The LA Kings Holiday Pack is back! The perfect gift for the hockey fan in your life. A three-game pack starts at just $159 and includes a holiday blanket. Buy today and you'll receive an additional game for free. Don't miss out. Visit lakings.com/holiday today. Happy New Year, Radicals. It's 2017, and this year is going to be fantastic.

Let's get it started. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, in 2017. While also building and working on your plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host.

Thank you for being with me. Man, it's good to be back. It's been a difficult start to the year already, and it's only January 3. More on that coming up. Nothing like getting off to a difficult start on January 3. You know, with the holidays this year, January 1, Sunday, and then January 2 off for most people, and I had some things I needed to attend to, so I went ahead and took it off as well.

I considered canceling January 2 and going ahead and starting the show early, but I needed to finish up some things before getting started. Well, then this morning on January 3, I woke up, and I had planned to wake up very early and get to work early, and just like I had planned, I had some kind of bad stomach bug.

And so that dogged my heels all day long, and here it is at 8.30 at night. On Tuesday, January 3, that I'm finally getting to the recording of the show. It's just been a tough day. But, hey, that's life. Tough day, but I'm getting you the show out, because that is one of the big things that is a major focus for me, which is largely going to be what I'm going to share with you today.

Just a very personal show. Littled up my plans for 2017, a few changes that I just want to share with you. I try when I make changes on the show to let you know about them, so those of you who are long-time and regular listeners, you'll know about them.

If you're not a long-time listener, feel free to skip this one and come back tomorrow for more focused, personal content about you. But today is just a little bit about me, some of the lessons that I'm learning, and some of the lessons that I've learned in the year that's just behind us, 2016.

So today's show will be pretty brief and to the point. I've got to get to bed. I've got to get up before a.m. for a flight to Chicago tomorrow. I've got a quick two-day trip up to Chicago tomorrow. So, yeah, so let's go. 2017 is going to be a really great year.

I'm very excited about it for me. And I also hope that it will be a great year for you. And I hope that I can contribute to that through the content here on Radical Personal Finance. In many ways, 2016 was a difficult year for me. It was a year of disappointment in many ways, and I'm going to share some of those disappointments with you, again, with the hope of encouraging you.

I don't like it when people only share the good, the positive, the exciting, the enthusiastic, and don't share the difficult. I don't like it when people present an image of themselves that only includes the positive. I don't like it when people are fake. So, in light of that, I'm going to share with you some of the reasons why this past year has been difficult for me.

Because I don't think it's fair if you only get one side of the story. For example, I know that many of you have followed the journey that I've been on with entrepreneurialism and Radical Personal Finance here, and kind of this lifestyle business that I've sought to create, and you've been building similar ones of yourselves.

And it's very easy for someone like me to only talk about how great that is and how fantastic it is. But here's the reality. It's a new year, and I'm sitting here at 8.37 p.m. on Monday night, recording a show, and I've got to get up at 4 a.m.

tomorrow to catch an airplane flight for a busy, busy few days. That's the reality of business. So, in order to be fair, I want to share with you kind of what's happened and what's happening, so that as we walk through 2017 together, that you can get the full picture.

I hope you had a great holiday season, my family. We had a great time. Just returned back into town from a two-week road trip. The last couple of weeks. Back this past year in 2016, I bought a small RV, which was a long-time thing that I had wanted to buy, and went ahead and did it this past year.

And so, we had a great time. I spent two weeks, took off about December, what was it, 15th? Meandered up out of Florida, and cruised up to-- We cruised up the East Coast of the United States. We did-- We're calling it-- In our family, we called it the Great Lighthouse Tour of 2016.

My son, my three-year-old son, is very, very into lighthouses. He just loves lighthouses. We live near the Jupiter Lighthouse here in Jupiter, Florida, and we often go down to the beach and swim and paddleboard underneath the Jupiter Lighthouse. And so, he loves that lighthouse, and so we toured him and took him all around, showed him the St.

