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See some of the most fun, funny, and outlandish sights and characters of this legendary destination. Tickets and info at vegasexperience.com. You're an intelligent person and you know that if you want to earn more, you first got to learn more. If you want to receive more value and equity from the marketplace, you must first become more valuable yourself.

So you know, as we talked about on Monday, that you need to increase your education. But here's the question. How do you do that? Well, today I'm going to share with you an intelligent person's guide to self-education. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets.

Thank you so much for being here. This is Episode 210 of the show. We're building, building on Monday's show where we talked about earning more after we learn more, becoming more valuable. Today we're going to talk about self-education. I've got a number of shows planned in coming days on some specific attributes.

But first, I want to give you a framework for self-education. How do you actually approach the process? A lot of things you can do. How do you choose? It's absolutely mind-boggling. If you sit down and want to build out the process of designing an education, just your options are incredible.

In today's world, your options are absolutely incredible. How do you choose between all of the podcasts you can listen to and the books you can read and the audio books you can listen to and the seminars that you can attend and the conferences you can go to and the diplomas you can earn and, and, and, and, and?

Where do you start? You figure that out. Today I want to give you some ideas that I hope will help you to think about this logically so that you can apply this to your own situation. Monday we talked about three different ways to increase your wages as an employee.

If you didn't listen to that show, please go back and listen to it. It's episode 208. This show is building on that. To refresh your memory, though, the three ways that you can increase your wages are, number one, work more hours; number two, produce more work during the hours that you work; and then, number three, produce more valuable work during the hours that you work.

We talked about which of those you should focus on first, which one has the short-term benefit and which one has the longer-term benefit. Today we're going to build on that topic number three, which is increasing your value. That was the core of that – well, it wasn't the core of that show, but that is the core of really increasing your long-term wages.

That's the only thing that I know of that you can do where you're not going to be limited over the long term. So when we think about the acquisition of skills, we know that over time we need to develop them, and we always need to learn first. So as a good financial planner, I'm going to help you by giving you a framework for that plan.

I'm going to give you some ideas to approach and design your own self-education plan. This comes out of my doing a lot of thinking over the last few weeks. One of the things that I've been considering is all of the different educational products that I want and need to design and to create.

Coming up on a year of doing the show here, and as I've been doing it for a year, I've gotten a much clearer picture of kind of how I think the structure of my business going forward is going to be formed. I've gotten a clearer picture of what I'm able to do in a podcast and then what I'm not able to do in a podcast.

I've gotten a clearer picture of the value of this show that you're listening to but also the value of other things that I can develop and present to you. As I've considered that, I've gone through a lot of different ideas. So for example, I'm working on writing a book.

It's on the back burner for the next month while I work out some immediate income from some of these affiliate programs and advertisers that I'm bringing to you day by day. But that's one of the projects that I'm working on. I want to design some audio courses, some specific audio courses.

I want to – in the long term, I want to develop some seminars and set out some radical personal finance seminars. My plan is for my products to be very expensive. I want them to cost a lot of money. I'm going to charge you a lot of money for them.

But the key is that they also must be worth it. In my mind, I want to design things that are worth in excess of ten times what you pay for them. As I've told you on the show many times, if you're not getting in excess of 10x value of what you're paying for this show measured in pure dollar terms in your life, don't pay for it.

Now, you say, "Well, how am I doing that? You're presenting it free." If you've gained any financial compensation – or excuse me, any financial benefit from this show, just take a tenth of that and send it to me. That's my request. Sign up at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron if you haven't already.

Thank you to the 200 of you who have done that. By the way, incidentally, we're almost at $2,000. And once we get to $2,000, I'm going to do a little work on the intro. I think I'm probably going to keep the music but just design it a little bit.

But that would be awesome. It was a really cool milestone to hit 200 individual patrons and I really would love to hit $2,000 a month. So if you've been on the fence – well, let's do it this way. Let's say 25 of you have been on the fence. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron and just pledge it a buck a month.

I got to at least be delivering in excess of $10 a month of savings for you. Back to the product. So I've been thinking about these products and I've been thinking about, OK, how am I going to charge because I want to make a lot of money. But I want to make that money in a very ethical way.

And as a financial advisor, when I make money, I need you to be making a ton more money than I am. So I've been considering all the different things that I could do. So I could write a book. Like I said, I could develop an audio CD course. I could develop all these different courses.

I've been thinking about what is the value of those things. What is the value proposition? If I were going to write a book, what would be the value of my writing a $10 book or the value of my writing a $37 book? I don't plan to write a $10 book.

It's too much work. I plan to write a book. This is a $37 book or more. Who knows? If I'm going to develop a course, what would be the difference between my charging $197 for a seminar or for a course or $9,997? What would be the value? And how if I were going to design a $10,000 seminar or course, how would I make sure that that seminar or course was returning $100,000 of value?

That's a little bit different. And so in thinking through these things – by the way, I'm convinced that I can do that. I'm convinced that I can deliver a $10 book and a $10,000 course, but there's a different market. But that's been the genesis of my considering all these things.

And I've got some ideas, and these are ideas I've had for a while, but I've gone ahead and formulated them for you today. So let me start with my thesis. My thesis is this. The level of your education determines your level of value in this world. What's the first instinct that we have when we're helping someone?

To educate them. Now, thankfully, I'm so grateful that our level of education doesn't necessarily make us more valuable as a person in God's eyes. It seems like God delights to use the derelicts of society in his work. But it unquestionably makes you more valuable in this world and in the eyes of people around.

And you can see this played out in so many areas. I see it in the love that children have of learning. The very first instinct that a baby has is to learn. They're obsessed with it from the very first time on. When they're first trying to figure out how to roll over and how to stand up, they're obsessed with learning because they know they've got to get with it.

I think we're the ones, the adults, who seem to mess that up for them. Our patience with the, "Why, Daddy?" or "Why, Mommy?" "Well, why is it that way? Why is that way?" Our patience is what grows short. It's our fault. And we're the ones who stomp on their love of learning and say, "Well, that's just the way it is." I think all of us who are parents are learning patients.

But the first thing that we want to do when we want to help somebody is usually to impart education for them. There's a long history of this even in terms of the development of the world and the development of Western society. If you study the history of Western civilization, you go back to the Renaissance or go back to the Reformation.

One of the things that you find, for example, specifically the Reformation, was that there was a complete and total transformation of education. Because without education, people tend in the direction of superstition. Without education, people are easily controlled in mass. Without education, common people are just simply pawns in the king's arsenal or whoever the ruler of that place happens to be.

That's why for much of history, especially through the Middle Ages – well, in the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, you can look in the primary focus of education was just purely this focus on manual skills, on being able to do the job and nothing more. And the Reformation is actually – was fundamentally what changed that and we owe a huge debt of gratitude for our modern Western civilization to that history.

Education is incredibly important without going into a history lesson. But the key question for you to think through is this. Who decided what you would learn? Who laid out the goal for your education? Who told you what to learn, how to learn, and why to learn? Who? Speaking broadly, for most of us, somebody else is the person who made that decision.

Somebody else gave us the goal of learning. Somebody else laid out the path of education. Somebody else told us why and what and how to learn. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's probably a pretty good thing. I'm doing that for my own children, laying out their educational path.

And that's really valuable. But it's not necessarily a good thing if that's all that it is. Think back to your own educational process, especially in your early years of life. The major goal for most of us of our primary education was that we learned the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

We started with coloring and singing songs and we quickly moved into reading, writing, and arithmetic. And we need those skills in order to be able to function effectively in modern society and in order to be able to move into a secondary education. Now, here's the question. What is the primary goal of secondary education, secondary schooling?

For most of us, it's pretty simple. Graduate and get your diploma. Why? If I were to come to you and you would have been in, say, ninth or tenth grade in the US system, and I ask, "Okay, I think that you should finish high school." Why? What would be your answer?

Well, I think the majority of people responding to that question would say, "Well, so that I can get a good job. I don't want to be a high school dropout because if I'm a high school dropout, I'm doomed. I can't get a good job." And that's true. We teach our kids that they're doomed in society if they drop out of high school and kind of beat that into them and most of them believe us and some of them don't.

