Unwrap the holiday savings at Citadel Outlets. Shop the early access Black Friday sales for the best deals of the season. The all night shopping party starts Thanksgiving night at 8 p.m. Visit CitadelOutlets.com for more information. - Happy New Year, Radicals. Welcome back to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host.

Today is Tuesday, January 6, 2015. Yes, it is 2015. I made an oops in the last show and I'm sure it'll happen a few times. 2015, this is the show where we're gonna talk about how to transform your fuzzy feel-good New Year's resolutions into workable plans of action. Things that you can actually do to bring those goals and dreams into reality.

I hope you had a nice time off. I did, I spent the first week out of town visiting with family and the second week in town working hard on some business stuff for the show and then also working hard on some projects around the house working on improving some things that I've been neglecting here in my household and helping to improve my marriage by finishing some things.

I'm excited to be back in front of the microphone, ready to share with you the ideas. Today I'm gonna share with you some ideas on my personal development plan for 2015. I'm doing it with the purpose of helping you to think about whatever it is that, helping you to think about how to put a plan of action in place to help you achieve your goals.

The turn of the year is a convenient time to think about your goals. I like it, for me it's very convenient. My birthday is in June and my wife's birthday is also in June and so that gives us kind of a midpoint where there's a special day that's a midpoint of the calendar year and then I like the flip of the calendar year.

So I do a lot of things in terms of six month projects. I use those periods of time to do some personal observation, checkups, just try to figure out, okay, am I on track with some of the things that I'm working toward. So I find that to be a convenient time of year.

A lot of people, these days, New Year's resolutions, they're so jaded as far as what people, people have all these comments about them because people make them in this half-hearted idea and without any intention of following through, no plans behind it. They've almost become a cultural joke. But I don't see any reason not to take advantage of the natural seasons of life and a turn of a calendar year is a natural season of life where it's useful to sit down and look to see where you're at, especially when it comes to talking about finance.

If you're running a company or you're an investor, your financial statements are always gonna be dated in some manner. So those usually are often gonna be a calendar quarter. So, okay, we're gonna look at a Q3 report or maybe you're looking at monthly balance sheets. So we're using the calendar month as a useful time.

And then you're looking at either a calendar year or a tax year for your year-end, a fiscal year or a calendar year for your year-end statements and so it's useful. And so I just, I like that same ebb and flow of life. So I've been, over the last few weeks, I've been working on my personal development plan.

I'm gonna share it with you today. Today's gonna be a little bit personal. And I'm gonna use this, my plan, as an example of just kinda how I approach goal setting where I focus a lot on, a little bit on the vision, okay, here's what I'm trying to do, and then a lot on the roadmap to get there.

And I'm not, I wouldn't hold myself out as a great example of an incredible goal achiever. I wouldn't hold myself out as somebody that you need to look at and say, "Hey, whatever Joshua does is exactly what I'm gonna do." I'm a learner right alongside you. But I have learned in a few things that have worked well for me and a few things that haven't worked well.

Much of what I've learned surrounding goal achievement, however, has come to me within the context of financial planning. And in working in financial planning, most, many people have financial goals that they've set for themselves. Usually those goals are somewhat general, maybe the focus of, you know, I wanna save some money or I wanna be rich.

But few people take the time to make clear goals. And it's really astounding when you start working as a financial planner, you start asking people about their goals and you realize that everything that the success gurus say about the number of people that actually have goals and a clear plan of action to follow toward those goals is true.

I've always started all financial planning fact-finding appointments with a question about a potential client's goals. And it's a really interesting thing because usually it comes out of left field and many people are, "Wait, how are you getting this personal?" But I find it to be a good litmus, not litmus test, a good, I guess, little mini test to see if somebody's gonna be a good prospective client or not.

Now, it usually takes a little while for a relationship to be established where somebody shares their most personal intimate goals. But if somebody doesn't have goals, they can't answer that question in a clear manner, then at least in my years of experience working as a financial planner, there's very little, the relationship is not gonna be very fruitful and it's good to smoke that out in the beginning.

So I've always liked starting with asking people about their goals. So many people have ideas about what they'd like to accomplish, but few people have clear, specific goals. And so setting out those clear, specific goals, I think is a good starting point. And then more importantly, however, I believe, is having a plan of action that you're reasonably confident in, that if you follow this plan of action, that it has some chance of working for you.

Where I've often noticed this is things like retirement planning. Most of the time people say, "I wanna retire," but they haven't sat down and said, "How much do I need? "What does that mean? "When do I wanna do it? "Let's work a little bit of math "to figure out what are the numbers "that I actually need to consider myself retired." And then, is it practical?

Can I actually get there? Can I actually save the $3,000 per month that I need in order to accomplish that goal? And so financial planning is very good. The process is very good at exposing that. And then the most useful thing about it, about a good financial planning engagement, is that you regularly review the progress toward goals.

And so with my clients, I tried to at least have an annual review of the financial plan. And you update the balance sheet, you update all the assets, you figure out how much more has gone into the investment portfolio, and then you basically should have a meter to say, "Are we on track or are we off track?" Some of the tools that the financial planning industry has are still a little bit clunky in that regard.

I think there's some real opportunity for some programmers and designers to design some really beautiful tools to monitor that on an ongoing basis. But regardless of how clunky it is, just sitting down and saying, "Am I on track?" That has real value, has real value. So I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what am I gonna work on, work toward here in 2015, and kind of developing my plans of action.

And so I'm gonna share them with you. And I still struggle a little bit. I'm gonna share some of my areas of focus. I'm not gonna share specifically some of my specific goals. It's a little bit too uncomfortable for me to share specific dollar figures or specific numbers or specific things.

So I'm gonna share with you in a general way. I don't know, it's a little bit hard for me to, some people are very comfortable giving away all the details of their life. I'm not that way. And I'm not sure that it's necessarily important. I think if you're the kind of personality type who's motivated by that, then I think that would be valuable to know.

But I'm not really that type of person. And so I'm gonna keep some details quiet. Little tip for you, years ago I heard Zig Ziglar talk about goal setting. He made two interesting comments. He said, in response to this question, who do you share your goals with? And he said, share your give up goals with everybody.

And share your go up goals very carefully, or something along those lines. And his point was, if you have a resolution, a commitment to stop doing something, tell that to everybody. I think he was a smoker, if memory is correct. Or he was actually, he decided to stop drinking alcohol.

And things like that, he said, declare them far and wide. I will not drink alcohol any longer. I will not smoke. Or I will not eat fried food. Or I will, whatever the, you insert, whatever your thing that you wanna give up, insert that here. But his point was, spread that far and wide so that people can remind you, and so that you can be held accountable to that.

But his encouragement was, share your go up goals, the things that you're working towards, very carefully, and share it with people who can encourage you, and who can help you along your path. In finance, I've seen this a good bit. If you share the fact that you are working your way toward being a millionaire, or a multi-millionaire, or toward being financially independent, you gotta be careful about who you share that with, because many people simply don't understand that it's possible, and many people are gonna discourage us.