Augustine Lighthouse. We wound up going up the Tybee Island Lighthouse in Georgia, and we saw a couple of others as well, which we really enjoyed that. So, we had a great time and just took off work. I was behind, and I thought I was getting things done, and then life was just busy, but we had a great time, and I hope you had a great time as well.

But one of the key things that I've done a lot over the last couple of months with 2016 was really reflected on what worked and what didn't work for me. And probably the key insight that's the most important for me was to recognize that 2016 was a year of unfocused wandering.

And this is not something that you want to emulate. Now, it's probably better, my wandering is probably better than some wandering I've had in the past. I certainly have had clear goals of what I wanted to do, but I haven't known how to get there. It's been one of the biggest challenges for me in my business and in my personal life, just trying to figure out how do I actually get from here to there.

In short, the lack of a business plan for me, especially with radical personal finance, caught up to me this past year. Long-time listeners will remember that, as I've told the story, when I started this show, I did not have a business plan. Now, that's not a good plan starting a business.

Generally, you want to have a business plan. Business planning is very important, and it's very important to be able to sit down with a business, with a spreadsheet, and if you're starting a new business, figure out what you're going to sell, where you think your customers are going to come from, how you're going to do that.

That's very, very important. But I could not figure out any possible way for me to do that with starting this podcast. The reason was, the metaphor that I've used is, I felt like trying to figure out how to build a business that's based off of a podcast is kind of like figuring out how to become a multimillionaire by transforming yourself into a best-selling author.

It's possible that you could become a multimillionaire by becoming a best-selling author. But the path to get there is not clear. It's not simple. It's not easy. And so, if you're going to become an author, all you can really do is just sit down and start writing. Now, you can study along the way what type of things you want to write about.

You can practice your writing style. You can figure out who you're going to try to sell to, and you can start to create a plan. But to crack that nut on best-selling is really hard to design, especially if you don't have any previous experience as an author. Now, perhaps there are authors who can do it, but usually they're going to need to bring some significant experience or some deep, deep background in marketing or some really solid plan to the table.

It's just not an easy thing to do. Well, when I started Radical Personal Finance, it was a similar thing for me, where I said, "Well, if I can build a show that people find useful and valuable and want to listen to, and if I can build an audience, then I know, because I've done my homework, I know there are a bunch of different ways that I can make a living from that." But I didn't know how.

So I set that aside, pretty much, and just kind of worked on just learning how to do it, publishing lots of shows, trying to build an audience, figuring things out. And it was very helpful. Many of you found me during that time and started to listen. Well, the challenge was that back at the end of about 2015, I started to need to figure out how to transform and earn more from the podcast and earn more from my work.

And so I didn't know exactly how to do that. Now, if you've ever considered podcasting, I want to make something very clear to you. From experience and a piece of advice, podcasting is a bad, bad business. I strongly discourage you from trying to get into podcasting as a business.

The very best way for you to utilize something like a podcast will be as a component to your existing business or as a supplement in the marketing plan to your existing business. That's a much wiser approach to use podcasting. I would strongly discourage you from trying to build podcasting as a business.

But I've been building podcasting as a business. And there's been kind of this constant struggle and a constant tug of war in wanting to do and knowing what I want to do. Let me give you some practical examples. The very best way for me as a financial planner to use a podcast would be as a form of marketing and outreach to my clients that I work with as a financial planner.

That would be the very best thing. And if you're a financial advisor or if you're an accountant or if you are a salesperson or anything like that, I would encourage you to consistently create some sort of useful, valuable content for your client base. That's one way that podcasting can be really, really excellent.

I still have a domain, Financial Advisor Podcast, where I want to teach financial advisors how to do a podcast. I haven't been able to get that done, but that's something that I think all financial advisors really should have a podcast, but not one like mine. Something different. That would be the best way to do it.

But when I look at what I want to do and kind of what I enjoy doing, I don't want to go back to the world of individual financial planning. I like doing this. I like teaching. I like teaching in public. I feel like it's where I feel like my personal skills are the most useful.