And unfortunately, many of the people that drop out of high school with very few exceptions are pretty much doomed societally speaking. They wind up in the lower tiers of society and they seem stuck there until somebody can come along and encourage – well, hopefully this show will come along.

For those people that are good at high school, the next goal is often, well, college. So come along and ask yourself the – ask the average college student, "Well, why should you go to college?" Some people will give very intelligent answers. I'm developing my character. I'm getting a liberal arts education.

I'm becoming a well-rounded renaissance man or renaissance woman. Most of us, though, would just simply say, "Well, I want to get a better job. I want to make more money." That's the purpose. And many of us have done that and now we find ourselves in the workforce thankfully gainfully employed and with the advantage of having had an extensive formal schooling and formal education.

Here's my question. Whose goals have you fulfilled in that process? Unfortunately, many times you've fulfilled somebody else's goals. Yes, one of your goals might be to get a good job, to live a happy life. But the major question is, was that the primary goal? Why do you actually need a high school diploma to get a good job?

Well, I think about it this way. It's true that if I drop out of high school, I'm not going to be able to get a good job. Then your employer cares about the high school diploma. Your employer cares about your effectiveness on the job. Now, they might care about you as a person and desire that you be a well-rounded, developed, educated person.

But they can certainly express that care for you outside of the context of giving you a job. Their primary care is for your ability to do your job. So if they're going to make your job contingent upon your having a high school diploma, then it stands to reason that the high school diploma is serving your employer's goals.

I don't know of many employers who are out advertising that we want people who don't have high school diplomas. So here's the question. Was the high school educational process designed to meet your employer's goals or your goals? What about college? Well, if the employer is out advertising that we require an undergraduate degree, then there must be something about that undergraduate degree that is helpful to the employer, right?

Because it would be silly for us to have all of these rules and restrictions on the acceptance of jobs that we're going to require people to have all of these diplomas and degrees if there weren't some value for the employer, right? So have you fulfilled your employer's goals in that educational process or in your goals?

Now, how do we reconcile this with the fact that much of schooling doesn't seem to be practical? Because schooling for many people throughout history was purely practical and we could look at the history of apprenticeships, specific job training, and we could go into the development of the concept of what a liberal arts education is and why we have it today.

I just simply ask those questions. I want to demonstrate to you that most of schooling and most of education is based around somebody else's goals for you. And it usually hasn't been based around your goals. And I ask the question again, "Is that wrong? Should it be different?" Me personally, I wouldn't necessarily say so.

I think that's how it should be to an extent because my child's goals, what they actually want, are important to me. But I'm also going to give my children some goals that I have for them because they're not in charge. I'm in charge. They're not the adult. I'm the adult.

And it's my duty and responsibility to instruct them carefully and to point them in the direction that they need to go. Now, I can make that a little easier for them if I work hard on casting a vision and laying out some goals for them. For example, I think back to my own liberal arts education.

I wish that someone had taken more time to help me acquire a vision for the value of a liberal arts education in my life. I think if they had, I would have taken more advantage of it instead of just thinking, "Well, I'm going to college." This is what specifically happened.

I was in a program. I was in the honors program my first year of college, and I went into it because I was a decent – I was a good student academically speaking. But this honors curriculum that I entered had a scholarship associated with it. It was a very large scholarship.

Well, the year that I entered into the program, they removed that special portion of the scholarship. My sister had been through that program, and I think my brother had been through it as well, the same school. And so I knew it was worth a lot of money, and so I was willing to go through the honors program.

Well, the honors program was very liberal artsy, very classical, read all this – all of the ancient literature. And so I went through it my first year. But I wasn't really enjoying it because I was bitter about the fact they'd taken away the scholarship. And I thought, "Well, here I am.

I'm here in college because I need to be earning money. That's the primary basis. I'm getting a college degree because I need to be able to get a good job." And so after the first year I dropped out of the honors program, I got the same amount of money whether I was in it or wasn't in it.

So I didn't see the point of working harder at it. Today I regret that because I wish I had taken full advantage of the time to sit down and read a lot of that classic literature. I've gone on and read some of it today, but it's a lot harder to justify the cost of the time to sit down and spend hours reading thousands of pages of classic literature when looking at all the other things on my goals.

I'm probably better served putting that time in other areas. My point is I wish someone had helped me to acquire a vision for liberal arts education instead of just kind of assuming that I knew it. If I had a vision, I would have taken more advantage of it. Incidentally, I believe this is one of the fundamental problems with the way that we describe modern education, especially college education.

We all know that the reason we're finishing high school and the reason we're going to college is to get a better job. That's what we assume as a society. And yet when you look at it and you look at the things that we study, many of them don't help us to get a better job and many of the things we study and either of them really aren't going to make us more money.

And so we look and say, "Wait a second. I didn't learn any money-making stuff in college. So why am I doing this? It didn't help me." So that's the background. But now we come to our lives now. What about you? What about me? Where do we start in putting together the education that we need?

Because the reality is we're all at different places. Some of us have no education or at least little education that serves us. Some of us have a lot. It doesn't matter where you start. It only matters where you end up. So where do we start and how do we design this process for ourselves?

I think we start with goals. I know it's shocking. I would say we start with goals. It seems like everything starts with goals. But it really does. For years I used to listen to Brian Tracy and he would – had this little saying and he said, "Success is goals and everything else is commentary." I would hear him say it.

He would say, "Success is goals and everything else is commentary." I never understood it. I never got what he meant. I think I'm starting to understand it more and more. Because when I look at different areas of life, I think, "Huh, it all comes back to goals and everything else is just talking about goals." Now, I'm going to tell you a secret and you may not believe me on this, but – well, just listen.

Here's the secret. Did you know that there are some people in this world who actually haven't made the time to sit down and write out what their goals are? Did you know that? Now, I know it's shocking. I know you're surprised and if you're driving in your car, you're having a tough time staying on the road.

But it's actually true. There are people in this world alive today who actually haven't made the time to sit down and write out what their goals are in life. It's amazing. I know – again, I know it's hard for you to believe but it's actually true. There are people.

And I bet that there's – well, I wouldn't want to go too extreme on my discussion here. OK. So I would bet that there's one person listening to this show right now who hasn't made the time to sit down and write out what their goals are. At least one.

Maybe saying that there are two or three people might be a little extreme but there's at least one person listening to this show who hasn't made the time to do that. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine going through life and not knowing what you want and what you're working towards?

Can you imagine that? Just be wandering around, drifting aimlessly this way and that way, tossed by every wind that comes, blown here by the economy, blown there by somebody else's goal for your life, blown in this other direction by whatever job happened to show up in the newspaper. Can you imagine that?

Now, obviously you hear the tone of my voice. The sad thing is that that's the majority of people. And that's where we start. A good first step is just simply write down what you want in life. If there's anything that you want to be different about your life, write it down.

Now, don't make it too big or too complicated. Just write out what you want. It doesn't have to be huge. It just has to be what you actually care about. Now, I know I told you that one secret, but here's the bigger secret. Do you know that there are people out there who have goals for their life even if they haven't written them down?

And they haven't bothered to study how to make those goals happen? I've heard that there are people out there who want to be rich, but they haven't actually studied how to get rich. There are actually people out there who want to be healthy, and they haven't studied how to be healthy.

There are people out there who want to be happy, but they've never actually studied how to be happy. There are people out there who want more love in their life, but they've never studied how to get love. Believe it or not, there are people out there who want to get married, and they haven't studied how to attract a spouse.

Some people out there want to have a happy marriage, and they've never bothered to sit down and study how to create one. Some people want their children to be successful in life, yet they've never even bothered to sit down and study how to train their children. Can you imagine that?

Now, I know it sounds crazy, but it's true. There are people out there who want things and haven't bothered to sit down and study how to make that happen. That's the key. The key to establishing a self-education plan starts with knowing what you want. Start where you are and figure out what you want.

Don't make it too big. Don't make it too small. Write down what you actually want in every area of life that you can think of. There are lots of useful exercises we could go through to do this process, but today just keep it simple. Write down what you want in every area of life that you can think of.

And then here's the key. Once you know the goal, once you know what you want, now you need to go out and learn what you need to do to make that goal a reality. Did you know you can learn how to do things that you don't currently know how to do?

