Now the star-belly sneetches had bellies with stars. The plain-belly sneetches had none upon thars. Those stars weren't so big, they were really so small. You might think such a thing wouldn't matter at all. But because they had stars, all the star-belly sneetches would brag, "We're the best kind of sneetch on the beaches!" With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they'd snort, "We'll have nothing to do with the plain-belly sort!" And whenever they met some when they were out walking, they'd hike right on past them without even talking.

When the star-belly children went out to play ball, could a plain-belly get in the game? Not at all. You could only play if your bellies had stars and the plain-belly children had none upon thars. When the star-belly sneetches had frankfurter roasts, or picnics or parties or marshmallow toasts, they never invited the plain-belly sneetches.

They left them out cold in the dark of the beaches. They kept them away, never let them come near, and that's how they treated them, year after year. Then, one day, it seems, while the plain-belly sneetches were moping and doping alone on the beaches, just sitting there wishing their bellies had stars, a stranger zipped up in the strangest of cars.

"My friends," he announced in a voice clear and keen, "my name is Sylvester McMonkey McBean, and I've heard of your troubles, I've heard you're unhappy, but I can fix that, I'm the Fix-It-Up Chappy. I've come here to help you, I have what you need, and my prices are low, and I work at great speed, and my work is one hundred percent guaranteed." Then, quickly, Sylvester McMonkey McBean put together a very peculiar machine, and he said, "You want stars like a star-belly sneetch?

My friends, you can have them for three dollars each. Just pay me your money and hop right aboard." So they clamored inside. Then the big machine roared, and it clonked, and it bonked, and it jerked, and it burked, and it bopped them about. But the thing really worked. When the plain-belly sneetches popped out, they had stars.

They actually did, they had stars upon thars. Then they yelled at the ones who had stars from the start, "We're exactly like you, you can't tell us apart. We're all just the same now, you snooty old smarties, and now we can go to your Frankfurter berries." "Good grief!" groaned the ones who had stars at the first.

"We're still the best sneetches, and they are the worst. But now, how in the world will we know," they all frowned, "if which kind is what, or the other way round?" Then up came McBean with a very sly wink, and he said, "Things are not quite as bad as you think.

So you don't know who's who, that is perfectly true. But come with me, friends, do you know what I'll do? I'll make you, again, the best sneetches on beaches, and all it will cost you is ten dollars eaches." "Belly stars are no longer in style," said McBean. "What you need is a trip through my star-off machine.

This wondrous contraption will take off your stars, so you won't look like sneetches who have them on thars." And that handy machine, working very precisely, removed all the stars from their tummies quite nicely. Then with snoots in the air, they paraded about, and they opened their beaks and they let out a shout, "We know who is who, now there isn't a doubt.

The best kind of sneetches are sneetches without." Then of course, those with stars all got frightfully mad. To be wearing a star now was frightfully bad. Then of course, old Sylvester McMonkey McBean invited them into his star-off machine. Then of course, from then on, as you probably guessed, things really got into a horrible mess.

All the rest of that day on those wild screaming beaches, the Fix-It-Up chappy kept fixing up sneetches, off again, on again, in again, out again. Through the machines they raced round and about again, changing their stars every minute or two. They kept paying money. They kept running through, until neither the plane nor the star bellies knew whether this one was that one or that one was this one or which one was what one or what one was who.

Then when every last cent of their money was spent, the Fix-It-Up chappy packed up and he went. And he laughed as he drove in his car up the beach. They never will learn. No, you can't teach a sneetch. But McBean was quite wrong, I'm quite happy to say, that the sneetches got really quite smart on that day.

The day they decided that sneetches are sneetches, and no kind of sneetch is the best on the beaches. That day all the sneetches forgot about stars, and whether they had one or not, upon thars. Welcome to the Dr. Seuss Story Children's Hour tonight. Wait, sorry. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insights, encouragement and fun little stories that you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less.

Today we talk about stars and sneetches and diamonds and duds and drives. Happy Monday my friends. It is a brand new week and a brand new year. I hope that you are off to a great new year. How does it get better if you start your day with Dr.

Seuss? And of course, as with every good little story, I could probably stop right there and you can pick up the lessons and the morals of the story for yourself. Now of course, some things are rather obvious, like the fact that sneetches are sneetches whether they have stars on their bellies or not.

