- Big Boyz Comedy Kings is coming to Yamaha Resort and Casino Saturday, December 9th with D.L. Hughley. - That sweater so tight, it look like a snap between the legs. - Cedric the Entertainer. - Once we stop running, I'll find out what it was we was running about. - And Paul Rodriguez.

- What is it about old Mexican men? They could be missing a leg, they still want to get into a fight. - Hosted by my man Eric Blake and a special performance by Mario. Big Boyz Comedy Kings, December 9th at Yamaha Resort and Casino. Tickets can be purchased at AXS.com.

This is a 21 and over event. - Youversation episode number 35. Sponsored by Cross Digital, an internet broadcasting company. If you want help building a live streaming solution for your business, sports team, or website, contact us at crossdig.com. That's crossdig.com. And by Interview Valet. Grow your business by talking directly to your ideal prospects on podcast interviews.

You be the guest, we'll take care of the rest. Visit interviewvalet.com for more details. - Welcome to Youversation, the online training community that inspires productivity and profit. This is the place to get honest answers to your business and communication challenges. We help you connect with your customers and employees, giving you the tools and motivation you need to be more productive and profitable.

And now, your host, Dennis Washington. - Hello, everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Youversation podcast. I'm Dennis Washington. Thank you so much. We are now at episode 35. It's just the time flashes right by. It's fantastic. Really, really appreciate all the kind words, the great reviews on iTunes as well.

Thanks for all the great feedback. Got a wonderful guest for you today. Joshua Sheets is with us. He's host of Radical Personal Finance. It's a top-10 podcast teaching you how to live a rich life now and achieve financial freedom in 10 years or less. He also hosts a podcast called Encouraging Christian Fathers.

Joshua, welcome to the show. Kind of fill us in a little bit more. Tell us about yourself. - I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I came from the background of working as a professional financial advisor, and frankly, Radical Personal Finance is the core of what I do.

Encouraging Christian Fathers is simply a side project. I limited myself on the things that I wanted to talk about on Radical Personal Finance, and I didn't necessarily make it a religious show. And I felt like it would be a bait and switch if I used as a platform for talking about things relating to Christianity.

So that's just a side project that I do for fun. I got frustrated that I couldn't find any good podcasts out there that were specifically targeted to Christian fathers. So I said, "Well, let me go and build it." But Radical Personal Finance came out of another sense of frustration.

I'm picking up on a theme here. - No, that's a strong theme. I love it. - I was a longtime financial advisor and always loved the personal finance world, but I just got so sick and tired of the mainstream financial pundits and the fact that, in my opinion, much of the advice that they gave was wrong.

And finally, I said, "Somebody who actually has a little bit of a technical, academic, professional background in financial planning should jump this chasm over to the world of media." So I gave it a little test start and then I wound up finding that, "Hey, I think this is going to work." So I closed my financial planning firm and launched full-time into Radical Personal Finance on July 1, 2014.

And it's been a wild and bumpy almost two years, but it's been really rewarding. - You bring up, and I kind of want to skip to that part right there near the end where you talked about the bumpiness. Because I think a lot of people, especially the people listening to this podcast, we've all experienced those bumps in the roads.

We all have the best laid plans and things go bump along the way. You're routed, even in the last almost two years now with your podcast, but even before that, what kind of road bumps and speed bumps? I mean, I'm sure you've experienced some like that. Was there one moment that kind of sticks out to you that you really were like, "Wow, the doubt, the fear, am I doing the right thing here by closing up and going down this road with this podcast?" I mean, was there any moment like that for you?

- So, I teach financial planning for a living. And so I should, in theory, I'll leave it to the listener to judge, but I should in theory have a clue of what I'm doing when it comes to money. And the most difficult thing was when I decided to start the show, I had spent six years building a financial planning firm.

And the interesting thing about the business of financial planning is it is the worst short-term business you can ever be in, ever. All of your compensation and profit comes on the back end. But the first years of building a financial planning firm, it's a lot of work and not much money.

