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With no hidden fees and a 100% purchase guarantee, you can feel confident when you book your premium LA tickets with Sweet Hop. Visit suitehop.com today. Anarchy and Yaks? Who does he think he is? Get off the couch. With tasty philosophy and deep yaks, this is Nick Hazelton with Anarcho-Yakitalist.

Hey there guys, this is Nick Hazleton, the Anarcho-Yakitalist. I'm here with the 21st episode of Anarcho-Yakitalism. I had Joshua Sheets from the Radical Personal Finance podcast on with me and we talked about financial planning and what I should do and what other teens should do. Basically what anybody should do if they want to make money and if they want to be really good at what they do.

I thought this was an amazing show. I told you last show that I was really excited to put this out and I am. I had a great time doing this show. When we recorded it, I was absolutely dumbfounded by some of the information he gave me and I got super excited.

I was like, "Oh, I need to do this, this and that and that and you know, everything." And I got really excited over it. I was still pretty excited about it. I am definitely going to start using some of the stuff he suggested, using the methodology and remembering all the tips.

I'm going to have to be going over this show several times to get all of it because I think there's a lot of information. We may have overloaded on this episode with information but it's all extremely important. I think you can apply this stuff pretty much anywhere. I really enjoyed it partly because it kind of confirmed my bias about dropping out of school and starting a business.

People always tell me, "Oh Nick, you need to finish high school. You'll never get a chance to finish high school ever again." And while they're right, yes, I won't have another chance but I can have the opportunity to be financially independent sooner than any of my classmates that are going to college.

I have the opportunity to make money before they will ever start and then they're going to be loaded up with debt because they decided to go to college. Well, I'm in the positive from day one. So I think that while I'm young, this is where I need to start a business and I think that since I have the opportunity to fall back on my parents for financial support, that this is the perfect time to do it.

I think everybody should do this. That they should start their own business. I don't buy that people don't have ideas or can't figure out ideas to start a business because I have several. And if you really want some business ideas, I'd be more than willing to talk to you personally because there are so many things that people can do to make money in this world.

Anyway, I am very excited about this show. I really hope you guys enjoy this. So here it is. I have Joshua Sheets on with me today. How are you doing today, Joshua? I am well. It is a beautiful afternoon here in sunny South Florida and I'm glad to be on the show with you.

Man, it's windy and raining and miserable here in Oregon. That's because you live in Oregon, right? You're used to it. Right. Yeah. Perfect day to do an interview here. Alright. So you have a financial planning advice podcast called Radical Finance, right? Yes. Radical Personal Finance. Radical Personal Finance. Sorry.

So you have some background in financial planning too, right? What did you do as a financial planner? What do you know about financial planning, I guess? Well, in some things I know a little bit but I tell you the older I get, the less I feel like I know and the more confused I get by the world we live in.

I've found that the older I get, I mean that's constant in just about every area of life. But I have a long history with finance. When I was a kid, I kind of just wanted to be rich. I always thought it would be cool to be rich and so I figured that would be important.

One of my favorite sections in the bookstore was the personal finance section. So I would always get every book that I could and read every book on finance and personal finance and investing and how to get rich when most people didn't really care and weren't paying attention. So I had a long history called the personal finance industry and I did some things well and made various mistakes, plenty of mistakes over the years.

I went through high school, went through college. When I got out of college, I spent a couple of years working for a company in the marketing and brand management consulting business. When I went into college, my degree is in international business. I thought I wanted to do kind of like the big corporate Fortune 500 CEO type of thing.

I quickly realized that I didn't want to be involved in a large corporation. So I was in the process of extricating myself and I was planning to leave in January of 2009 and wound up getting laid off in June of 2008. I was meeting with one of my mentors, my former boss, after getting laid off and we were kind of laying out and he said, "What are you trying to accomplish?" I had some specific criteria that I was looking for in a business or in a job and when I laid them out, he said, "You ought to look at the financial services business." So he made a referral to his financial advisor and I went and met with that person and it was a good thing I did because financial advisors, just like anybody in any industry, vary in quality, vary in background.

After talking with him, this guy was good. He was kind of a hardcore engineer, very knowledgeable, very educated and really opened my eyes and I realized this could be a good business for me. So I did a bunch of research, interviewed a bunch of places and after a while, I wound up joining that company.

It was a company called Northwestern Mutual and I spent just under six years there working as a professional financial advisor. That opened my eyes to the professional side of the business. I spent a lot of time studying a lot of the technical areas of knowledge, got a bunch of financial planning credentials and designations and actually a master's degree in financial planning, which helped me to understand some of the theory side that had been missing in my personal finance education and kind of opened my eyes to show me what I hadn't known previously.

I had a good business and just enjoyed it. I loved working with clients but I was always frustrated by the bulk of the financial media and it always seemed hard for me to find any aspect of financial media that I could listen to. Either something was dreadfully boring and technically correct but just awful to listen to or something was fun to listen to but I could hardly handle it because it was just so technically inaccurate.

Maybe the person speaking or writing or something was just well-meaning but they were ignorant and I would have been too if I hadn't worked as a financial advisor. So finally, I wanted to start a show and unfortunately when you're in the financial services business, you are pretty substantially regulated by the SEC as far as what you can do and what you can't do and what you can say and what you can't say.

So what I ultimately decided to do was as I watched the podcasting technology develop, I decided that I wanted to help people on a broader scale than what I could do one on one. So I closed my practice, left that firm and started Radical Personal Finance and that was in July of 2014.

So now I host the show. It's every day, Monday through Friday. The shows are very in content. I try to keep the content extremely varied and interesting to tune into on a daily basis but they're pretty hardcore and my vision is twofold. Number one, I've committed to the audience to do at least a thousand episodes and I'm on about 150 or just under 150 right now and my vision is with those thousand, I probably will continue doing afterwards because I'm really enjoying it.

But my vision is to create a comprehensive curriculum that somebody with zero knowledge of finance could listen to and I kind of have this image of maybe a poor inner city young man or woman who has their $30 Android phone and they pull up my show and all of a sudden start listening to it.

Years later, they write me an email and say, "Look at me now. Look at the progress that I've made in my life from the knowledge that you've been able to impart." That's kind of my vision is to provide a comprehensive course for somebody to take them from zero knowledge up to essentially a master's degree level.

I'm trying to do it where it's both interesting but also extremely technically precise. My other aspect of my vision is to in essence hope that somebody who's listened to a good amount of my show could sit down and pass the certified financial planner exam purely based upon the knowledge that they've gained on my show.

I'm not sure if I'm doing it or not but I did have a listener write me a couple of weeks ago that had taken his enrolled agent exam to become an EA as a tax preparer and he said he passed several questions specifically because of the knowledge he gained on my show.

So that was a feather in my hat. I felt good about that. Yeah. So I've listened to your show. I was introduced to you when you were on The School Sucks. No, you had Brett Fanaught on your show, right? Right. So he posted those shows on his own and I found you there.

I listened to one, I think Finance is kind of boring as a teenager, but my dad started to listen to you as well and he really recommended me to start listening again so I did. I've listened to a few shows and I really like the show from a quality aspect but I also like the information and I'm starting to think more about it as a teenager.

I should be maybe a little bit smarter with my money. My operating principle, I have kind of two of them that stand out based on what you said. Number one, I understand conceptually why people think finance is boring but when it actually comes to practically, it's actually very hard for me to understand and here's why.

We all have unique, varied interests and things that we want to accomplish. We all have goals. They may be short term goals, they may be long term goals, they may be small, they may be large. Very few of those goals are financial or if they are, they're only financial because that's a means to another end.

But every single goal, everything we do in life, everything involves finance to some degree. So whether it's I want to take three years off and travel around the world or whether it's I want to go and make a difference in this charitable cause or whether it's I want to raise a family or whether it's I want to create this business.