And frankly, we could use that lesson today. So many of us are quick to judge one another by the stars on their bellies or the lack of stars and draw our conclusions rather hastily. But today, of course, this is Radical Personal Finance. And in the context of this show, although I would dearly love to preach for the next hour on that topic, in the context of this show, we talk about money.

And since my desire is for you to plan for, work towards and achieve financial freedom in your life, my goal today is to help you make sure that when your Mr. McBean tumbles on down the road, that your every last cent is not spent in the fix-it-up chappies pocket for his stupid machines to put on stars and take them off again.

Now in order to do that, we need some discussion points. And so very few of us are worried about the stars on our bellies, but I thought it'd be fun in the theme of and the modeling of Dr. Seuss, why not have a little alliteration? And so today we're going to talk about diamonds, duds, and drives.

That was the best I could do on short notice, diamonds, duds, and drives. And I want to talk to you about some strategies to help you avoid some of the peer pressure that you face, the peer pressure on all sides. Because frankly, many of us spend money constantly because of peer pressure.

And none of us are exempted. I face continually, continually the pressure and the desire to spend money based upon peer pressure. Sometimes I can evade that pressure, sometimes I cannot, but it's a constant challenge. And I expect it'll be a challenge through all of my life, and thus I expect it'll be a challenge through all of your life because we all face that pressure.

And I want to give you three simple strategies to help you deal with the peer pressure for spending. It's all well and good to recognize that keeping up with the Joneses really isn't a great move. It's all well and good to recognize that intellectually, but today I want to help you have some strategies for how you can avoid it.

And these strategies are very simple. The fashions of the day will come and go, whether it's in to have stars or out to have stars on your belly, or whether it's in to have long pants or short pants or big bottoms or bell bottoms or tight pants or skinny pants or sleeves or any of these things.

The fashions will come and go. I recently was reading a book and the author of the book talked about the fact that he had found this great coat that his mom was going to get rid of, a great camel-haired coat, and he got it for free from his mom because she was getting rid of it because it was out of fashion.

And he wore it for 40 years. An older man said he wore it for 40 years, and for about two or three of those years he was completely in fashion because those were the years that the fashion industry brought back that fashion, and so his friends during those 40 years, "You know what?

Let me find it." And I'm back. So the book was the book How to Survive – excuse me. You'll have to forgive me. My co-hosts haven't had their morning coffee yet. The book that I was flipping through is called How to Survive Without a Salary, Learning How to Live the Conserver Lifestyle by Charles Long.

And it's a good book. I have a number of these books, but it's some of the past genre of books on how to live cheap, and I really enjoy these books. I was going through and working on my book scanning project, and that gave me the opportunity to flip through some of these older books.

A little embarrassing. I guess my details were a little bit wrong, but here is the paragraph from page 57 of Charles Long's How to Survive Without a Salary. He relates this story. I'll start three paragraphs before. He says, "Look again, however, at the goods that fashion does change. They are the ones that don't need to have structural obsolescence built in.

They last forever. When is the last time you wore out a necktie and a Nehru suit, like a diamond, is forever? The real conserver is impervious to the dictates of fashion, but is a victim, nevertheless, of planned obsolescence. He may not change his ties to match the current width or length, but his light bulbs will burn out like everyone else's.

Knowing, however, that fashionable goods are discarded because of style rather than wear, he can often find best value by deliberately seeking out of fashion bargains. The conserver, examining his needs or reaching for his wallet, asks himself, "Whose need is it? Mine or the Joneses?" By ignoring artificial needs created by fashions and emulations, the conserver concentrates his money on the things that are really important to him, not on the straw men set up by the electronic snake oil peddlers.

From the day my son understood this simple concept, he was never again suckered into anything with the promise of dessert. Some years ago, Grandmother was cleaning out her rag bag, scissoring up wool for a rug she was making. She pulled out a heavy camel hair coat, gleaned from a rich and distant cousin's discards.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the coat, except that camel hair and narrow lapels were just a year passe. For protests, I salvaged the intended rug and wore it simply because it was delightfully warm. I wore it for thirty years. It was indestructible, and in at least two years out of those thirty, my coat was back in fashion.

At least I presumed it was back in fashion. Those were the years when acquaintances would admire and marvel that I could afford such a wonderful coat. In the other twenty-eight years, I got sympathy and was treated to coffee a lot. All that mattered to me, though, is that for thirty years, the coat fulfilled my need perfectly.