So all this past year, I've tried a little bit of this, tried a little bit of that. And you've heard all kinds of changes and just frankly a lot of confusion of me trying to figure out, "What am I doing? How do I do this?" And one of the biggest difficulties with my personality is, well, there's strengths and weaknesses.

Most of our character traits can have a strength and also a weakness associated with them. And unfortunately, they often go together. You can't just pick all the strengths and not have the weaknesses. You usually have to be at least aware of your weaknesses and higher to your weaknesses is usually the best plan.

Don't try to walk away from who you are, but try to higher to your weaknesses. So one of my major strengths is I'm a good starter, very good at starting things. And I'm also a good visionary. I am really, really good at creative thinking. I'm really good at seeing the big picture and seeing all of the different ways that I can get somewhere.

And so I'm very, very good at seeing great ideas and I'm very good at thinking about, "Oh, I could do that. I could do this. I could do the other thing." I'm really good at charting the plan to get there. But then about a week later or a month later or six months later, I'm very good at seeing the next thing, getting distracted by the next thing.

And it's a little bit humbling because when I reflect back on my life thus far, I can see how damaging that has been to me to not just stick with something, to not stick with something consistently. And when you bring that into the world of entrepreneurship, that character trait, it's a very difficult character trait because in my experience, the most difficult thing about being an entrepreneur is that you have to both decide what to do and then do it.

There are many days as an entrepreneur where I just long for a boss to tell me what to do, someone to say, "Do this." I really do. But that's not the path that we're on. So I've got to figure out what to do and then do it. So here are just some focuses for me and some important changes that you should be aware about for the format of the show.

Long-time listeners, you'll know that I have in the past, I've gone back and forth with different frequency of publishing of the show. This will be one of the biggest changes for 2017. In the past, in the first year and a half of the show, I did a show just about every weekday.

I would guess on average, I would do, let's say out of three weeks, I would publish 13 shows, something like that. I was pretty consistent with every weekday having a show. Now, they weren't all great, and I had my reasons why that was important at that time. But one of the challenges that I faced with trying to figure out what to do was the thought that, "Well, maybe I'm doing too many shows.

Maybe I should pull back." And I had a lot of people, and I needed to pull back because I didn't have a model where I was earning income from the show. I didn't have a model where I had the membership site, and then that pulled that back, and then I moved to Patreon, and then I brought on advertisers, and then I did fewer advertisers, et cetera.

I just got back and forth. And, well, I got back and forth. And I had a lot of people that said, "Well, you just publish too much content. I can't listen to it all." And so there was that constant nagging in the back of my head saying, "Well, maybe I'm publishing too much, and maybe I should pull back." Well, for 2017, I've decided to go back to the five-day-a-week format.

And there are a few important reasons, and I want to share them with you. I know that some of you will like that. Some of you won't. I apologize to those of you who don't, but it's the right thing for me to do at this point in time. And I think it'll really help me, and I think it'll really help a lot more people.

Creating the podcast, creating a broadcast, is the thing that I feel the most skillful at, the thing that I most enjoy doing. It's very important to me. And I love that I can distribute the content freely, and I love that I can be a source of encouragement for many of you as you battle your way through the war field of your journey to financial freedom.

That's probably my favorite thing. And I really love just doing what I'm doing right now, sitting down and creating the show. And I know because I've gotten hundreds of, and even thousands, hundreds of emails from people saying how helpful it has been. I love creating the show. And so I want to have my primary focus always be there, not on everything else, not on, let me rephrase that, excuse me.

I want to have my primary focus to be there, at least at this point in time. Not on trying to create other things, not on trying to do all kinds of other things, just on creating the show. I'm not saying there's not more work, more additional areas of focus, but I want the show to be primary.

Another thing I've learned is that I just have no way to predict what's popular or successful. When I go back through and I look at the analytics, and I look at the shows that are the most popular, I look at the comments and the feedback that I get, many of the shows that have been the most popular over the last couple of years, I never would have guessed that they were popular.