Who are you to think that you can achieve that? So, I think you have to be careful, the forum that you choose, to share those types of goals with, and make sure that it's a supportive community. That's why I love online forums, because of the creation of supportive communities that can come out of that.

And where you get the opportunity to actually interact with people, who can support you toward those goals. And you can even do it anonymously, which is wonderful. But I'll get to that in just a moment. So, for me, the theme of 2015, my theme of the year, I don't do this in some kind of formal, I'm gonna set a theme, some people do that great.

But, just what has come naturally to me, as a theme for this year, is the term, the couplet, world class. As I've reflected back, this past year, 2014, for me, has been a major year of growth and change. I closed a business that I've been working towards for six years, I kinda jumped out of the comfortable pot, caught to the comfortable bed, into a completely uncertain future, doing things that I've never done before, with starting the show, starting the business behind it.

And it was a very exciting, but, it was an exciting year, but I haven't felt expert at what I was doing. And I had achieved a certain level of comfort and mastery with what I was doing previously. And now, for the last six months, I've just felt like, I don't have a clue what I'm doing, just figuring it out and thrashing around frantically, trying to stay on top of the water.

And it's been a really great last six months, with bringing this show into the world, and so many of you tuning in and encouraging me, and sending me your notes, it's been a really positive experience. What has been apparent to me, however, is that I need to step it up a notch.

And I've mentioned this on the show in a couple of ways, and today I'll give details as far as what I mean by that. It was important to me just to start. I am very much convinced of the value in most things, of taking a ready, fire, aim approach.

Just shipping a minimum viable product, and letting the marketplace give you feedback. I like to think of all success and failure, or just simple feedback, is the marketplace giving me feedback. And so, I wanted to ship just a minimum viable product, which is why, when I started the show, just let me get something out there, let me get something out there.

Even though I listen, I can see ways to improve it, let me get something out there. And so, I've shipped this show for the last six months, and some of the associated aspects of it. But I haven't been proud that it's been truly world class. I believe it's been good, but not truly excellent, and truly world class.

And on the one hand, I think I kind of wanted just to do just good enough. I realized over the last couple of months, as I was thinking about it, that I kind of had this idea and this hope that I could just do my little show, do my little podcast, and make a little bit of money, and just kind of live a simple, unencumbered life.

And that's still there in the back of my mind. Many people have large accumulation goals, many people have large things they wanna buy, things they wanna do. I feel as though I've accomplished most of those, I don't have much of the desire that many people have for, I don't have the desire for stuff, I don't have the desire for a status, house, and those kinds of things.

So for me, I kind of desire a really great lifestyle. That's the core personal focus for me, and that lifestyle is defined in different ways. Part of it includes the physical surroundings, but much of it just includes being able to focus on the things that I really enjoy, and where I feel I'm really good at on a day-to-day basis.

That's an important part of my lifestyle. And I realized, however, that I was bringing that approach to the business and just kind of hoping it was gonna work. And probably it was due to the pretty rough launch of the membership program, and thank you to those of you who have joined.

I was hoping for that launch to be much more spectacular than it was with people joining. And most of it was my fault as far as, instead of doing it in a planned out way where I had all the services and things provided behind the scenes, everything ready to go, I just said I need to test this out and see.

Another major issue was right before launching it, deleting all of my iTunes subscribers, which still has had a ripple effect on the show. So that was pretty tough. But what I realized out of that was I wasn't necessarily, I was a little discouraged based on that launch, but I wasn't disheartened to the point of wanting to give up I'm committed to doing a minimum of 1,000 episodes of this show.

I think that's enough time to kind of work it out and see. But what I was discouraged was that it didn't just work as easily as I thought. I recognized that I needed to really step up my game and bring a higher level of professionalism to the show and a higher level of professionalism to all these new aspects of my life.

And it's been tough for me to figure out how do I do that? Because my skills are not, for example, on the technical side of creating this show. I've never owned a microphone. I didn't know how to use sound editing stuff. I don't know bit rates and kilohertz and all this.

I'm not a techie guy. My site was the first WordPress blog I'd ever put up. And as I was going through the process, though, I recognized that it's not good enough for me to be good enough. I need to be world class at what I'm doing. I need to be excellent, truly excellent.

Because I need to have a good testimony. I need to lead by example. Whether that's for the people that I'm encouraging to start businesses and forge out on their own, or whether that's for my son who is gonna be watching me over the coming years, I need to lead by example and really be excellent.

So over the last couple of months, I've come to a resolve to be world class in everything. And so for each of my priorities going forward over the coming calendar year, that's in every one of my priorities. For example, one of them very clearly is I'm a world class business owner.

Another one, I'm a world class podcast host. Another one, I'm a world class writer. I'm a world class speaker. I enjoy world class health. I'm a world class husband. I'm a world class father. Radical Personal Finance is a world class financial education site. And there are more, but that term world class for me is essentially my focus.

Is how do I learn the skills necessary to be a real leader in the space that I'm in, in the work that I'm doing? Whatever work you do, do it heartily, do it right. And that's what I'm committed to doing. Now I haven't known exactly how to do that.

And I've made some missteps over the last few weeks. One of the things that's dogged my feet has been the idea of how to figure out whether or not I should continue to go it alone or whether I should partner with somebody on the show. Because I felt incompetent at the technical side of how do I create a video course, how do I do this stuff, because I felt incompetent at those things, then I've searched for perhaps partnering with somebody.

I've had a few people reach out and I've explored some options. But ultimately, I decided recently that I just, I can't go that path. I wasn't willing to give up what I was gonna give up and rather I just needed to, I need to learn the skills. And I need to focus on becoming and learning the new skills.

Doesn't mean I'm not gonna delegate things out. I don't need to become an expert at certain technical aspects. But I do need to learn the basic skills. And so I'm applying myself to those skills. So let me share with you my priorities and then the associated plans with them as a hope of maybe inspiring you to make sure that you've got a lot of meat and bones to your goal achievement plan for this year.

Let me start with one of these things. One of my primary focuses is to be a world-class business owner. I wanna be a world-class business owner. And I haven't been able to get Tony Robbins out of my head since I read his most recent money book. When I look at what he does in what little I'm aware of with his book as a business owner, I'm just really stunned by, I guess his span of reach and influence.

He has all these different businesses and all these different companies that he's involved in to some degree or another. And I've noticed this with many business owners. Many business owners run many, many businesses. And sometimes they're related, sometimes they're not. But Tony Robbins has his resort that he does in Fiji.

He has a speaking career. He has a coaching company. He's got supplement companies. He's dabbling now in the financial advice business. He's got ownership interests in all these different businesses. And he still has the time for every other aspect of his life. And what I recognized is that people like him, people like Tony Robbins or other effective, influential, high-level business executives have skills that I simply don't have.

They have the ability to delegate. They have the ability to keep track of things. They just have skills that I don't have to be able to expand their reach so much. And so one of the key focuses for me is I need to develop more of those skills. I don't particularly have a huge interest in doing what Tony Robbins does, although I'm gonna do some of what he does, but I still need those same skills because for me to be effective at life, I need to build those same skills and systems and structures.