It didn't always meet others' criteria of what a coat should be, but distinguishing clearly between their needs and mine saved the cost of thirty years of top coats. So back to our Dr. Seuss introduction. Old McMarty McBean was the brilliant guy in this whole story because he walked away with a pocket full of money.

And I encourage you, whenever you can fill your pocket with other people's monies by selling them services that they desperately desire, I encourage you to do so, but to do it in a way that you'll feel good when you drive away with your pockets full of money. But the key here today is I want to help you protect your pocket of money.

In order to do that, I want to give you these strategies. So here are the three strategies that I know of to help you confront the peer pressure that affects you and wants to affect your decisions. Number one, you can conform to the fashion of the day. As stupid as it may be, so that you can enjoy acceptance by the group and further your own goals.

That's strategy number one. Just conform and embrace it. Strategy number one. Strategy number two, find a workaround that gives you plausible deniability without direct confrontation. So find some way to get there without fully embracing it. And number three, engage in the direct confrontation of the fashion at hand and make your mark by going against it.

Now these three strategies I'm going to weave for you just a few bits of advice around the concept of diamonds, duds, and drives. So of course I mean here diamonds as in diamond rings and diamond jewelry, duds as in the clothes that you wear, and drives meaning the cars that you drive.

Because these are three just interesting cultural sensations that all matter. The first thing we need to emphasize is culture and fitting into the group matters. It matters. I don't think it's a good place to start to say it shouldn't matter. And so therefore I'm just going to ignore it.

That's foolish. It does matter. I've been teaching a course on career and income planning. In that course, guess what? The fashions of the day matter. You need to fit into the group. If you're working in a job where your coworkers all wear white, I recommend that you wear white.

You've got to fit into the group because if you don't fit into the group, you'll make other people uncomfortable. And it's not stupid to recognize this truth. Signaling theory, which is a well-researched area of sociology, I guess would be the discipline it would fall into. But signaling theory would say that people will perceive you the way that you signal yourself to be.

And this is important. If you want to fit into the company culture, you should fit into the company culture. You don't go for a job interview at your local white collar attorney firm wearing muddy work boots, jeans with holes in them, and a buttoned down flannel shirt that still smells like cow manure.

You're not going to get the job. In the same way you don't show up for work or the job interview at your local dairy farm wearing a pair of $500 dress shoes and an Armani suit. You're not going to get the job. You got to look something close to the way that your interviewer or your boss expects you to look.

And it's foolish to assume otherwise. So don't start by embracing your spirit of nonconformity, especially if you're young or you're broke. Start by embracing your spirit of conformity and then figuring out an intelligent way to do that. The clothes that you wear matter. And I think it's important to recognize that.

So strategy number one, if you're looking at your clothes, you need to recognize that your clothes matter. And being out of step with your company or with your culture is not very smart. It will bring upon your head abuse unnecessarily. No matter how stupid the fashion may be objectively, if you're in the middle of the place where that fashion is acceptable and important, you probably should consider embracing it until you can get out of that place.

This stuff matters. It matters if you're a junior attorney who just got hired on out of law school. Well, in that case, you better look like an attorney. You better drive like an attorney. You better signal to your clients and coworkers your attorney-ness. That's a good place to start.

Conform to the fashion. Now, does that mean that you have to be stupid about it? No, I don't think so. You can still try to be smart. In a moment, we'll go to that workaround because I think there are workarounds. But if you need to wear attorney clothes, do it.

Just buy them as smart as you can. Try to find all the ways to save on them so that you can keep more money in your pocket while still signaling your attorney-ness. If you need to drive an attorney's car, do it. But try to find ways to drive and express your attorney-ness in your driving without being so utterly stupid as to get ripped off or to spend more than you can afford.

Conform to the fashion, as stupid as it may be, so that you can enjoy the acceptance by the group and further your personal goals. Now, in my opinion, this applies in other areas, even as dumb as they may be. Let me give an example of something that always drives me nuts.

Diamond engagement rings. If you research the history of diamond engagement rings, you will find that the entire thing is a giant marketing facade. It is dumb the fact that we men give to our loved ones diamond rings to try to impress upon them how valuable we are so that they'll marry us.

That is dumb. It's objectively dumb for multiple reasons. Number one, diamonds, they may last forever, but they're not in short supply. There are many, many diamonds and the market is artificially controlled and manipulated in order to make them have perceived value. Rubies are far more rare than diamonds are, but yet how much value do you place on a ruby?

