The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. You could do a classic herb roasted turkey or spice it up and make turkey tacos. Serve up a go-to shrimp cocktail or use Simple Truth wild-caught shrimp for your first Cajun risotto. Make creamy mac and cheese or a spinach artichoke fondue from our selection of Murray's cheese.

No matter how you shop, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace all your holiday traditions. Ralph's fresh for everyone. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua. I am your host and today I want to talk to you about the Golden Age of human progress and achievement that we are living in, share with you some ideas about how you can participate in it more fully to get more of the things that you do want in your life and to get rid of the things that you don't want in your life.

Friends, I have never been more excited about the future than I am today. I don't know how to say it other than that, other than to say that I have never been more excited about the future than I am today. You and I are living in a golden age of human accomplishment, human achievement, and opportunity.

I posted recently online on my Twitter profile that something to the effect of I've never been more excited about the future. We live in just an incredible time and it came from a place of just genuine, sincere gratitude. I was sitting here at my desk just marveling at the world that you and I live in.

And I think we brush past these things so fast. I'm just amazed at so many things that we're experiencing right now. I'm amazed that I can speak to you the way that I'm speaking. I'm amazed that I can live the incredible life that I've been so fortunate to live.

I can have the experiences I've been so grateful and fortunate to have. I mean, if we were to go back even 30 years, I think we, if we were to go back 30 years and put you and me in the place of the richest person in the world at that time, oh man.

And say, would you trade with the richest person in the world 30 years ago or with the opportunity that you and I have today? I gotta imagine most of us would pick today. I mean, let's see, let's do the math. 2020 back to 1990. I mean, just think of the things that were not available to you in 1990.

Think of how limited your life was in 1990. Now, if 30 years is too much for you, go back 50 years. But I bet you, you wouldn't want to go back 50 years. Just think of all the things that you would lose. And this is just, I'm bursting over with this today.

I have had such a productive day. I have felt wonderful. I'll talk more about that. But I just, looking around and I see nothing but opportunity. Nothing but opportunity. I see opportunity on every side. For you, for me, for every person in the world. As I look around the world today, I'm just amazed when you actually see on the ground what it looks like for millions and millions and millions and millions of people to be being lifted up out of poverty, out of abject poverty every single years.

I want to be accurate, not millions and millions and millions and millions every year, but it's millions and millions and millions every few years. This is, we're just getting started. The next decade of your life and my life is going to be the most incredible decade in the history of this world.

And you and I are at the front edge of it. You and I get the opportunity to shape it and to lead it. There has never before been a time in human history when you as an individual had more choice for you and when you as an individual had more of an opportunity to impact those around you for good.

Never before have things been as good as they are right now. There has never before been a time in human history where you could eat as cheaply as you eat today, where you could have as much free time as you have today, where you could live as cheaply as you live today.

There has never been a better time to be alive in the history of this world. That, my friends, is such a blessing. That is a blessing for you, it's a blessing for me, and my hope and prayer is that you and I can take the blessings that we've been given and share those with others.

That's my mission. But it's real, it's true, it's right in front of you, it's right in front of me. They're all right there. All these possibilities. I am excited in a way that I have never been. I'm excited in a way that I can't remember ever being before. I'm excited—let me go ahead, I'll make the statement.

I'm excited in a way I've never been before because of the potential and the opportunity that I have running over. And you have the same thing that I do. It's different, but it's right there. Now you say, "But Joshua, I appreciate that you had some Kool-Aid this morning or something happened, but I'm not feeling that." Well, I want to give you some ideas today because I want to help you.

My mission here is to serve you, to serve you with useful ideas, to help you to see the possibilities that are out there. And friend, if you're one who focuses on problems, you know as well as I do that there are problems. There's this silly comparison that's often drawn, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" The idea being, "Do you think everything's going to get worse or do you think everything's going to get better?" Both of those are dumb.

It's dumb to be an optimist and it's dumb to be a pessimist. Be a realist. But reality is that things are going so well. And I hate to even tone this down. We could talk about problems, right? I've talked about lots of problems, but in the midst of every problem is an opportunity.

In the midst of every crisis is a potential game-changing opportunity for you. There's a reason why we have the silly aphorism that every cloud has a silver lining. It's true. Now here's what's so incredible about what you and I have the opportunity to do. You and I have the opportunity today to change our focus, to change it from the things that just happen to be around us to the things that we want to be around us.

You and I have the opportunity to change our focus from the things that other people are complaining about to the things that we want more of in our life. In a minute, I'm going to give you some very practical suggestions of how to do this. But here's what I see more than I've ever seen before.

You create the reality in your life first by what you focus on, and then you experience that. I don't want to get into the metaphysical questions today about reality. I believe there is such a thing as reality. Again, we want to be a realist. But the reality is that you and I create our experience of life.

And we do it whether we know it or not. Much of the time, it's just simply something that randomly happens. See, we don't get to choose where in the world we're born. We don't get to choose the time, the epoch into which we're born. We don't get to choose the family into which we're born.