Finance is the language of business. It's not quite the language of life but everything connects to finance and by being proficient in the language of finance, you can avoid a lot of the major mistakes and then by having it, I think of it as almost like practical goal achievement.

You give me a goal and I guarantee no matter what it is, it's connected to financial planning in some way and so that's what I try to teach people is don't be intimidated by finance. It really is connected and it's really integral to life and one of the challenges is that we as a society in the United States of America, we have a society where we're woefully ignorant of finance and so we consistently get ripped off.

Very few of us as a percentage of population are satisfied with our lives. Our corporate finances, our governmental finances are in total shambles and that's just simply a reflection of us as a population. So I try to make it fun and interesting and show how it relates and once you grasp a few basic key concepts, it's really not that tough as a subject.

It's straightforward and you don't have to get into all of the arcane details that I do. I tell people to pick and choose what you want to listen to but every goal that we have in life involves finance and we've got to figure out how to fund those goals.

Otherwise, we're not able to make things happen. I'm starting to realize that as I listen to your show and as a young man, I'm trying to get out of school as soon as I can out of high school because I want to do my own thing. I want to farm and start my own business and I'm quickly realizing that it costs money to live on your own.

Right. So there's a lot of financial planning and it really does tie back to finance in everything. I totally agree with you there. I have a little farm and I do not keep very good booking records but I should be and I'm making some steps to do that with some of the tools that you suggested on your show like Evernote and I can't remember what the other one you're using for time management.

I'm definitely moving in that direction. It's so key because if you look at the substance of life, we've got to budget our energy and our resources and there are probably a few budgets that are super important. Number one is our time. The thing that we choose to invest our time into, that is incredibly important.

We've got to budget that time. Now, the cool thing is that pretty much with few exceptions, most of us can choose and are choosing what to spend our time on. There may be some external factors. For example, if you have a schooling requirement, well, there's a certain requirement and you have to fulfill that under the laws of the land.

But most of us have the same amount of time and we all choose how to invest those hours or simply how to use them. Then time converts over into money usually and money is in some ways stored up time and of the two, the time is far more valuable than the money.

Money is always replaceable. If you run out of money, you can always go get some. If you run out of time, you can't go get some. So there's this constant interplay between them and the reality is money buys you more freedom of time. I've got various ways that I apply to.

One of the things I try not to do is I try not to be prescriptive over what other people should do. I have my own personal goals in life. I have my own personal way that I'm working to accomplish them. But it's not my business to tell you how to run your life.

But I do want to make you aware of all the options. One of my biggest regrets for example is I feel like I wasted so many years when I was in my teens and early 20s. If I knew then what I know now, I would be financially independent now.

I'm almost 30 and I just didn't know it. So for example, how old are you Nick? Nick Loper: I'm 16. Tyrone Loversley, PhD: Okay. So as a 16-year-old, I try to spend time working and I love working with men and women in your age bracket because I think in my mind that our teens are one of the most valuable points of our life.

Oftentimes when we're younger, especially when we're in our teens, we often are slighted a little bit by our culture. People say, "Oh, you're only 16," or "You're only 14," or "You're only 15." But what stands out to me as I look back on human history is I'm fascinated by how throughout human history, the average age of adulthood for most cultures is somewhere before the teens.

It was in some cultures, for example in the Jewish culture, you would have the Bar Mitzvah and the Bat Mitzvah and that occurs at 12 or 13 years old and that traditionally is the transition from childhood to adulthood. The same types of transitions exist historically in many cultures. But we've often forgotten about that in our own current day and we think, "Oh, I can't do anything until I'm 18 or until I'm 21." If you look at our own history in the US, first go study Ben Franklin and look at the age at which he was working and running a business.

Go study Thomas Edison and look at the age at which he was working and running a business. But two of my favorite other stories are interesting. When you look at a man named Admiral Farragut, and it was actually David Farragut, and he was the US Navy's very first admiral.

But what's interesting is if you go back and you look at history, at the age of 10, he joined the Navy and he was commissioned into the Navy at the age of 10 on a warship called the Essex. That's basically fifth grade and his ship went out and they're at war at the time and they had a battle and his ship was the victor.

But when he's out sailing at the age of 12, he was given his first command of a sailing ship, of the prize ship. What would happen is his ship had won, they took the ship as prize and they put Farragut aboard at the age of 12 to be the captain over this ship.

So he's commanding a skeleton crew and their charge is to sail the ship from where the battle had been into a safe harbor. And on the ship while Farragut is actually under command is the captain, the former captain of the ship who had been defeated in the battle. And if you go and you read the story, it's so interesting.

The former captain was incensed that a 12-year-old, what he viewed as a boy, I would say a 12-year-old man, was put in charge of this ship. And he said, "I'm not going to do it." And Farragut at 12 years old says, "If you tell that captain," the captain said, "I'm going to go down and bring up some of my pistols and I'm going to take back this ship." And Farragut said, "If you show your face, you're dead." He's commanding at war a full ship and he sailed it safely in and goes off.

And 15 years old, he's in the Navy. He's running – I mean he's continuing to be in the Navy. He's commanding ships. Just an amazing story to go and actually look at it and look at what the normal age of maturity was throughout history. George Washington, if you go look at George Washington, I believe his father had died and he was running a – the ranch at the age of 15.

I think he was working as a surveyor and if you go out and you look to see what he was actually doing and you put it into the context of the time, here he was working on a dangerous adult man's occupation at the age of 15, making the equivalent of what in today's dollars would be somewhere around $100,000 a year.

That's the type of thing that he was doing at the age of 15. And when I started learning about that stuff and also when I started to understand the details of financial planning as far as how productive that like 15 to 25, that decade from 15 to 25 can be financially and how different somebody's life course can be when they make some careful steps and careful planning steps at an early age.

It just blows me away and I try to live without any regrets but there are some of those things where I work very hard to try to encourage all of the 10-year-olds, the 12-year-olds, the 15-year-olds, the 16-year-olds, the 20-year-olds, the 25-year-olds that I know and say, "Let me give you a few ideas of some ways that you can set yourself up to be financially independent at a very early age." Yeah, and I really appreciate hearing somebody talk about that stuff because I'm really looking to be able to be financially independent as soon as I can.

I would like to retire because I'm pretty sure Social Security is not going to be around for me and I don't even think it would be enough if it was. So what I'm doing is I'm trying to start a little business. I have a herd of yaks and a set of pigs and I'm trying to make money off farming.

I know it's going to be tight on money and my goal is not to make a million dollars. I just want to farm because I think it's fun. I want to do the podcast because I think it's fun. So my goal is to make enough on the farm and the podcast and doing whatever just enough so I can have my own little place on the farm and the podcast just so I'm pretty much self-sufficient.

I'd like to be able to grow my own food enough that I don't have to pay for that expense and that's so far my goal and it's not too much more detailed than that. So I'm wondering what else could I be doing to be more financially safe. So I'll give you a framework that you might find to be useful and one of the challenges with finance is if you don't have a framework, you don't have anything on which you can hang your ideas.

The reality is financial planning is very repetitive but people don't recognize it because they don't have a framework. In essence, there are essentially five things that you can control and these are the only five things that you can control with regard to your personal financial planning. The first three are what most people think about and these first three are mandatory.

The fourth one is also mandatory but most people don't think about it and the fifth one is kind of optional but it's where all the good stuff is. So when you are born, you have no financial capital. It's possible that something was set aside from you. Pretend for a moment nobody gave you a trust fund, nobody established anything for you.

So you have no money. You have no financial capital. But what you have is human capital. So because you are simply alive, you have a certain amount of human capital that is yours and that human capital has a couple of different aspects to it. There could be just simply something like your health.

That's innate to you, the level of health that you have, the level of energy that you have, the physical strength that you have or the emotional strength, any skills that you have or ability, talents or just natural intelligence. That's the human capital that you have and there are other aspects to it.