Did you know that success is a simple skill and that all skills can be acquired and developed and improved? So you start with the goal by figuring out what it is, and then you study the subject so that you can learn how to achieve the goal. If you have a goal of being rich, you've got to learn how to actually get rich.

If you have a goal of being healthy, you've got to learn and study how to get healthy. If you want to be happy, you've got to learn and study how do I get happy. If you want more love, you've got to learn and study how do I get more love.

If you want to get married, you've got to learn and study how do I go about attracting somebody to be married to. If you want to have a happy marriage, you've got to learn how to have a happy marriage. These are all skills that are learned. It's no secrets.

It's written down. It's talked about. It's recorded. But you've got to study it. So it starts with the goal, moves into study, and then ultimately you must take action, and that's the ultimate key. You've got to initiate the action of the cause before you can experience the effect. But the cool thing about this is even if you don't get all the way toward taking action or creating an action plan, even if you just start with one of those steps, you'll automatically make progress.

Just simply writing down what you want makes you aware of it, and you're far ahead many of your peers. Studying how to get what you want will move you immeasurably closer, and you'll almost automatically just start taking the actions. But now when you start with knowing what you want, studying how to get it, and then building out an action plan, it makes the attainment almost a certainty.

It's not a matter of if, simply a matter of when. The when in all of our situations will vary. But when you put that plan in course, it's not if, it's when. So how do you actually build the study plan? Well, it's going to be different for every subject and every goal you have.

But the general principle that I have is learn from those who have been successful at achieving the goal that you desire. Learn from those who've done it. You want to find a teacher, and there's somebody out there who knows more than you do in any subject that you're interested in.

Thomas Carlyle's famous quote, "Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him." No matter what you want in life, from the simplest to the biggest, from the most common to the most esoteric, there's somebody out there who knows more than you do. And if there's not somebody out there who knows more than you do, the only reason that's true is because you've already consumed all of the information and learning and knowledge from those who did know more than you.

And now you've built on their achievements. And that's how it should be because we stand on the shoulders of giants when we learn from those who have gone before. And then we add to the knowledge base so that we can pass it down to those who come after. Now, here's the most incredible thing about the world that we live in.

Believe it or not, the greatest teachers in every single skill throughout history have recorded their teachings for us. No matter when they lived, and you can actually have access to that information. Isn't that amazing? You can learn from the best military tactician in history if you're interested in military tactics.

You can learn from the greatest business person throughout all time if you're interested in business. You can learn from the greatest parents who've ever lived if you're interested in being a better parent. It's all recorded for you. Now, when you combine that with the fact that every single skill is learnable, it opens the vault of everything that you need to know.

Years ago, this was impressed deeply on me, and I started to change how I saw the world. I think it was – I don't remember who it was. Somebody was teaching just that everything simply comes down to skills. Even the things that don't seem initially to seem like skills are skills.

Think about something like self-discipline. If you are a very disciplined person, you have a lot of self-discipline, can you see how that would help you to go a little bit farther and more easily achieve your goals in life? I think it's fairly straightforward. Now, here's the question. Is self-discipline something that we have?

Automatically, some of us have it, some of us don't. Or is self-discipline something that we learn? I would submit to you that self-discipline is learnable. My evidence, look at something like the military. Military hammers self-discipline into people who are in the military, right? So if you go and you study the number of people who are former military personnel and the ranks to which they rise in business, it's remarkable.

There's an overconcentration of those types of people at the higher levels of business. Why? Self-discipline might be one factor. Self-discipline is a learnable skill. Did you know that goal setting is a skill? Could you see that your life could go a little bit farther if you had mastered the skill of setting and achieving goals?

It's not something magical. It's a skill. What about health? Did you know that attaining and maintaining good health is a skill? Did you know that you can develop it? There are myriad examples of this. Go back and look at – Jack LaLanne comes to mind. He was this super sick person who develops a skill of being healthy, commits himself to it, and lives a long and healthy and inspirational life of many people.

Did you know that love is a skill? Here's a question. Are you skillful at expressing love towards your spouse? Did you know that being a great lover is a skill? And that I can be developed and improved. That might be one way of expressing love towards your spouse. What about languages?

Did you know that languages are just simply a skill that can be developed? The ability to speak multiple languages is simply a skill. I've never found any proof at all that somehow some people are magically better at languages than others. It's the most destructive concept for somebody to hold when it comes to learning a language, to say, "Well, I'm just not good at languages.

And the self-concept that we have of ourselves and our abilities in many different areas is very limiting. There's no innate ability or lack of ability with regard to languages unless you come down to something like I can't hear if you are physically deaf. But there are people in every – in other – in the United States of America, we all speak one language and that's it.

It's English. I don't want to speak anything else. There are very few of us who speak a little bit more. But did you know there's a place in the world where they just speak three, four languages? If there were some magical difference, then you would expect there to be a lot of people there who just simply can't learn three or four languages.

But what you find is that language learning is a skill. And there are techniques that are more effective that once you learn some techniques and you apply them, then you've acquired a skill of acquiring a new language a little bit more easily. It's not inherent though. It's not inborn.

Any little baby from any – in any culture, you drop them anywhere in the world and they'll learn the language. How to be a clear and effective communicator is a skill. How to rebuild your life after bankruptcy is a skill. All of these things are skills. Now, obviously, there are going to be differences in our level of attainment.

There are going to be built-in differences. I'm 6'5". I'm not ever going to be 5 feet tall again. So I've got a certain physical limitations that other people don't have. But I can still learn and develop the skills, and the key is not to compare yourself to another person but to compare yourself to yourself in terms of am I making progress from what I have and where I am.

The size of your vision will impact your focus and the level of progress that you're satisfied with. Studying and self-education will enlarge your vision. Some people's vision of raising their kids well and effectively is to keep their kids off drugs. All right. Good. That's a good start because there are lots of parents who don't have that as a goal.

So if your goal for your children is keep your kids off drugs, awesome. Good place to start. Study it and work on that. Develop the skills that you need to learn as a parent so that you can impart something different to your children to keep them off drugs. Study the subject.

Now, here's what's fascinating, though, about studying something. Along the way, you might pick up some different, perhaps bigger ideas, and your vision might be enlarged. The reason why I brought Steve Maxwell on the show to discuss his experience with his sons all buying houses debt-free in their 20s was to expand your and my vision for our children.

The reason I brought Dr. Voren Poitras on the show to discuss establishing a rite of passage into adulthood for your kids at around the age of 12 or 13 was to expand our vision of what's possible. That's what those stories did for me. That's why I brought them to you.

I've got a bunch of other people I'm trying to get on the show, but examples of kids who are financially self-sufficient entrepreneurs in their early teens, young men and women who completed a college degree, an accredited college degree debt-free by the age of 18 instead of just bothering with just a high school diploma.

Now, let's say that you, over time, are exposed to other people, and you say, "Well, here's a normal person who established this. Their kids didn't buy a house debt-free because their parents gave them a million dollars. They worked, and they earned the money." So you take on a little bit of that vision for yourself.

You see someone else's kids who are entrepreneurial or who are relatively self-sufficient in an early age, and you compare that vision to saying, "Well, my vision for my kids is that they not be on drugs." It changes your perspective a bit, eh? You say, "Well, that only works for smart kids." Really?

Maybe. There are always limitations on some people. There's a difference in the level of academic intelligence that certain people have. There are differences in physical abilities. There are limitations that exist but probably not nearly as many as we think. Let's talk about something like academics for your child. Could a 12-year-old, a modern, your son or daughter, could my son at 12 years old have finished the equivalent coursework of a high school diploma by the age of 12 instead of by the age of 18?

Or could an 18-year-old finish a college degree by 18 instead of at 22? Well, look throughout history, and the answer in ancient times and in historic times is clearly yes. The answer today is clearly yes. There's story after story after story after story after story of that being true.

So why not you or me and why not our children? Now, of course, there could be valid reasons not to do this, but if we approach it as how could I do it, it might lead us in a different direction of studying the subject and developing the skills around it.