You probably don't even know what a ruby looks like. Bible said a virtuous wife who can find her worth is far above rubies. What it was talking about, a ruby is more valuable than a diamond, but you don't know what a ruby looks like and you do know what a diamond looks like.

Well, it's this whole giant scam that the diamond industry came up with and they said, we have a lot of diamonds, how can we sell more of them at higher prices? And they decided, well, we'll market them as a symbol of love. Before that, they were not, and yet today they are.

Now, no matter how dumb, I should give more examples of how objectively dumb they are. Ever since that time in the United States American culture, when we've embraced diamonds as the way for a man to profess his undying love and forever attention to his wife, his fiance, a prospective fiance, ever since that time, marriage has systematically declined in strength.

The giving of the diamond ring certainly never helped marriage because all the trends are down. So objectively, this is dumb. I'm trying to give a little few objective data points. Yes, I'm being, speaking large and being a little bit hyperbolic, but this is really true. And yet as a young man, you probably are better served by embracing the custom and figuring it out.

Now, I'm sure that there are young women out there who would be okay with marrying somebody and with becoming engaged to their fiance without a diamond ring. I've met a few of them here and there, but much of the time, probably not. Probably not. I know for my wife, when I proposed to her, which by the way, another one that drives me nuts about the diamond ring thing.

When I was growing up as a little boy, I often thought to myself, you know what? It would be so scary to be a man kneeling down, asking a woman to marry you. What if she says no? And it wasn't until a little while before, it was in a couple of years before, I was in a position where I was actually going to propose to my wife that I realized if you're asking her to marry you and you don't know the answer, you better not be asking her to marry you.

Not a good move. Hopefully, your relationship has a little bit better communication and has been a little bit more straightforward than that for that to be out of the blue. Don't get me wrong. There's a place for romantic notions and actions and all of that. And if your fiance embraces that, great, go for it.

I certainly have sought to do that as well and to create the most romantic image possible. But that's primarily so she can tell a story to all of her friends. And the whole reason for a diamond is so she can feel proud to show off a ring to all of her friends.

But try to do it in an intelligent way. So, if you're going to embrace the fashion and conform to it, try to do it in some way that gives you more bang for the buck. At this point, if I were giving advice about diamond buying to myself, I would say that I dramatically overspent on my wife's engagement ring.

But to this day, she still loves it. And I don't...do I regret it? I don't know. I don't...I hate that question. She still loves it. I bought a custom ring. I had it custom made by a jeweler and it was designed exactly the way that I knew she would want it and she loves it.

So, if you're going to do something, embrace it. Just do it as intelligently as you can and get as many long-lasting benefits as possible. Same thing with clothes. If you're going to get nice clothes, go ahead and get them. Just buy them as smart as you can and maintain them as smart as you can if you need them to fit in for conformity.

And then finally with driving, if you need to drive a certain vehicle to fit in, to conform, do your best to drive it and enjoy it. Try to get a good deal, but enjoy it. If I were a new attorney, I probably would be driving some kind of car that had the luxury nameplate on it.

But you know what? They are fun to drive. It is fun to drive a luxury car. And so, I would try to do it smart. I would try to get a good deal and I would try to buy used and I would try to play with all of the tricks, which I'll go through more in a minute.

But at the end of the day, enjoy it and embrace it. Now strategy number two, find a workaround that gives you plausible deniability without directly confronting the specific issue at hand. And I think this is the most powerful strategy that we should continually be thinking of. When confronted with a peer pressure moment, when confronted with a fashion of the day, when confronted with the fact that we don't have stars on our tummies, try to figure out a way that gives you plausible deniability without directly confronting it.

Because it's very tiresome to spend all of your life working so that you can blow all of your money and put it into Mr. Marty McBean's pocket just so that you can fit in. But it's also tiresome to constantly be confronting everything. It's tiresome for you and it's tiresome for your friends and family.

I think at 500 episodes of the show, I don't think I've ever really ranted on diamonds. I don't have an interest in being known as the diamond ranter. There's a reason for that. I don't want to be the constant anti guy. There are a very few number of issues that I believe are very important and I will go to my death defending those issues if that's what it takes.

But I'm not going to waste my life energy confronting every single thing. And friends, this is not a good way to live. Whatever your issue of choice, whether it's politics, whether it's... Whatever your issue of choice, don't get yourself so many issues that you spend your entire life just being anti.