Never would have guessed them. Some of them were the ones that I spent the least time working on. Some shows I labored on for hours and hours and hours, and they didn't move the needle. Some shows I sat down with a quick idea, and they'd been extremely popular. So I've learned I just can't predict what's popular or successful, but I do know that some percentage of my work will be extremely helpful.

And in creating, in some ways, more consistent content, as long as it's not wandering all over the place, I feel I have a better chance of producing more work. I also have learned that it's very important for me to have a systematic, consistent schedule. And probably the biggest disappointment for me in the last year has been that I've finally recognized, yet again, that I don't get any more work done when I have less to do.

Many of the comments that many of you shared with me would go something like this. "Joshua, hey, listen, we love having the show, "but pull back on the show a little bit "so you have time to do other things." And so I've done that in the past year. I've published fewer episodes and changed a number of things and pulled back on the format, pulled back on the number of shows.

But I haven't been able to get other things done. And it's a little bit funny, 'cause I'll tell you one story. When I was in college, my freshman year of college, I was in the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University, here in West Palm Beach, where I went to school.

And I took 18 hours of class, and it was rigorous, it was pretty difficult. It was challenging classes for me. I was in the honors program, so a lot of the literature was challenging. Also, I was doing calculus and never enjoyed calculus. And so it was a challenging semester for me.

At that point in time also, I was working my way through school. So I had scholarships and grants that covered a significant portion of my tuition, but I had some shortfall. And so I wound up, for most of my freshman year of college, I worked three different jobs. I had one job that was kind of an on-campus work-study job, which was some bird-brain thing.

I sat behind a desk, and as I remember, I sold candy bags for a dollar and checked people in and out of the residence hall where I lived in exchange for some random low-paying job. I did that a couple days a week, here and there in the afternoons. And then on Thursday nights and Friday nights and Saturday afternoon and Saturday night, I would ride a bicycle taxi around the downtown in West Palm Beach here.

It's called City Place. And so I would ride this bicycle taxi around, and that was one of my jobs. And then on Saturdays, I would do construction for a friend of mine who was building an addition on his house. And so Saturdays were tough days. I'd go and we'd start work at 7 or 8 in the morning after I'd been up till 2 on Friday morning riding around for the bicycle taxi.

And then 7 or 8 a.m., we'd start, and I'd do construction all day. And about 4.30, I'd quit, go take a shower, and then ride the bicycle taxi from about 5.30 till 2 a.m. So those were long days. But I did pretty well. I didn't, if I recall correctly, I didn't get straight A's, but I did A's and a couple B's here and there.

And I did well, and I got through that first year, and I didn't have any loans. I paid my way through. Well, I worked a lot, and so I decided my second year of school that I needed to have a little bit easier. And I realized that I could just easily borrow money on student loans, and after all, I was going to graduate with a big business degree.

I was going to make a lot of money. And so when I was making a lot of money, it would be easy for me to pay those loans back. It would be no big deal. So I decided to take fewer hours of classes, and I decided to work, not at all, just to live on student loans.

So I dropped my course load, I think, to 15 hours per semester, and it didn't work at all. The problem was that my grades went down. Yeah, I think I hung out a lot. I have no idea where that year went. My grades went down. Actually, my second year of school, I dropped out of the honors program, and so my classes were even easier, and I took easier classes.

My grades went down. And again, I don't know what happened to that year. I have almost no memories from that year. I think I had a lot of fun, but I don't remember it. My junior year, I studied abroad the fall semester, and in the spring I came back and got in a fight with the dean of the business school and dropped out of school.

And then my senior year is when I went back to school, and at that time I wanted to finish and graduate on time in the four years, and so I took summer classes, and I took 18 hours of class, and I was working 40 hours a week. And my grades were the best they'd ever been.

I got straight A's my senior year, all of my senior capstone business courses. I got straight A's, and I learned more that year than I had learned ever in the two previous years combined where I had been on campus. I learned so much. Now, I was busy, but I was structured, and I learned a lot.