We don't get to choose any of those circumstances. When we're young, we don't get to choose the people that are put into our life. We don't get to choose our parents, our uncles, our aunts. We don't get to choose, most of the time, our school teachers. Until there starts to be an age of accountability.

Until there starts to be an age of choice. And then you do get to choose. See, even at a very young age, if we talked about levers of influence, even at a very young age, the people who know very clearly what they want and they don't want are able to exercise influence over their circumstances.

The 15-year-old who doesn't like the teachers that they're given at school will be able to get out of studying under those teachers, even though he's 15 years old. How much more you and I, how much more responsibility do you and I bear in our lives to look around and say, "Am I choosing the people that I want to be influenced by, or am I just being influenced by the people who happen to be there?" I saw this tweet online and I loved it.

It was written as a response to a political kerfuffle, but I thought it was brilliant in it. And the guy wrote, he says, "Create the reality you want to be in." And the dude who wrote that had no context. He was thinking about it as, "Look at all these political people who watch this certain news channel and how dumb they are." But you know what's real?

There's a truth in what he says. "Create the reality you want to be in." And you and I have the opportunity to create the reality that we want to be in. So let's start with talking about how. How do you do that? Well, everything begins in the brain. Everything begins in the mind.

The reality that you're living in right now is influenced by and probably created by the thoughts that you have had previously in your life. The job that you're working right now is a job that you're doing because in the past you thought it would be a job that you wanted to do.

The house that you're living in right now is a house that you're living in because at some point in the past you thought it was a house that you wanted to live in. You and I are not coerced into these decisions. No matter how much you feel trapped by your circumstances, you can look around and find a whole lot of responsibility to take for the decisions and the choices and the actions that have put you into those circumstances.

That is the healthiest place to start by taking complete and total responsibility for where you are. Let's talk realism. Are you 100% responsible for everything that has happened to you in your life? Of course not. That's not realistic. But can you find elements of responsibility in almost everything that has happened to you in your life?

You betcha. And the healthiest thing that you can possibly do is take responsibility for everything that you are responsible for. Even in the worst situation, as we're so indebted to Viktor Frankl for writing about extensively, even in the worst situation where you are being exterminated by a bunch of brutal sadistic thugs, through no fault of your own, you can take responsibility for your response, your reaction.

And you can choose to measure and adjust that response and reaction. Now if a dude who's being sent into a gas chamber to be exterminated due to the accidental DNA that he was given by his parents, if that dude can take responsibility for his reaction and his response, do you think that you and I can look around and take a little responsibility for the things that are around us?

If you want your life to change, if you want something to be different than the way it is right now, you've got to start that in your thoughts. You've got to begin that in your imagination. You've got to start by thinking about what you do want instead of what you don't want.

That's where all things begin. If you want a different future, you've got to start by imagining a different future. You don't have to believe it. You don't even have to believe it's possible for you, yet. Although, I'll tell you, it is possible for you. You can do it. You just have to be willing to open your eyes and your mind to the possibility.

The ideas that you can think of in your head, the images that you can hold in your head will draw you. They will draw you towards them because they'll affect how you think. You don't have to tell anybody about the things that you'd like to be different, but you do have to start to think about the things that you would like to be different.

Let's talk practicality. I want to give you some simple recommendations. Number one, start by thinking about things that you would like to be different. Don't think about problems. Don't think about things you don't like. Think about things you do like. Think about the kinds of things that you would like to be different in your life.

If you're sitting in traffic, frustrated at the cars in front of you, while you're listening to my voice, and if that's annoying to you and frustrating to you, then start by grabbing a piece of paper and writing down, "I don't like to sit in traffic. I don't want to sit in traffic anymore.

I want a life that is free of traffic." Acknowledge it, and then start to think about how much you'd like to live a life that's free of sitting in rush hour traffic. Start with that. Start by thinking about things and writing them down. Notice what you want. So many of us are so accustomed just to living, we're never thinking about what we would like, what we want.

I'm amazed at how little imagination people have, because they're not used to thinking about what they would want. Now why that's there, I don't know. We could argue about that. It doesn't matter. Start by thinking about what you want and noticing it, writing it down. Next, start to cultivate around yourself an atmosphere that will help you to continue thinking about what you want.

And you do this by eliminating voices or input, and by adding voices or input to your life. I'll give you an example. I cannot stand to be in houses where the TV is on all the time. I have never in my life, save one semester in college, I have never in my life had a TV in the house.

Never had one growing up. Never had one as an adult. My wife and I don't have one. We don't plan to ever have one. And it's not that there's anything inherently wrong with watching moving pictures on a TV screen, right? Of course not. My wife and I enjoy watching YouTube videos together.

We do it on a computer. But what's wrong with the TV is you don't get to control the input from it. And the vast majority of what's on it is defiling to your soul, upsetting to your spirit, stupefying to your mind, and I need a verb to say what it does to your body.

It makes you sick and fat to sit and watch this stuff. I mean, it's practically drug commercials. And so I'm very sensitive to it all the time. I'm very sensitive to it. I go into somebody's house where they got the TV on. I cannot understand why they let that filth into their house.