I was just so struck. I was on Twitter last week and I look at the hashtags that are trending and something... And I look at there and the hashtag that was trending was nothing matters but. That was the hashtag, nothing matters but. Now I don't know what the source of this hashtag was, but I clicked on it.

The top handful of posts were all wholeheartedly politically, political. I took a screenshot and just listen to this. This is from Bryce Tacky. This was his post on Twitter. Hashtag, nothing matters but impeaching Trump and Pence, imprisoning every complicit traitor, flipping and keeping Congress blue, electing Democrat governors, electing Dems at every level everywhere and holding them accountable.

And to do all this, we must resist and resist and resist. The one right below that in my little screenshot, Christopher Zullo, nothing matters but electing a Democratic Congress in 2018. If you want to destroy your life, just start actually living in accordance with these words saying that nothing matters but impeaching Trump and Pence, imprisoning all these people, flipping Congress, electing a Democratic Congress, et cetera.

You don't have any control over a single one of those things and your Twitter posts are not going to make a difference. Now I get it. It's Twitter, it's hyperbole, it's political Twitter, all of that. But my friends, this is what we see every day. People destroying their lives over issues they can't change while they ignore the ones that they can.

So whether it's politics or whether it's the fact that diamonds are a ripoff or whether it's the latest financial thing that's done or whether it's the fact that your neighbor cuts their grass too short, stop wasting your time confronting every single thing and embrace a few things. Just move on.

Get some joy out of it. Back to plausible deniability, finding a workaround that gives you plausible deniability without direct confrontations. I said a moment ago, I'm just going to using my diamonds, duds and drives. I said a moment ago that I bought my wife a custom engagement ring when I proposed to her and that was fine.

If I were going to go back and do it today, the only reason that I bought her a custom ring was because I knew she had in her head a design that she thought would be cool. She had told me about it a few years earlier and I'd made note of it.

I'd gone home, I'd listened to her and I'd made note of it. I'd actually gone home and drawn a picture of it, of what she had said even a few years before I proposed to her. So I knew that was in her head. But if she had never dropped something, a hint, if I'd never known that she had a desire for something interesting and custom, I would have bought her an engagement ring at Costco.

If you're shopping for an engagement ring, go to Costco. Walmart also, but I would go to Costco. And the reason is because it'll be easier for you to get something that is, again, plausible deniability. It'd be easier for you to get a diamond that is of decent clarity, of decent quality, that's been graded at Costco than at Walmart because Walmart sells low-end and high-end jewelry as well.

Now you can learn the grading system and you can learn all of that, but go to Costco. Spend the money. Get something that's fairly valued, that's pretty inexpensive and it gives you what you need, the diamond ring, without directly confronting and telling your fiance, "I'm not going to give you a diamond ring because that just fits into the giant scheme and scam that is engagement rings." It's simpler.

Saves you money, gets you in there, get much closer to wholesale than retail. Now with your clothes, my encouragement is if you need them, find some way of working around it. So perhaps in your environment, a suit is optional, but maybe you can get by with a shirt and tie and a coat.

For a number of years when I was a financial advisor, I wore suits, but I came to realize that suits in Florida are a scam. Again, the origin of suits for men was that these were primarily workable, useful clothes that protected you from being cold. Same thing with academic robes.

If you're in academia, you got to buy these crazy expensive robes to wear twice a year. Well, the point of academic robes, they were a practical feature. It was something that professors wore to keep them warm while they were in the bowels of the dungeon that they worked in.

It was 50 degrees down there and that was a way that they kept warm. Well, that fashion became something that was a way of expressing superiority and expressing their status. Okay, if you become a PhD and you're a professor at a college, you got to buy your crazy $750 robe and your fancy hat that shows and all of the academic regalia that you wear a couple three times a year.

So same thing with suits. Wool suits became the fashion, but they used to be a practical thing. You didn't have zippers, you had buttons. You had a coat, it was woven a little bit more finely, it kept you warm, and then that became the fashion so that now in Florida, you have people that walk around in wool suits in Florida or polyester suits, even worse, and that's what's expected in the business environment where it's 90 degrees and dripping wet.

Well, interesting, my workaround for that is embrace Spanish fashion. I couldn't get away with this as a financial advisor, but one of the workarounds that I would do is just wear a pair of linen pants or a pair of khaki pants and a guayabera and a straw hat and embrace that and you can get around most of it.