And so basically I tell people it takes three years to know if you're going to make it or not, it takes five or six to be stable. And then you only start to really reap the profit after about 10 years because you're just constantly reinvesting into infrastructure, building things back up.

So I had finally, after five years, and the reason I said using five years, five years is when I decided to make the switch, it took me one year to make the extrication plan. So it was total of six years. But after five years of hard work, I had finally built the business to where I could pull back a little bit on the effort level.

I had a decent amount of passive income coming in. I had a stable financial life. I was doing well. I had a stable established client base. Everything was working finally after years of labor. And I was married, had my first baby on the way, and decided to turn all of that in for a launch into a business that has no proven business model, that is notoriously finicky, this new frontier called podcasting.

And I decided to put it all on the line and walk away from everything that was safe and secure. And let me tell you, I mean, I could say numbers, but it doesn't matter. That was an expensive financial decision. But I did it because I saw what my goals were and I knew I had a hunch that it would work.

And I'm so glad that I did. But the whole process has been very, very difficult. I mean, five years into, excuse me, four months into my progress with Radical Personal Finance, I deleted all my iTunes subscribers accidentally right before I was getting ready to launch a membership site. So I had this whole big launch plan and I delete my entire subscriber base due to some error I made.

I've made every mistake in the books, but I just keep going forward and it's been a very rewarding process. You know, you bring up the mistakes and I think everybody at some point experiences some sort of mistake or some sort of problem that unexpected like that. Obviously, some mistakes may have more of an effect on us than others.

But I think what you described is very common among people that I speak with that especially the entrepreneurial spirit, we tend to get very emotional or emotionally attached to our companies, to our visions, to the things that we want to do. And as you pointed out there, and maybe this is something that you touch on frequently with your podcast as well, but it sounds like sometimes we can maybe let our emotions get in the way of good judgment and go after something that may sound good in our own head, but if we don't get it really vetted among close personal friends or advisors or that mastermind group, whatever the case may be, we could really be taking ourselves down kind of a rough road ahead.

I mean, is that kind of what you – it sounds like maybe even you experienced a little bit of that yourself. Yeah, it's – so here's where I'll tie in financial planning to the lesson because this is something I really think is valuable. Because failure and mistakes are inevitable.

They're inevitable. And I don't think that failure is particularly a mark of shame. We're taught that it's a mark of shame, but there's no reason for it to be. One of my favorite most encouraging quotes that I return to often was a quote years ago. Zig Ziglar used to hammer home into my head.

He said, "Failure is an event. It's not a person. You are not a failure. You simply fail. Failure is an event. It's not a person." And when you look at the lives of people who've gone the farthest, you usually find a string of failures littered behind them. And people want to get the success without the failure.

And I'm convinced it's not possible. So it's one thing to accept that intellectually, but it's another thing to accept it emotionally. And it's tough. When I fail at stuff, it's tough. But I'm growing and I'm getting better at it. I look back at the last decade of my life and I see how much stronger I am.

So that said, when I started Radical Personal Finance, I had to ignore the advice of almost everybody around me because very few people understood. From the perspective of actual good business judgment, I don't even recommend what I did to other people to close one successful business in order to start an untested, unproven, complete jump off a cliff.

The reason I had to do it was because as a financial advisor, financial advisors that are licensed with the SEC, you are completely restricted from saying anything interesting or meaningful in public. And so I could not maintain my financial planning licenses and say anything in public. And so I decided, well, I'm going to have to make this switch.

So I couldn't do what I would recommend to most people. If you want to make a transition, do what Michael Masterson calls chicken entrepreneurship. Start something on the side and give it some time and nurse it a little bit and see if it's going to work and make a transition to it.

I couldn't do that. But and nobody believed in the idea. Nobody believed in the concept except my dad and my wife. And even circumstantially, I was facing, I was, you know, again, young family, kid on the way. It was just a, it was a difficult decision. But what I did work to do was to say, well, how can I mitigate the details of failure?

