Hey parents join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways, and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones. Yesterday, Radical Personal Finance had the honor of being featured prominently in a column in the New York Times.

The column was written by Carl Richards, a personal finance columnist, aka the sketch guy. There in the New York Times and he was talking about the best investment to make, which is the investment called you. Now it already planned a couple of shows here at the end of the year regarding what to do in 2016.

And today I'd like to go ahead and welcome any new listeners to the show who are coming over from that column with a detailed discussion of how you can actually increase your income. I'm going to give you today the overall framework for exactly what you can do this coming year in order to carefully and strategically increase your income.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you so much for being with me and I do again welcome any new listeners to the show. Radical Personal Finance is your comprehensive resource. For wealth building here, we talk each and every day about how you can systematically pursue financial independence.

Ultimately, the goal is to give you a plan to become financially independent in 10 years or less. Now I have no doubt that if you are new to the show and you're listening to a personal finance podcast that the concept of being financially independent is probably at least mildly attractive to you.

This is after all the most commonly stated goal that most of us have with our individual finances. If you talk to people and ask them what they want their money, generally you ask them if they want to be retired, they usually say yes. Or if they want to be financially independent, they usually say yes.

But just because we have that goal doesn't mean that we know how to get there. And here is the simple reality. You are not going to get there without at least a decent level of income. Now remember, the Radical Personal Finance wealth building framework that I have taught you involves five points and a total of 10 words.

So those 10 words, these are the only things that you can actually do to help you build financial independence. This is what we talk about each and every day on the show. Number one is increase your income or to use the two-word version, increase income. Number two is decrease expenses.

Number three, invest wisely. And the ratio between your income, your expenses, and your investment prowess will ultimately determine the level of wealth. Number four is avoid catastrophe. And number five is optimize lifestyle because those are both extremely important because money is not all about – well, life is not all about money.

Today, we're going to focus on increasing income. Ultimately, if you could only do one of these things well, focus on increasing income because with high enough income, you can get through many of the other problems. Now, with a low income and extreme skill on the expenses and the investment perspective, you can build financial independence.

But everything is easier with a high income. The challenge is few of us have been actually taught how to increase our income. If we have been taught how to increase our income, it's likely that it's been in simplistic terms, for example, work harder or do a better job or go to college or get an MBA, something like that.

But really, there's not much taught that's an organizing framework for how to actually increase your income. And today, I'm going to give you that framework. To the best of my knowledge, it's original with me although just things that I've observed and tried to classify. I welcome your comments on today's show.

If I find any holes in anything I have to say, I'd be happy to hear those ideas and I'll integrate them into the framework. But today, I'm going to give you how I think about income. Specifically though, we're going to talk to employees. Business is in and of itself a whole different ballgame.

The concepts are applicable but today I want to speak to employees because as an employee, you face a very simple proposition. Do good work. Get paid more. And today's show is going to cover three parts. Basically, in the introduction here, I'm going to give you the three ways to increase your income as an employee.

These are the only three things that you can do that will actually result in your income going up and you've got to do them. Number two part is I'm going to share with you which of these three to focus on first. How do you actually look at your situation and decide when you should focus on number one or number two or number three?

And then in the final third of today's show, I'm going to talk to you about how do you actually do these three things and give you specific tips and techniques that you can apply to each one of them. But let's start with the framework itself. If you are sitting down and thinking about the next year of your life and wondering how you can actually increase your income, here's how you need to think.

You need to actually do something and here are the three things you can do. Number one, you can make more money if you increase the number of hours that you work. See, we're paid in a market economy based upon the work that we produce. And the simplest and most direct path to increasing your income is going to be increase the amount of work that you produce.

And the simplest way to do that is just simply to work more. The number one way is to increase the number of hours that you work. The number two way is to increase the output of work per hour. So that means simply producing more work, whatever that means within your context, for each hour that you're at work.

And then number three, you can increase the value of the work that you output. You need to increase the value. If you're producing work that's more valuable, however that's measured in your industry, then some of that value will come to you in terms of higher financial compensation. The cool thing about the world that we live in and the economies in which most listeners will live is that we live in a market economy.

So the market is going to pay you based upon the value that you bring to the marketplace. Now, in the short term, there may be hiccups. In the short term, you might have a boss that doesn't recognize your contributions. There will be irregularities and inefficiencies in the short term.

But over the long term, you will find that your compensation is tied to your value in the marketplace. There are sectors in which that's not the case, notably if you work in the government economy. You're not necessarily going to be paid based upon your value in the marketplace. The president of the United States doesn't make more than the president of GE simply because he's the president of the United States and has much bigger sway.