That's just what comes to mind right off the bat. If you look around you and you look at where you're born, there are also going to be some certain advantages or disadvantages that are external to you that you can't really control. So for example, the geography that you live in.

Where in the world do you live? Do you live in the United States of America or do you live in Kazakhstan? The physical geography of – actually as a farmer, you would think a lot about this. Do I live on the high plains desert or do I live in a fertile valley?

Do I live here in Florida? Do I live on the flat grasslands or do I live up on the Rocky Mountains somewhere? That's going to factor into what you do. There are also things like the economic system that you're born into or your family environment. Just very practically, our family, there are certain advantages or disadvantages that we might have as our family.

We can't control these things. Maybe our parents are wonderful, connected, successful, loving, caring, socially upward people. Or maybe they're alcoholics who get blind drunk every day and beat us. We can't control that. That's an external factor. Or the network that we naturally have or the time period in history in which we're born.

There's a big difference for you and me being alive in 2015 than if we were alive in 1915. There's a massive difference. We can't control those things. So we have all of these external factors. And then you have in addition to those external factors like geography and family, you also have just some innate personal factors and aspects of your character.

Things like your physical strength, your appearance. Are you good-looking or are you not good-looking? Your personality, any innate abilities or skills that you have or genetic advantages, any inborn talents or levels of intelligence. So you start with looking at those things and saying, "Okay, what do I have?" And you look at your resources.

What are the opportunities? What is my environment around me? Who are my contacts? What are my skills? What are my natural inclinations? What are those things that I usually am inclined towards? And you look at those resources in the same way from a farming perspective. You want to look at the land and yaks are going to need different resources than pigs.

They're going to need different resources than chickens. You need to look and say, "What does the land actually have? What is the land suited for?" So we begin by turning our human capital into financial capital. So earning money. All that means is taking our energy and applying it to earning money.

And there are two ways to do that. You either get a job and that job pays you wages or you start a business and that business gives you profits. That's it. Everything falls into that. So now you have income and you've created financial capital. Now, that is something that you can control because money and income is what drives every aspect of a financial plan.

Now, when that income comes in, you have a choice and you say, "Am I going to consume this income or am I going to save this income for consumption at a later date?" And we all have that choice every day. You have the choice of, "I have a dollar.

Am I going to consume it or save it so that I can do something with it tomorrow?" And the ratio that we get into is going to make a big difference. So, for example, the first thing that matters is how big is that income. And that's the first thing of the five that you control.

I'm going to just give you all five and I'll pause in a moment lest I go on too much without answering questions. But let's start with the first one. So the first thing you control is your income. How big is your income or how little is your income? And you always want to be focusing on increasing income.

And the cool thing is there are so many, many, many ways to increase income that if you just simply think, "How do I increase income?" you can come up with ways. You can increase income in farming. You can in architecture. You can increase income in podcasting. It's just a matter of figuring out how do I increase income.

And that's the first one. Any questions so far? Does that make sense conceptually? Yeah, it makes sense to me. Yeah, I'm definitely--I have done some of that looking at what I have as a resources on the farm with myself. And I am working to use my human capital to make money, right?

As you're saying, yeah, I think that's--I'm following it and it makes sense to me. Right. So that's where we start. You transform the human capital and energy through work that you have into money. Now, when that money--then that comes in, and again, some of it is consumed and some of it is saved.

The consumption is called expenses. And so this is the second thing that you control. How big are your expenses? Are they little or are they big? Or are they super big? If your expenses are more than your income, that's a problem. If your expenses are less than your income, that's good because it allows for surplus.

And so step one is increase income. Number two is expenses. Decrease expenses. That's the key to wealth. And then that creates surplus. And with that surplus, then we say, "What rate of return do we earn on that surplus?" That's the key. And so we're always looking to say, "What's the best investment for this surplus in a way and how can I invest it in a way that fits my life goals?" So different ways that this could be applied.

You invest this year $5,000 plus a bunch of work and energy, and you create at the end of the year a profit of $10,000 on your farming enterprise. And so now you've got $10,000 sitting there and you've got a choice. What do I do with this $10,000? You could take it and you could spend all of it on a trip around the world.

That would be a consumption. Or you could take it and spend it on a trip around the world and say, "My goal for this is this is actually an investment because what I'm going to try to do is I'm going to enhance my human capital." So if you're continuing to work in farming and maybe you're into philosophy or literature or history, so you might say, "I want to enhance my knowledge, but for me, let's stick with farming because it makes my metaphor easier." You could take the same $10,000 and you could say, "I'm going to go ahead and spend this over the next year by going and interning with the leading farmers of the world from every major discipline and movement that I can find.

So I'm going to go and intern with the permaculture people. I'm going to go and intern with the mainstream big ag people. I'm going to go and intern with – I'm struggling for categories, but you figure out who are the leaders in my space. Who is the best yak farmer in the world?

Who is the best pig farmer in the world? You go and intern with them and use those expenses. Well, now you're investing the surplus into your human capital so that it will drive more income in the future. That can be a good investment or you might just consume it.

We're always having that choice between how much should I consume, how much should I invest. If you are always thinking about that, then you'll always be making good choices. The more that you invest at an early age, let's say that – I'm most familiar. I don't know what type of agriculture you do, but I'm most familiar with the permaculture people, the grass-fed, free-range people, the rotational grazing, all these modern, natural, organic type of methods.

So let's say you figure out and you make a list of the 15 leaders in the field. So whether that's – who is it here in the States? Like Greg Judy with his cows or Mark Shepard up in Wisconsin or Joel Salatin in Virginia, these are just kind of the famous people.

Or Jeff Lawton in Australia or Alan Savory in Africa. You say, "Here is my list of 15. I want to know these 15 people." And you focus intensely on reading every book that they've written, studying everything that they've done. You're getting them for – calling them for interviews on your podcast.

You're showing up and you're interning and volunteering on their farms. Well, that's going to dramatically transform the network and the opportunities that you have for your farming business. And so now you can go from – I don't know. How many animals do you have right now? I've got six yaks and ten pigs.

OK. So now you go from a herd of under 20 to a herd of 40 or 50 that you're managing. And now you're building up national consulting because you are now the expert in yak and pig raising. And now you're building up consulting contracts all around your state where you're helping other young farmers get started.

You're building out a career where you're investing and you have a broad network. You have an international network and you're connecting people. And now you get to the point where, yes, you continue to maintain your own herd. But you transform yourself to where you can come in and you can come in and be paid a thousand bucks in a day for your consulting expertise to come in and identify.

These are the major ways that Joe or Sally down the road, another 14-year-old interested young farmer, can dramatically enhance their returns and their profit. And so – and you could do this. That's just the example I made up off the top of my head. But you could do this in any industry.

And so you're investing the surplus back into your human capital to build your income which makes you more valuable because you're going to be paid exactly what you're worth. The reason why people make a million dollars a year is because they're worth far in excess. They're worth a million dollars a year because someone else is making a lot of money on what they're doing.

And so all you got to do is figure out what are the systems and the patterns and what's the plan for this specific industry, whatever that industry is that you're interested in, and then set about applying yourself to it and transforming yourself into an expert in your field, grows your income.

That way you can grow your lifestyle which is ultimately one of the things that we're trying to do. We're trying to enjoy a nice lifestyle but also concurrently always investing back into your income. >> Yeah, okay. Yeah. That totally makes sense to me. I'm really digging it. And I see some opportunities where I can do that sort of thing.

I live right next to some of the leading people in the biodynamic farming industry. >> Awesome. Awesome. Perfect. >> And my goal is to be the first yak dairy, yak commercial dairy in the United States so I would have that national recognition as well. So yeah, I'm really enjoying this.

I really think this is cool. But I think I kind of – I see where I can use this myself but maybe somebody with different goals, how would you think that would go? Like say I want to go to school and become a lawyer. How would I do that in the best way that I could?