Many people are amazed at, I've gotten emails and feedback from people saying, "Joshua, how do you do a daily podcast?" And I kinda chuckle 'cause I think, now I think, how does Rush Limbaugh do what he does? How does Dave Ramsey do what he does? How does Clark Howard, where these guys are doing two or three hour, how does Glenn Beck, he does a three hour radio show and he does a one hour TV show and he's running a TV company and he's writing books and he's speaking and doing all these things.

Like how on earth do those people do that? And the answer is they have skills that I don't and they built teams and systems around them that equip them to be able to do that. So I think of this as, well, I just need to do the same thing.

And up till now, I've done everything myself. So far I haven't hired, with the exception of the creation of my logo, which was a friend of mine who's a graphic designer, I've done everything, 100% of everything associated with this show myself. And I was a little bit tired of, I've had people when I was working as a financial planner, I had different people working for me and I had some really great staff working for me, but I didn't like the, I didn't like feeling constrained at having to support staff people and pay their salaries and do that.

I just wanted to do my own thing. And I think enough time has passed now that I've gotten a lot of that out of my system and now I need to really build up my ability to outsource, my ability to build a team, my ability to leverage my time so that I can create better products to help people in a more effective way.

It's not useful for you, my listening audience, if I should be spending time absorbing a new financial concept or thinking about how do I communicate this more effectively and more clearly, it's not serving you if I'm spending that time uploading MP3 files to the internet. It's really not. So I need to build those skills.

I also, however, the flip side is I have to do it in an intelligent way because I'm essentially bootstrapping this project. I need to do it in an intelligent way 'cause I'm not willing to try to grow too big too fast. I'm not willing to try to run out and borrow a bunch of money.

I'm not willing to give away part of the ownership of my company. That was the decisions that I came to. I'm not willing to surrender my brand and become a sub-brand to somebody else. So those were difficult decisions to come to because I could probably, maybe they're wrong, I don't know.

We'll find out, look back in hindsight and be able to figure out. But I could've leveraged and scaled more quickly, but I realized that if I do that, I'll miss the opportunity to become a bigger, more skillful person. I'll miss the opportunity to learn to become better. So I'm going to develop myself as a world-class business owner.

And there are a few aspects to that that I'm really focused on right now, right in front of me. Number one is I need to hone and develop my personal productivity skills. Now, I've got a pretty decent foundation. I've been paying attention to task management and time management techniques for a while.

I've worked out systems that have worked for me. I've got a stronger foundation than many people, but I still haven't felt really expert at this area. And so I've decided that a major focus is I've got to become expert at this. At least for the coming months, I'm going to continue to be doing more things myself, 'cause I've got to build up the revenue of the show in order to be able to outsource things.

It's kind of this vicious cycle. I've got to build up revenue so that I can hire things done, so I can create a better product, so that I can build more revenue. But that's business, and that's okay, it's fun. It's an adventure. But in the meantime, I've got to become much more ruthlessly effective and ruthlessly efficient at my own personal productivity.

And so I've set out an educational plan for myself in that area. And the tools that I use primarily, at the moment, I use, I write a lot in just paper notebooks and things like that. But as far as the technical tools that I use is I use a task management application called Nozbe, and I use Evernote, and I use a tool, well, let's start with that, at Nozbe and Evernote.

And essentially what I'm trying to do is get myself disciplined to using Evernote as my brain function and Nozbe for my task function. And of all the tools that I've tried over the years of task management functions, Nozbe I think is the best. And the reason that it's the best, that I have found so far, is because the founder and CEO is ruthlessly committed to his core mission, and because they actually have a business model behind their software, so it's always getting better.

I used to look for free software opportunities, and I still use some, but one of the things that I've come to appreciate is the importance of paying for software on an ongoing basis so that it gets better over time. Because if you can pay the business owner for the creation of their product, then they can put more resources toward making their product better.

So I like the fact that Nozbe has a free version, but to really get benefit of it, then you pay for it. And they have a really world-class task management system. What I'm gonna do again here, right in the beginning of the year, is they have a 10-part training course and productivity course that Michael Sluinski, the founder of the company, has created.

And I'm gonna go through it again with a careful focus on my own personal systems, and make sure that I'm fully understanding and utilizing the new version of the software. So I've laid that out with action plans of tasks of, you know, watch video one, take notes, change something.

Watch video two, take notes, change something. So that's gonna be a big, major focus. I wanna become really expert with my tool. And I think this is an important thing for you to consider, is when you have tools, it's important to know how to effectively use them. Many people don't read their manuals.

And it astounds me when people don't read a manual because they miss out on half the functionality of, I guess, how their tool can work. It's very difficult for me to sit beside somebody who's working on a computer, because so many people who are working on computers are annoyingly slow.

And they use the mouse for everything, they're clicking. It's very, it takes a lot of self-discipline for me. For example, working next to somebody in PowerPoint or in Microsoft Excel takes a lot of discipline for me to sit and watch them work, because it is agonizingly slow. And just a simple thing is, if any time you are learning a new program, A, take a course on it, find a book and read a book.

I remember in college, one of the most useful books that I had was a book on Microsoft Office, where I went through and did all of the exercises for Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Access. It just helped so much to go through the basic training functions to speed me up forever.

And then, so try a book, but then also print a list of keyboard shortcuts out, and follow that list and just start looking. Any time you're gonna do a task, is there a keyboard shortcut? You know, on your computer, don't ever go down and click for the next window.

Use the Alt + Tab function on Windows. I don't, I'm not a Mac user, so I don't know what all the Mac shortcuts are. But search for keyboard shortcuts. If you are working in Excel, you need to know every keyboard shortcut, you need to know every thing to speed yourself up, just to increase your effectiveness.

So that's what I'm doing with Nozbe, is I'm gonna go through, make sure that I know all of the fundamentals of exactly how the program works, so that I can be lightning fast with the use of the program. I've struggled with, I've used Nozbe a bunch of times, and what happens when I use digital organizers, I often get overwhelmed.

And so, for example, last couple months, I actually switched back to a paper-based system. But the problem with the paper-based system is then, that got overwhelmed. So I'm going back to Nozbe, and I'm not changing, because it's the best tool. I've used it effectively in the past, and I'm gonna be really expert with it, and focus a lot on always working from that list, which I'll get to in a minute.

Second tool is Evernote. And I've used Evernote for years, but I'm not a power user. I'm gonna become a power user of Evernote. I read in the past, my educational plan for how to implement this priority, is there's a book called Evernote Essentials, written by an author named Brett Kelly, and it's just all about how to use Evernote.

It's basically the training manual for Evernote. And I am also, I'm gonna go through, and go through that book again, page by page, and make sure that I become a power user of Evernote. Because at this stage, my life has become so much more complicated over the last few months, with dealing with research for shows, show notes, show outlines, the actual process of creating the show, handling listener questions, kind of just the whole process becomes so much more complicated.

So I need to become a power user of these tools in order to keep things hammered out. For time management, what I've done over the last little while, is I've reinstituted kind of a time budget for myself, of tracking where my time is going. And I've needed to do this because of basically trying to figure out how much time is actually going to handling blog comments?