And I've never forgotten that lesson, that when I was the busiest, I learned the most, and I actually valued it the most. I got the most out of it. I had a similar experience when I was working as a financial advisor, similar type of thing. I was working a lot, had a very disciplined schedule, things were going good.

Then I started to pull back on the time that I was working, and all of a sudden it was like everything pulled back. And now, again, in the last year, for me and my own personal productivity and my own personal work life, the same things happened. So I pulled back on the number of shows.

I haven't been able to build up the other output. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm busy with other things that are important. After all, I've got young kids and involved in a lot of things that aren't related to radical personal finance. But it's been frustrating to me because I don't feel good when I'm not producing something useful.

So I'm trying to learn the lesson from that and recognize that the old aphorism, "If you want something done, give it to a busy person," is a common aphorism for a reason. It's true. If you want something done, give it to a busy person. I've recognized that the times in life that I actually feel the best and I feel the most fulfilled is when I'm working the most, not in the workaholic sense, but in the sense that I have a clear outline that keeps me focused.

And so for my own benefit, I want to go back to the consistency that I had in the past. And I'll be doing that here in 2017. Now I want to do that in a couple of changes. There's been some other things that I've wanted to do on the show that I didn't feel fit into the statements that I've made in the past.

For example, 2017, I'm going to cover more current events. There have been a lot of interesting events, and I think 2017 is going to be a very interesting year. Very interesting year. I don't know what it'll hold, but none of us do, but it'll be interesting. And I want to cover some of those current events.

And I've made the choice not to cover them in the past because I viewed, and I've stated, that what I was doing was building a body of work that I wanted to stand as a kind of a standalone thing. I've had this dream, a thousand episodes, let me just create this thing that can stand there, and I've wanted much of the content to be timeless.

Well, I'm changing that. Some of the content that I'm going to be going forward in the topics are not going to be timeless. I'm not anticipating doing a five-day-a-week talk show that's all about current events, but probably one out of five or one out of 10 shows, I'm going to deal with some current events.

And I think that'll be important. I want to do it. I think it'll be helpful to you, the audience. I haven't talked about, "Dow at 20,000, what does it mean?" I don't interview people on those subjects, but I'm going to do that, and I think it'll be helpful. So that means that some of the past archives, some of these shows will not be as timeless as I've tried to keep most of the content in the past.

It'll also mean that I'm going to be doing some repetition of topics. It's another thing that I've tried not to do. I've tried, if I've done a show on a certain topic in the past, I've tried not to do that, but the challenge is that I've recognized that's not serving you, my listener, in the best way.

Because first, we need repetition. Repetition is the mother of skill, and we need to build that repetition in things that matter. But also because the archives are so large, many of you listeners now come in and just join, but you don't go back and listen to the archives, which is fine.

That's your prerogative. But that means you're missing out on important concepts, and I know that in show 136, I covered blah, blah, blah, but you're never going to get that. So there'll be some repetition of topics. I'm not--that doesn't mean that I'm going through and going to be recycling and saying, "What was the most popular show from episode 200 to 300?" and redoing that, just simply saying that I'm loosening the guidelines that I've given myself in the past.

Also, I'm going to do more interviews. Based upon time constraints and whatnot, I pulled back on the number of interviews, but I like doing them. I know you guys like them, and I've got a long list of people I'd like to interview, so I'm going to be doing more of those as well.

And here's probably the biggest thing that you'll see starting on tomorrow's show, is I'm going to be bringing in, incorporating, many more ads here on Radical Personal Finance, and a couple of changes with that. I've had a love-hate relationship with ads in the past. I've done them, and sometimes I like them, sometimes I didn't like them.

I've been very conflicted over it for various reasons. But at this point in time, in the last year, because I pretty much did very few ads, I walked past about six figures in revenue for Radical Personal Finance for my business. And I did it because I thought that I could make it up in other areas, but I haven't made it up in other areas.

And I've just come to the conviction, especially with a third child on the way, it's not fair to my family. It's not fair to me, and it's not fair to my family, for me to walk away from six figures of revenue because of bringing on ads. Now, the deep concern that I have had in the past was how to do it in an ethical way, especially since I'm doing ads that are reads of my voice.