If that's specific enough. >> Right. The goals don't matter. The only thing that – because these things are universal. We all need to create income. We all need to invest that income wisely. We're all going to have expenses, and we're all going to need to invest that income wisely, and you control those three things.

What happens is most people don't think about this. And so they think about it subconsciously. So for example, school, college. Historically, over the last hundred years in this country, we have developed this idea that college is going to be the way that you sign your golden ticket into a cushy, wealthy life.

That's the general perception that most people in society have. It's changing a little bit but still that's the general perception. Now, why? Most people don't understand the underlying theme. The reason is because historically college is intended to be an enhancement of your human capital. When you go into college, you are supposed to know a certain amount, and when you come out of college, you're supposed to know a whole lot more, which is supposed to be in skills that are valuable to the marketplace.

And so there's an expense or an investment rather. There's an investment required for a college degree, an investment of time and money for tuition and the time to study. And then the idea is that we're enhancing our human capital. So people already do what I'm saying you should do naturally.

They already know it. It's just not identified. And what I'm saying is just identify it and recognize that here's what I need to do. Now, the key is once you understand the first three parts of the framework, income, expenses, and intelligent investment of the surplus. Once you understand those first three keys, you need to look and say, "Well, what can I do that's going to make a bigger difference?" So let's stick with income.

The higher the income, the better. Something is that. So if we're talking about building wealth, then we want to pursue the higher the income, the better. And I'll come back and show where because people would say, "Well, no, it's not. It's got to be in line with your goals." But in general, the more income you make, the richer you can be and the more wealth you can build.

Another one, the more years of income, the better. So the longer you've been earning, that's better. So if you can start at 16 instead of waiting until 25, that makes a huge difference in how much money you can have over time. Another one that's true, kind of a corollary of income is the higher the rate of increase over time in your income, the better.

So if you put two people side by side and one of them starts at $40,000 a year and one of them starts at $40,000 a year and the other starts at $50,000, and they both work over a 40-year career, the one who starts at $50,000 is going to make dramatically more than the one who starts at $40,000 because of the higher starting income.

The more years of earning, the better. So if you start at 16 and I start at 26 and you've got 10 years of a jumpstart, you're going to make a much higher rate amount of income. And then if you increase your income at 10% per year and I increase mine at 3% per year, you're going to earn millions and millions more dollars than I do.

So what I'm saying is recognize that, understand it, and apply it. So as an attorney, I would say, "Why am I going to be an attorney?" Okay, I'm going to be an attorney because I love law. Great. That's actually number five, which we'll get to in the framework. But if I'm going to law school, then what I need to do is I need to get through law school as quickly as I can and I need to do it as early as I can and I need to do it for as little money as I can in order to achieve the required outcomes.

And so you just apply. I want to keep the cost low. I want to get the return out high and I want to apply myself and enhance my human capital. So I don't care whether it's farming. I don't care whether it's law. I don't care whether it's podcasting. We all have our own unique things in our industry that we need to learn and to apply to.

So you need to recognize them. And by the way, I don't want to take your interview too long, but I can give you a formula on income that years ago I learned from Brian Tracy and it changed my life. Basically how to increase your income by a thousand percent every ten years.

It completely changed my life as far as my game plan to run on with regard to my income. Yeah, I'd love to hear it. I've got plenty of time. All right, feel free to cut this or split this out as you like. I learned this from Brian Tracy. It's not original with me, although I've modified it a little bit in my telling of it.

But Brian Tracy made the point years ago. He said you should have a goal of increasing your income by a thousand percent every ten years. And you say, "Man, how can you do that?" So if I'm earning $40,000 today, how can I earn $400,000 ten years from now? Or I don't know how much you're making with your yak business, but let's say I made $10,000 of profit this year.

How do I make $100,000 of profit ten years from now? And what he taught me was he taught me that if you will increase your effectiveness and your value by a thousand percent in the next ten years, then your income will follow along. Because what happens is we often get it wrong.

Oftentimes we go and we want to demand to make more money. But when I go into our boss and say, "Boss, give me a raise," and the boss says, "Why?" "Well, I need one and then I'll work harder." That's the wrong approach. We need to work harder, deliver more value, and then the boss will give us a raise.

Same thing. That's why I like business. I love that you're running a business. You don't go to your customers and simply say, "Hey, pay me more money." You say, "Here, I've enhanced the value. Whether my meat is better or my milk is better or whatever it is that's better, I've enhanced the value.

And so therefore my product is worth more money." And so you've got to create the value first. So the way to increase your income by a thousand percent or by ten times more than what you're earning today is to increase your value by a thousand percent. And I like that because I can't really control the income of what other people choose to pay me but I can control my value.

And I'll tell you this. The cool thing about a market economy is you will be paid what you're worth and if you're not being paid what you're worth, someone else will find you, recognize what you're worth, and will pay you what you're worth. Because there's this constant competition and there's a competition among employers for employees.

And I never recognized this when I was younger but the most difficult thing that business people have to do is to find great employees. So if you don't have a business, if you do, great, then your job is to find great customers that value what you do. But if you're looking for a job, the hardest thing that a business owner has to do is to find a great employee.

So become a great employee and then you've written your ticket. So I'll continue with a thousand percent formula. The key is if you can become one-tenth of one percent better every single day, then over time those numbers compound hugely. One-tenth of one percent better every day, five days per week equals one-half of one percent better every week.

If you can become one-half of one percent better every week, then that means every month you'll become two percent better and more effective at what you do. If you're two percent more effective every month, then you'll be 24 percent more effective every year. And if you compound that out, it comes out to about a thousand percent after ten years.

But the key is just focus on the one-tenth of one percent better every day. And so what Brian Tracy taught me is he said number one starts with reading. So every day, every single day, you've got to read from 30 to 60 minutes in your field. While you're reading, you need to be taking notes and looking for ideas that you can apply to your situation.

Now, depending on what field you're in, that's going to drive the content that you're reading and also depending on what you're trying to assess. So maybe it might be that you have a need to get more effective at understanding the biology of the yak. So you're going to spend your time ordering away to Tibet and trying to get the Tibetan manuals on how to take care of yaks.

It may be that you're struggling with your business management skills and you need to sit down and read a book on accounting and you've got to figure out your accounting system because there's just waste in your system. But the point is you need to be reading about something that you need and looking for ideas to apply to your field.

If you read for 30 to 60 minutes a day at the average rate of speed that the average American reads, you'll read on average about a book a week. If you read on average about a book a week every week, you'll read on average about 50 books a year.

If you read on average 50 books a year in the next 10 years, you'll read 500 books looking and searching for ideas that are helpful to you and you'll apply them to your business or to your job. In our modern world, nobody reads. It is absurdly easy with just that one thing to completely differentiate yourself from everyone else in your field.

Within the course of probably a year because you've read 50 books on something but no less than two or three years and most definitely in 10 years, you will be the world's expert on what you do. There will be very few people in the world who know more than you do and as such, even just on that basis, you're able to command a higher wage from the world because you're the world's expert.

Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I see where I should be doing a little bit more to become an expert in especially yak farming and anything else because yak farming is a very small niche and it's very easy to get on top of that, I think.

So yeah, I understand and I like that. And just remember this. People often confuse schooling and education and they think that school is about education and that to get an education, you have to go to school. Purpose of school was never education. From the beginning, school has never been about education.

It's been about school and I'll let Brett fight that war with you or educate you on that more than me. But the point is you must have an education. Schooling is optional. Education is not. At least it's not for success. Just because you go to school or don't go to school, that in my mind is a very unimportant thing.

But if you are not educated, you got a world of hurt coming because the world is getting faster and faster. The competition is getting tougher and tougher and you've got to be well educated. And if you think about this, the average master's degree program for a master's degree in college requires the student to read about 30 to 50 books and write a dissertation.