How much time is actually going to prepping for a show? Do I actually have more time or am I wasting it? I need to know those numbers so I know if I'm gonna outsource this task to somebody else, how much time am I actually saving? What's it worth to me?

So the little app that I found, I've tried a bunch of these over the years, and now I'm on an Android phone, but I found an app called Glio Time Tracker. And you might find this one useful, but essentially it's a really good way of, you put in the tasks and then you just hit start and stop, and it creates a list for you of how much time you've actually spent on things.

I haven't found in the past most of the computer-based systems to be very effective for me, because I need to know, 'cause I'm doing a lot of stuff away from the computer. I've used a lot of paper-based systems. There's some really great paper-based ideas that I've used. But I found this Glio Time Tracker to be useful.

And then I also found another app for the Android called Alarm Every 15 Minutes, where every 15 minutes my phone buzzes and it just vibrates, and that reminds me to make sure that I'm recording my time. I'm gonna go and check out again. I've noticed over the last couple years that I used to use Rescue Time.

I've noticed that, and I didn't like it, I didn't think it worked very well. I've noticed that they've improved that, so I'm gonna give that a shot again here in January, and then see if they've improved it enough that that could be better for me. They seem to do, I mean, it's a more well-built system, probably, than this little time-tracking app that I'm currently using, so I'm gonna see if it's worth the cost.

This is important, that's just my tools, and so I've set out a plan to learn the tools and to become really expert with the tools. Then the key, however, for personal productivity is not the tool, but actually the action behind the tool. And so I'm gonna really focus here in the first quarter of 2015 on strengthening my habits of one, always working from a prioritized list, I've gotten weak on this, instead of simply just focusing on my prioritized list ruthlessly, I get weak on checking this, checking that, we all do, it always happens to us.

But I'm only going to work from a prioritized list that I've decided in advance. Next, planning each day's work in advance. Again, I often find myself kind of scrambling, how do I get this done, this takes forever, and I'm gonna plan each day's work and the time allotted for the work in advance.

And then keeping up on my weekly and monthly reviews. What I find is that without those weekly and monthly reviews, my systems break down. And so that's a big deal for me, is making sure that I keep those calendar appointments with myself and that I do those reviews to keep my lists current, and especially current such that I can throw out stuff that I don't wanna do that I'm not doing.

So those are just my personal course for setting these things out. Now what's useful about this is the reason I started with the productivity tools is goal achievement is basically a system of action steps. And so I have in Evernote and Nozbe, they're hooked together, I have a goal, a project is the terminology for Nozbe.

I have a project entitled I'm a World Class Business Owner. And under that World Class Business Owner has an outline of all of these things that I've said. And that's linked to an Evernote note where everything is broken out into a step-by-step, do this, do this, do this, do this.

And then as it's done, I can cross it out and I can check the task is done. And each day and week as I'm reviewing that category, I can see what's the next thing that I need to do. Many people, I've received questions from people asking, well, how do you, Joshua, how do you get so many financial credentials and designations?

Well, it's simple. You sit down and you say, okay, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna get my certified financial planning designation. All right, what's required? Well, I gotta do, I think it's eight classes for that and I need to take an exam. Well, let's lay out the eight classes, write it out.

Class one, two, three, put the order you're gonna take it and then break down the first class, sign up. You know, your action steps are pick a school. Okay, well, actually research schools. You have to research, where am I gonna do it? Next, pick a school, enroll, pay the enrollment fee.

Next, order the materials. They send you the books and then I just add to my to-do list. There are 18 chapters in this. Read chapter one, read chapter two, chapter three. And I like crossing things off. So I literally will put read chapter one, chapter two, chapter three on my list.

That way I can have the joy when I finished chapter 11 and I feel like I'm wading through this horrific book of check, chapter 11 done. I'm one step closer, one step closer, one step closer. And you do that enough times and you can pile up a bunch of financial credentials.

That's how you get through a university system. That's how you get it done. So for me, it's no different except this type of plan is where I'm actually focusing on the education that matters to me. My personal productivity skills, really understanding my software so I can be lightning fast with it.

So instead of having to think about it, I can be really, really useful from it. I also need to really develop my personal outsourcing skills and I need to build a team around my business and around my objectives. So in order to do that, there's some pre-work, which is what I've been focusing on.

Is I need to know exactly what my highest priority activities are. What is it that I can do that no one else can do? And basically that's sitting down, preparing and creating and doing this show. Maybe someone else can do it better, who knows? But that's the thing that I think I can do better than anyone else.

Everything else I need to get rid of. Now, the challenge is how to get rid of it. Because again, bootstrapping this show, perhaps it would be nice if I could just outsource it and have it all done with a snap of the finger, but that'd probably be an expensive mistake 'cause I'd probably just waste a lot of money doing that.

So I need to focus on what are the tasks that are most important and what are the tasks that are important to get rid of now and what order should I do that? And then I need to find and build a team of people and software to help me with the things that I'm not great at.

I've done a really good job with that on many aspects of this show and this business, but I've not done it well with other aspects. And so tools and resources. So I've listed out and I've done a bunch of research on what are the tools and resources that I've got.

So I'll share them with you. One of the things that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna read Chris Ducker's book, "Virtual Freedom." He published it this year. He gave away a copy of it at FinCon, which is where I picked up my copy. And I think he's a guy who teaches people how to outsource their stuff and he owns an outsourcing company in the Philippines.

So I figure I'm gonna start with that. I'm gonna read all of his suggestions from that he's written about how to outsource different aspects of your business to virtual assistants. And I'm gonna take careful notes, think constantly about implementing again that thousand percent formula. What can I do? What can I change?

Put something over on my action list. Okay, here, this is something I need to do. What are the action steps from it? Mark up the book, keep the careful action steps, implement the suggestions. Another book I've read in years past, I'm gonna go and pick it up again, is Sam Carpenter's book called "Work the System," which is all about having a systems mindset towards your business.

And I don't think he's received very wide acclaim for his book, but I really enjoyed it. And so I'm gonna work my way back through it again, applying it to my current context, create the manuals, create the procedures, create everything, and document the systems that need to happen surrounding my business.

Next, one other site and actually podcast that I've enjoyed is there's a podcast called the Less Doing Podcast. And I commend it to you if you're interested in some of the current tools. The host of that podcast is a guy named Ari Mizell, and he's kind of a technology freak, and he's always current on these tools.

So I find he's basically my aggregator for new and improved tools. And so whether it's things like IFTT, If This Then That, is a useful program that I use, or Zapier was another program, how to make all these software systems work together and use all these technological tools to basically create the systems in your life.

So I'm gonna go back through his podcast, and I haven't listened for a while, but I'm gonna make a real focus of going through them, notebook and pen handy, taking notes, writing out action steps, using him as my aggregator. I'm gonna go back through, over the years, I've read all of Tim Ferriss's books, and also probably the majority of his blog.

But the thing that is so interesting to me is, I remember, I think I found him before he was cool. I remember being in college before he made it such a massive splash for himself, coming across him. And I started to become interested, and then I just watched his success and popularity just take off, I couldn't believe it.