If you go and you look at a picture of assembled dignitaries and presidents of a South American or a Central American group, you'll find that 50% of them are wearing a guayabera as their shirt. It works perfectly fine if you're in Miami as well. Now the other workaround would be something like wearing khaki pants and a blazer.

I found that I could wear khaki pants and a shirt and a blazer and I would have multiple advantages from that. Number one, it pulled back a little bit on the sharkness of my look. I never got why financial advisors dressed like sharks with glittering French cuff pins and stick pins in their ties and all of that.

They look like they're the next whoever that guy was from the Wall Street movie, the next wolf of Wall Street, ready to steal all their client's money. There was a little bit more advantage of looking like an accountant than looking like a shark, but it also had the advantage of being cheaper.

Look for something like that. Now beyond that, fashion advice, I don't have any solution for you, but look around and try to figure out, is there a workaround wherein I can get what I need to get without trying to just directly confront this and wear jeans every day? Similar thing with what you drive.

Try to drive something that doesn't neatly fit categorization. I'll give you my secret solutions. Number one, Toyota Prius. If you work in an industry where fancy cars are expected, buy a Prius because mostly people will think that you're a greenie weenie environmentalist and they won't ask if you really are.

So you can pull in a crowd of Mercedes and BMWs and a Prius and nobody will think twice about it. It's not a poor person's car. It's an environmentalist's car. It's great. Or an SUV. That was what I wound up when I was a financial advisor. I was wrestling through these questions and I actually wrote an email to Tom Stanley, author of The Millionaire Next Door and a bunch of books that I appreciated on marketing the affluent, selling to the affluent.

And I relayed to him my woes and I said, "Dr. Stanley, I need to buy a car and I work with wealthy people, but I don't want to buy a Mercedes." And he wrote back and he said, "Buy a full-size SUV." Vast majority of wealthy households have a Chevy Suburban or GMC equivalent of that and many of them also have a Ford Expedition, have that in their driveway.

It worked. Bought a Ford Expedition. Never worried about how I looked. Worked great. Same thing with a minivan or something. If you buy a minivan, people will think, "Oh, you got kids." So look for a way to drive something that doesn't neatly fit categorization. Or of course, there are many other ways.

Maybe you drive a Toyota 4Runner. Well, go ahead and put a nice roof rack on it and strap some unnecessary doodads to the front and back bumper, make it look like you spend your weekend overlanding in the Sierra Nevada mountains and going to Moab and people will just think, "Well, that's just your thing." Or drive an old Tacoma or something like that.

Find a way to mix it up a little bit. What you don't want to do is drive a broken down Ford or American sedan that makes you look poor. You got to find something that gets you out of that categorization. So look around and think about something that you would be into that'll do the job and give you plausible deniability without trying to just directly confront it.

That's strategy number two. Or strategy number three. Go ahead and embrace your confrontational spirit and engage in direct confrontation with the fashion of the day. Now maybe this is you. This isn't really me. I'm more prone to worrying about what people think of me than that. But if this is you, go for it.

If you want to get back at the De Beers family for the giant scam that they've waged upon the world, go for it. And guess what? If that's you, you'll probably attract a fiance who's willing to put up with your funny ways. That's fine. Go for it. She's probably a gem.

But stake your claim and own it. If you want to come against it with the clothes, stake your claim and own it. Dress like a rock star. Dress like a cowboy. Dress like a hoodlum. Whatever, I don't know, whatever it is, pick it out. And if you want to be that one who just says, "No, frugality is important to me," go for it.

Now this is, I think, really best done in an area where you can prove your worth objectively. And here I'm thinking of somebody like an NFL star. From time to time you'll read about these sports people, whether it's an NFL star or an NBA player or somebody like that.

Who knows? NFL is the most important because the average NFL career length is tiny. If memory is right, it's something like three and a half years. So the average NFL career length is really, really small. And so if you go into the NFL, speaking statistically, you better be prepared for a three and a half year career.

That means you better not blow all your money signing up for a big hairy mortgage. Now when you become a superstar, and especially if you're a superstar in a career track where you can be a long-lived superstar, go for it. If you're a Tom Brady or if you're another quarterback where you can have these long careers, that's great.

But the average NFL player is only going to have a few years of earning. And so from time to time you'll read a story about so-and-so in the NFL drives a Toyota Camry, the same Toyota Camry they went into college with and they drive it and park it. Guess what?