The president of the United States doesn't actually earn – well, he's in office – doesn't actually earn very much. All the remuneration for being president comes from the influence that you can – well, wield or if you're cynical like me, sell after you leave the office. But the few hundred thousand dollars the president has paid is certainly not indicative of the impact that the president has in the marketplace.

And all of the government economy works the same, and you could expand the government economy to be any kind of standard, say, unionized economy where you're paid based upon your seniority. How long you've been at a job, things like a teaching economy, which is part of the government economy where you're paid based upon the number of degrees that you have and the standardized service.

But there's no special pay for your contributions. The best advice I can give you if you are working in that economy is either – well, number one, just do the bare minimum at your job. All you need to do is do just enough not to get fired and put your focus elsewhere.

I don't recommend that for life satisfaction, but that's certainly a path that you could pursue. Or you've got to punch the ticket as far as the benchmarks and degrees that you have to earn. But in a market economy, it doesn't matter how many degrees that you have once you have a job.

It doesn't matter how long you've been somewhere. It only matters the value that you bring to the job. And so in order to be paid more, you've got to become more valuable. You've got to actually be more valuable. There's no shortcut. There's no magic formula. It's as simple as, one, increasing the number of hours that you work; number two, increasing the output of work per hour; and number three, increasing the value of the work that you output.

Now, where should you focus first? Because you can't work more, do more work necessarily per hour, and produce more valuable work all at the same time. A simple example would be if you're going to produce more valuable work, you're going to need to spend time studying, and that's time that you're not spending outputting work.

Each of these areas of focus will have a different benefit at a different point in time, and that's why I think of it as a continuum between short-term focus and long-term focus. Before I get to that concept, I want to talk about sponsor of the day today. Sponsor number one is Paladin Registry.

Paladin Registry is the solution that I came up with that is an answer to the most requested problem that I get here on the show, which is, "Joshua, I appreciate you as a financial advisor coming to the internet and sharing with us a little bit of insight into the financial planning business.

Now, how do I go find a good financial advisor?" And I obviously can't work with very many people if I'm going to continue creating radical personal finance, and so I went out and looked for an answer to that question, and it's tough because it's very individual. There are great financial advisors at probably every firm, at least if there's at least a few advisors there.

At least one of them is probably great, and there are terrible advisors at probably every firm. And so I can't just say, "Well, search this name or search this number, and there you're going to find guaranteed a great financial advisor." There are great financial advisors with credentials. There are great financial advisors without credentials, and there are great financial advisors in every compensation structure.

You can't just say, "Well, fee-only advisor is the best," or "Commission-based advisor is the best." It's all down to the individual person, but that doesn't help you very much. So my best solution that I've been able to come up with so far has been a company called Paladin Registry.

Paladin Registry was started by a man named Jack Waymire who was a former financial advisor, and he saw the need that I also saw, and he started a registry service, which is a careful research process where advisors apply to be part of the registry. They pay a fee to be part of the registry, and then Jack and his team vet those advisors, digging into their background and their – any disciplinary actions that have been against them, digging into their qualifications, their experience level, their credentials, all of those things.

And then they curate a list of recommended advisors. Then if you apply for that list, they'll pass your info along to those advisors. They'll send you about three, and then you can interview those three advisors, and you have the opportunity to work with one of them if you would like.

But of course, there's no commitment. You can work with anybody. If you're interested in more information on that, go back and listen to episode 248 of Radical Personal Finance. That episode is an extensive interview with Jack Waymire, the founder, where we talk about his history. We talk about the problem of finding a financial advisor, how to solve that problem, all of the requirements and qualifications.

It's basically everything you need to know about Paladin Registry. And then if you are looking for a financial advisor, go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin, P-A-L-A-D-I-N, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin. That will translate you forward to a simple landing page where you'll put in your name, your address, your email address, your phone number, and the amount of assets that you have that are potentially available for the advisor's advice.

And then they will search their database and they'll send you some recommendations of advisors in your area. Please use that tracking link so I get credit for your using the link. That would be very helpful to me because I'm paid a commission if you use that tracking link. Please fill in the information completely so that they can properly match you with an advisor.

And then you can interview those advisors and hopefully at least one of them will impress you. So let's continue now with talking about where to focus. Here is how I consider the concept and it's a continuum between what's quick and doable in the short term versus what's quick and doable in the long term.

So let's talk about number one, increasing the number of hours that you work. If you are low on money and you need to increase your income, this is the fastest way for you to increase your income especially as an hourly employee. If you're accustomed to working 40 hours a week and let's say you're earning 20 bucks an hour, well, if you want a 50% pay increase, just go from 40 hours a week to 60 hours a week.

And you'll go from $800 a week to $1,200 a week. Pretty direct path. That's the fastest short-term benefit. If you really need to, you could go from 60 to perhaps even 80 hours a week. And if you're going to work 80 hours a week at 20 bucks an hour, that's going to be $1,600.