So I'm gonna go back through, and I'm gonna study his body of work again myself, and take careful notes on all of the suggestions that he makes, because he's walked the talk, and starting with nothing, with no particular, I mean, a special advantage other than a unique, other than his energy and effort, and personal talent and skill and ability, and applied that to his, so I'm gonna go back through, and I've got most of his stuff listed out on my to-do list, and go back through and take careful notes.

I'm also researching, and I was planning to make the research before this, but I need to really understand more of the best strategies of things that are going on for online businesses, and some of the, so I'm gonna take a look at the resources from a site and some guys that are doing a project called Fizzle, and there are three entrepreneurs who are essentially coaching people to online businesses, and I'm gonna go through their stuff, and try to learn everything I can from their systems, and apply that to my scenario.

I also have a number of other specific technical things that I need to learn, and so one of them is I need to really become, not necessarily an expert, I don't need to become world-class, but I need to be very good at WordPress, and I'm not. I get intimidated by the web stuff, and ultimately, I don't wish to do it, but I need to be intelligent enough at it to have it done for me, and so I'm still in the process of researching, okay, who's gonna be my WordPress coach and teacher.

I also need to become an expert at email marketing. I use AWeber, which my system is totally broken right now, so I'm gonna fix that up, and then my membership site and that software, I need to become an expert at that. So those are also priorities for me to go through all of their training tutorials, make sure that I become really expert at that, and then an additional technical skill that I need to learn is I need to learn how to do screencasts and video casts, because a lot of the specialized product training is gonna be based upon screencasts and video casts.

So under my business owner project, those are my different priorities, and it probably sounds like a lot. It is a lot. I find that I prefer to have more stuff on my list than I'll ever get done, so that when I get bored with one thing, I can just flip to something else that's already on my list, and so I do not expect to be able to cross everything off of my list on those strategies within this year or this quarter or anything.

I don't expect to ever finish that list, but I know that if I get 50 or 70% of the way through it, I'll be an expert at that, so that's just all I gotta do is I gotta get at least 50 or 70% of the way through it, and I'll probably get through a good bit of it, but then I'll probably reassess and say, you know what, I'm good enough at this.

I understand enough about how to do WordPress on my own. I've been able to fix these things myself. Now I know enough to hire a good developer who's really world-class at it, so fundamentals, gonna build the fundamentals in all of those areas. Now I know that was a lot, and I'm not gonna go through every one of my areas of focus to that degree of depth.

I'm gonna cover two more with a little bit of depth, and then just briefly touch on each of the other ones, but my point in doing that was that my hope for you is that you will apply this same process of designing an educational plan for yourself that's in line with your goals.

So if you understand what do I need to do, what am I trying to accomplish, and then you can say, well, now in order for me to do that, what skills do I need to develop? What knowledge do I need? Now you have a focus. With that focus, you'll be able to accomplish things, because then you can look for areas of synergy, and I'm gonna share with you how I'm structuring, at least with my plan.

We'll see if the plan survives contact with the enemy or not, but my plan of how I'm overlapping all these things. The important thing is once you know the specific skills that you're weak in, then you can target your learning. I know many of you listen to my show on your commute.

I love that, I think that's awesome, and I hope that I can really serve you toward your financial independence goals. But remember that you shouldn't only consume my show if you've got enough of the basics down and you need to focus on something else. So the reason I need to be a world-class business owner, one of the reasons, is very important, is because this is the way that I'm funding my financial independence plan.

I'm funding it immediately with building my ideal lifestyle without having the savings to be able to just simply say, I'm declaring myself financially independent off of investment income. So I need to build the business to fund this lifestyle now, and I need to continue to build the business to provide enough room in my personal finances for me to save enough money in a reasonable amount of time to become financially independent.

My show, my hope, is that it's very useful for you to encourage you and inspire you toward your financial independence. But you may find that my content is not serving your specific needs right now. You might find, for example, that you work in the marketing department and you need to become, in order to gain your financial independence, you need to become a vice president of marketing at the firm at which you work.

Well, in that scenario, you're probably well-served by finding some really excellent marketing podcasts and interspersing my show with those marketing podcasts. But you need to sit down and say, what's the plan towards that? So for me, I'm not at the stage where I need to go and listen to any more financial podcasts.

I'm at the stage where I need to go and listen to a WordPress podcast, or I need to listen to little technical tools that I can use to really develop, to streamline my life, or how do I outsource these things in a more effective way, or how do I do a better email marketing campaign, that type of thing.

So this is why I'm sharing with you my ideas is to hopefully encourage you and inspire you and give you some tools that you can apply to your own scenario. Let me give you a couple more that have to do with the show, and I'll tell you just how I'm designing my personal development plan for this coming year.

The next one is I'm a world-class podcast host. And I split this out from being a world-class business owner because the host is a very different set of, it's a very different skill set than the business owner. The skill of being the broadcast host is all about my on-air presentation.

How concise is it? How in-depth is it? How interesting is it? How funny is it? How, do I use the right tone? Is it engaging? And to me, this has been the toughest thing for me to figure out how to develop a plan behind, 'cause I haven't known where to go for examples.

For example, how do I become a really great interviewer? Well, the only best thing I have is just by noticing people in interviews that I enjoy and trying to listen and see what is it that they do. I haven't found a book that says, here's how to be a world-class interviewer.

So here, under this category, my plan is actually fairly simple. The best resource that I've found so far is I found a website called transom.org, T-R-A-N-S-O-M, transom.org. And the founders of Transom, they're affiliated with public radio. And essentially, it's all about how to create good public radio for national public radio.

It's the most useful thing that I've found where they're taking from the radio world and applying it to all types of media, whether it's distributed as a podcast only or as a radio show and a podcast. And so this is heavily influenced by popular public radio shows, such as This American Life or Radiolab.

That type of reporting radio is essentially what they're heavily focused on. But I've enjoyed a lot of their topics. I have to figure out how to apply that to teaching and education, because it's very different. My wife and I enjoy listening to Radiolab, but that's something that we listen to when we're in the car together on a trip somewhere.

That's not an effective way of communicating in-depth financial content. So I've had to figure out how do I take some of that and apply it to what I'm doing. So I'm spending a good amount of time consuming the information and the teaching at Transom, listening and thinking, how can I apply these lessons to myself?

But the key thing on this one, way for me to become a world-class podcast host, is I dedicate time, well, actually, before I get to that, one of the key things is by doing a lot of it. One of the reasons why I started The Daily Show, and I may not continue The Daily Show forever, I don't know, but one of the big reasons was I needed to do it.

I needed to do it a lot to get better. I have gotten worlds better as a host over the last six months by doing the show as frequently as I've done it than I would have if I'd only been doing a weekly show or a biweekly show, something like that.

So I need to do a lot of something when starting to get better. I remember this was one thing I did well when I was starting my financial planning career, is I was terribly nervous about talking to people, and in the financial planning business, we call it doing a fact-finder, where you go out on an initial conversation with somebody and you get to know them and find out what they're trying to accomplish.