It's nothing but violence, war, rape, depression, both economic and personal. It's nothing but backstabbing and lying and hypocrisy. It's nothing but loud commercials about your bodily fluid problems. It's nothing but sickness and death and disease on all parts. It is so, if you're not kind of desensitized to it, it is so jarring.

I don't understand how anybody who owns and watches a TV ever maintains a quiet spirit. Because as soon as you flip it on, you can't really choose what comes in. It just comes in at you. Now, I'm not saying you have to go get rid of your TV right now, although I genuinely recommend it.

It'll lead to a much quieter life. But notice how the input just comes in at you and you don't really control it. Yeah, you can change the channel, but at the end of the day, you don't really control it. So one thing you can do is eliminate voices that don't help you.

Now, TV is something that is hope. Well, for some people, it's not easy, but it's fairly easy because you don't have to hurt a relationship. But if there's a person that you know who is just constantly tearing you down and dragging you down, stop. If there's a podcast that you listen to that does nothing but feed your fear of the future and that does nothing but make you feel bad about things and make you worried and concerned, etc., stop.

If there are books or magazines that do nothing but feed the filth all around you, stop. Cut that stuff out. Get the bad negative influences and the negative input out of your life. Cut it off. And then replace it with the good, the beautiful, the noble, the virtuous, the exciting, the clean, the pure, the things that are true, that are real, that feed the soul.

See, the problem with TV is not necessarily what's on it. Could be a problem, could not be a problem. When I had a TV for the semester I was in college, Discovery Channel, I was there, I was glued. I loved it. I'm so interested in all that stuff. It's the production quality is so fantastic.

I love it. But the problem with TV is not what's on it. Problem is what you're not doing when you're doing something like watching TV. It's the opportunity cost. See, you could spend time reading a book that would help feed your goals, feed you in something that you really want and teach you how to do it.

Or I guess books are bad, people don't read anymore. You and I are the only ones who read. Most people don't. Let me use a non-book example. You could spend time on a YouTube channel that is going to inspire you and educate you about something that you care about instead of just being a passive consumer of what comes into you over the broadcast or cable TV network.

Now perhaps I sound like an old fuddy-duddy using the example of TV because there's been a revolution. Of course, everything's on demand. Almost nobody sits down and just consumes what happens to come in at that moment on the cable channel. So I probably picked a bad example to use.

But hopefully the lesson is coming through. Choose ideas that inspire you, that lift you up. Cancel a magazine subscription to something that fills your head with problems or fears or worries and replace it with something, replace it with Success Magazine, right? If you're in the US. Replace it with something that, a financial magazine that helps you to be confident about the future.

One of the, some of the most practical ways to do this, I would say, curate a personal Instagram account that feeds your goals, the things that you do want in your life. Build something, a haven for yourself where the stuff you don't want just simply isn't allowed in. Put up walls around it so that you can go into that space, be it physical, be it pictures on the wall, be it virtual, be it carefully selected YouTube subscriptions, carefully curated Instagram profile, et cetera.

But have a place where nothing that you don't want invades and it's all focused on the things that you do want. You and I are living, one of the aspects and components of the golden age that we live in, is you and I are living in a world in which individual people, small voices, can have access to other small communities of people without the need to appeal to a broad audience.

And what this means is, you can, people are able to connect with their audience without having to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And that's powerful. See, in the old world, the world of legacy media, corporate media, in the world of cable channels and big newspapers, et cetera, in order for the media empire to be successful, they had to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Well what do the lowest common denominator people like? Blood, violence, gore, sex, intrigue, gossip, backstabbing, et cetera. And so what is on the front page of the newspaper? Politics, blood, violence, murder, rape, all the stuff that appeals to the lowest common denominator. So if you were going to be somebody who wishes to live a different lifestyle than that, it was a lot harder in the old days to find media sources for yourself.

Now they've always been there, if you've looked. Success Magazine has been being published for decades. Orson Swett Marden, I think, was the guy who started that. Darren Hardy runs it today. So Success Magazine has long been a staple of the kind of thing that was available. You could find some highbrow intellectual stuff, right?

You could read The Economist, you could read The Atlantic, et cetera, and get your highbrow intellectual stuff. But all that stuff still, it keeps us trapped in the arguments and the debate and the culture wars and all this stuff, which there's a place for it, right? But I like to be an educated and widely read person.

I care about those things too. But it was hard to find a place that was with media, which is very powerful, that would just feed your brain and just be positive. Now the most common places, ways throughout history, while this is available to you, was with books and with audio courses.

So if you were to go back to the 80s, right, where audio courses came into their own and books previously, you could find people who were dedicated to reading nothing but books that inspired them. To this day, I love to sit down and read a Dale Carnegie book. It's timeless stuff.

And when you read a Dale Carnegie book, you can't come away with anything other than something positive to think about. You could sit down and read the Book of Proverbs, and you can't come away without anything positive to think about. You could sit down and read a, what's his name, Earl Knight?

The dude who wrote the book a long time ago, you know that guy? You could read the books is the point. The books have always been there. And so you could curate an environment around yourself in your home library of positivity, of things that uplifted you, things that kept you focused on.