Example, were you ever taught how to study? To me, this is remarkable. We send children through 12 or more years of school, and very few of them have ever been formally taught how to study. Wouldn't that be a good thing to teach a student? Here's how you actually study, and here are some specific study skills, and here's a system for academic achievement that you need to understand and acquire?

Wouldn't that be helpful? Shouldn't that be the first course, basically? What about memory skills? Have you ever been taught how to use your memory? Have you ever been taught how to remember names and how to remember faces? Have you ever been taught how to remember dates and how to remember facts and how to memorize numbers?

Most of us haven't unless we've gone out and acquired the skill ourselves. I never had a course when I was in school on memory, but yet throughout history you find that many people, especially in ancient times, there's a well-proven curriculum of how to have a great memory. You had primarily oral cultures, and people could recite thousands of pages of text.

So if you had a goal of saying, "How could I help my child do this?" that might inspire you to start studying how to help them achieve it, and you might say, "It would be good to teach my child some study skills," not just toss them into the studying loop and figure, "Well, they'll figure it out," but rather to say, "Let me teach you how to study for tests." Look at the science of the SAT and ACT.

Look at the test scores of those who take prep classes. It's a big difference if you know how to take the tests. Why don't we teach that? Now, other simple things. You could adjust the schedule of the school year, get rid of the months and months off from school.

You get rid of the summer vacations. That would automatically collapse. That would be a very simple thing that could be done if you had a goal of helping a child finish their academics a little bit quicker. You get rid of all the time wasters, or you could just give the child a greater motivation, incentivize.

Go out and study a little bit about psychology and learn how to incentivize people toward achievement. So if you are exposed to something like that, it might give you an idea and expand your vision a little bit, and then you take it back and say, "Well, let me study this topic and figure out how I could help this happen." And the cool thing about learning is you can't unlearn something that you've learned.

When you've heard the stories on this show of normal, employed people being financially independent in their early 30s, you can't ever unlearn that. You may choose not to follow that path. You might not want to do what they did to achieve that, but it removes your excuse of being able to sit around and complain about being broke at 65 years old.

If someone else could do it in 12 years and you're 50, you got 15 years if you want to be rich and retired at 65. Get busy. So when you lay out your goals, you should obviously then follow up with some questions. And this is where we get into education.

Question. What skills do I need to develop to achieve this goal? Goal. I want to have a happy marriage. Skill. Being a loving spouse. Skill. Being a great listener. Skill. Understanding the love language of my spouse. Skill. Being creative. Skill. Being funny. Skill. Looking sexy. Skill. Being a great lover.

Skill. Being a great parent. You lay out the goal of something and then you say, "Well, what habits could I develop that would serve me well?" I want to be healthy. Habit. Drink water. Habit. Go for a walk. Habit. Make healthful food choices. Then you ask yourself the question, "What is likely to derail me?" Figure out what are those things that happen.

What are the things that throw you off? Example. I want to make healthy eating choices. I'm on a diet. I'm working to lose weight. What's likely to derail me? Birthday party. Uh-oh. Now, make a plan. What habit would serve me in good stead there? Well, maybe it's to have a big healthy meal right before I go.

That's a habit that could be developed. What's likely to derail me? Going out and getting drunk. Okay. Well, how can I avoid that and put in place a different habit? Well, I'm a social drinker, so therefore when I go out to the bar with my friends, I'm going to start drinking.

Then once I have two, all of a sudden now I'm getting drunk. Well, maybe instead of setting up the social activity at the bar, you set up the social activity down at the beach volleyball court or at the basketball court. I don't know about where you live, but where I live, every single Friday night there's a bunch of people playing basketball together down at the local basketball court in the local park.

Social, slightly different effect than having your socializing in a bar. So this process of goal setting is a skill that can be learned and can be taught, and also any goal has skills that can be learned and taught to move towards that goal. So we've got to teach kids to set goals.

Goal, graduate from high school. Okay, good. That's a good goal to have. We might break it down. You're teaching your third grader. Son, daughter, your goal is to graduate from third grade. You got one year. That's good. It's good and it's generic. It might be a little bit different.

For example, we might change the goal from graduate from high school to graduate from high school as valedictorian of my class, or because we can't necessarily control what other people do, we might just set a number to it for ourselves, and who cares where we shake out in the ranking, but say graduate with a 4.0.

That might be a good goal or it might not be. How would you know? Well, you've got to count the cost. Count the cost of achieving the goal. Then count the opportunity cost of achieving the goal and see if it's worth it. If you want to graduate from high school as a valedictorian, there's going to be an opportunity cost.

There will be things that you cannot do if you want to achieve that goal. It might be worth it. It might not be. So then we teach kids saying, "Okay, we're going to graduate from high school. What skills do I need to develop to achieve this goal?" Well, to graduate high school, you need to be academically capable.

So again, back to the example, what skills would help? You need to learn how to study, learn how to memorize. You need to learn and understand your learning style, figure out how you learn most effectively. You might need to learn the skill of going out and finding and acquiring an excellent tutor.

You might need to learn the skill of finding an extra study aid, simple example. How many of you in school were taught about the learning technique of spaced repetition? Simplest thing in the world. Putting information down, funneling it into a spaced repetition system. That can be a physical system or it can be a software system.

Basically, the idea is let's say that you're studying vocabulary and you're trying to learn new words. Nowadays, it's super easy with computer programs. You put this vocabulary into the computer program and you go through the start going through the flashcards. When you miss them, you just click, "Oh, I missed that," and then the computer will present it to you more quickly.

When you get it right, the computer will present it to you later. You don't need a computer to do it. I used to do this with vocabulary for foreign language. You go through the cards and the ones that you're getting right, you set them aside. You go through those once every couple of weeks.

The ones that you're getting wrong, you go through them every day. But today's world, you teach somebody about the concept of spaced repetition. You download Anki onto your phone and onto your computer. You upload a flashcard database and you're done. Now, you combine that study aid with something like some simple mnemonic memory techniques.

Now, you can ace, no matter who you are, you can ace every single memorization test you ever need to take by simply developing a few mnemonic memory techniques and a spaced repetition system of study applied over time. So we take this massive roadblock for many people which is, "Oh, I'm not good at taking tests." Okay, learn to be good at taking tests.

"I'm not a good studyer." Learn to study well. Why? Ha, there's the good question. It's got to be worth it. You would need, in order to graduate from high school effectively or successfully, you would need to learn to be proactive. Proactivity is a learned skill. Writing a paper to complete your assignments is different than learning how to memorize facts and dates and information.

So you need to develop the skill of self-discipline. You develop the skill of doing what needs to be done, when it needs to be done and not procrastinating. You need to develop the skill of academic research. You need to develop the skill of writing. And all of these things are doable skills and there's proven techniques for every single one that we can go out and learn.

Little things. Some people struggle to--I'm amazed, I love extreme examples--but some people struggle to write a book in their lifetime. And some people write one book a year. Some people write four books a year. So some people never write a book. Some people write one book in their lifetime.

Some people write one book per year. Some people write four books per year. Some people write even more. My favorite example that I've ever heard of is a guy named Jacob Neusner, who's an American academic scholar of Judaism. And this man has written or edited more than 950 books.

Yes, you heard right. 950 books. He's 82 years old, as I record this in June of 2015. If we do a little math just to figure this crazy number out, if we assume he's been working on books ever since he was 22, and he's 82 now, that gives us a 60-year writing career.

That means that on average he's written 15.8 books per year since then. So almost 16 books per year. I went and just for fun, I checked the bibliography. You can find it on Wikipedia, if I remember. I'll put a link in the notes. And I just picked a random year.

I picked the year 2000. And in the year 2000, he was credited with writing or editing over 40 books in the year 2000. So essentially a book a week. He's developed a bit of a writing skill. But the skill of writing, when you just start putting these things together, is a number of sub-skills.

Skill of understanding the English language. Skill of understanding the process of research. Skill of developing an argument. Little technology things. Learning to type is a skill. Learning to type quickly is a skill. Switching from the QWERTY keyboard to the Dvorak keyboard might make a big difference. Or learning to dictate your thoughts.