Well, the only way to get good at it is, yeah, you gotta study a little bit, then you just gotta go do it. Dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of times until you get really comfortable because you've been down this road 50 times. You know exactly how this conversation is shaping up.

So one of the key tools, I think, that we don't talk about enough in our culture, we talk a lot about how to do things smarter. Yeah, do things smarter, but just simply do more. Write more, write more stories, and you're gonna get better as a writer more quickly.

Record more shows, you're gonna get better as a host quickly. But then the key also for me, which is where I was going before I interrupted myself, is in addition to doing more shows, carefully listening to my shows and coaching myself. Oftentimes, this is a bit countercultural. We don't usually trust ourselves to coach ourselves.

We usually look for someone else to coach us and usually look to someone else for their affirmation. But the reality is, we're probably pretty good consumers of our own content. I'm a pretty good consumer of financial content, so what I need to spend time doing, and I do this, and I'm gonna do it a lot more in this coming six months, I haven't made the time for it over the past six months, is listening carefully to my shows.

Listening and saying, what was annoying? I catch certain verbal crutches, I catch certain repetitive things that I do. For example, I have a tendency to repeat myself. And so by focusing and recognizing, I asked the question twice, I repeated myself multiple times, it allows me to slow down and produce a better quality product.

And so just by focusing on what is the actual quality of my work. In financial planning, you could do this in your career. One thing I've recommended to many people is when you're making phone calls. A lot of my business had to do with making outbound initial introductory sales calls to schedule an appointment for a financial planning appointment.

I would record that, record the audio and listen to myself and say, would I give myself an appointment? And I tell you what, for a lot of time it was no. But then over time you learn, okay, yeah, I would give myself an appointment. That sounds like a reasonable professional approach.

I would give myself an appointment. So the super, super valuable, just focus on your own work and think about how it can be better. So that's one of my areas of becoming a better host is just a few of the aspects from my educational plan to build the skills necessary to become a better host.

Another project of mine for 2015 is this. Radical Personal Finance is a world-class financial education resource. That's my vision. And in order to do that, I've got a lot of work to do to build that up. What I've learned is in many ways, I'm seeing more and more how the structure of this show is going to work into the business.

And I thought that the show itself was going to be that resource. And I think it will be, continue to be that resource. But what I've recognized is that in many ways, the show is almost the sales page. The show is almost the lead-in to the other resources and products.

One of the ideas that I've had that I haven't been able to implement yet is to map my shows to the certified financial planner curriculum so that somebody who's an interested CFP student can simply go and say, "Ah, here are all of the CFP topics. "Now I'll just listen through those shows in that order." But what I've learned is that in order for me to create the type of radio show that I'm envisioning, it has a lot of variability with topics.

So that makes it very difficult for someone to go back through the somewhat voluminous and growing everyday archives in order to find the topics that they need. So what I need to do is continue creating the show as the resource for the regular listeners who can consume the entire body of work.

But then I also need to create a number of guides and products that are specifically suited to specific situations. And this has to be to complement the financial advisor rather than to compete with the financial advisor. I can't compete with financial advisors effectively. I think we need good financial advisors.

And one of the most frustrating things for me to do has been to try to figure out how do I serve the need for great financial advisors myself? And I've had this for the last six months. I had this registered investment advisory firm pending and it was never officially open.

And finally, a few weeks ago, I just simply made the decision, my wife and I said, "Listen, I cannot do this. "I at least can't do it right now." Whether or not I could do it someday, I can't do it right now. That the educational resources are more important and that's what needs to be done right now.

So I can't begin the firm. I'm perfectly confident that if I desired to, I could create a firm similar to what Rick Edelman has done where he is the marketing spokespiece for the firm of advisors. And I could train advisors to do planning the way that I think it should be done in this comprehensive way.

I think I could help reinvent the industry, but I don't have the skills. I'll just say I don't have the skills to do that at the moment. The same way I said I need the business owner skills, I don't have the capacity. So I finally said, "Just gonna shut it down.

"No chance of doing that, period. "Not gonna do it. "I'm gonna focus on building the educational resource." So what I need to create for Radical Personal Finance is I need to create a lot of useful educational resources that answer specific questions for do-it-yourselfers, but that also help people to become confident and competent in preparation for meeting with their advisors.

Let's say as an example, I were going to, somebody was a new parent, and they knew that they needed to purchase some life insurance. Well, it would be useful if they could go and find a resource that said, "Here's what you need to know about life insurance." And this would be a course.

I'm envisioning a video course, four or five sessions, 30 minutes each, a comprehensive, straightforward primer on life insurance that could tell them basically how to do it themselves, but then also give them the information they need when speaking to a life insurance expert. That way, they could feel comfortable with their level of knowledge, and then get the specialized advice of an expert.

Or if somebody is saying a common question I get on the show, "How do I know "if I have enough money to retire?" Well, here's what you need to know. And I'm doing shows on that, but they become somewhat disjointed. And because I don't do a whole series five days in a row, they become a little bit disjointed.

So what I've recognized is I think that the very motivated do-it-yourselfer will be able to get out of the show enough of the information that they need to do it themselves, but that there's a real need for me to create these additional focused value-added products for those whose time is limited, who can't listen to the comprehensive content that I have developed here.

They need just a specific answer. And so I'm studying, and I've set out a studying process for myself this year. I'm gonna study all the major people in the financial advice business. I'm gonna read their books again. I'm gonna look at what they're doing and how they're doing it and try to learn.

So I'm gonna study Dave Ramsey. I'm gonna try to understand more of his history, understand more of how he developed his, the approach he took to developing things, David Box, Suze Orman, Jim Cramer, Clark Howard. I'm gonna focus on what are they doing and how did they do it, and try to understand what they're doing.

'Cause essentially, the difference between my show that I envision and many other podcasts is I'm trying to create something that's more along the lines of radio than podcasting. I don't know if I can do it successfully, but that's the, that's kind of where I'm going to for my learning and understanding.

And I'm gonna try to understand how did these people have created their content and applied it. I have some others as well. I'm gonna read through this year all of Nick Murray's archives, all of Joshua Kennan's archives, and so, and just try to understand what are they doing well, and how can I learn from what they're doing.

I'm also going to spend a lot of time consuming the body of work of some people who aren't specifically in the financial space. And the people that I've chosen here, well, one other who's in the financial space, I'm gonna consume Ramit Sethi's work. He's the guy who writes the site, "I Will Teach You to Be Rich." And his stuff's never really clicked with me, but it seems to be very effective with his core audience.

So I'm gonna consume his work. And then I'm also gonna study through what Dan Miller is doing with "48 Days," and also what Michael Hyatt does with his ventures. And neither of those men, their content has never really appealed to me. I've kind of not really understood why they're so effective.

Dan Miller less than Michael Hyatt. I've liked Dan Miller's stuff. It just didn't really appeal to me that much as far as just the need that I've had necessarily. But Michael Hyatt, I've never understood why is he as popular as he is? People, the weirdest people in my life are fans of his.