And that for me has always been a stable part of my life, a staple that I have depended on to keep my brain straight. Books are peaceful. The things that I like about a book that I don't like about movies is that I can look at a book and I can skim the book.

I can pre-read the book and decide if it's positive, if I want to be involved in it. I have a disease. Some people don't do this, but I have a youngest child disease syndrome that means that I always read the end of the book first. I don't like to read novels that I don't know what the end is, which makes me not a movie buff at all, because I don't like to have my emotions controlled by somebody else.

I want to be in control of that. So with a book, I sit down, start reading, see if it engages me, flip to the back, see what happens. Then I can enjoy the novel knowing that I'm not going to be drawn into somebody's plot against my control. My wife says it's a youngest child syndrome.

Maybe it is. But that's the nice thing about books. Books are peaceful. They just sit there. They're not overly stimulating, etc. But they also do lack some imaginative power. There's something powerful about pictures. There's something powerful about images. There's something powerful about video that is so engaging and so captivating.

But never before now has there been a time that you could build a reality around yourself and curate that reality very carefully with as much detail and as much opportunity as there is today. But in the last decade, something magical has happened. Now for you to go back, when I was in high school was when Survivor came out.

It was all the thing. And I remember watching Survivor. If you're wondering about TV, I can't remember. I think I went to my grandparents' house and watched it. Anyway, I saw some of the episodes of the very first show of Survivor. And that form of reality TV changed everything.

It completely changed the TV landscape. What you see today is night and day different from what was on TV prior to Survivor. It's changed everything in our society, off to and including politics, most obvious example. That President Trump is a product of a reality TV. And so you had this world of reality TV, so-called reality TV, that's totally changed.

But here's the problem with reality TV. It wasn't reality. If you read the people who've done reality TV shows and whatnot for large TV networks, you always have to put more drama into it, right? Because they want the drama. They're still selling to the lowest common denominator. People want more drama, more arguments, more fights.

But YouTube and hopefully other platforms in the future has changed that. Instagram has changed that. Because now individual creators don't have to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And what you can do is you can curate for yourself media that only fits your goals. Your three most powerful tools in today's world are, number one, podcasts.

My hope is that Radical Personal Finance is serving you. It's always my intention to serve you, to build a positive environment of ideas and solutions, ideas and plans, ideas and action steps, inspiration and next action. Those have to go together. Now I've failed at it sometimes. I'm sure I'll fail again in the future.

Try to keep the show very, very positive. I try to not present a problem without a solution. I'm sure I fail at that. I'll fail again, but I try. And so my hope is that this show is serving you and I'll make it better. But you should choose all your podcasts based on that, based upon shows that serve you, that help you to create the reality that you want to live in.

If you don't like a certain reality, just change it and create the reality that you want to live in. Podcasts are powerful because of the dual nature, because you can surround yourself with things at a very low cost. When I was in high school and college, I invested in thousands of dollars of audio programs to build a nothing but positive environment around myself.

I still have my CD wallet from those days. I don't know if you remember those giant CD wallets, the very biggest ones, I think is 260 CDs. I could today show you my CD wallet that has thousands of dollars of educational audio that I had so that I never had to listen to the radio.

Today, with podcasts, it's so cheap. Now that comes with a problem. You should invest in the high quality stuff. There's still value because it's better edited, etc. But build a reality so that at least when you're alone and you're not being quiet, you're driving the car or something, you cut out all of the nonsense, cut out the war, and cut out the depression, and cut out the violence, and cut out the politics, and just curate for yourself an audio environment that you want to be involved in.

Where did this Today Show come from? I was leading podcasts off my phone. They're podcasts on subjects that I care about deeply, on things that I really am interested in. But I decided they're not helping me right now because they're not positive. They're not my goals right now. They're good for me for my background knowledge on the world.

They're good for me to stay informed, etc. But they're negative. When I listen to them, I don't feel better and happier and more positive and optimistic and excited about the world around me. I come away from them feeling anxious and annoyed and frustrated. So I deleted them. I'm not doing it right now.

Maybe someday in the future, I'll be so positive in the rest of my life that I can go and do that without it affecting my mood, but I'm not going to take it. So podcasts. Number two is pictures and video, specifically Instagram. The in my opinion, most powerful social media platform right now.

There are others and whatnot, but the most powerful thing about social media platform of Instagram. First, it is not subject to your personal network unless you've chosen it to be that way. You don't have to see people making political posts, Joshua included, on Instagram unless you really want to.

There certainly is a political Instagram, but much of Instagram is lifestyle. It's goals, it's positivity, it's community, it's people sharing their experiences. And because of the nature of channels that are theme focused, you can curate for yourself a set of channels that surround you with ideas. Now is it all reality?

Not a chance. And you got to be careful. In the new world, you need new filters, right? You need to recognize what's reality and what's not reality. When you look at what an Instagram influencer, how many shots they have to take to get the perfect shot, et cetera, you have to filter for that.

But one of the most powerful visioning tools that you have today is something like Instagram. And especially if you'll keep the channels and the input and the information focused on reality, not over the top-ness, you can curate for yourself a warm environment that keeps you focused on the things that you do want.