And what I realized is that a lot of it was just simply due to years of being hounded on as a financial advisor. One of the things that's very difficult, those of you who are in the business will recognize, or if you're not, you can recognize, financial advisors are not, well, the public perception of people who go by the name of financial advisors is pretty low.

That can be difficult. It can be difficult psychologically when you're constantly kind of stomped on a little bit, especially if you came from the type of business that I came from where I started off my career selling life insurance. And it takes a lot. Life insurance salespeople probably don't often have the best self-image.

Now, today, I see the value of life insurance, and I could very happily say I sell life insurance. But when I was starting, I couldn't do that. And then there are so many conflicts, and people are so consistent about, well, you make all your money on commissions, so therefore you do the wrong thing.

And then when you do finance, and well, you make all your money on commissions and fees, and financial advisor and broker, and it's expensive and blah, blah, blah. And I think that there was a lot of that. Because I started in the business so young, I didn't have the perspective of maturity where I was really confident in the value that I brought.

And when I left in July of 2014 to start Radical Personal Finance, it was kind of like a big relief for me to finally be away from the perceived conflicts of interest. It was psychologically a big deal. And with ads, my fear was, well, I don't want to go back into that thing where people say, well, Josh was on the take for such and such.

And Josh was, I don't want to go back to the place where Josh was filtering his opinions because of, you know, advertiser XYZ. So I've dealt with that over the past year and kind of worked through all that and thought it through. And I guess in short, I don't believe I can not do ads at this point in time.

Because ads can be very valuable and useful things. They can present us with information that's helpful and that's useful. And the other, you know, and I'm a little bit tongue-tied just simply because a lot of it is just personally kind of, it's humbling just to realize, well, all those things that I said, that it was my pride that was involved.

My pride of wanting to say, well, I'm not on the take for anybody. I'm beholden to no man. Here I am. And it's humbling just to recognize when you have that much pride about something, but also to recognize the source. So bringing that all together is that I'm going to be doing ads on radical personal finance.

There's going to be a great variety. Some of them will be financial. Some of them won't. I'm working with a rep, an ad rep who will be helping me bring advertising in. I'm going to be going ahead and getting back to some of you who've contacted me about potentially advertising on the show.

And I basically kind of said, well, and hemmed and hawed and didn't give you rates and didn't do any of those things. And you'll be hearing a lot of ads going forward on radical personal finance. Because I really think, you know, in thinking about it, I think that'll be the very best way for me to focus on and bring you what I'm really good at bringing you.

And to really focus on that, doing it better, doing it more professionally, and also building up the revenue that I need to be able to hire to my weaknesses, to be able to expand the team here at radical personal finance, to be able to hire to my weaknesses so I can do a better job serving more people.

And also to help my family, because it's not fair to my family, to my children and to my wife, for me to maintain my pride in some kind of arrogant way of, I'm beholden to no one. It just doesn't work. So I'll be bringing more ads on in the future.

Those are the basic things for the show for you to be aware of. Personally, I just shared, those of you who are interested, just a few things that I've recognized that have been real problems in my own personal habits over the last year. One of the major focuses for me going forward in 2017 is I'm gonna be doing much more reading of books and less time on the internet.

My reading habits have significantly deteriorated this past year. And it's really frustrating to me because what I've realized is when I stop reading, I stop growing. And then I don't feel like I have anything to give. I don't have fresh information. And that happened a lot with me this past year.

Because I stopped reading as much, I stopped being as inspired, and I felt like I was draining my reserves of ideas and of energy and of excitement. And just, I kind of felt like it was same old, same old. So for me, a big focus for this next year is doing more reading and just spending less time on the internet.

The internet is an incredible blessing, but to me it's also been an incredible source of stress. And so walking away from a lot of it, just gonna be spending more time me, me and authors, reading books, talking with authors through their books. And I'm excited about that. I'm gonna be spending a lot more time thinking and creating, and I'm just gonna allow less noise in.