And he seems to be just so effective at building his business. And so I'm gonna study his work, and I like him, but I don't know. I just don't have that same feeling that a lot of other people have. But I'm gonna go through and try to work my way through and understand what it is that he does so well.

Because he certainly seems, the marketplace is really benefiting from what he's doing, it seems. And then Dan Miller, I like Dan Miller, I like his grandfatherly attitude. I don't personally click a lot with the young, aggressive, single, 23-year-old internet hotshot. It doesn't, that doesn't appeal to me. It's fine for other people, that doesn't really appeal to me.

I like the gentle, humble, people like Dan Miller. And the other thing that I've been working on Dan Miller's work is I've realized that much of what I do with financial planning, the weak point is the coaching. That's the weak point with financial planning is you need to have those coaching skills.

And he's widely regarded as having a well-constructed coaching platform to teach people how to become coaches. So I'm gonna join all of these people's programs, I'm gonna learn and consume their content and just really strive to understand what they're doing so well. And then replicate the good things that I like from their models into this show.

So that's some of how I'm applying this to be the world-class financial education site. And I'm way behind on the things that I've intended to do with each of those aspects. But I've got the plan laid out and gotta get stuff done. So that's the plan. Number of other areas that are on my goals and we'll start to wrap up.

But I'm gonna just share with you a few other things. For example, one of my major focuses, two of my major focuses of additional skills are my own writing abilities and my speaking abilities. Let's start with speaking. I have given a couple of speeches in the last six months.

And one of the things that really frustrated with me was how uncomfortable I was doing it. Once upon a time, I was very comfortable being able to give a compelling speech on a specific topic that was useful for the audience and to feel comfortable doing that. Well, the two of the speeches that I've made recently, I just really wasn't comfortable and I didn't feel like I had done a very good and effective job with it.

And I really wish to start developing some of that content for the different format and just the podcasting format for the verbal spoken content. So I need to work on my skills. So this year I'm gonna be rejoining Toastmasters. And I spent several years in Toastmasters in the past, but this time I'm gonna be joining what's called a Toastmasters Advanced Club.

And quick primer for you on Toastmasters, 'cause I think it's such a useful organization. It's widely regarded by many people as having just the perfect curriculum for learning public speaking skills. And so it starts with most clubs are just basic clubs and you'll have everyone from real experts in there to rank amateurs who are completely uncomfortable.

I mean, they're just, they basically could get up and stammer their first speech. And what's really beautiful is Toastmasters has a comprehensive curriculum to take you from an initial speech where you're completely uncomfortable to a comprehensive, beautifully well designed and delivered speech. It starts with their initial manual is, the initial phase of achievement is to become a, what's it called?

A competent communicator, I think is what they call it. And so they give you, you start working your way through an initial manual that has 15 speeches. And each of the chapters in the manual has an instruction section, a few pages of here's how you construct a speech. And then you prepare a speech focusing on that specific aspect of speaking.

So it begins with an icebreaker speech, then it moves on to how to be in earnest. So how do you convey earnestness, sincerity, conviction, et cetera, speech organization, vocal variety, et cetera. And there are 15 speeches. And then once you do that, you've achieved the competent communicator first initial standard.

Then they have what are called advanced manuals. And these advanced manuals cover many different topics. And so the club that I'm gonna be joining is an advanced club where all of the speakers and members of that club have at least achieved the minimum level of certification, the competent communicator certification.

And based upon that, you have people who are more experienced at speaking and you can get a little bit deeper. And I'm gonna be working my way through a few of the manuals. There are a total of something like 12 manuals that they have, I think, that are advanced speaking manuals.

The ones that interest me are communicating on television 'cause I wanna learn some of the specific skills for creating excellent television presentations. I did a couple of things where I was televised for some things this year and it just really didn't feel like I did a very good job at it.

The entertaining speaker manual, humorous speaking manual, persuasive speaking manual, professional speaking manual, speaking to inform storytelling, technical presentation, and then the special occasions speeches. So each of those is a comprehensive manual where you go through different exercises and you prepare speeches based upon these specific requirements. And that builds your ability to craft a speech that is focused on a unique occasion.

They have other manuals as well that you can work through if they're of interest to you. So the special occasions one is interesting. How do you create a great toast? How do you give a praise speech? How do you do a roast? How do you roast somebody? How do you do an award acceptance speech?

So you can prepare for these things and practice them in advance and that can extend your ability with speaking. So this is a focus of mine for 2015. I'm gonna rejoin this club and I'm gonna work my way through some of the manuals. I've chosen the ones that I'm gonna start with and then we'll see.

I'm not gonna go just one manual at a time. And then that'll help me. I'll videotape those. I will use them as a learning experience and I will be able to assess my progress in that direction toward the need that I have of being able to deliver compelling financial presentations to educate people and help people in another forum.

Another area of focus for me is I'm gonna focus this year on being and becoming a world-class writer. Writing has often been a weak point. I've mentioned on the show in the past, I haven't loved writing. But I've come to terms with the fact that it doesn't really matter whether I love it or not.

I've gotta do it. Because ideas that are communicated in print effectively are ideas that matter. When I think about the people that I introduce on the show and I think about, excuse me, that I interview on the show and I think about what they've been able to convey through their books and their written content as compared to in an interview format or in a speech, speeches are valuable but they're very different.

Podcasting is valuable. It's very different than writing. And I need to focus on building my skill in this area. I need it to, I'm sure that at some point, once I can figure out what's needed in the marketplace, clarify my own message, I'm sure I'll need to prepare it to write a book or two or something like that.

So I need to practice that now. But I also wanna model this skill for my son. And I need to build my own productive output. And this is only gonna come with practice. The only way I'm gonna become a better writer is by simply by writing. And so I'm focusing on four different areas of writing.

Number one is I need to dramatically improve the show notes that I create for radical personal finance. And this is important for my marketing efforts for the show to help things be found, help the content be found. Number two is I need to focus on preparing some excellent guest posts and articles for broader publication as a marketing outlet for the show.

Additionally, I'm gonna prepare some of those separately, some of those be private, but then I'm also gonna start writing on joshuasheets.com to have an outlet for some of the things that are not necessarily appropriate for this show, but that I still have an interest on. I need to be careful with the content that I present on radical personal finance.

When I get into some of the offbeat areas that I'm interested in, I can lose some people. So if I talk about baby education, that's a real interest of mine, but it's only a real interest to some in the audience, maybe who are in similar stages. So I'm gonna start and develop joshuasheets.com and start putting some of the information there, some of the things that I'm learning and sharing some of those things in that forum as an effort to focus my writing and work on that.

And then also, I'm gonna be working on creating products and manuals for the membership, the irregulars, here at Radical Personal Finance, and that's gonna be a lot of writing as well. I don't plan to use any special tools. I don't need any coaches. I'm just gonna write and read it and see how I'm doing on that and focus on how I'm, you know, just critiquing my own content.

And then also to be an effective writer, I need to continue to read and consume a wide range of content. And so I've got an extensive reading list planned out, which I won't go into in depth at the moment, but things that are gonna influence the show and then also things that I am focused on as well.