It's a doubling of your income immediately. That's really powerful. And so if you are in need of money, focus on simply increasing the number of hours that you work. This can also be done even if you're not paid an hourly rate. For example, one area where I learned this was in a sales capacity.

And one of the things that I did and I advised the salespeople, if you're a salesperson, you should track the number of hours that you spend face-to-face in selling situations with prospective clients and clients. And if you want to make more money and double your income in sales, all you got to do is double the number of hours that you actually spend face-to-face with prospective clients and clients.

It's pretty shocking when you review the data in the sales industry and a salesperson might say, "I work 50 hours a week," but in reality, they're only five hours a week in front of a client or in front of a prospective customer. Well, if you want to double your income, just double the time and increase the number of hours that you work.

When I was in sales, I only considered myself to be working when I was face-to-face with a prospect or client or working to get face-to-face, which meant being on the phone, making phone calls to try to be face-to-face with a prospect or client. So that's the most direct path in the short term.

But it's the hardest path to continue in the long term. Think about it. Forty hours a week is probably an average – well, a work week that most of us consider to be average. Sixty hours a week may be sustainable over time. For some people, for some people, it's not.

Eighty hours a week, it's doable, but it's getting hard to sustain that much work over a long period of time. And you can't really push it much higher than that 70, 80 hours, at least not be able to maintain your health or your sanity in most businesses. So although increasing the number of hours that you work in the short term is your fastest path to income, it's the hardest in the long term.

And it can be the toughest grind. Now, number two, increasing the output of work per hour. This is one that in the short term is a little bit less direct. If you are somebody who makes widgets, there's a certain amount of time that it's going to require you to make a widget.

You can work faster. You can make more widgets. And as skill comes, you will little by little be able to increase the number of widgets that you make per hour. But that's going to take a little bit longer to actually come through as you build the skills that you need.

However, if you are able to build that skill, you're going to be much more productive in the long term. And so it's more sustainable. If you can increase your widgets per hour rate, you should be able to sustain that beyond a point. So on that continuum, a little bit slower to implement but much more sustainable over a career to focus on increasing the output of work per hour.

The third way of increasing your income, which is increase the value of the work that you output, that's going to be the slowest to see the benefits from. Let's say you're focusing on producing more valuable work, on increasing your skills such that you're moving in a direction in the marketplace where you're going to be producing more valuable work.

It's not going to happen in the first week. It's not like going from 40 to 60 hours a week and getting a 50% pay increase. You're probably going to go from 40 to 60 hours and you're going to start working. There's going to be no difference in the first week because it takes time.

And in fact, it may even take time away from your hours because you may have to pull down your hours of work so that you can spend more hours of study. But that's where the real magic is in the long term. The people who really make a massive difference in their income are those who produce more valuable work.

Consider any of the professions, things like practicing law. Everybody goes to law school and the people that go to law school are probably similarly prepared and similarly equipped. And when they get out of law school, they all have the same admission to the bar or the same certificate. But why is it that some lawyers go on and produce work that's valued at $100 an hour and other lawyers go on and produce work that's valued at thousands of dollars per hour?

That's because they're moving in the direction of work that's more valuable in the marketplace. So, where should you focus? That's the question. All three of these are important, but you've got to look at your present situation, your present needs, and your current job and your long-term goals. If you're in a financial bind, I just think of someone like Dave Ramsey's advice, go deliver pizzas.

If you're in debt and you've got a straightforward job and you can't really work more hours at that job, but you need quick cash but little amounts of cash in the short term. Let's say you need an extra $10,000 to pay off credit card debt or $5,000. Go deliver pizzas.

What are you doing? You're increasing the number of hours that you work. Now, there's not much output per hour. It's not a very valuable work. It's also – you're not doing very much of it, but you're increasing the number of hours that you work, and so it's a direct path to higher income, and it's great advice.

But let's say that you are deeply in debt and instead of being $5,000 in debt though, you're $5 million in debt. Well, delivering pizzas is going to make no measurable impact. So in that case even, yeah, you need to work more hours, but you've got to produce very valuable work.

That's not going to be applicable to many people, but if you're a real estate developer and you lost your shirt, you've got to go out and figure out how you do really valuable work. So look at your job. Look at your situation. Look at your needs. Many people who are listeners of this show are not deeply in debt.

You're not trying to just make more in a short term. But you want to steadily, progressively in the next year make progress. So here you might want to focus a little bit on increasing the number of hours that you work. An extra hour a day working through your lunch break might make a big difference, but you're more likely going to benefit from focusing on the output of work per hour or by training yourself for more valuable work.