It's positive, it's motivating, it's encouraging. Some months ago, I was digging into the weight loss part of Instagram. I've lost 40, 50 pounds over the last few months and have another 50 pounds or so to go. So I'm working hard on that. But I stumbled into the world of super fat people on Instagram.

And I was just amazed at how motivating and encouraging it is for people who are 500, 600 pounds to have and be able to curate a community of other people who started at 500 or 600 pounds and who lost 300 pounds and to interact with them. And I was just so interested.

I subscribed to all of the channels, the 300 pound weight loss channels, and I've just been so impressed with how much influence and impact all these people are having. My favorite channel, Instagram, I'll tell you, I think Stella is striving, I think is her Instagram. It's this lady named Stella who's lost, I think, half her body weight.

She started at 600 pounds and she's down to 300 pounds, something like that now. And I love her channel. She's so great. She's wonderful. And she shares her ups and her downs. But it's so encouraging when you see a normal person, in fact, a person who's in a worse than normal starting condition, and it inspires me.

It's like, well, if Stella can do it, I can do it. Right? If Stella's going to the gym, I'm going to the gym. It doesn't that resonate with you too? So there never before was the opportunity for the community of super fat people to be able to build friendships and encourage and inspire one another until you get to Instagram world.

You can do this with other platforms too. Facebook groups are powerful. Lots of ways to do it. My encouragement to you is curate for yourself an Instagram channel. And I say channel because if you start a second one, just set up a second profile. It's not about your personal friends or anything.

It's just your vision board. There's the old concept of the vision board, making pictures of the things that you do want and printing, putting these pictures together and having them for yourself. I'll give you one. And there's nothing. It's great. It's a great idea. I've never just displayed one thing on my wall just because generally I've always wanted to keep most of my goals private.

I don't like them to be displayed on my wall. But what I used to do is I used to just trim magazines out and I've got notebooks filled with cutouts from magazines of things that I wanted. And I've done a lot of things from that over the years. It absolutely works to create a vision board.

Well, a digital vision board can be an equivalent of that. So trying to keep things really, really practical. If you like the magazine idea, I recommend you start it. Call it a lookbook. That's what my wife calls it, a lookbook. And I could have them from when I was in high school.

I used to buy the composition notebooks because they were cheap. And I would cut out all the magazines and post them in there. Little bits of wisdom, things I was reading, etc. But they're all positive. Look through them and then stimulate my brain. Back to that positive visuals. Visuals stimulate you in a way that other things can't.

So build for yourself an Instagram account that is positive, that surrounds you with the things that you do want. The number three is YouTube. I've had a long and difficult relationship with YouTube. I've talked about that publicly in the past. It's not important here. The reality is today, YouTube has offered individual people the chance to create content and ideas, education, entertainment on one theme and communicate that with a small audience effectively.

So when you find those right channels, those things that you really like with the people that you like, the people who are not obsessed with violence and gore and controversy, but who are simply sharing things that are positive, that are beautiful, you can start to curate around yourself a positive environment.

And you can start to share that with another person very effectively. Some of you have shared my podcast with other people, which I really appreciate, but almost nobody listens to my podcast with other people. Podcasts are a solitary thing. Instagram, nobody sits around and says, "Here, let's share the same phone and let's look at the Instagram account together." Nobody does that.

We all have our own, which is fine. But what video can do, especially with YouTube, is it can bring people together in a way that's entertaining and allow them to focus on something. When I first was pitching my wife on the idea of going and living in an RV full-time, she's never thought about it, right?

That's not been her thing. Ironically, she had more RVing experience than I did before we went and moved into one. I had no RVing experience until I bought my own. I had only one time for three nights ever stayed in an RV ever before I bought my own, where she'd been in an RV many times.

I'd always dreamed of it though. But when I'm trying to say, "Hey, listen, maybe we could go and travel full-time," she didn't know anybody who'd done it. She's never thought about doing it. So it sounds crazy and wacky. So what did I do? I found some YouTube channels. My favorite one, or our favorite one at the time, was Less Junk, More Journey, young couple who was RVing full-time.

Keep Your Daydream, Mark and Trish who run those are two good YouTube channels. Other people like those, but we like those because they're families, they're children. We had a bunch of children. And so the young couples and whatnot, it just didn't fit us. But for other people, go and find that.

And so we started watching them. And it's reality TV at its finest, right? Because it's actually reality TV. Now you still have to filter, but it's actually reality TV. And over time, when my wife saw that other people could do it, she's like, "Yeah, it didn't sound so crazy." And I've given that advice to many people, and I give it to you.

If you're trying to find somebody and say, "Hey, here's an idea," start with video, because you can watch a video together. See, even books, most people don't read books together. It's hard. You don't sit there and read the book together. But video has a way of bringing people together.

So if you and your spouse are trying to get on the same page about something, go and look for some YouTube channels, and go and find some other people who are going through it, and curate an environment around yourself that fits what you want. Make it about you, right?