Well, you are reading 50 books per year so you're getting the equivalent of a new master's degree in knowledge every single year. That's traumatic over time. But I'll boogie on to step two. Step two is this one's the one that most people know about is learn while you drive.

That's the key. And this one, the speakers for years have been talking about this and it's never been easier than it is today with the world of podcasting. I used to spend thousands of dollars on audio programs. I had a – years ago, I was driving a 1993 Honda Accord with over 300,000 miles on it when I sold it.

And I had a friend of mine that was asked to borrow a CD and this friend was into personal development and improving their skill and their effectiveness. And I pulled my binder of audio programs out of the back of the car. And he, knowing what that stuff costs, he said, "This binder is worth more than your car is as far as what I spent." I said, "Yeah.

I know where to invest my money. A car is stupid. It just destroys my money. All it does is steal money from my pocket. Yeah, I need it to get around but it steals money from my pocket. This stuff prints money for me because it gives me ideas. It gives me inspiration.

It gives me motivation. It gives me education." So when you drive, be learning something. And whether that's the yak farming – I don't know what language they speak in Tibet. But whether it's the Tibetan language so you can go over and talk to the 92-year-old world's expert and interview him on camera for your yak farming website.

Spend that time doing something productive and you don't always have to do it. I'm not a total nerd. Maybe if you want to listen to music on Saturday afternoon while you're cruising with the windows down, fine. But the rest of the time, be learning because the average American who lives in metro area spends the same amount of time in their car as the average college student spends in class.

So just study and you've got the world of education free at your fingertips with podcasts. I mean again, I teach master's degree level financial planning every day on my show. And so like that right there is all some people need to get rich. So study while you – or speak while – excuse me.

Listen while you drive. Now, here's where I divert – well, go ahead and give step three of Tracy. Tracy gives five steps. I'll just give my own take on the steps. But I'll say step four is need to go to industry conferences, whatever the conferences are that are in your field.

And this is tremendously important especially as the world becomes more and more fragmented and more and more localized. There's kind of a concurrent movement towards localization and towards centralization depending on which aspect of our society that you look at. But industry conferences are incredibly important, and I think that on average we should be going to a minimum of two, ideally four or five every year.

So for someone like you, if there's a biodynamic conference, you need to be there. If there's a yak farmers conference of the world, you need to be there. If there's a permaculture conference, you need to be there. If there's a local organic milk conference, you need to be there because what happens is, number one, you're getting the cutting edge ideas at a conference.

The people that are invited to speak and to share at a conference are the ones who are leaders in their field. And if it costs you $2,000 and you have to sell your car and go to the conference, it's more valuable than the car because you're going to hear the cutting edge ideas.

You're going to get tuned in and most importantly, you're going to meet the people that are there at the conference. And the people that are there at the conference are not the normal, boring, lazy, not very motivated people. They're people who are giving up their weekend to go to a conference on a topic that they're interested in.

These are motivated people who are going to be, whether they are now or not, the leaders in the industry. And one of the keys is to know the leaders of the industry before they become leaders of the industry. So go to the conferences. That's so, so important. And whatever the thing is that you need help with, if it's how do I manage my herd, go to that.

If it's how do I structure my day, go to that. If it's how do I run my books, go to that and figure that out. And you can do some of them virtually. You can learn the information virtually. When I go to a conference, I'm not saying this is right for everyone, but what I practically end up doing is I pretty much skip most of the sessions, stand out in the hallway, spend time meeting people, and then I just listen to all the sessions after the fact while I'm driving around in my car.

That way I get both benefits. I can listen to all the presentations while I'm driving around, but I can meet all the people that are there out in the hallway and build that. That's step three. Step four, you're doing a lot of work already. You might as well publish your work and share it.

I think you've got to have a website or an online presence that is specifically focused on what makes you different. For you, Nick, you had better have, and I looked briefly at your podcast website, but you need to have yakfarmerofamerica.com and that's Nick Hazleton's website. If you're going to go through all the work of reading 50 books a year and taking notes on them and highlighting the things that you need to apply, you might as well go the extra work of writing an article or two per year as part of your process of becoming a noted expert.

If you don't have an online presence in today's world, you don't exist. That's how you found me, was through my website. That was the first thing I did. I'm going to go talk with Nick. I pull up Nick's website and look at it. You need to be focusing and forcing yourself to write down what you're learning and to help other people because the whole point of written communication is that you're helping other people by synthesizing what you've learned.

Because other people have written books that you're reading, synthesizing what they've learned, you're standing on the shoulder of giants. That's how progress has moved forward. We stand on the shoulders of those who've gone before. We take their ideas, we adjust them, we modify them, and we teach them to other people.

We short-circuit the learning process of other people. Think about if today you had to sit down and design a 747. You'd have no idea. But if I gave you how to do that and if I didn't give you any books, you'd probably never in your life achieve it, even knowing that it's possible.

But if I just gave you all the books in about a decade, you could go through and you could sit down and read the books on aerodynamics and flight systems and electronic controls and what works and what doesn't. And you probably at the end of a decade of focused study could sit down and design a 747.

Why do I say that? Well, we send an engineer to school. They go to engineering school. They get their professional engineer's license. They start a job. They continue studying. It probably takes about a decade or two, and they can design – they're being part of the team at least of designing the next Boeing whatever 7 something 7 it is.

So you should be helping other people out. This does a couple things. Number one, it forces you to record and chronicle what you've learned. Number two, it establishes your reputation and your presence as a leader in your field. And it's just a valuable process for you to be able to synthesize and clarify your thoughts.

So that's step four. And then step five of my plan – and Tracy, again, his is a different – here's my step five. Step five is if you're going to go through all the work of reading all those books and listening to all those stuff and writing all those essays – after all, it's a lot of work – you might as well learn to speak well while you're at it.

And so if you're not currently skilled in public speaking, start with a local Toastmasters club and become a speaker because here's the deal. You're already going to the conferences. And remember, you're reading 500 books every decade in your field. There's no one at the conference that knows more than you.

And if you can effectively string three or four sentences together and convey some important information for somebody, then why on earth aren't you sitting up there on stage at the industry conference as the noted expert? You've got the web presence. You're an established authority. You know what you're talking about.

You're focused on what you're doing. And thus, you are now the leader in your industry. Now, all that stuff is completely doable, but it's also easy to avoid and to skip and that's what most people do is they don't make any time for it. They don't take any pressure for it.

They just simply do that. But whatever your industry is, you've got to be applying that. And it's very hard for me to imagine any industry in which the number one – if you go and look at income distributions and you study something called the Pareto principle, the 80/20 principle, you see that in any industry, 20% of the people make about 80% of the money.

80% of the people make 20% of the money. But what's interesting is if you look at the 20%, it still applies and you find that about the top 20% of the top 20% make 80% of the money. So it's the top 4% make 80% of the money. And it's interesting.

If you actually run the numbers, it does it again. It does it again and it does it again. The top 20% – and today I think off the top of my head, although I did some analysis on this six months ago or so ago, the top 1% of the world's population controls about half of the world's wealth.

And what's interesting is if you run that 80/20 Pareto analysis through, that's about what you would expect is those numbers. So the key is consistently moving yourself from the bottom 80% to the top 20% and from the bottom 80% of that to the top 20%. And at some point in time, you're probably not going to have much interest in needing to go higher and that's okay.

And so if you don't increase your income by 1,000% every decade for the next 50 years, then that's okay. You can stop after going from 20 to 200 and from 200 to 2 million and from 2 million to 20 million. Then you can stop at 20 million. But there's no reason why in any industry it's not possible over the fullness of a career.

Yeah, I'm really excited about all this information you have. I think it's all brilliant. I really enjoy it and I can definitely see how it can be universally applicable to anything, even not making money. Just the networking idea at least. If your goal is to run for political office, whatever, that's exactly what you need to do.