Best example, John T. Reid. In his book, I read a book of his on how to write and publish a successful how-to book. One of his major examples is switch to Dvorak. When he switched to Dvorak, it made a huge difference of increasing his typing skills. If you've never heard of that, if you type for a living, you might consider making this little change in your skills.

The QWERTY keyboard was designed for typewriters. And if you remember those typewriters, they had those little keys that would go forward and they would get stuck. The QWERTY keyboard was intentionally designed to slow down the typist. It was intentionally designed to slow down the typist so they didn't break the typewriter.

So our entire world exists under this fabric of a keyboard that was designed to slow down the typist. And yet that's what all of us have learned and we're very proud when we get up to 50 words a minute on our typing speed. There are other keyboards that you can learn.

One of the more famous ones is one named called Dvorak. And if you learn that keyboard, it will substantially improve your typing speed. I haven't learned it myself yet, but I also don't do very much typing. But I consider it. There's a cost to my doing it. I haven't done it, but I might consider it.

Or even just learning to dictate your thoughts. I'm always amazed at – I mentioned before on the show, an author that I read, Gary North. I just love him as an example of a blogger. He writes four articles per day, every single day, six days per week. That gives me a little bit of encouragement when I struggle to get one article written a month.

Here's somebody who's developed the skill of writing four articles per day plus writing full-length books. Four articles a day, six days a week. Now, I don't want to write four articles a day. I don't want to write 20 books a year or 16 books a year. Point is these are skills and you can learn from the skills of other people.

There's obviously lots more – there's lots more things that you can study. But the point here is when we set a goal and when we start studying the material and then we establish a system of action and accountability and feedback for ourselves, then we can really start to achieve substantial, substantial progress.

Now, that's for kids. What about for you? I like to use those examples for kids because they're talking about things that are common experience for all of us. But very few of us these days are worrying about passing high school. I don't have many listeners who are in fourth or fifth or sixth grade.

I'd love more, but I don't have that many right now. Point is when you write out and establish your own comprehensive list of goals for yourself, those goals will be quite varied. But the process is the same. When you establish a goal, then you start in saying, "I need to study about how to achieve this goal." Let me give you an example of an unusual goal that most people don't think about.

But I want to show you how the process applies. For example, one of my goals at the moment – it's written on my list of goals that I'm working from – is that my family, that my wife and I together, that we can safely and easily and naturally and joyfully birth our baby girl into our family before July 15, 2015.

That's my goal. But it's not only that. Because I want the experience to be special and memorable in every possible way. I want the birth to be relaxing and easy for my wife, and I want to be able to look back on the event with her for the rest of our lives as a tremendous, intimate, special experience in our family.

Childbirth doesn't happen every day. And yet, what an incredible miracle it is. Once you take note of the fact that you have a goal like that, it gives you a path to run on. This is why I'm shocked that many people don't have goals. They say, "Oh, we're just having a baby." Yeah, but how do you want to have the baby?

What's your goal? Before we had our first baby, I didn't have a clue. Most of us don't until we've been through it. Most of us have never attended a birth. We're scared of it. We make fun of it. We make rude jokes about it. We deprecate it. We avoid it.

We insult it. We prevent it. In our culture, in the U.S. American culture, we insult, we devalue, and we consistently demean women. The way we treat women in our modern U.S. American culture is absolutely disgusting. I despise it. Now, men and women are both to blame. Men, we're to blame for doing it, not stepping up and being a man and defending our wives' honor.

And that's our job to stop that. And women, you're to blame for not standing up for yourself and for your value as a woman. Sorry, I better rein it in or I'll get off track. The point is that when you establish something as a goal and then you visualize and see how would we want this to be, then it gives you something that you can do.

So when we became pregnant with our first baby, I established a goal. Then I started studying. Now, when you start studying, you learn all kinds of interesting things. For example, I always thought because I was taught by culture around that childbirth was a painful and scary experience. I always thought it was a medical emergency.

And most of you listening do too because our perception of reality is shaped by the common culture. So when it used to be when I thought about childbirth, I thought about screaming woman in a taxi cab, screaming into the emergency room, lying on her back under a fluorescent light, screaming in pain and horror and anguish.

That was the image that I have. Well, we started studying and we learned that it didn't have to be that way. It might be that way for many people, but that's mainly by their choice. Now, of course, there are medical exceptions. I'm not an idiot. There are medical exceptions for some.

But we learned that for most, birth can be beautiful, intimate, special, and pain-free. And we said, "We never knew that. Wow. We never knew that." Once you start studying it though and you start building out what you would like your goal to look like, then you start applying it and you study and you learn and you apply and you study and you learn and you apply.

Then it can make a difference. After we had--and before also--after we had our baby, we started studying kids. I learned all kinds of things. I learned all the difficult decisions that you need to make as a parent. Frankly, having a baby is the easy part. And yes, my wife agrees with me.

Once you have that, then you got to decide all the other things you're going to do. Are they going to sleep on their front or on their back? Are they going to sleep in bed with you or in their crib? Are you going to sleep--are they going to sleep on a schedule or on demand?

Are you going to vaccinate or not? If you do vaccinate, are you going to do this schedule or that one? If you don't vaccinate, are you going to not vaccinate now or not forever? Do you circumcise or not? When do you start teaching them? I always thought kids started learning when you put them in preschool, and I discovered you could actually teach a baby to read.

Blew my mind. Never thought of it. When do you potty train? That one was a huge surprise for me. I started studying it. I thought everything--everyone says you potty train kids when they're older, when it's easier. And all of a sudden, my wife told me one time that she had read and learned that--I forget the exact statistic, but something like most kids in the world are potty trained by one year old, and that shocked us.

Absolutely shocked us. We researched it formally through reading and studying, and also anecdotally, we asked all of our non-U.S. friends who are from different cultures when they start potty training their kids, and we discovered that it's actually probably true, the statistic. I don't know the exact number, but it's probably true.

So the point is these are things that should be on your list of goals, and then they should have a study plan associated with them. Anything that you want has a study plan that you can develop, and then you've got to start wading through it. And when you start wading into it, all of a sudden it's tough, and you find there's all kinds of opposing viewpoints.

There are people who will argue over here for this one, and there are people who will argue the exact opposite of it. So you've got to start sorting it through and figuring out, wait a second, what's the framework here? What's the construct? What's actually happening in this situation? You can do it.

You can learn. You can develop the skills. If you're sick, find out why you're sick and do everything in your power to get as well as possible. Of course, one person's level of health that they're able to achieve may be different from another. Don't worry about that. Worry about your own level of health.

Are you depressed? Find out why and do everything in your power to get as well as possible. Do you have a miserable marriage? Find out why and do everything in your power to get the happiest marriage possible. Do you have a bad job? Find out why and do everything in your power to get a better job or to make your bad job as good as possible.

Are you broke? Find out why and do everything in your power to get as unbroke as possible. Everything. Now, why have I spent 57 minutes and 40 seconds on goals and talking about education? I've labored and labored and majored here on goals because I believe if you get that, you almost don't need the second part of this because you'll automatically do it.

The point is when you have goals set in every area of your life, you'll almost automatically be pulled into building things out. But now let's turn on how to set up the actual education plan. And there are a variety of continuum that you can use to consider education. So for example, should you establish a broad education in many subjects or a deep education in a few?

Do you need a formal education with an institution or do you need an informal direction – excuse me, informal education? Should your education be self-directed or should it be other directed? Should you focus on personal knowledge from an individual or general knowledge from society? Should you get a cheap education or an expensive education and how do we measure cheap and expensive?

Should it be academic or experiential? There are many more. But the reason that I spent 58 minutes talking about goals is because you need a filter first before you start looking at education. You need a filter on what to study. It's impossible to know everything, absolutely impossible. Knowledge is increasing today at an astounding rate, faster than it's ever increased in the history of mankind.

It has been increasing for a much longer period of time than ever before as well. So the filter that you need to apply to this knowledge is personalized application to your life. What matters to you and what doesn't? You should specialize but not too soon and not too much.

The basis of our modern economy is the division of labor, the concept that each of us has a unique special contribution to make. And the most rewards, especially monetary, come to those who are specialists. So you must specialize but don't specialize too much and don't specialize too soon. Because your general knowledge will often inform your specialized knowledge.