And that was where what I teach with financial planning is you can recognize that failure is inevitable and you can judge and know, OK, is it inevitable? We never know what we're going to fail at. We know that in time failure is inevitable. So let's make sure that when we do fail, we fail in small manageable ways.

That's risk management. And let's also make sure that we've got backup plans. So to make the transition of going from a financial planning firm to an untested business, I had to leave financial planning. But the way I decided to control for the failure was to go and get another job, something that would be some dead end job that what didn't require me to be emotionally engaged with the future of the enterprise, but rather I just was going and doing a job and coming home.

And I looked around, worked hard to find something that I could do. I thought about selling cars. I thought about delivering pizzas. I actually went and got a job delivering pizzas for a week. Somebody told me you could make 20 bucks an hour doing that. I needed to make about twenty five hundred, three thousand dollars a month just to meet my my monthly cost of living.

And I did it for a week and found out you can't make twenty dollars an hour delivering pizzas. And it was a waste of time. But it was it was fun. I learned a lot from it. But I ultimately wound up get building a part time consulting contract in the financial planning field.

And so what that did was it controlled the risk of failure where I wasn't putting my family's you know, I wouldn't put in my family's future on the line. I wasn't I wasn't betting all of my money on some expensive endeavor. I was just potentially taking a detour with my time.

And that's what I believe is so powerful is by with financial planning. The reason one of the reasons why I do what I do and the thing that I do most effectively is help people make a tangible transition from where they are to what they want to do. And that's where financial planning people think of it as this this theoretical mystical concept.

It's not. It's a matter of the fact that if you don't if you don't have a lot of expenses, I mean, I could I could support my family on twenty five hundred three thousand bucks a month. Well, you can do that delivering pizzas if you want to work enough hours.

So so then I limit that. I limit the impact of failure dramatically, which opens up all of the opportunities. So that that's how I engage with failures is limit the impact, recognize that it's it's going to happen. But let me make sure that when it happens, I don't get wiped out because failure is no problem to come back from.

Athletes get hurt. You know, people, business people, shut certain lines of business failure fail. But if you get completely wiped out, it can be really hard to come back from that. So avoid wipe out risk. I love that. And there are so many things by listening to the podcast.

I mean, there were so many nuggets of great information that Joshua just share with us there. And Joshua, I love your story. There's a little similarity between you and me is there as well, because you having to sever your ties as a financial advisor before you could go into the advice world of a podcast.

Very similar for me because I worked in at a television station in Birmingham, Alabama, before I started my company. And with me, with the company being a content marketing company, the contract I was under in television, I really could not do what I was. I could not start my company without violating my TV contract.

So, you know, there was I experienced that very similar thing of not being able to really start the business and test it and see if it was going to work before quitting my main job. And so I certainly understand that. But I love how you put this. And for everybody listening, one of the big takeaways that I take from this is this idea of when we do fail, because it's not if.

And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, maybe the first time out especially, just don't understand this. But just like baseball players are going to strike out more often than they get a hit, when we do fail, having that backup plan, being able to manage that in small, manageable ways, I absolutely love how you describe that, because that is something that I try to pray and preach to people that especially like college students and young adults that are coming up wanting to start their own business, hey, this is real life here and things are going to happen.

You've got to be prepared for that. And I absolutely love how you describe that. That is fantastic. Let me kind of switch, Joshua, a little bit here about strategy, because obviously the podcast has become a big thing for you. Would you say, well, let me phrase it like this.

A lot of businesses, a lot of people have preached over the years that in order to be successful on the digital side, you've got to first start with a website, you've got to have a blog, so forth, so on. Does that still apply in the year 2016, or are we seeing things like podcasts become just as important or more important on the digital side?

It's not either/or. I think it's a matter of a strategy. When I set out to start Radical Personal Finance, I thought through what I had to offer and what the opportunity was that I perceived in the marketplace. And what I perceived as the white space opportunity was that there wasn't a podcast that was delivering major depth of content, nor a wide breadth of content, and there wasn't a podcast that was delivering a lot of content.