Couple of other quick areas. For example, I have all of my personal goals working towards complete debt freedom and financial independence. That has some aspects associated with it. A major focus for me is my health. I'm about to turn 30 this summer, and over the last year, I've never felt, I've been overweight most of my life and have had various issues with, I've gained weight, lost weight, gained weight, lost weight, gained weight, lost weight.

And I've never really had any issues with being overweight though, but lately I'm just starting to feel old. And I've done some things, worked hard over the last year on some different aspects of improving my health, and they've been less effective than I thought they should be. And I won't go into detail on all these things at the moment, but I've done different exercise programs, I've done different ways of eating, and everything's been less effective than I thought it would be.

So I've been really focusing on how do I build my health in a comprehensive way that's a sustainable way and a long-term that also integrates with all the other aspects of my life. And that comes down to quality, proper food and nutrition. That comes down to proper movement that's fun, proper exercise, proper physical structure, my mental health, things like that.

And so it's a real focus for me. I'll talk more about that some other time, probably on another forum. Some of the members of the audience have shared some resources with me and I thank you. One of the things I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get some testing done.

I think I might have some kind of, I don't know, thyroid issue, 'cause I'm gonna get some testing done and see if I have some issues there. And then I'm a world-class husband and a world-class father and I've got different things associated with those. And then with my spiritual life, I'm changing with my own focus and relationship with God.

I'm changing a couple of things that I'm doing with my own personal study. I'm using this year, I read the Bible a lot and other resources as well on a wide range of subjects, which too comprehensive and not necessarily focused on this type of target. But one of the things I've done in years past, I've read through the Bible several times, but this year I'm focusing on taking a different approach and I'm doing it book by book, focusing on one book for a month, reading through the book many times and understanding how each book of the Bible fits together.

And I'm using as an outline some materials. If you're interested, you can find them online called "Unlocking the Bible" and it's by a man named David Pawson. And he teaches through each chap, excuse me, each book of the Bible. And this is a real weak point with my own personal knowledge and understanding of how do these different books fit together.

And I get the comprehensive view, but what I'm interested in now is understanding how each book of the Bible works together. And so I'm making a major focus of taking that type of approach where I'm specifically focusing, for example, in January, reading through Matthew multiple, multiple times at the moment about once a day.

And then in February, I'm gonna go to Genesis and I'm gonna go Old New Testament, work my way through using his content as an outline to really understand how each of the books of the Bible fits together. So I'm pretty excited about that. That is really great. That's a good thing for us.

In closing, I want to share just an idea of how to integrate these things and in hopes that it'll inspire you. 'Cause it probably, I mean, it sounds like a lot. I'm a little bit daunted when I look at my lists. And again, I don't expect to ever finish everything.

I'm done with this whole idea of you gotta do something to perfection. Everything's gotta be done. Hey, you do the best you can, you just work at it and you have fun and enjoy the process. But at least with an outlined plan and a general roadmap, I think it's more likely that I will be able to make progress toward my goals.

One of the things, however, is I think a lot about how to integrate things. How do I integrate different of these ideas? So let me give you an example. I just talked a little bit about health and exercise. I've done different things throughout my life, including this past year, I joined, again, a local CrossFit gym.

I enjoy kind of not having to think about things, just having a curriculum laid out. I enjoy working hard. So I joined a local CrossFit gym for a couple months. Did not work for me. It hadn't worked for me in the past, but it did not work for me, not necessarily from an exercise standpoint, but it didn't fit with my life because it required me to leave my house and leave my family for an hour worth of working out and a half hour on getting ready and getting home.

And that's an hour and a half out of my day. That's a valuable hour and a half. So what I've spent a lot of time this year thinking about is how can I build things where there's synergy? So for example, I'm working on, I'm gonna be doing an in-home exercise program so that I can do it with my wife and with my son.

And that way, everyone's together. I'm building on my responsibilities to be a world-class husband and a world-class father, but I'm also building world-class health at the same time because of the time spent together. Or one of the routines that I'm putting into my day is following lunch to walk with my son to the local park and get out, get some sunshine, get some exercise.

And then by being outside, I can get exercise and I can spend time with him. I can spend time talking with my wife, having a lot of focused, intimate conversation. And that way, things build on each other. When I'm building as a, if I'm working at Toastmasters and I'm focusing on becoming a world-class speaker, in order for me to do that, I need to prepare an outline and a goal and a focus.

Well, that outline could very well be written as a useful blog post or article, which is posted on Radical Personal Finance or at joshuasheets.com. It could also be used as training for creating a more effective podcast presentation. And it could also be a component of a podcast presentation so that I can create content that I can release on the feed when I'm out of town, perhaps, to continue maintaining regular content.

Debt-free and financial independence, I get to research that stuff and focus on perfecting my own personal systems while creating content to help other people perfect their own systems. And that builds my mental health and my enjoyment of the content, of learning it and conveying it. 'Cause to me, that's fun.

I love to teach and I love to convey the information. So all of these things add on top of each other. I can listen to, as I'm building Radical Personal Finance into a world-class financial education site, I can listen to Dave Ramsey and I can understand what does he do so well as a broadcaster where people enjoy listening to him so much.

And then I can say, what does he do so well as a business owner and what does he do so well as a marketer? And I can narrow in on those things and that affects each aspect of my life. So what I love and where I like to think about is how can we get a lot of synergy from different areas of focus and build things together?

And hopefully some of the ideas that I'm working on for my life coming forward over this next year will be useful to you. That's it for today's show. I thank each and every one of you for listening. Hope this has been useful. A little bit more personal. And one of the things that I'm doing also is working to do less of the show, like the behind the scenes on the public feed, creating more additional content for the member program where I'm gonna do more of sharing what's actually going on with behind the scenes on the show.

But I'm gonna start to do a better job of keeping the lines more, it's a little bit stronger between the public facing information and the private facing information. Thank you all for listening. It's been an awesome, 2014 was an incredible year for me. 2015, I'm more excited about 2015 than I've ever been.

I think it's gonna be really, really fun. I'm enjoying learning all these new skills. I'm enjoying having the opportunity to just improve and to get better. And to me, that's fun. Learning is so neat. It's a lot of hard work sometimes, but I'm in it for the marathon and I'm just enjoying the process.

Thank you to each one of you who have left reviews and who have joined the membership program over the past couple of weeks as I've been out. I appreciate each one of you investing in me. And it's so nice to have customers, paying customers, 'cause that puts such an incredible responsibility on me to say, I need to ship some stuff here, some additional benefits that are gonna be world-class.

And I've got a bunch of ideas on that. I will be putting a lot of that behind the scenes as I learn to get the technology. I got really waylaid with the technology stuff, thinking about outsourcing it. But as I figure out how to do it better, I'm gonna be putting a lot of that stuff behind the scenes, creating some private user forums, things like that, where I'll be spending a lot of time.

Big plans coming, details coming in the future. Thank you for being here. Happy New Year. (upbeat music) - With Kroger brand products from Ralph's, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season. Because Kroger brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices. And with a money back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite.

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