You need to show up to those things. And then with the gaining the 1,000%, you can transfer that into something else like listeners. So I think those steps are almost, if not completely, universally applicable to pretty much any goal that you have. I think that's absolutely great. I am in the process of applying it to the world of financial media, financial coaching, financial consulting and podcasting.

So I've got 10 years of study in the technical financial topics. I've got years of practice of conveying ideas. But I'm a total novice when it comes to marketing and internet marketing. So I'm in the process of doing it and it's still a little bit ugly because I'm working on it.

And the first thing I focused on was for my show for the last six months is learn how to create an effective, interesting, concise show. And over the last six months, I can go back and I can show you, I can go back and hear the improvement in my ability to articulate my ideas and to be clear and concise and interesting.

And so I've seen that progress. But now for 2015, I've got laid out a variety of key areas of focus. I could pull up my document and show here are all the areas of focus. And one of them is to create a really great show. So I've got to have a great website.

I've got to have a great show and prove the production quality of that show. And so I've got the books lined up. I've got the courses that I'm working my way through. I'm focusing on applying them consistently. I'm going to the industry conferences. This year, there's a conference, New Media Expo.

There's a conference called FinCon, Financial Bloggers Conference. There's a conference called Podcast Movement. So these are all on my calendar. There's a bunch of financial planning conferences. I haven't decided necessarily which ones I'm going to go to because it just depends on the calendar. But I know for sure I'm going to be at the Financial Bloggers Conference, FinCon, and I know for sure I'm going to be at the Podcast Movement Conference and probably going to be at the New Media Expo.

So I've got three of them picked out. Now the other ones depend on those things. I'm working on improving my relationship with my wife and our marriage. We've got a great marriage but I want to make it better. So I'm working my way through and focusing and tracking and writing and considering and doing it.

And I'm applying it to every area of my life that's important to me. I've got a young son. I want to be a world-class father. So I'm spending a lot of time learning about being a father and what it means and how to parent with vision and thinking about what's my vision, what are my goals for my son and looking out and saying, "What do I need to be doing today?

What do I need to be doing differently today?" So this is just a method of thinking. And again, I thank you for the compliment but I stole it all from Brian Tracy and I'm sure he stole it all from whoever it was that he learned it from. He just synthesized it and articulated it for me which helped me.

And now I'm just trying to synthesize it and articulate it for you to help you. But what happens is one of the travesties I see with education is when we're young, we're not taught how to educate ourselves. This is one of my personal beefs. I don't like to go on school rants very much.

But this is what I don't like about schooling is because schooling is something that's done to you. Education can't be done to you. You've got to go out and acquire it. And so the fundamental skill is to know how to acquire the education that you need. And once you reach a certain point, you've got to choose what's important.

So I spend at this point very little time spending with financial planning stuff. I will in the future because I need to stay current. But right now, it's not a priority. I can lecture for weeks just off of what I've already accumulated. But I'm a total novice at the internet world.

So I'm educating myself rapidly and rapidly and rapidly on the knowledge that I need right now to apply to my situation. And so that's the skill of self-learning and the skill of finding out what do I need to know and now how do I apply it here now in my current situation.

>> Absolutely. Yeah. I mean I just don't have any questions I guess. I think this is all – I'm getting excited to go out and do stuff now. >> So let me – since you're young, I'll – and I've been on a roll with kind of – and I hope this content is helpful.

Let me wrap up my five things because I think this will help you and whether or not your listeners ever get to this point in the interview, that's up to them. But at least for you, I want you to have this knowledge. So the first three things that I mentioned, we can increase income, we can cut our expenses, and we can invest wisely.

Now the key is your results will be driven by how extreme you are with your decisions. If you're making $10,000 a year and you increase that to $10,000 to $100,000 a year, if everything else is held constant, you will be able to pile up much more money more quickly than everything else.

On your expenses, let's assume you're earning $100,000 a year. If you're spending $90,000 and you can cut your expenses from $90,000 to $40,000, everything else equal, you will pile up money much more quickly. And then on your investments, if you can increase the rate of return that you get on your investments, then everything else equal, you'll pile up more money.

So the key with financial planning is we just continually rattle around those three things and I have it in my head as a triangle. Income, expenses, surplus, income, expenses, surplus, income, expenses, surplus and we go around and around and around and around and around. And every single financial article that you read, every single financial trick, every single tip hangs its hat somewhere in these five but it probably hangs its hat on those three.

So everything I just gave you, that thousand percent formula, that's all on income. That does nothing with expenses because you know what? If you make a million bucks a year and you spend a million too, you will be broke. It will be a fun lifestyle but you'll be broke.

So you've got to deal with expenses and frugality, frugality, frugality is the cornerstone of wealth building. You got to look and say where am I? If I'm earning $10,000 a year and I'm spending $10,000 a year, it's hard to be able to go from spending 10 to 2 to make a difference.

So there my income in that situation is my low hanging fruit. But if I take my income from 10 to 50 and now I'm spending 50 and I'm making 50, well that's going to be the low hanging fruit. I can easily go from spending 50 to down to 30.

And the key metric that I wish I had and I'm about to do a show on this but I credit, I never understood this even though I can't remember how much time I'd studied investments. But when I was younger, I read all these personal finance books that said save 10% of your income and I dutifully saved 10% of my income because I thought that was the right number.

And that is what if you have a wise older uncle or a father or a mother that gives you advice, they'll say, "Hey, listen Nick, you should save 10 or 15 or 20% of your income." But there is an article and just Google an article called, do a duck duck go search.

I try to avoid Googling things. Do a duck duck go search for an article called The Shockingly Simple Math of Early Retirement. And that's the most clear presentation of it on a blog called Mr. Money Mustache. He's a financial blogger. And what this shows is it shows different savings rates that you can accomplish to be financially independent at a certain amount of time.

And what you look at is if you'll save about 10% of your income, it takes about 45 years for you to be financially independent. If you save 50% of your income, it'll take about 17 and a half years for you to be financially independent. And if you save 75% of your income, it takes about 7 and a half years for you to be financially independent.

If I had known at 18 that that were the case, I would be financially independent today. I didn't know. And that's why I try to tell every 18-year-old and 16-year-old I can. Because when you're younger, you can make a few simple decisions. And if you're 16 years old, and we'll give you till 18 to get your income sorted out, and you start applying some of the stuff I talked about there, and you get to the point where at 18, you're making 50, $100,000 a year just by being a world-class expert and building your businesses and building them in a well-rounded manner.

And you got to figure out how to do that in your specific area. But if you just simply say to yourself, "For the next from 18 to 25, I am going to save 75% of my income," when you arrive at the age of 25, you'll be in a position where you can continue the lifestyle that you've been living for the rest of your life without having to make more money.

And that's a powerful concept. Now whether or not you choose to stop making more money, that's up to you. And chances are you probably won't because I never really have met anybody that does. But it's a totally different scenario to be in at 25 when you are in a position to where you're working because you want to, not because you have to, than to be in a position where you're still just trying to figure out your career.

So check that article out, and that can help you figure out what to do with your expenses. And I'll give you a four and five of my five. So number one, increase income. Number two, cut expenses. Number three, invest wisely. Number four is avoid catastrophe. So if you picture in your mind a triangle that has income at the top, expenses on the right, and invest the surplus on the left, put a big circle over all of that called avoid catastrophe.

And what happens is along the way, you've got to plan for things to go wrong because if something goes wrong, then the whole kind of triangle gets bumped over. And so this is where we've got to think through what can go wrong. And this is going to vary for every one of us.

One thing, you could lose your job, so you plan for that by saving money. Four of your cows could die, so you plan for that by having a diverse herd of diverse genetics and by having saving money. As a farmer, you never eat your seed corn. You might have insurance.

You might need, you avoid, you could have a car accident or you could have a truck accident and now your truck is destroyed, so you need to make sure that you're properly insured. So this is where insurance and basically catastrophe planning comes in. You always think, "What are the risks that I face along the way?" So that's a big circle over top.