That's going to be where the real gains are. I'm going to give you some real tools for how you can actually focus on each of those things in just a moment. Before I do that, sponsor of the day number two today is YNAB, the You Need a Budget, Y-N-A-B, the YNAB budgeting software.

And this is also – the first one, Paladin Registry, was the most requested problem. This software solution is the number one most used product by the radical personal finance community. When I was early on saying and accepting potential advertisers on the show, I made a mention of it on the show and I got over a dozen emails from listeners in the first few days basically saying you should get YNAB.

YNAB is awesome. YNAB is a budgeting software that solves the biggest problem with budgeting brilliantly, which is how do I actually manage the money that I have and actually budget the money that I have? Not this thing about budgeting where I design an ideal month on a perfect basis based upon ratios, but actually, okay, I've got $5,000 in my checking account.

How do I budget that? And it solves that problem brilliantly. It is one of only two solutions that I know of that actually does a good job of this proactive approach to budgeting, budgeting this month's income. I'll be doing an extensive show on budgeting this week, but for now, if you're interested in trying it out, go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/YNAB, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/YNAB.

Try a free 30-day trial. It's a fully featured trial of the software. Check it out. Big recommendation to you. If you are getting that trial, go through and go through some of the YNAB training materials. Go through one of the live classes that they have, the basic introductory classes, and go through some of the advanced ones.

At first, I thought I understood it. Then I started taking classes and I realized that even though I was using it effectively, it had a lot more power than I knew. So if you've never gone through their training classes, do that. So please use that link, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/YNAB. Again, that's a tracking link, so I get credit for your download.

Free 30-day trial and I thank you so much for doing that. So let's wrap up today's show by talking about what you can actually do this next year to increase your income in each of those things. Let's break them down. Here are some thoughts to stimulate your creative juices.

To increase the number of hours that you work, you should probably first care about the work that you're doing. Now, I know this may not be where you expected me to start, but I think it's a big deal. You should probably care about the work that you're doing. Look around you and think about who works a lot and ask yourself, "Do they care about the work that they're doing?" You'll find some people who don't.

You'll find some people who work a lot of hours simply because they need to. That's a mark of their character where they're actually doing that. I think we should admire and honor and venerate those people. However, my experience has been the majority of people I know who work a lot of hours do it because they care about the work.

If you care about the work, it's easier to do more hours and it's almost a self-fulfilling cycle. It's a virtuous cycle. Because you care about the work, you work more hours at it. Because you work more hours at it, you get better results. Because you get better results, you care about the work more and you're excited about it and you're honored as being good at it.

You feel good about it, so you work more and you work more and the cycle repeats itself and repeats itself. So if you're doing work that you look at and you dread the idea of putting in more hours, let's say you're at 40 hours and you're thinking about how can I go from 40 to 60 hours, you might seriously consider if this isn't the year for you to make a career change, that might be the best thing for you to consider doing.

I work many more hours now on radical personal finance for less pay than I did before when I was a practicing personal financial advisor making more money working fewer hours. So you say, "Well, how is that – how is that the right move?" Well, because I'm actually working on number one and number three.

I'm working on all of these. But because of lifestyle optimization, back to 0.5 of my five-part formula, optimize lifestyle, that's for me an optimization of lifestyle. I would do some of this work, not all of the work I do, but I would do some of this work even if I were already financially independent and didn't have to.

That makes a big difference in your ability to focus. So number one, make sure that you care about the work involved and if you don't, take that as a good signal that this should be the year where you focus on changing to something else. It doesn't have to be something you know you're going to do for the next decade.

It doesn't have to be something you know you're going to do for a career. It just has to be something else and frankly, realistically, is it going to be that big of a deal if you go try something for two years and then find out you don't like that and move to the next thing?

Thankfully, in our culture, the stigma and social problems or career workplace problems that have maybe come in the past from switching from job to job, those are effectively gone. If you don't do it now, then when? I mean that as an actual question, not just a rhetorical question. If you don't do it now, then when?

Make a plan for when you will do it. But get after it. Life's too short to not care at least in some degree about the impact of the work that you're making. Another thing that you could utilize to be able to work more hours is increasing your stamina. To go from 40 hours a week of work to 60 hours a week, you need physical stamina and this may be the limiting factor for some of you.

Maybe some of you can't actually work that much because you don't have the physical strength and ability to do that. That's fine. But if possible, perhaps your way of focus this next year will be to focus on building good health and energy. This is one of my things off of my personal development plan for this coming year.

I've been really thrown for a loop by the birth of my baby girl and she was so sick for the first three months of my life. It was the toughest three months of my life – excuse me, for the first three months of her life and it was the toughest three months of my life.

