that if the reason were that important to you or that big of a deal for you, you know you'd figure out a way to make the change that is necessary. And so I think the same thing occurs when it comes down to that period of needing to exercise courage in doing something new.

If the reason you're doing something new is important enough to you, you'll find a reason--you'll find the courage to exercise now when it's hard. You know, why do I care about being able to speak in Spanish? Well, I think about just this huge world of Spanish speakers, and I feel like--I just feel this desire to be able to encourage them and to speak to them.

And in some ways it feels just deeply fulfilling because there are many more poor people in Spanish-speaking contexts than there are in English-speaking contexts. And so I think somebody should help. Somebody should help. If we're going to continue this revolution of bringing millions and millions of people around the world out of poverty, somebody should share and should do it, and somebody who's not a shyster should do it.

And so I have a reason to do it. And so those reasons, I build them up in my head, and I find it difficult sometimes to talk extensively about all of the things that are personal to me, but I have enough reasons that are built up in my head where I can just stay focused and I can keep on going and it'll pull me through.

So what I do and what I encourage to you is paint a picture in your head of what success looks like and then paint a picture in your head of what failure looks like. So start with success. Pretend that you do the thing that you're scared of, and you do it, and in time you become excellent at it, in time you develop that confidence that comes, and you build that picture up.

I like to sit down, put on some music, and just close my eyes and clearly see that until I can grasp that image clear as day in my mind. And I see this is what success looks like. These are the potential benefits. If I get off the couch and go for a walk or if I don't eat that bad food or if I do this other thing and teach my child this certain thing that's difficult for me, see what success looks like.

And then on the other hand, paint the picture of what failure looks like and put yourself in a situation, close your eyes, and just imagine yourself as a total failure because you didn't take action. You didn't exercise the courage that you needed to exercise. And then see what would actually happen in that circumstance.

What would that look like? What would that feel like? And then hold those images and say, "Which do I want?" And if you can get those images clear enough and you can make it so obvious as to where you're going to wind up being and how you can grow towards it, then it'll make progress.

And that's why I do my stuff in Spanish--I'm forcing myself to do my Spanish stuff in public because I, over the years, was inspired by other people who demonstrated how they learned. For a long time, I listened to people and I heard people who were just so great, so polished, so crisp, and I thought, "I could never be as good as them.

I could never do things as well as they could." And I just thought, "That's unattainable. I didn't do anything." But then over time, there started to be this open revolution of communication where you could watch people's progress. You could see it charted out. And then I thought, "If I could see other people's progress, I could make it too." And that's been so deeply helpful for me that over the years, I've wanted to share that with others.

And so it's humbling, it's difficult for me, and if it were going to keep me from taking action, I wouldn't do it in public. But at this point, I've built things to where I'm strong enough to do things without them putting me in a situation where I'm too scared about them.

And so I figure, if I can build this as an example for other people, and I can leave a legacy to show how so many other people have-- how you're not the only one. It's been difficult for other people too. Other people have started in difficult situations, and yet they pushed through.

If I can do that effectively, then I can help inspire other people. So that's why I do my Spanish stuff in public. It's good for me. It challenges me. It imposes all this deep pressure on me. But I know that it can also help you. I know that it can serve as a signal for you.

And if I can do that, and I can get you to go and to say, "You know what? If Joshua's willing to humble himself, if Joshua's willing to be vulnerable and do something he's not great at, then I can see that Joshua's getting better." Because a year from now, when you come and go back to my first episode of Radical Personal Finance in Español, a year from now, you're going to go back and you're going to say, "Wow, Joshua's gotten so much better." And so I want you to know now, right now, that that's what's going to happen so that you're not surprised by it.

So then you can go and you can take that back to your life, and you can say, "You know what? I'm going to go ahead and do that thing that's been difficult for me. I'm going to go ahead and tackle that thing that I feel nervous about, but I'm going to do it." And then what I know from experience is that then that will allow you to go and be an inspiration to someone else.

Because the world has enough experts. The world has enough people in high, shiny, glittering towers. What we need more of is local leadership, local people in their community. And so when you can come and you can say, "Hey, look, I can do this," and they see you making progress, then that inspires change.

And that rolls over and rolls over and rolls over. And then together, collectively, we can make progress. I want to close today's show with the classic comment from Theodore Roosevelt's address to the speech in Sorbonne. I actually read the speech. I think I read it for a show a number of years ago, and then I deleted it, but this is just the well-known part of it, that to me makes all the difference in the world, and yet it demonstrates a truth that anybody who's done something knows about.

Roosevelt famously said, he said, "It's not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming.

But who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be among with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." To me, that particular poem, it's rightly called a poem, that particular poem expresses the truth.

It's not the critic who counts. The credit belongs to the man who is in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, etc. And so I encourage you, if you're struggling with courage, commit that quote to memory. Years ago I did. It's been years since I've thought of it.

But I committed that quote to memory and I'd repeat it to myself. Not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming.

But who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, but his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

If you will let words like that ring in your heart and start to take action when it is difficult for you, in time you will become a high-achieving person. You will become a successful person. And what you will find is no successful person will ever judge you. No high-achieving person will judge you.

There will still be plenty of losers reaching out and sniping at you, and you will not care, because you know that the energy that they spend sniping at you is energy that they will never invest in themselves. But when you get around people that you admire, people that have done great things, you will find a camaraderie of experience, people who know that it is not whether you actually win or you actually lose.

It is rather that you are doing it, that you are trying it, that you are exercising that courage. The most important thing to keep in mind is you must actually exercise the courage. So if you find that you are not exercising the courage to actually take action on something that you are working towards, something that you care about, if the new adventure is so risky that you are paralyzed with fear, do not even let that stop you.

Just figure out a way to lower the risk, get it down to where it is safe enough for you to start and take action, and then start. I promise you if you do that, you get better and better and better and better and better. And the fear will never go away.

You will always be nervous. You will always be a little frustrated. You will probably be a little bit scared. The fear will never go away. But you will have developed the habit, the skill of exercising courage, acting in the face of the fear so much that it will be fairly straightforward for you to do it yet again, yet again, yet again, yet again.

And the trajectory of your life that you will actually build will be so shocking that your friends will not recognize you. Your friends will be on this linear path where they are just getting a little bit better. And what will happen is if you start exercising courage and you start building, you start to be on this absolutely exponential path.

And that exponential path will completely separate you from them so much that they won't recognize you and you won't recognize them. But other people who are growing, who are on that same exponential path, they'll be your friends. They'll be your reference group. And then the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

There's a reason why. It's pretty obvious when you start to experience it. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Radical Personal Finance. I thank you for being here. Make sure if you're not following the page on Facebook, make sure to come by facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance if you're a Facebook user.

Of course, that is available to anybody there. I'm streaming there every day as I build these new skills, even in video streaming, et cetera. I'm streaming there every day. The goal is to do it at noon Eastern time every single day. So at noon Eastern time, U.S. time, New York time, the goal is to be there as long as I have a computer that works.

So I'd love to have you there. If not, come on by YouTube. Find Radical Personal Finance on YouTube. If you'd like to check out my new Spanish channel, just search Radical Personal Finance en Español on those two channels. It'll be on the podcast directory fairly soon. And then make sure you come by radicalpersonalfinance.com/store.

I have several courses available for you there. I'm in the process of reshooting one of them. I'm going to be launching several new courses as well. Keep your ears out for those in the next few weeks. Radicalpersonalfinance.com/store. Thank you for being here. 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.

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