And then the last one, number five, is another big circle which I call optimize lifestyle. What I mean is sometimes all income is not created equal. If you have a predilection to where you enjoy working with yaks and hogs and being outside and planting vegetables and being with your animals, you can make 50,000 bucks a year doing that.

But you can also make 50,000 bucks sitting in a cubicle working as a junior programmer. If you're the type of person that likes to be outside and that's of interest to you, make sure that you're not sitting in a cubicle working as a programmer. Now, if you're the kind of person who can't stand the dirt and doesn't like the smell of soggy yak fur, then make sure that you're working as a computer programmer because the reality is you're going to earn the same $50,000.

It's nice if you can do it in a way that's agreeable. So I call that optimize. Optimize your income for what you do. Make sure that you're focusing. You've got a world of possibilities. You could farm anything. So make sure you like farming yaks. Otherwise, you can go and farm buffalo if you like them better.

So optimize your income. Same thing with expenses. You can spend $1,000 a month to rent an apartment in Chicago, Illinois or you can spend $1,000 a month to rent a villa in Aruba. It's the same $1,000 a month. It's going to have the same financial impact in your lifestyle but the reality is you might enjoy the lifestyle in Aruba more or you might enjoy the lifestyle in Chicago more.

So focus on that. Number three is invest wisely. So optimize your investments in a way that's going to make sense for you. I would consider it to be not a wise decision. If I were a 16-year-old yak farmer working on building up my herd, I would not want to all of a sudden say, "Oh, I've got an extra $1,000.

I'm going to go buy Coca-Cola stock." Chances are there's something close to you that you know of that's going to make a better rate of return than Coca-Cola stock, whether that's more animals, whether that's property, whether that's a bigger truck so you can access a market that you don't currently have.

Look for a way to invest wisely or whether that's buying the plane ticket to go to Tibet. That might be a better investment for you than buying Coca-Cola stock. Now on the flip side, for me, I might like buying stocks and I don't really want to own a yak herd.

So for me, it might be wiser for me to invest $1,000 into Coca-Cola stock. So optimize how you're investing and then optimize how you're avoiding catastrophe and make sure that your plans for each catastrophe that you're worried about are as simple and as straightforward and as optimized as possible.

If you apply that thinking, that triangle of income expenses wisely, cover it over with good risk management planning and then you cover all that over with this lens of saying, "How can I optimize this? How can I do this in an agreeable way for me?" It doesn't have to be for everyone else but for me, then over time, with consistent effort, consistent effort, consistent effort, consistent effort, it will have effect and you'll build a massive empire.

I guess that's how I would say it. That's what I wish I knew when I was 16 years old. I'm kind of dumbfounded by all the information. I'm going to have to listen to this maybe even a few times and then start working on doing what I'm doing better because I feel like I've done a lot of the things you've said.

Certainly not all of them in some ways but I'm doing it very slowly and very disorganized. I have the tools to make it more organized and to be able to do it faster. I think that this was super beneficial. Dave: Last tip for you and I appreciate the kind words and I hope it is.

That's why I love doing this because I just love trying to help people work through these things. That's my tip as far as how to organize it. Trust me, this is a lifetime process. I have not done all of these things so-called perfectly. I'm still working on them for myself.

You're going to go in fits and starts and that's normal. Don't feel any pressure of things like I can't do this. I read a lot of books but this last week, I have not read any books because I have been working my tail off trying to get some things done for the show, trying to get some stuff written up for my site and create some products.

This week, I'm not reading books. It doesn't invalidate the idea. It just means that this week, I'm not reading books. I am while I'm working. When I'm doing something that is more repetitive and less creative, I am listening to a seminar on how to be a better internet marketer and how to create more effective, more useful teaching and products for people.

But it's okay to not be doing it all the time. There is no such thing as perfection. But the key is just doing it consistently. The other thing I would love to teach and just get every five-year-old to understand is the importance of compounding. We've often had somebody talk to us about compound interest but we don't really understand what it is.

Here's the challenge I would give to you, Nick, and anybody listening. Go and run what we call the magic penny scenario which is essentially the idea that if I give you a penny and I offer you two scenarios and I say, "Nick, I'll give you a million dollars cash today tax-free or I'll give you this magic penny that doubles in value every day and it's going to double in value every day for the next month.

Which of those do you choose?" Nick Loper: I think I'd actually choose the penny but I'd have to do the math real quick and I can't do the math based on what I've learned. Ted Diller, MD: You're right. You should choose the penny. After this interview, go do the math.

Now here's the math I want you to pay attention to. First, pay attention to what a penny comes out to be at the end of 31 days. It's over 10 million bucks. It's pretty amazing at the end of 31 days. But go and look at how much the penny is worth when you're five days in or when you're 10 days in or when you're 15 days in.

It's worth almost nothing. This is why people give up on the work of investing, investing in themselves, with self-development, investing in anything. It's because when you've got that magic penny that doubles every day and you say, "Wow, this is going to be great," well, if we put a magic penny, the second day it's 2 cents, the third day it's 4 cents, the fourth day it's 8 cents, and the fifth day it's worth 16 cents.

You're not rich. And if you go down to the 10th day and the 15th day and the 20th day, you can't even see the growth. And most people, they get to about the 10th day or the 15th day and they pull out the five bucks and they go spend it on a cheeseburger.

They don't let it grow to be the $10 million. So you've got to do this stuff consistently enough for it to take roots. When I read my first book on financial planning, I didn't understand half of what was in there and I didn't grasp the concepts in a way to articulate them with the framework that I've given you today.

But what I did understand was about two words, but the next book and the next book and the next book and the next book and the next book and the next book and the next book, it starts to build. So if I came today and walked onto your yak farm and said, "Okay," and you walk me around for a visitor's 15-minute tour, I don't actually know anything about yaks.

But after living with them every day for about five years, I'm going to start to know something and I'm going to know them pretty deeply. So the key is to give things enough time with enough consistency that you get the compounding on your side. And at this point, that five-part framework, I've never read that anywhere.

I think it's original with me, although it's not like it's exactly rocket science. It's just me looking at it and saying, "This is how the world works." And so now I look at that and I can hang everything that I've learned in 10 years of studying financial planning into those five things.

And I'm still testing the idea and trying to say, "Is there some way that this could be better? I'm missing anything." But I come at a more mature stage with my knowledge there is my point. So don't give up when you're just getting started, but stay consistent. The other tip of how to apply it, think on paper and pick one thing at a time.

You cannot possibly optimize everything all at once. But what you can do is every day, wake up, pull out a notebook and a sheet of paper and say, "Today, what can I focus on today? What should I focus on today? Or what's my biggest problem?" Or if you just write down, "What's my biggest opportunity to double my income in farming?" And another thing, this is also Brian Tracy.

He's not the only person that I learned from, but I learned a lot from him and I value the work that he did for me years ago. He said, "Just force yourself to write down 30 ideas." So if you say, "If I were in your shoes, I would start with a sheet of paper and I would say, 'How can I double my income this year in farming?' And I would number that paper from 1 to 30.

And I would write down 30 different ideas. The first 8 or 10 come pretty easy. The next 8 or 10 come a little harder. The last 8 or 10 are super difficult. But at the end of it, you force yourself to come up with all kinds of interesting ideas.

So idea number 1 is, "I could double my herd." Idea number 2, "I could double my prices." Idea number 3, "I could partner with a neighbor across the yard and I could teach him how to do this." So idea number 4 is blah, blah, blah, and you go on down the list.

Now at the end of that, sit back and look at that idea and say, "Do I like any of these ideas and do I actually think any of these are good?" If none of them are there, if none of them are good, skip it and go on to the next day to another question.

But what's probably going to be the case is you're probably going to look at that and you're going to say, "Wow, you know what? I would like to double the amount of money that I'm making in farming. And you know what? If I just simply doubled my herd, I've got the customer base that I need.