I had all these great habits. I was getting to the gym. I was making progress and the last three months, just it was an emergency time where I had to basically do the bare minimum and take care of her. Well, now she's doing better and the question is, well, what do I need to do to increase my stamina?

Because I get to the mid-afternoon and I start to fade. So I need to be focused on this, increasing my health and energy through building in the time for exercise, making sure that my food choices are promoting energy and health rather than draining me. So this is a big thing for me, building stamina.

It matters. Sometimes people just can't work more because they don't feel good. So if you need to take some money and invest it in yourself to feel good as your financial advisor, at least your virtual financial advisor, I hereby give you permission. Take your money and invest it in yourself.

Frankly, $100 a month in some supplements or $100 a month in some medical care that can make a difference in your life might go a lot farther than $100 a month tossed into your 401(k) and put into the stock market. Or it might not. That's up to you. Another idea for you to consider is if you want to increase the number of hours that you work, you need a lifestyle or a schedule that allows you to work more.

So simple example for me, I can work more hours than many people because I can get more work done before 8 AM than many people because I have a lifestyle and a schedule that allows me to get that work done. I don't have to get in the car and my work is not defined by driving and sitting in rush hour traffic driving to Miami.

My work is defined as walking into my office, turning on the computer, sitting in the chair and reading and writing and developing a concept like this framework that I'm sharing with you today. So build a lifestyle and schedule that allows you to work more. If nothing else, if you switched from working in an office that you had to fight rush hour traffic five days a week to switching to working four days from a more convenient location in one day in the rush hour traffic, that could buy you another six or eight hours of available time that you could put into working.

That could have a dramatic impact in your income over time. So think about some of those big-picture ideas as you're considering your plans over the next year. These lifestyle considerations don't generally happen by accident. But as you're extrapolating from your big-picture financial goals of big-picture goal, I want to build financial independence in the next ten years, smaller-picture goal, I need to increase income.

Okay, what do I do to increase income? Well, I'm going to focus on working more hours. How do I do that? Well, maybe I need to move. You can see how they connect. That's what I did. If you're interested in that story, check back over the last couple of episodes where I shared my house story.

But the – how I've applied that is first you heard the story of how I moved from farther away from my office to closer to my office and bought a house that was more expensive but was closer. And then you heard how I moved again to be able to work more hours.

I sold my house. Over the next few years, it's my prediction and intent that I will get much more work done because I don't have to own a house than the other way around. It's totally freeing to me and it massively increases the number of hours that I can work.

And again, because I've chosen work that I care about, it's not a burden to me. I wouldn't rather be working on plumbing or I wouldn't rather be putting a fresh coat of paint on my roof or putting the waterproofing paint. I wouldn't rather be doing yard work. I'd rather be working.

I would honestly rather be working. So think creatively about things like that. Ask yourself what is keeping you from working more hours. If you're being kept from working more hours because you just don't want to, that's fine. But if you just don't want to because you're enjoying other lifestyle goals or if you just don't want to because you don't like the work, those are two very different things.

I don't work on Saturdays and Sundays because I don't want to because I've dedicated those days to other areas of my life that are more important, to being with my family, to being involved in the church. Those are much more important to me. But I have plenty of rest time the rest of the week to get the work done that pays in income.

It's different now for me though than it was a few years ago. As a financial advisor, in retrospect, now I can admit it a little bit easier that one of the reasons why I wasn't working more hours was because it wasn't the right fit. It wasn't work that I wanted to do.

So think creatively. Now, obviously, again, you can just simply put your work boots on and work more hours. You can come in earlier. You can stay later, work through lunch, all of those things. But we talk about those a lot of other times. So today, I want to be more strategic with you.

Next, to increase the output per hour, so now we're on that number two, to increase the output per hour, you need better tools and more proficiency with the tools of your job. And you need just more experience and more focused process improvement. Now, tools and training is something that most people can really make an investment in, and this will be unique to you.

For example, if you work in an office environment, I'm just flabbergasted sometimes by the people I see who can't type, who can't type quickly. And I am amazed when I see an executive who a significant portion of their day involves writing very important, high-powered emails, very impactful emails and memos and things like that, and they can't type.

I look at that person and I just – I can't do this in face-to-face conversation. It's out of the social order and I don't answer questions unless I'm asked. But I just want to scream sometimes like, "Do you not see what you're doing?" Three solutions. Number one, take a typing class and dedicate a few hours here and there or dedicate 15 minutes a day to becoming more proficient with typing.

If you don't want to do that, number two, get Dragon NaturallySpeaking or other dictation program, put it on your computer and do everything with your voice. Or number three, hire somebody to sit next to you and type and go back to the days of the dictaphone. And you should not be spending your time typing in this slow of a manner.