The election of this past year, as much as I worked so hard to stay away from it, but still it just kind of sucks you in, right? I think we're probably, many of us are guilty of that. My wife is so good at staying under, she says, "I live under a rock.

I don't want to know about that stuff." And I'm so jealous of her sometimes because my character is too weak and I get sucked in and I want to read this and I want to get involved. But man, is all that noise stressful. I want to spend more time thinking and more time creating this year.

And then back to the area of focus, recognizing that lack of focus has been, has really hurt me in this past year. I am forcing simplicity onto myself. And I just give like a very simple example. I have a love-hate relationship with task lists and to-do lists and productivity systems, et cetera.

I am an idea person. I can come up with ideas so quickly. And I also have a great deal of confidence in my ability to execute on ideas. So I am so good at giving myself things to do. And when I build out, if I go through a goal-setting exercise or I build out a productivity system or something like that, I can fill that thing up so quickly.

And so what happens is I'll sit down and I'll start organizing myself and I'll create projects and goals and sub-projects and task lists and things like that. And before you know it, I got 400 things on my to-do list. And then I become so overwhelmed by it that I just delete the whole system, throw the whole thing away and start fresh.

It's a common cycle over about every six months. Well, that's not helpful. That hasn't been helpful to me. So I'm forcing this year a lot of simplicity on myself. I am not permitting myself to use any kind of digital list-making system. Rather, I'm forcing myself to keep it entirely written.

And so I've been doing this for a few months, but it's so helpful to me. But I'm forcing myself to write my to-do list manually on paper with pen and paper and then to rewrite it about every few days. That way, I have to face the things that I have on there and say, "Do I really want to do this or is this just one of your, you know, Joshua, this is just one of your great ideas?" If I really want to do it, then I can rewrite it.

But if not, what happens, I get tired of writing it and I can just go ahead and scratch it off. That's been really, really helpful for me. So those are some simple areas for me that are big areas of focus for me. I have some significant goals in 2017.

Very excited about this year that's coming up. And I'm looking forward to sharing it with you. I'm so excited. I could go into so many more things, different type. I'm going to do more book reviews. I'm going to do more author interviews. I've got a lot of exciting plans for this year.

I'm trying to keep some of those ideas out and just let them come. I just wanted to basically share those important announcements with you so that you would be in the loop and not surprised with some of the changes over the coming days. 2017 is going to be a great year.

I look forward to sharing it with you. I hope that many hundreds of you have been joining the Radical Personal Finance Facebook group. Thank you for that. Some awesome discussions going on. I hope you guys are appreciating that way of connecting with one another. And I'm going to continue growing here in a scalable way.

Thank you for your patience with me as I'm learning. It's very humbling to have all your learning in front of thousands of people. It's very humbling. But the commitment that I made at the beginning is I'm trying to stick through it, which is why I'm sharing some of these things with you, is to share the good and the bad.

Share the real. If we have the ability to communicate with people and they put up walls, then how is that helpful? What happens is you wind up thinking that you're the only person. Entrepreneurial endeavors are tough. Seth Godin wrote a book called "The Dip." And in many ways, my hope, I think, this last year for me has been the dip.

I hope it was the dip. I hope that means we're on the upside there. But that's life. Life is not all straight. It's not all straight compound growth. It's not always fantastic. There's a lot of learning along the way. And I hope that you're going to be able to take some of my lessons.

Be back with you tomorrow. If I miss tomorrow's show, it's just simply due to the fact that I was sick today. And my apologies. But I plan to do a show on RVs. And I'll share with you just some of the things that I've learned, especially the last two weeks traveling with my family.

I love RVs. I think they're awesome. And I've got some radical ideas around them that I think will be helpful. Then I will do that with a couple of... I'll share with you a couple of interviews. And thank you for being with me. I'm excited about the coming year.

And I thank you for listening and for walking on this journey with me. I will keep doing everything I can to improve and to get better, to serve you more effectively on your path to financial freedom, to walk with you each and every day. Thank you for your patience.