And in the beginning you need to have a broad exposure. You need to understand what are the things that you want to do and the only way you're going to know those is by having a broad exposure and then you move on to specialized knowledge. But even when you're intensely specialized you can't lose sight of other related aspects of learning or you're going to become irrelevant.

Find yourself laid off in the next recession, sitting on the sidelines without a clue how to reskill. Be broad in scope on things that matter to you and deep on the things that matter to you the most. There are only a few areas in which I want to be world class.

I want to be a world class financial advisor and financial broadcaster. I want to be a world class husband and father. A few other areas but let's keep it simple. I don't have any interest in being an expert on physical health. I just need to know enough to cover my own needs to make sure that I'm maximizing my own physical health.

So the key is specialize but specialize in the areas that matter to you the most. You do need both a formal education and an informal education. Both of them have a role but they only have a role if they fit into your goals. So when we start with goals, we can go back and we can properly assess the formal or the informal education and the relative importance of it.

An attorney and a mechanic are both probably going to need some form of formal education and both are going to need some form of informal education. But the attorney is likely to need far more formal education than the mechanic to achieve an equal level of success. Now let's talk about how to acquire that education.

I think about this in terms of a matrix and I hope this is helpful to you. But there are a couple of axes on the matrix. You can have education that is impersonal or you can have education that's personal and you can have education that's synchronous or that's asynchronous.

So personal and impersonal means do you have education that's just simply out there, generalized knowledge that you've picked up, or has somebody made that education personal and applied it to your specific situation? And the synchronous versus asynchronous, is this just simply knowledge that's floating out there or is this – and you're currently – you're receiving it at a different time stamp – at a different point in time than when the person that is writing things down or sharing it recorded it or is this direct and appropriate now?

So those are the scales. Here are some examples. So impersonal, asynchronous education is what I'm doing here. I'm not speaking to you as an individual, although I imagine that I am, but frankly, I don't know what your name is. I don't know what your situation is. I don't know anything about you.

So this is highly impersonal. I'm broadcasting ideas out into the public and hoping that they fall on fertile ground, knowing that many of them won't but some of them will and that's who I can impact. So this is impersonal education. It's also asynchronous. I'm recording this on June 24, 2015.

But whether or not you listen to this on June 24, 2015 or on July 24 or on June 24, 2025, hopefully there will still be some value here. So this is asynchronous. The value of this education is not specific to a time stamp and we're not communicating face to face.

So podcast is an example. Reading a book is an example. Listening to an audio book or an audio program or listening to conference recordings or a journal or magazine subscription or internet reading, these are all impersonal, asynchronous types of education and super valuable. However, there's also impersonal synchronous education.

So this would be where you need to be physically present, things like high school and college classes and lectures or seminar lectures or conference lectures, things like that. Those are impersonal. Your tenth grade geography teacher is not designing a customized curriculum to you based upon your individual knowledge and growth and your proclivity towards understanding African geography as compared to Asian geography.

It's impersonal. It's just a generalized curriculum. But it's synchronous. They're working with you. Then there's personal synchronous education such as personal same-time interaction with a teacher where they're actually teaching you on a specific basis or a coach, your football coach who's training you on your specific needs or you're an advisor of some kind, a life coach, a financial advisor, a marriage counselor, a pastor, something like that where they're specifically giving you personalized advice and education on exactly what you need now.

The football coach is correcting your technique of whether you're squatting on your heels or on your toes. That person is giving you what you need, not writing a general topic for everyone out there. And there may be personal asynchronous education, I don't know, maybe trading essays or writing books to refute someone else and you're going back and forth.

I'm not sure. But for me, those are the – it's only just the three categories that are important. So when you look at the resources that are available to you in the modern world, the sheer quantity is dazzling. You can learn from family and friends. You can learn from your teachers or professors or noted experts.

You can read books. You can read everything that's on the internet. You can listen to podcasts or audiobooks. You can go to conferences or classes or workshops or degree programs. You can go to YouTube or Udemy or anything. So how do you choose? How do you actually choose? Well, you choose based upon what's applicable to you and your goals at this point in time and you ask yourself, "What is going to help me achieve my goal?" And that's going to vary.

So I think often that you should start with general knowledge and education. Books are usually going to be the cheapest way to a college – excuse me. Books are going to usually be the cheapest way to acquire knowledge or substitute here the internet. They're going to be cheap if we measure cheap in monetary terms.

That's another distinction I want you to think about. If we measure cheap in terms of monetary terms, books undoubtedly are the cheapest way to acquire knowledge. They're dense, they're often comprehensive, and they cost almost nothing. Books will usually form the foundation of an education. But although books are cheap when measured in monetary terms, they're very expensive in terms of the time required to consume them.

It can take a very long time to find an answer to your question if you're searching in books. If you have a Bible question, which is going to take you longer, searching the Bible from front to back or asking a pastor? If you have a physics question, which is going to take you longer, searching a stack of physics textbook or asking your physics professor?

So books are cheap in financial terms, but they're expensive in terms of time. And they're likely to be very general or to build on a very general foundation. And books are 100% impersonal. They're general. They're impersonal. Now, you could talk about other forms of general education, audio courses. More expensive than books, but often less costly in time for two reasons.

Number one, usually an audio program is going to be shorter than a book. Number two, you might be able to overlap that audio course onto something that you're already doing, something like your commute time. Audio courses are often condensed, and they do require time, but again, it's usually less time.

And an audio course is usually more focused on a specific topic. It's edited. It's synthesized. It's drilled down to the basic essentials. But still, it's 100% impersonal. If you buy a Tony Robbins -- what's his flagship audio course? I don't remember. You buy a Tony -- or Unlimited Power.

You buy a Tony Robbins Unlimited Power audio course. He didn't record that for you. He sold it to 50 million other people. It's 100% impersonal. But it might give you a great basis. And it's the same with Internet writing, podcasts, audio books. These things are pretty cheap in terms of money.

They might even be free. My podcast is percentage-free in terms of money. But it's very expensive in terms of time. Here we are an hour and eight minutes into the episode, and that's a lot of time. So I work very hard to make it worth your time, but still I recognize that when somebody commits an hour to listening to my ideas, that's an incredible confidence.

That's an incredible vote of -- it's a great gift. It's very expensive to you, and I hope that you are getting great knowledge and benefit from it. But these things are cheap in terms of money but expensive in terms of time, and they're usually pretty general. They're 100% impersonal.

And then some formal schooling or education is also very general, whether this is primary school or secondary school and undergraduate degrees. These are all very general. They're very cheap to get financially, but they're crazy expensive in terms of the time that's required to complete them. If you think about how much time it costs you to finish primary and secondary school, that's 12 years of your life.

And all you have is a bunch of super general knowledge. That's why we put young people into these kinds of institutions because what do they have? Lots of time, not so much money. And this is very impersonal education. If you go down to Roosevelt High in your town, it doesn't matter what your name is or who you are or what you do.

You're going to study the same subjects that everyone else is studying. Now, what if you shifted that along that impersonal axis from that very impersonal, very asynchronous -- it could be either asynchronous or synchronous -- but very impersonal general education to more specific? How do you get more specific?

Well, a few examples might be something like a training program or a licensing program, a training program or licensing program to get you into law school. Law school is three years. It's a big difference than 12 years, but yet it opens up a career for you. Or a licensing program like getting your financial advisor's securities license, more specific.

Or other specific examples would be conferences or seminars. All usually cost more money than buying books and buying tapes or MP3 files. They're more focused and they're slightly more personal. You might have access to a speaker at a conference or seminar. You might have access to a fellow attendee.

Another example would be instead of just a general undergraduate education, perhaps a higher degree, something like a master's degree or a doctorate that would move you into a more specialized field. And when you get more specific, you got to add an additional dimension of talking about am I gaining knowledge or access to people?

I haven't quite figured out how to work this into my quadrants, but what I mean is this. The primary benefit of an Ivy League school to you as a student is not what you learn at the school. You don't learn practically anything different from most schools. Other exceptions, sure, maybe.

But what's the primary benefit is the fact that you're getting access to a different tier of society. Colleges and universities in general and specifically, especially the Ivy League are filtering mechanisms for society. So rich people send their kids to an Ivy League school not because they're going to get a better education but because it opens up access to a different tier of society or to their own tier of society.