Don't choose anything that I like, but make it about you and your family, and curate those voices so that you just have places that you can go physically and digitally that are just focused on your goals. Eliminate and cut out the stuff that's not helping you, the stuff that's not serving you, the stuff that's dragging you down, the stuff that's making you angry and depressed, and bring in more of the stuff that lifts you up.

You will create the reality that you will live in based upon your thoughts and your actions in the coming days. There's the old quote, who was it? I forget who to ascribe it to, but that you're the average of the five people that you, the books, five years from today you'll be the average of the books that you read and the five people that you spend the most time with, something like that.

I butchered that one. It's a true quote. Here's what's cool though, right? You've always been able to choose the books that you read. I know reading's out of vogue, I know, but man, if you're not reading books that are teaching you things, you're just behaving dumbly. Stop. Get some books and make sure those books are things that you care about.

If you're not good at reading, learn to do it. Take a class. Learn to read. But there is no better return on investment than you get with reading. Do you understand that when somebody writes a book, they invest at the very minimum hundreds of hours into that labor? Usually those hundreds of hours come after years and years of experience or study or research or thinking about that craft.

And then as a part of that book process, most people, and here we're talking about nonfiction books, most people will invest so many hours into reading everything that has been written on this particular subject. They've done research. And then all of the authors before that have put together, have cumulatively done exactly the same thing.

So when you read a book, you are taking in the absolute height thus far of human knowledge, of human achievement. You are standing on the shoulders not only of giants, you're standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the shoulders of giants.

In almost any field, if you read a nonfiction book that's well-written, what you are receiving from that book is you are receiving thousands of years of knowledge adjusted, synthesized, et cetera. So reading a book is like taking a syringe filled with vitamins, minerals, everything in their most concentrated form, sticking it in you and putting the plunger down.

That's what a book is because it's synthesizing and working with an accumulated thousands of years of knowledge because of that process of authors, knowing the authors that have come before them, wrestling with the ideas, adding experience, adding to those ideas. That's what reading is. And here's what's incredible. You don't have to read just one book, right?

Read 10. Any person in the world who has the basic intelligence to read at normal levels can easily read a book a week. So 10 weeks from now, you can have read 10 books on whatever subject you're interested in and you can be a world-class expert in 10 weeks.

That's the power of books. I get it that it's not in vogue. I get that video is easier, but when you understand what a book is and you understand the power of that, and then more importantly, when you understand the timelessness of books, you can go back today and you can have a conversation with Jesus Christ.

You can go back today and you can have a conversation with Plato. You can go and have a conversation today with any philosopher. You can go and have a conversation today with Julius Caesar. You can go and have a conversation with Benjamin Franklin. You can go and have a conversation with Thomas Edison.

You can go and have a conversation with Marie Curie. It's all right there. Booker Washington. All of these things are right there and you can have a conversation with them. There is no other media that allows that. If you are ignoring that, you are behaving like a fool. Sermon over on books.

That's books. I got so, sorry, I don't even remember what my other point was. Okay, got it. Don't behave like a fool. Read books. You have to read the average of the books you read and the people that you spend the most time with. Here's the thing. Throughout all of human history, you and I have been limited to spending time with the people that are in our community.

Usually our neighbors, usually a maximum of a couple of hundred people. That's how it's been throughout all of human history. But today, you can spend time with anybody in the world, practically. You've just spent 45 minutes and 31 seconds with me. I've just given you my ideas, my thoughts, my suggestions.

I've shared my passion, my emotion, my exuberance, my enthusiasm with you. I've had a conversation with you. Now, of course, this has been mostly monologue thus far, but you know what? You can have a conversation right back with me. You can call into my Friday Q&A show and you could talk about anything you want in the world.

You can reach out to me on Facebook. You can join our Radical Personal Finance Facebook group. You can reach out to me on Twitter, on Instagram. You can email me. I'm right there. Sometimes you have to try a couple times, but I'm right there. And you can talk to me.

I'm easy to get a hold of. So now we have a genuine two-way dialogue, a genuine conversation. And the incredible thing about the world we live in today is there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have done what you want to do. They've done it.

They started at a worse place than you, and now they're beyond where you want to be, and they'll tell you how to do it. You just got to find those people and start spending time with them. So what do you do? Everybody has a podcast. Everybody has a Twitter handle.

Everybody has got a blog. Everyone's writing in a newspaper. You can find it. Anything you want, it's there. It's incredible the access that you have to people in today's world. People who have done what you want to do. Spend your time with those people, because you know what? Those people will believe that it's possible for you, because they know it was possible for them.

They'll help you. They'll coach you. They'll teach you. But let's take it one step further. The key is crossing that virtual, physical barrier. Take your virtual relationships physical. Find the person that you want to go and spend time with and go. Now, a lot of times you pay. I paid $10,000 last year to go to a seminar for somebody that I wanted to meet in my industry.

You know why I did it? I didn't do it because I needed to hear what was said at the seminar. I didn't do it because I needed to know all the details of what was said. I find information is best consumed in book form or in verbal form. I paid $10,000 to build a relationship with somebody that I wanted to meet in my industry.