If I doubled my herd, I doubled my supply and that would help." So the next day, you write down, "How can I double the size of my herd in the next 12 months?" Write down 30 ideas. One of those ideas might be, "I need to rent some land and I need to buy 6 more yaks." So now that leads to the fact that leads to the next day.

How can I find land to rent? Well, I can call all the local neighbors. I can look in the newspaper, etc. Now what you see is, hopefully you see the process. What's happening is you're going from a question of, "How can I double my income?" You're coming up with solutions and what you're ultimately getting to are next actions because there's no next action I can do that's a single discrete action that's going to allow me to double my income next year.

There's no one thing that I could do. But what I can do is I can go to the local sale barn every time there's a sale and I can make sure that I start talking to the older farmers and let them know, "Hey, my name's Nick. I raise yaks.

Listen, do you know of anybody that's got some fallow land? I need a place to graze my yaks and I can't find anybody. Do you know anybody?" That's the next action that I can do. I can reasonably expect, I think that would be a pretty reasonable expectation, that if I did that, if there's a sale once a week at the sale barn and I went there every week for the next eight weeks, I'll bet you at the end of eight weeks the word is going to have gotten out that, "Hey, you know what?

There's this young guy named Nick. He raises yaks. I noticed you've got 15 acres sitting over there. Listen, maybe he wants to graze them there." And you now have an opportunity. You drive over there and you say, "Let me tell you about the benefits of yak poop and how great it is for your land and let me tell you about my rotational grazing and let me tell you about my business practices," and all of a sudden this farmer says, "Man, Nick, this is awesome.

Listen, I'll tell you what. What I want you to do is I want you to go ahead and get your six yaks and graze them on my land, but what I'd love for you to do is I'd like to get into the yak business myself." And I got this other 150 acres over here and I'll tell you what, I don't have a lot of money but I got $100,000.

How many yaks can I buy? And now you're sitting there speechless saying, "What? You have $100,000? Okay, well, let's not start with 100 yaks, but let's start with 12. And what I'd like you to do, Nick, is I'll hire you to be my herd manager and if you'll manage my herd and I'll cut you in, I'll pay you a salary and I'll cut you in on a percentage of our profit together as my business partner, I'll provide the land and I'll buy the yaks because I want to get into this business." And now all of a sudden, the next farmer over is looking over and saying, "That's a pretty good herd." And you're saying, "Hey, listen, I do pigs." And now you've got a joint venture.

And now a year down the road, you've learned from those guys, you've built up a relationship, you interview them on your podcast about what they've learned about farming, you're going all around your community and interviewing everyone you can and learning. Then all of a sudden, you get the great idea.

You're like, "Man, this is the best business in the world. Working for a 16-year-old where I don't have to deal with the stupid child labor laws, this is the best business in the world. All I got to do is just get animals." You sit down and you take two weeks and you sit down at your computer and you write a book, "How to Get Into Farming at 14 Years Old." You put it on the internet, put up a sales page, learn a little bit about internet marketing, you sell it for $29 and all of a sudden, five young men and women all over the world buy your book every day and you're building up an income stream and building up an income stream.

Then you get a call from Roosevelt Elementary, 10 miles away and they invite you in to come and teach the young elementary students what you've done and you show pictures of the yak empire that you've built. It just goes on and on and on and on. I don't know if any of those things are actually going to work in the yak business.

You'll have to figure out what works but that's how wealthy people build. You start with a question, you build a plan, you take a next action, then you assess and you take it one by one by one by one, you think on paper, you take action, you think, action think, action think and over time, it grows to be you can build an empire that way.

I guess that was my wrap up. I hope I didn't overwhelm you but my point is start simple. One question, one sheet of paper, list one to 30, write 30 answers, look at those answers and ask yourself, "Do I want to do any of these?" If so, what's the next question I need to ask?

That's my concise summary of what I just said. >> I'm going to start doing that now. This has been a great show. Thanks for coming on. >> I love this. I had a great time. >> I think this is probably the best show helpful wise that I'll ever put out or that I have put out.

Hopefully, it will get better but I don't know how to really top a lot of this because I'm really excited. I think this is a great show. I'm really glad that I contacted you. >> Sure, man. I love that you're doing a podcast. I think that it's one of the most amazing accessible.

I love that you're doing this show and I love that you're calling me and I'll tell you this, don't ever be scared to call anybody. Because I've got a standing rule. If I possibly can, I take every call and I try to do everything I can to help. I think there are a lot of people like me.

Don't be scared to call every single person that you can. The worst that somebody can say is no. Call all your heroes and interview them on your YAK podcast and you'll learn over time. You learn by doing. That's what I've learned. If you're not good at something, do it a lot until you are good at it.

Podcasting is exactly the same way. I think you're off to an awesome start. I hope this was helpful. >> Yeah, it was and thank you. This has been my education really. I've learned almost as much as I have from school. This might be the 19th episode I've done and it's been great.

What's your website again? >> RadicalPersonalFinance.com. Everything is online at RadicalPersonalFinance.com. If you'd like to listen to my show, anybody who wants to, just go in your app store on your phone and search Radical Personal Finance and my app will pop up and you can do that or I'm also in iTunes and Stitcher if that's where you usually listen to this stuff.

RadicalPersonalFinance.com is my home. >> Cool. That's awesome. Again, thank you and I hope we can do this again sometime. >> Anytime, Nick. Have a great day. >> Yeah, you too. I hope you guys really enjoyed that show. I did. I've been telling you that I've been super excited to put it out and I am and I'm glad that I'm wrapping this up so that I can put it out tonight.

I'm really, really excited about the information that we talked about. I think this is extremely valuable information. I really hope that you guys use this. I'm going to be re-listening to this and taking notes so that I may be able to use these tips a lot better than I would just listening to it twice, once doing the show and then once editing.

This will be the first time I'll actually have planned to re-listen to a show after I edit it because I really think this is an extremely important show. I know I'm being pretty repetitive here, but it really is. I greatly encourage you guys to do the same, not just because it's my podcast and I'm very proud of it, but because of the information that we talked about.

I think that it's just absolutely brilliant. I think you can apply it to anybody's situation. It's not just about finance. Sure, we really focused on how to make money. You don't really need to take that from it. I don't think that most people's goals are to be a millionaire and that they might think that this information doesn't apply to them, but I think it's really the opposite.

I think that it'll be easier for you to implement these tips and strategies into your livelihood to make your life better than if you were trying to do it to make money because I think that you're shooting for a lower goal than if somebody was going to be a millionaire.

My plan is not to be a millionaire. I really don't think that I'm going to make a whole lot of money, but my main goal is to be comfortable in life and be able to put out a show that I really enjoy, that I think really helps people. That's my goal is to have my own farm that I have, that I'm very proud of.

When I work, a lot of the time it isn't to make money. When I work, I work for gratification saying that, "Yeah, I completed that task. That's what motivates me to work on the farm, not because I'm going to make this much money off of it. Otherwise, I would have gotten into something else." But I still see opportunities where I can make a lot of money and I think I will certainly try because like Joshua said earlier, having money really frees up your time.

You don't have to worry about finances and you have the opportunity to do more things. I think that this is a really beneficial show. I rambled a little bit there, but I'm going to wrap this up right now. I really hope you guys enjoyed that. I really did. I'm very excited to release this and can't wait to put out.

I can't wait to start implementing these strategies in my everyday life. I really hope you guys too. I'll be sharing this show quite a bit because I think it is the most important show I've ever done and the most useful show I've ever done. Philosophy is great, but this really applies to your life and I think that we can all use it.

I'm done rambling right now. Thank you guys for listening. Have a good day. Nick Hazleton with the Narco-Yaketynism. With Kroger brand products from Ralphs, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season because Kroger brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices. And with a money back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite.

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