The people that can afford to send their kids there do it so that their kids can get access to the job interviews or so that they can have the hope of meeting a prospective mate who's rich instead of a poor one because they're likely to meet them at the Ivy League school.

Now, obviously, there are a few worthy scholarship students that they let in, but they're being filtered for some very exceptional skill or ability or other applied effort. I love the famous line from Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon says, "See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years, you're going to start doing some thinking on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life.

One, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on an education you could have got for $1.50 in late charges at the public library." I just love that line. He's standing at the bar showing off to the girl. The point is you can get a far better education if you spend four years at the public library in Boston instead of spending four years in the Harvard classroom if you're just talking about knowledge.

But what you can't get in the library that you can get in the Harvard classroom is specific focus knowledge to a subject of study and access to the right people, access to the right professor, access to the right classmates. It's also a slight difference in learning style. Perhaps some people find it beneficial to talk in a group setting.

But back to the more specific. In addition, conferences, seminars, you can take classes and workshops where you have access to the teacher. Think about the famous story of Warren Buffett going to Columbia University to study under Ben Graham. So what you get when you start to go up from the general is you get a higher price tag measured in money and a slightly lower price tag measured in time.

Now, if you get more specific, you could go into something like a group coaching or a mastermind group. Here you get much more personalized interaction with the teacher and personalized advice. These are going to be more expensive in terms of money, but they're going to be less expensive with regard to time.

Instead of having to filter through dozens and dozens of books, you're going to have an answer. So if you came to me and you were involved in a group coaching class of how to podcast, I could save you going out and reading all the blogs and reading all of the posts and reading all the books on how to do it.

I could say do this, this, this, this, this. It would be more expensive than what you could get out there for free, but it would be cheaper in terms of time. Do this, this, this, this. At the most specific level, you get into the world of things like one-on-one advice or one-on-one coaching.

This is usually the most expensive in terms of money, but it's usually the absolute cheapest with regard to time. You could think of this in the context of financial planning. The primary benefit of hiring a financial planner is having an answer right now to your question specifically applied within the context of your specific situation.

You can apply this to financial planning or accounting or social security planning or nuclear physics. It doesn't matter. You get one answer right now from an expert, but that expert had to go and develop the generalized knowledge to be able to do that. So when you're looking at designing your personal education plan, you got to keep all these things in mind.

Now, you don't have to have them as convoluted as I have them in my head, but you got to at least be aware of them and ask yourself the question, "Do I have lots of time or do I have lots of money?" Choose wisely. In the beginning, we usually have more time than money, and if you're there, then that's probably a good phase of your life to focus on books.

If you're unhealthy and you don't have a lot of money, pick up a few books on nutrition and start there. You don't have to hire a nutritionist and a private chef. But if you have money and are a bit older, well, why take the time when you have the money on surplus?

Go hire a nutritionist and a doctor and a private chef. One of the luxuries that I personally would indulge in if I were mega rich is to have a private chef to cook all kinds of creative meals under strict dietary constraints. It's challenging to work in creating fancy, unique, creative meals with healthy ingredients when you're also juggling a lot of other things.

You also want to ask yourself, "Do I have the appropriate broad and general foundation for what I need to do first?" There's no point if you're 18 years old and you want to get rich in real estate. There's absolutely no point and you're paying $15,000 like I almost did when I was 19 to go to some expensive seminar on real estate investing or to join some kind of private coaching community.

When you're 18 years old, you don't have two dimes to rub together. Save your money, get some books from the library, and go to work. Then, once you have the broad foundation and you're actually involved in it, then you might be well-served by the advanced seminar where you pay $3,000 for a weekend to go learn how to invest in real estate within your tax-qualified accounts.

But that's only going to be useful to you if you have the broad foundation, the framework to be able to fit that in. Now, the flip side is, however, do you need information and knowledge or do you need access to a person or people? Paying for access to a person or people can be powerful.

Paying for information can also be powerful. But sometimes you just need access. What I mean by access is you need specific knowledge at a point in time. Or you need specific access to somebody because they're going to bring something to you that can't be there with a general foundation.

A client working with a financial advisor, the client might know as much about finance as the advisor, but they don't follow through. Well, in that case, they're getting the general information, but they're also getting the follow-through or they're getting the specific services that are coming. It's not about the information.

It's about the personalized service or attention. Or paying for access at the right point in time can be incredibly valuable. If you're going into a business deal and you're trying to figure out, "Wait a second. I don't know about this contract," well, what you need right now is a high-priced, experienced attorney who can help you negotiate the contract.

You don't have time to sit down and go out and read about the books on negotiating, read about the books on law. You should have done that a little bit, but it's too late. So now you need access to the expert. Is that education? I would say yes, it is.

Next question when you're thinking about educational options is how is the education and information that you need in your life best served to you within the context of your situation and your goals? If you're a car mechanic, your education is going to be delivered in a different format than if you're a social media advisor.

As a car mechanic, you might need hands-on instruction. I probably should have picked a different example because the first place I go when trying to figure out car things is YouTube. You should pick a different example. But as a mechanic, again, the hands-on instruction might be super useful to actually get in there and start working with things that you can't learn from YouTube.

Now, as a social media advisor, yes, you need to get in there, but all you need is a few podcasts and a couple YouTube videos and you can be a few steps ahead of everyone else when it comes to being a social media advisor. If you're an actor, your need for how you receive the education and the information that you actually need is going to be very different than if you're an accountant.

An actor needs specific coaching that's specific to their acting ability and their acting skill. It must be very custom-tailored because it's highly subjective. And the actor needs specific access to a certain group of people. Now, if you flip that, an accountant needs primarily information. As an accountant, you don't need feedback on your accounting techniques.

You just need to learn here are the accounting techniques. You don't necessarily need access to some high-priced or specific market. Your services are in some ways a commodity until they're highly developed. Another question to consider is will the right answer change your life? Think about a high-priced tax attorney.

Can a high-priced tax attorney effectively serve a 23-year-old wage earner fresh out of college? Not a chance. There's no trick that that person can apply. There's no secret that's just simply being held from 23-year-old wage earners about money and their taxes. Get your 1040EZ and fill it out and that's basically it.

There's no major secret. Now, could the high-priced tax attorney effectively serve the billionaire with a business empire around the globe? Ah, now there are some useful tricks and there's some specialized knowledge that can be applied. So could getting the right answer change your life? For the fresh 23-year-old wage earner, you don't need that personalized advice.

You need a book on budgeting and saving money and you need Joshua's podcast. To the billionaire, you don't need to listen to thousands of hours of Joshua's podcast. You need to stroke the check for the high-priced tax attorney and get your personalized education now. Are you just interested in exploring photography as a hobby?

Well, if that's the case, it's not going to change your life. And so to go out and spend $10,000 on a fancy course to study with a world master is probably not great education for you. This is one of my things. I have a casual interest in exploring photography just casually for fun.

Well, watch some YouTube videos, maybe take a lynda.com course, something like that. That's about it. But on the flip side, if it weren't a hobby, if it was some kind of professional adventure, then maybe it would change my life to invest heavily in the education. Or think about this.

Do you have irreconcilable differences with your spouse? Well, in that case, skip the books and invest in the best marriage counselor you can find. I mean, the books might help, but the reality is it will dramatically change your life if you can save your marriage or not. Or are you dying?

Well, if you're dying, find the best medical advice money can buy and don't stop until you're either cured or you're dead. That's the kind of thing that's life-changing. Hope these examples are helpful for you to start to see how in some cases getting the generalized knowledge can help and in some cases getting the specific knowledge is more important.

Three final points and I'm done for the day. Number one of my three final points, establish an education budget for yourself now and continue it throughout your lifetime. In the coming shows, I'm going to be talking about some ideas of how you can become more educated and also establishing some affiliate links where I can gain a commission by selling you education.

Yesterday, I talked about Amazon.com and I set up an affiliate link there. If you'd like to use my affiliate link, I'd be grateful for you for your Amazon purchases. There's no increase in cost for you. Just click through it first and that makes a big difference. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Amazon and then just click through to that to Amazon.