I paid $10,000 to build a relationship with somebody that I need a relationship with. You know what? If you, obviously, you've gotten to this point of time, you're 48 minutes into this relationship with Joshua today. I pay attention to the people who send me money. I pay a lot of attention to the people who send me money.

When people send me a lot of money, I pay a lot of attention to them. It's a great use of money. If you are not regularly initiating contact and paying people that you want to spend time with for their time and attention, you're missing out on the fast lane to very quickly start to develop success.

Now, that paying used to be, for me, it was fairly simple. Lunch. I'd invite people to lunch. Now, it costs money to invite people to lunch, but why do you think I have different categories in my budget from consumption categories versus investment categories? One simple thing you do, I've said this to hundreds of people.

You know how many people do it? Almost none. Almost none, just like with any kind of decent advice. But every single week, just set aside one day, Wednesday lunch. You know, every Wednesday lunch, you're going to have lunch with somebody that you admire, that you look up to, that you would like to know, that you would like to learn from.

This can be somebody in your company, somebody in your industry, somebody in your church, somebody in your community, somebody that you admire. And make it a habit that on Monday morning, if you don't have a lunch schedule, you pick up the phone and start calling, or you send an email and you start sending an email.

Build a human connection with somebody and invest in inviting them to lunch. Nobody is so busy that they don't have time for lunch. Here's the dirty little secret about success. The most successful people are usually the most available. Joe Blow, who doesn't have a clue about what he's doing, has got to work, he's got to work overtime, he didn't even have a lunch break.

He's stuck. Joe President got plenty of time for lunch. He'll go to lunch with you, invite him for lunch. And if he doesn't, there are 10 other people who will. So simple thing, start having lunch. If you need to go a little bit deeper, if they're not in your town, go see them.

Get on an airplane, go see them, get in your car and drive. If you live in a place, especially a big metro area, if you live in Atlanta, Georgia, Miami, Florida, San Francisco, you're within a tank of gas of almost anybody. The people who are in that... So take a day off, take a vacation day and go for lunch.

You don't only have to have lunch on days that you are at your office. You can also have lunch on a day that you've taken off for lunch to go to see somebody in the next town over that you admire and that you respect. Build a relationship, look to serve them, add value, build networks, build connections.

Go to their events. So many people have events. You know the thing about an event? Participation is always available. Almost every speech you've been to, you will notice that the speaker always stays around and waits. Now, you may have 20 seconds. It's hard to take a receiving line with a lot of people.

It's hard for speakers to do that. You may have 20 seconds, but in 20 seconds, you can pitch a clear idea, you can ask a clear question, you can create a connection that you can then follow up on later. So go. Don't sit around and wait for somehow the people that you admire to somehow magically bumble into your life.

Go and build the relationships. If you do these things that I'm describing, you cultivate and curate sources of positive influence and encouragement and inspiration. You cut out sources of negativity, depression, frustration, anger, violence. You build a little cocoon around yourself and your reality will start to change. And as you learn more of the knowledge and skills that you need to expand your cocoon, you naturally start to interact with other people who also live in cocoons of positivity and growth and success and wealth and prosperity.

You start to be in their cocoons and your cocoons will start to build. What will happen is as you go through that process in a period of years, your life will look very different. And you'll find yourself living a life filled with prosperity, joy, happiness, success. But it starts with cutting off the things that you don't want and bringing in more of the things that you do want.

This is not metaphysical mumbo jumbo. I am not a materialist, philosophical materialist. I am not. I believe metaphysics is absolutely an important component of life. I'm just describing and trying to show you how this process happens. But it doesn't happen if you sit around and complain. I go into the cesspool because I want to reach out and save people, right?

I want to bring people out. But man, I can't stand it. You'll sit around and whine about, "I can't do this because this structural injustice is just, I can't overcome this. And so and so is racist, and so therefore the first thing I got to do is get over this.

And I can't do this. Don't you know I'm disabled?" And so what? Who cares how hard of a hand you've been dealt? I sure don't. And you sure shouldn't. Because how hard of a hand you've been dealt simply is going to mean that people are going to have more empathy and compassion and sympathy for you when you sit around being a loser.

You can sit around and you can whine, and you can protest, and you can cry, you can complain about how much your life sucks. And people will walk past and say, "Man, that dude's life sucks. I'm sure glad I'm not him." And if that's all you do, a few years from now, your life is still going to suck.

You're going to still be broke and fat, disabled, discriminated against, underprivileged, and it's still going to suck. And it will keep on sucking until you look around and you see the lifelines that people have been extending to you constantly. But you were so focused on how discriminated and underprivileged you were and how much was wrong with the world.

Of course it's wrong with the world. It's called sin. You have people who are evil, sinful people, and they have created situations that are not right. And there's death and there's carnage and there's sin all around. But in the midst of that, there are lifelines. There are people who are willing to reach out their hand and grab yours and pull you up out of that cesspool you've been living in if you show a little bit of initiative.

You don't have to show much. You got to show a little bit, right? Picture in your head that you're sitting in an open sewer and some dude walks along and says, "Here, give me your hand. I'll pull you out of the sewer." Now, I don't know if you've ever interacted with a sewer with your hands, but crap is slippery and your hand is covered with crap because you've been living in a sewer.