But I see it all the time. I see an executive who their time is so valuable on an hourly basis and they're sitting there plunking out memos with two fingers. Or another area I saw this, another way you can improve skills. When I was in college, I worked a job for a company and I was – what was my job title?

Graphics consultant or something like that. Basically, all I did was create PowerPoint presentations for people. We were a marketing research company and we created deliveries – excuse me. We created research studies and then analyzed those studies for marketing insights and then delivered those marketing insights to the large companies that hired us.

Now, in that culture, in that corporate culture, it's death by PowerPoint and everything is created in the form of a PowerPoint deck. If you're not familiar with corporate lingo, that's the lingo. It's a PowerPoint deck. First of all, that really bugged me and I pleaded with the management team to try to say, "Why are you having these experienced marketing consultants doing PowerPoint presentations?" It's like the value of their mind is not in creating presentations.

The value of their mind is in analyzing data for insights and then communicating that data to the clients. And in the modern business culture, we've effectively lost the ability to write a memo or write a report. And so what could be communicated clearly in a five-page written report, which could be typed out by someone with reasonable typing proficiency, could be typed out in a fairly short order.

I'd watch these marketing consultants spend hours creating PowerPoint presentations and it's a stupid system because what happens is you do neither thing well. The PowerPoint presentations are not a good format for conveying written thought. Neither are they good presentations. A good presentation doesn't have hundreds of words on a slide in a long-form narrative and a good report doesn't have just a couple hundred words.

It's got more of a detailed format. So it was the worst of both worlds, but that was the culture. The major point was I would watch these marketing consultants struggle with PowerPoint. And I took a computer class and when I got this new job, I didn't have any skills with PowerPoint.

I actually bluffed my way through the initial exam using the help menu. The initial exam for the skills was can you use PowerPoint? I'd never really used PowerPoint that much, but I just sat there and was good at using the help menu on the computer to figure out how to do the things I needed to do.

I passed the exam, did better than most applicants, and then learned as I went. And then I went and started reading a computer class book. I took that book. I systematically worked through all the exercises. I printed out a list of the keyboard shortcuts and learned my control Cs and my control Ds and my control Es and my control click and control shift click to make things go straight across and practiced a little bit and then massively increased the speed.

Today, even though I haven't really done much in years, I could create an in-depth PowerPoint presentation in much, much less time than many other people. And that makes a big difference. So invest in the tools or training you need and invest both money and time. The first thing you should do with any new program is get the manual for it.

The first thing you should do with any new tool, if it's a physical tool, is study it. The first thing you should do is look for the information because what happens is we spend so much of our life in school, which is absolutely irrelevant for the vast majority of us who aren't teachers.

It's irrelevant to our life. And then we go into occupations and because we've never been taught how to get an education, we don't actually proactively go after it. But you've got to educate yourself in your field of work. Now, those tools, again, could be a duplicate set of wrenches so you minimize the time walking across the shop or it could be a computer system where everything is synced together and you take it to the cloud.

Figure out how to increase your output per hour, develop more efficient processes, look at your workshop, look at your workflows, chart them out on a piece of paper. Focus on figuring out if you hired you as a consultant, how would you make your life better? And that is a never-ending process.

But if you don't do it, you're doomed because there are people who are. Now, some of those things you can adjust. Some of them just come with time. You can focus on getting the most efficient hammer. But the carpenter who's used a hammer for 20 years has an experience and knowledge and practice to be able to sink a nail in a few blows whereas the new rookie carpenter with a brand new hammer that's the best on the market, if you miss it, it's not transferring the force from your arm into the nail.

I hope that wasn't too theoretical of an example. But I love to watch experienced carpenters. They pull out a nail and boom, boom, boom, and the nail is in and I am nowhere near that proficient. So some of those things you can focus on with tools and tricks and techniques and hacks and study.

Some things you just got to focus with good practice and good experience. But even in that, good practice and good focused building of experience is going to make a bigger difference than anything else. Many people forget the fundamentals. When I was a kid, I studied piano for a few years and to this day I regret that I never was proficient with fundamentals.

I moved on too quickly and my piano teacher allowed me to move on too quickly to playing songs when I should have done more time practicing fundamentals. So I became okay and then I just let it go and today I can't play for anything. Well, now as an adult, I'm working on building that skill again and now I'm focusing heavily on fundamentals.

So whatever the fundamentals are for your business, practice them. When I was in sales, it was memorizing my scripts, practicing my delivery, recording myself on the phone and listening to the recording, videotaping myself, giving presentations and watching that. Focused practice will make a big difference. For you, it may be that.

It may be something else. But build the experience. And then finally, to increase the value of your output, you've simply got to do a few things. Number one, you must become more valuable. How do you do that? Well, you develop yourself. You develop your mind. You develop your experience.