It puts a little cookie in your browser and that saves you money. But a simple thing, you can get books for free at the library and that's a great thing to do. I'll talk about this more in a future show. I personally – I get some books at the library if I'm just going to skim them.

But I made a decision sometime back to buy all my books because I gain more from having the book to own, to tear it up and to write on it, to highlight it and to demolish it and destroy it because I actually get the benefit from it more. But I'm establishing – there are other educational opportunities.

So the key I believe is to go ahead and establish an education budget for yourself now and invest in your education continually. I get frustrated because I know people who spend $40,000 on a college diploma and won't buy a $10 book after they've graduated. What a waste. You buy a $40,000 diploma of generalized knowledge and you won't buy a $10 book that might save the life of your suicidal teenager?

Don't do that. Invest in your education. Now, I don't know how much is the right answer. Brian Tracy used to say invest 3% of your income in yourself. I've never established a specific percentage of income. I probably need to, but there just seem to be always so many things calling for income.

So I just kind of have a rule that I invest 3% of my income in myself. But the point is set up a separate account, whether you just simply say, "Whenever I want to buy a book, I'm going to buy it and I'm not going to worry about it," or whether you say, "I'm going to go to two seminars a year," or whether you say, "I'm going to go back and I'm going to go ahead and buy that college degree," or whether you say, "I'm going to go get that certification.

I'm going to become the ASE certified mechanic instead of the non-ASE certified mechanic," or "I'm going to go through the CFP classes and become the CFP financial planner instead of just the financial planner." Whatever it is, establish the budget and continue that throughout your lifetime. Number two point as I close is think carefully about what's right for you right now.

I hope that these ways of thinking about it will help you to see. If you are filtering something through your goals, then you can look and say, "What do I need?" If you need a specific answer, go pay for it. So if my wife and I have a goal of having that beautiful birth that I described to you earlier, but we need a specific answer to a specific medical situation, I'm not going to go on the internet and start browsing internet forums.

I'm going to the doctor and I'll pay through the nose for the information because that's going to help to get the goal taken care of. But if I don't need that specific answer, then maybe I'll spend some time reading some essays or reading some books. If you need a specific answer to your situation, go pay for it.

If you need a general improvement to reach your goals, go pay for it. But you might be paying for it in terms of time instead of in terms of money. That's kind of the tradeoff. You do need a broad foundation first in just about any topic. Now, if you don't have that broad foundation, it's hard to gain from the specifics.

You need to learn the vocabulary of something first. I can fly through a financial textbook, but I can't get through a photography essay because I don't know the words. I don't know what ISO means and I don't know what lens millimeters mean in terms of I get what a millimeter is, but the meaning of that is lost to me.

But when I say a term like a qualified plan, the meaning of that to a financial advisor is instantly, "Ah, I know what a qualified plan is." But to most of you who are listening, you don't know what a qualified plan is, but that has a very specific meaning within my industry.

So sometimes you just need the general. Sometimes you need the specific. If you have those goals, be they as complex or as long-reaching as I want to be financially independent at the age of 42 and financially independent to me means $10,000 a month or whatever, or if it's as simple as I want to have a happier marriage, which is actually not necessarily simple.

It sounds simple, but if you have those goals, then just look at it and say, "What kind of knowledge and skills would help me?" This is a good journaling exercise. What would help me? Go back and listen to the whole section that I did in this show on talking about how we coach a student.

If I had the goal of graduating from high school, effectively getting my high school diploma, what skills do I need to develop? There's a lot of things in that. But I'll tell you, I've never found a student who said – by the way, my plea for you is teach students this stuff.

Teach your students how to study. Teach your students memory techniques. Teach your students how to be educated. But back on track, think about it in terms of a complex thing. Write down all these things and think about it and look at it and say, "What would effectively serve my needs?" So, for example, the marriage thing.

If you look at it, me reading marriage books may help a little bit. But if my spouse isn't reading marriage books, yes, I'm going to be helped. But maybe the better solution is for us to spend the money on a weekend marriage seminar. And that weekend marriage seminar together will learn.

Maybe that's going to be the key. So apply the educational ideas in the context of your goal. My final point as we go – Jim Rohn is my favorite philosopher. And I'm going to close with two Jim Rohn quotes. The first one is this. Jim Rohn always said, "How long should you try?" And the answer is, "Until." Apply that to your goals.

How long should you try? Until. How long should you try to raise a successful child? Until. How long should you try to have a happy marriage? Until. How long should you try to be financially independent? Until. Now, if you don't want a certain goal, take it out and toss it and apply something else.

But the point is you'll never arrive at the end of life. And there's always going to be one more goal. So the key is the process and not the result. That's what this learning process is. Until the day I die, I hope to be getting better and learning and growing.

Education is not something that you buy. It's not something that you just do one time and you're done. It's a process. It's a lifestyle, something that should continue. And then one of my favorite Jim Rohn quotes, "Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune." If you've got a high school diploma, even better if you have a college diploma, great.

That'll get you a living, maybe. Most of you, it'll get you a living. If that's where your education stopped, it's very unlikely that today you have a fortune. But if you continue your education over time, you'll be able to accumulate a fortune. It's working for me. I've seen it work for other people.

I'm convinced it'll work for you, that in the fullness of time, self-education will lead you to a fortune and a rich life in every definition of the word. I think that's what I wanted to share today, and I hope this has been helpful to you. As we go today, I'll just ask of you three things.

If this information has been helpful to you, I have three requests, and you can go down them as far in the list as you want to. Number one, please tell a friend. If you are enjoying the show, if you find benefit in the content, please tell a friend. That is super, super useful.

The strongest way that a show like mine spreads is by telling a friend. If you want to make it super easy, I created a free application for you. You can just simply tell your friends, "Hey, if you want to hear this cool podcast, just go in the App Store on your phone and search 'Radical Personal Finance' and you'll find my show." So number one, tell a friend.

Number two, I haven't asked in a while, but I would be thrilled if those of you, especially many of you who are new listeners, would please leave a review. Those reviews and ratings in the various podcast directories make a big difference. If you are listening through iTunes or if you have an Apple iTunes account, please leave a review and rating in iTunes.

If you're listening through Stitcher or another podcast service, please leave a rating and a review there. Or if you're listening on my app, I'd be thrilled if you just pull out your phone and go on the App Store. Those two things are free for you in terms of money, but they're not free in terms of time.

There's nothing in life that's free, and you've got to measure cost both in terms of time and in money. But those are the first two. Number three, if this has been useful to you, I would be thrilled if you'd consider supporting the show as a patron. I am this week rolling out a number of affiliate things.

I'm rolling out a number of sponsors because I'm able to bring them on, and I need to do a whole show on that. I just was more excited about getting to this content than talking again about the show. I try to do more stuff that's going to help you rather than just talking about me and my things.

I do need to get to another show on that and explain kind of what I'm doing because I have talked about that on the way through. I'll do it at some point here. But as I do that, though, my core focus is I really am focused on simply serving you, and I want to do that directly.

And so the best way to do that is you sign up to be a patron to the show. You can sign up for as little as a buck a month, or you can sign up for more. That's up to you. So thank you all so much for listening. I will be back with you as soon as I'm able.

I have two shows, number one, on how to find the best deal coming as soon as possible, number one, on how to find the best deal on audio books, and number two, how to find the best deal on online education. So that will be coming at you pretty soon here.

Cheers, you all. I'm out. Thank you for listening to today's show. Please subscribe to the podcast with our free mobile app so you don't miss a single episode. Just search the App Store on your device for Radical Personal Finance and you'll find our free app. If you have received value from the content of this show, please consider becoming a patron.

Your financial support is how I pay the bills for the show and how I plan to grow our content. You can support the show with as little as a dollar a month or as much as you feel the content is worth. Details are at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. If you'd like to contact me personally, my email address is Joshua@RadicalPersonalFinance.com or connect with the show on Twitter @RadicalPF and at Facebook.com/RadicalPersonalFinance.

This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment, but your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you. Please develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy and consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions.

I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person and I make mistakes. If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please come by the show page and comment so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here. The LA Kings Holiday Pack is back!

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