So pretend that I come along and I reach my hand out and I say, "Listen, brother, I'll pull you up out of there. Give me your hand." I cannot hold onto your hand if you don't try to close it. There's no way that I can pull a 200 pound man out of a cesspool when you've got a slippery hand if you don't close your hand.

You don't have to do the pulling, right? I can pick you up. But you got to close your hand. And that's the way it is with all this stuff. People sit around and they whine and they complain. Dare I say it, they do nothing but bitch about how bad things are and they don't close their hand.

Now, I may not be able to pick you up out of the sewer and put you on the top of the mountain, but I can get you from the sewer onto stable ground, right? And then there'll be somebody else there who when you start looking, you'll say, "Hey, there's somebody who's willing to teach me.

There's somebody who's willing to take me there." Or I can take some money and buy a book. I can do this. I can start to make progress. I can start to make an improvement. If you will do that day by day, week after week, month after month, year after year, you'll look back and not even recognize where you were.

You can't actually pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, as anybody who's ever put on boots would know. But what you can do is you can reach out a hand and you can ask for help. You can ask for advice. And then you can start taking strides. That Instagram channel I mentioned to you Stella is striving has inspired me so much.

I can't remember for sure, but I just love Stella's attitude. She was 600 pounds. She was fat, huge when she started. And she hired a trainer. And man, having been fat for most of my life, I have such compassion for the mental anguish of fatness. And you look at her early workouts, it's laughable.

It's laughable to think that walking is a workout for somebody. It's laughable to think that leaning against a wall is a workout for somebody. But you know what? Stella did it. And then she did it again. And she did it again. And she did it again. She did it again.

And she did it again. And you know what? Her workouts are still laughable to you because you're in four times better shape than she is, if there is such a metric. I am in way better shape than she is. But the progress that she has making has transformed her life.

Now what do you and I have to complain about? I'm not 600 pounds. What's our excuse? Kind of sounds ridiculous to have an excuse when you're not even starting where she is. Look out. She'll beat you. Because she has captured the vision of progress. And that's what you and I need to do every single day.

Get the crap out of your life and fill your head with the good, the positive, the noble, the virtuous, the things that you want, the things that you want to see more of in the world. Fill your head with those things so that instead of your life being a cesspool, you can bring a little spot of light and help your neighbors.

As we go, I would invite you, I have over the last, it's been six years, six years now, I have always loved a podcast. There is something special about podcasting. I love to talk to you in this format. Various reasons for that. I love it. I'm not going anywhere with the podcast.

I'm still going to be here for you as regularly as I can possibly make happen. But I am not having the impact and influence that I wish to have with exclusively having a podcast. And so I am taking my message to other platforms. I talked about this recently and maybe at some point I'll talk more in deep, but after a frustrating thinking about it, I decided to re-engage on social media and I'm re-engaging significantly big time.

I reactivated my once deleted Instagram account. That is my favorite. And I would invite you, if you would like some positive encouragement from me in a different format, go to Instagram.com/JoshuaSheets, Instagram.com/JoshuaSheets and follow me on Instagram. I am intending to do a lot with Instagram. I really like the format.

I especially like the format of stories because it solves my fear of everything being on the permanent record. And so I'm much more liberal with some of those things there in stories. So follow me on Instagram. Follow me on Instagram, Instagram.com/JoshuaSheets. Number two is also I will be doing more on YouTube.

YouTube is very hard for me, but I will be doing a lot more on it. Go to YouTube and find the channel Radical Personal Finance. Follow me there. YouTube.com/RadicalPersonalFinance, Facebook.com/JoshuaSheets and Twitter.com/JoshuaSheets. I'll be on all those platforms. If you only choose one, choose Instagram for the reasons that I previously said.

I love the platform. I deleted my account. I had 12, I don't know, a thousand, I don't know, something like a thousand people following me there a few years ago. I deleted my account. So I decided to pull back in on some privacy. I have changed. I have recanted from that position and that will be my primary thing going forward.

I love the platform, Instagram.com/JoshuaSheets. Come and follow me there. Final ask, I guess, since I'm not giving you a pitch, if you like the show, do me a favor, go and review it on wherever you listen to this, iTunes or Google Play or wherever you listen to the show.

Just if you have the ability to drop a review, do that. It doesn't have to be a long one. It doesn't have to be all that great. Five stars is great, but what I mean is that you don't have to write 18 paragraphs. Just write a couple sentences about what you think about the show, honestly.

That would be super helpful to me as I build the platform. I'm done playing small. Maybe at some point I'll talk about that, but over the last few years I've played small and I don't like it. It sucks. So I'm playing big and I'm thankful that you are here and I hope that I can continue to serve you more effectively in the days to come to help you because I want to be on your podcast feed.

I want to be that positive voice of encouragement in your ears. I want to be on your YouTube subscription, that positive voice and source of inspiration, and I want to be on your Instagram feed, that positive source of inspiration to help you get where you want to go faster.

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