You develop your ideas. You must become more valuable, which is why constant flows of information, constant flows of data, constant flows of being current on what's cutting edge in your industry is so, so important. I've lost touch in the last year and a half since I left the field of advice.

I have lost touch with a lot of stuff that has changed in the financial advice space. Now, I'm temporarily okay with that because I'm developing not so much the technical side of the show but I'm developing the theoretical construct of the show. But ultimately, it's actually a big thing for me.

I've got to continue to stay current because the market is marching on. I'm not current with everything. Well, it's hard work but I've got to do that. I've got to become more valuable. Study. Become the excellent student of your industry. In addition though to becoming more valuable, you've got to go to where your value is valuable.

Now, obviously this is your choice but let me give you an example. Let's say that you are skilled with leadership, direction. You're skilled at motivating people and leading an organization. Well, you can exercise and practice that skill in the military. And if you particularly care about your mission, perhaps that will bring some sense of fulfillment to you but it's not going to bring a lot of financial remuneration to you.

You're going to make whatever the pay grade is of somebody in your rank. Now, you could take that and go from, say, $75,000 as an officer in the military and you can move over and you can go to the nonprofit sector. You can lead an organization in your town, a nonprofit organization.

You can do an excellent job and you can have an impact. It's not going to increase the income very much that you have. Or you can take those same skills that you would exercise in both of those areas and you can take them over and you can build a company, solving a problem.

And you can work in the free market where your value is measured by money partly and your income will increase massively. Is one of those things better than another? I don't know. It's up to you. Not all important things in life are measured by money. I make a lot of decisions that result in me making less money, and I do those things consciously and because they're important to me.

So I'm not about to tell you that everything should be measured by money. But I do ask you to question sometimes if money is not a useful indicator. For example, do you feel that I should be paid for the work that I do here or should I just give it all away?

Well, that's a hard question for some people to answer. But sometimes you can do things and if you apply the same skills in a public format, you can have a much bigger impact. My favorite example of this would be – let's see, a guy like – maybe a guy like Salman Khan from the Khan Academy.

So here's a guy who just starts teaching on his own. He could have gone into the governmental space and taken a job as a beginning schoolteacher there in his area and make $40,000 a year and teach 30 students per class. But he took the same skills. He leveraged them.

And now what? I don't remember the current numbers, but over 20 million students use his stuff. And he's fundamentally transformed the value of education for people and I hope he's making a ton of money even though all of his stuff is for free. I hope he's making a ton of money.

He's certainly at the very least making more than he would have made as a public schoolteacher. Much bigger impact. Much bigger impact and more money. So I don't think of it as either/or. The – Apple, the computer company, or Samsung, the computer and device company, they've done far more to alleviate poverty around the world than has the most focused educational company, the most focused education nonprofit.

Because when you can give a kid a $50 Android and open up the world to them, they want to learn. They'll learn. That's going to be a much bigger difference than investing in the local infrastructure of building a school in one little community. So my point is not to denigrate where you choose to be involved.

All of us choose to do things and not everything is measured by money. Again, I'm part of that. But my point is to stimulate your intellectual creativity to recognize that Steve Jobs developing the iPhone will have a much bigger difference on many, many more people than if he had spent his time and efforts going and trying to build schools all around the world.

So you've got to go to where your value is valuable. And then finally, in order for you to increase the value of the work that you output, you must communicate your value effectively. This comes down to marketing. You've got to effectively communicate your value to the marketplace. It doesn't matter how brilliant your ideas are.

If you can't write them down or if you can't speak them out and communicate them verbally or if you can't somehow get them across to somebody who can, it doesn't matter how brilliant your ideas are. They're not going to be recognized by the marketplace. Now, you can apply that in your job situation.

You need to effectively market yourself. Very simple task that some of you maybe should do this next year is start an industry-focused blog, start an industry-focused podcast, start an industry-focused YouTube channel, start an industry-focused Periscope stream, start an industry-focused blab. I don't know. Whatever the new 18 new tools are that are going to come along, start one that's applicable to you because you've got to communicate your value and help other people.

That might be what you should do this year or some of you might need to start a job search and say, "Where do I go where I can communicate the value?" You've got to figure out how to put these things together for you. If you can figure out which one applies to you, then you can make a plan to start systematically implementing.

And that's where I want to close today's show is talking about the value of systematic implementation. One of my major personal weaknesses, my major flaws personality-wise, business-wise is I want to do everything all at once right now. And in some respects, that can be useful. I've recognized that character quality and tried to harness it for good.

But it can also be a negative where it allows me to be so unfocused. You cannot do all of these ideas that I have mentioned simultaneously. You cannot, number one, increase the number of hours that you work all while you're studying to – while you're practicing your work and while you're studying to create more valuable work all while you're trying to move.