You can only do that effectively if you're in a career where your performance is going to be measured by some other standard. And that's why it works for an NFL player. It all comes down to how many yards did you run the ball or how many plays did you pass or how many defensive plays were you able to make.

That works. The president of your team, the owner of the team, the coaches, they don't care what kind of car you drive. They care how effective you are on the field. And so go ahead and embrace that frugal, zany person. "Oh, you know, this is Joshua. He's the guy that drives the Camry, isn't he so funny?" But we'd go to him on the weekends and ask him for financial advice.

That's cool. Where that doesn't work and where you should be a little bit slow giving advice to other people is you should be a little slow giving advice to other people if their careers are different. So back to the worst example, best example, the attorney, the attorney that drives around in the broken down looking car, the old Toyota Camry, is probably going to be thought of to be a not very good attorney because it's hard to see the win-loss record and the number of passes.

Now, if that attorney has succeeded in staking their claim with some big wins, they're the ones who beat the giant chemical company and they're the environmentalist who drives the old car because they beat the giant chemical company, that's one thing. Or if they're the attorney that has a long string of victories and successes and this is just their weird thing, that's fine.

But if you're just getting started and you don't have those things, then you got to pay attention to what the signaling, the signaling that you're doing, the signaling theory. Got to pay attention. And so if you can stake your claim, go for it. Now, here would be a flip side.

If you're going to engage in direct contradiction, confrontation of the prevailing situation, do it in a way that fits a brand that you're trying to achieve. A good example here would be my friend Alan Moore, the co-founder of the XY Planning Network. The first, well, I've never seen him in anything else, I guess.

But whenever I've met Alan Moore, he's always wearing jeans, Chacos, and an XY Planning Network t-shirt. Now, that fits his brand because primarily he's involved in marketing to other financial advisors who he wants to enjoy to fit to come and join his firm. And so he can wear his t-shirt and basically he's marketing to young people and saying, "Hey, if you're a young financial advisor and you want to come and work with other younger clients, come and join us.

And look, I'll wear my t-shirt and this is the way that we can be. We don't have to wear the stuffy suit and shirt culture." And so it's a direct marketing scheme that's pushing back against the stuffiness or the perceived stuffiness of the financial planning industry. So you can embrace that.

I recently stumbled across a guy who all he does is he's a lawyer, but he exclusively defends in firearms-related cases. And so his image is he went ahead and he's got all the tactical gear and all the clothing and that stuff, and he's not wearing a shirt and tie because he's trying to be very clear that this is what I do.

I'm not doing criminal defense on the weekend and doing a little bit of tax fraud cases here and there. I'm just doing firearms stuff. And so he embraced the tactical look. And you can do that. You can do that. Just think carefully about it. If you look at it, what you'll find is that when people who engage in direct confrontation of the fashion, the reason they're successful is because it's part of their overall brand.

Why did rock stars embrace long hair or weird face paint or doing their shows from the stage naked or wearing leather pants? That's because it was countercultural. They're trying to push back against the stuffiness. That works as attraction for a time. But you can't be an accountant at the big four accounting firm and think that showing up to work in a pair of tight leather pants and no shirt is going to advance your career.

It's simply not. And frankly, I think if your work is an accountant and you exclusively work with rock star clients, I don't think it'll help your career if you show up for your next meeting with Gene Simmons wearing your leather pants. It's fine for the rock star to do that.

But when they want an accountant, they want an accountant. If you're going to go and sell books on how to fight with the IRS and you're going to do seminars, well now go ahead and embrace your rock star nature. If you're going to have a radical brand, go for it.

But you've got to sell it all the way through. So if you're going to engage in direct confrontation, do it, but do it very advisedly. That's my point. See a lot of times what bothers me when people analyze things is they ignore what in my mind is proven and settled.

That people care what you wear and they care what you do and they care how you act. I believe that's true. Maybe people shouldn't care what you wear, but the fact is they do. Maybe they shouldn't judge you by the way you dress and by the way that you speak, but the fact is that they do.

And wishing it were otherwise doesn't make it so. You might wish that you were someone that you're not, but wishing it doesn't make you someone else. You are you. And so in all these things, being countercultural only works if you're in an area where that counterculturality is going to be useful.

And so think carefully about it. If you can be measured by some objective performance or if you can use your desire to engage in wearing leather pants in the office and you can do that as part of your brand, go for it. But you better make sure that your prospective targeted customer will actually appreciate your leather pants.