It just cannot happen. You've got to do things one at a time. The simple example of if you're going to spend time studying, that's going to be time that you're not spending working. If you're going to be spending time working, that's time you're not going to be spending studying.

In my personal life, as an example, when I decided to sell my house, that resulted in my not being able to do other work in the last year. The output of the volume of shows that I was producing went down. My output of writing went down. I planned a certain writing schedule for the book, decided to sell my house, and now I'm months behind my planned writing schedule for the book.

But I still think it was a good decision because it was a strategic decision. And so you've got to focus on these things one at a time. So as you're thinking through today's show, think through a plan that's going to be sequential for you and focus on one thing at a time.

Figure out what's that one thing that is going to make a bigger difference. What was the – okay, let me see if I can pull the quote out of my head. There was a book, a very popular book this last year written. It's called The One Thing. It was written by Gary Keller and I can't remember the name of his co-author.

My apologies. But the book was called The One Thing, and the central question of the book, the guiding principle, is what is the one thing that I can do that would make everything else irrelevant or unnecessary? Basically, what's the most impactful thing? It's just a reiteration of the old Pareto principle.

What's that 20% of things that are going to make 80% of the impact? And then what's the 20% of the top – the top 20% of the 20% that's actually going to make 60% of the impact? That's what it is. For me, that one thing in the past few months was getting rid of my house.

That was why I've gone through the challenges that I went through in order to do it because that was going to be the biggest impact for me and the biggest thing that would make the biggest difference in my life. But for you, you've got to figure it out. So go back.

If it's helpful, go back and listen to today's show again and just think it through for your situation. And here at the end, I'm going to summarize kind of the outline as it is in my head for you very succinctly. Remember, five-part framework. These are the five things that you can do and all financial advice falls into these five things.

One, increase income. Two, decrease expenses. Three, invest wisely. Four, avoid catastrophe. Five, optimize lifestyle. If you want an intro to that, that's the Patreon video and that's the framework of the book that I'm building. Now, of those things, increasing income, there are only three ways you can increase income.

One, increase the number of hours you work. Two, increase the output of work per hour. Three, increase the value of the work that you output. Biggest short-term impact, increasing the number of hours you work. Worst long-term impact though. Next, biggest short-term impact, medium impact, increasing the output of work per hour but much more scalable for the long-term.

Slowest short-term impact, increasing the value of the work that you output but that one has the highest long-term benefit. So that's how you think about where do I focus on. Then you need specific plans and strategies for increasing the number of hours that you work, specific plans and strategies for increasing the output of work that you output per hour, and specific plans and strategies for increasing the value of the output of your work.

You've got to become more valuable, go to where your value is actually valued, and communicate your value effectively. I hope this has been useful to you. This is just an overall outline of at least how I think about the subject. If you have anything to add to today's outline, I would be happy to hear from you.

If you've got comments on today's show, feel free to come by the blog and comment or email me, Joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. Find me on all the social networks as well. That's fine as well. But I hope this is useful. The key is often we don't know what to do. We have these vague ideas and vague goals, and we don't know how to actually take the first step.

I know for me, this is in the goals of my life that I don't make progress on. It's usually because I don't know what to do or I don't really want to do it. So I hope this framework is useful. We're heading into a new year here. In this new year, there are a lot of exciting opportunities.

I think there will also be some very challenging times. Challenging times are where fortunes are made. Sometime I should go back and do a show on how many fortunes have been built in the middle of economic recession and depression. It usually can be a tremendous opportunity for a few people.

So I hope that you're preparing yourself and are prepared for that opportunity. Thank you so much for listening. If you are new to the show, welcome. Please subscribe to the show in iTunes or just search the App Store on your device, and you'll be able to find the show.

We've got an app on Android, app on Windows, app on Amazon, app on iOS. So just search the App Store on your phone for Radical Personal Finance. If you'd like to support the show, please frequent our sponsors. Again, today, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin if you're looking for a financial advisor or /YNAB if you would like to try my favorite budgeting software.

Or if you'd like to support the show directly, please join the Patreon program. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Patron. The way that works is you can sign up. If you found value in the concepts today, you can sign up for the show. You can sign up to send me a certain amount of money per month.

It could be as little as a buck a month. It could be more. It could be a couple hundred bucks a month if you find the value there. I've got some bribes there that will be helpful for you. If you're new to the show also, please go back and check out the archives.

I work very hard not to repeat show topics. So I don't do in-depth shows on the same topic again and again and again. So go back and listen through the archives. Some of the early shows were a little rougher with my delivery. But hopefully the content is still useful, and I'll be back with you soon.

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