When it comes to the face paint, I don't know how to advise you on that. When it comes to the strategies and the fashions of the day, those are my three strategies for them and think through them. Now it's not just about your diamonds and your duds and your drives.

It's not just about your cars and your clothes. If I'd have been able to come up with a C word for diamond, I would be carrots. That's what I should have done. The carrots and your clothes and your cars. Cars, clothes, and carrots. Oops, if I'd thought a little longer, I would have come up with my alliteration around the letter C.

It's not that those are the only three things. I'm just trying to give you examples. So when you look at something that you need to do in your business and in your life, think about it and then think through which strategy am I going to engage in. Do I conform to the fashion, even though it's dumb, just so I can enjoy the acceptance by my group and then go ahead and move forward with my personal goals?

It's not a wrong choice. If I grew up in the hood, in the inner city, I would wear baggy jeans and oversized clothes until I got out of the hood and I would carry a backpack and change my clothes on the bus or in the public restroom until I got to my job.

And on the way home, I would change them again on the way home until I could afford to move out of the hood. It's not stupid to not get picked on because you don't match. What's stupid would be to be late to your job because all your buddies in the hood are picking on you and being bullies to you because you don't wear baggy clothes.

So sometimes conform to the fashion, dumb as it is, so you can enjoy acceptance by the group around you and further your personal goals. Number two, find a workaround that gives you plausible deniability without direct confrontation. This I think is the sweet spot. Spend most of your time, if you think about it, in almost every area, there's a workaround.

And number three, engage in direct confrontation of the fashion, but do it very advisedly. Be careful. There are some people who are megastar athletes or who are megastar rock stars or who are megastar actors or who are megastar accountants. And because of their ability to prove their megastar-ness, people will put up with their antics.

But if you're not a megastar, they may not put up with yours. The antics aren't the causal factor in success. It's the megastar-ness or the ability to demonstrate megastar capability that leads to success. As we close, remember, you know what? I should do this without the music. As we close, let me read to you again just these few paragraphs from the Dr.

Seuss story. Just because it, and think about this now that I'm done with my show on strategies. Think about this now in the context of just the silliness of our society and the silliness of our spending. Then quickly, Sylvester McMonkey McBean put together a very peculiar machine. And he said, "You want stars like a star belly snitch?

My friends, you can have them for $3 each. Just pay me your money and hop right aboard." So they clamored inside. Then the big machine roared. And it clonked and it bonked and it jerked and it burked and it bopped them about. But the thing really worked. When the plain belly snitches popped out, they had stars.

They actually did. They had stars upon thars. Then they yelled at the ones who had stars from the start. "We're exactly like you, you can't tell us apart. We're all just the same now, you snooty old smarties. And now we can go to your Frankfurter parties." "Good grief!" groaned the ones who had stars at the first.

"We're still the best snitches and they are the worst. But now how in the world will we know they all frowned if which kind is what or the other way round?" Then up came McBean with a very sly wink. And he said, "Things are not quite as bad as you think.

So you don't know who's who. That is perfectly true. But come with me, friends. Do you know what I'll do? I'll make you again the best snitches on beaches and all it will cost you is ten dollars each." "Belly stars are no longer in style," said McBean. "What you need is a trip through my star-off machine.

This wondrous contraption will take off your stars so you won't look like snitches who have them on thars." And that handy machine, working very precisely, removed all the stars from their tummies quite nicely. Then, with snoots in the air, they paraded about. And they opened their beaks and they let out a shout, "We know who is who.

Now there isn't a doubt. The best kind of snitches are snitches without." Then, of course, those with stars all got frightfully mad. To be wearing a star now was frightfully bad. And of course, old Sylvester McMonkey McBean invited them into his star-off machine. Then of course, from then on, as you probably guess, things really got into a horrible mess.

All the rest of that day and that century, on those wild screaming beaches, the Fix-It-Up Chappy kept fixing up snitches. Off again, on again, in again, out again. Through the machines, they raced round and about again, changing their stars every minute or two. They kept paying money. They kept running through, until neither the plane nor the star bellies knew whether this one was that one or that one was this one or which one was what one or what one was who.

Then, when every last cent of their money was spent, the Fix-It-Up Chappy packed up and he went. And he laughed as he drove in his car up the beach. They never will learn. No, you can't teach a snitch. This is a story that's about to change your life.