So the reason I home in on those things is because that's what I built Radical Personal Finance. That was my theory. I was looking for a show that I would want to listen to. And I have a strong academic background in financial planning, and so I was looking for a little bit of academics.

But man, I don't want to talk about the tax code every day. That's just horrible. So I wanted a little bit of tax code to make me smarter, but I also wanted something a little bit interesting. I wanted to hear some interesting subjects, not just the same old, same old every day.

So I was looking for variety, and I was also looking for depth. I get so frustrated by the five-minute TV interview. I want to hear what somebody actually thinks. And so my theory was I'm going to build the show that I would want to listen to. And hey, if someone else wants to tune into that, great.

So I've done shows on the lessons we can learn from homeless people and vagabonds. I interview people that live in cars and don't have any money. I interview people who are multimillionaires and talk about what they've learned. I do deep dives on tax planning, on retirement accounts. I talk to people who don't save money.

People who say I try to keep it interesting, and I try to keep it in depth. Now, it is an exhausting process to do that. But that was the opportunity that I saw, and that was what I tried to build my platform on. I've gotten a little distracted on-- rephrase the question you asked me.

That was my intro. I forgot why I got it. I went for that. No, it was a great description. But the idea from a platform perspective, though, because a lot of people-- the whole website and app thing or blog versus some people like, I'm just going to build my business on Facebook and all, or podcasts.

Is there one platform you start with? Yes. Thanks. And I knew it was an important question, and I just-- forgive me. I had gotten a little off track in my mind. So the reason I went into that was that my competitive specialty, I decided, was going to be verbal content, lots of it, in-depth verbal content.

And so I put up the bare minimum website for the first year and a year plus. I just had the standard WordPress-themed website. In retrospect, if I knew what I knew now about the technology, I never would have launched a WordPress site at that stage. And I focused exclusively on the audio content.

I did a lot of mistakes. I never focused on massively improving the email list. I just focused on the audio content. And so my only thing I wanted was for people to connect with the audio and to subscribe to the show on an audio basis. That was my starting point.

And that was-- the reason I did that was because I couldn't do everything. I didn't have the capacity. I had never been a broadcaster. I didn't know what I was doing. And so I said, I'm going to focus exclusively on creating the best and the most audio content that I can, and I'm going to focus on my skills there.

Now on that foundation, that worked. And my show grew a lot. It doesn't mean that everything else wasn't important. It doesn't mean that the website wasn't important. It doesn't mean that Facebook wasn't important. It's just that I couldn't do all those things simultaneously. And so I said, I'm going to focus exclusively on my core skill now.

Now since that time, I've since expanded my capacity. I became much more skillful as a broadcaster. I became much more reliable and consistent with my ability to create the content. And I expanded the financial model, the income behind it, where I could afford to go ahead and hire things.

And so since that time, I've gone ahead and built a really strong website. And I've gone ahead and focused, and I'm still focused, on massively improving all of those other aspects, and to good effect. So I get a much better response now when people look at my website, and they take me for a bigger deal because of the strength and the beauty and the impressiveness of my website.

So it's made a difference. But the problem was, the problem with the advice of you got to do it all is you can't do it all. So you got to pick what can I actually do. And I chose to focus on the podcast platform, the verbal content first. If I were going to do it over again, I would do it exactly that same way.

I would ignore everything else. I mean, I had an extra Twitter account. I shut that down. The Facebook page, not all that big a deal. I just focused on the podcast content. So I say, start with where you're going to compete. I've seen people in the social media space, YouTubers.

If you're going to build it on YouTube, just focus exclusively on YouTube, and then later you can expand out the website. In a perfect world, would you like to have everything ready to go at once? Yes. And if you're a large company, a large business, you have resources, there's no reason not to be excellent in as many areas as possible.

But for me, as poor little old me, I only could be excellent at one thing at a time, and I believe that's a more effective strategy is start with one thing, master it, and then move on. So that whole concept of just deep diving into one area and get really, really, really, really good at that before you branch out is so critical.

And the people that I talk to that are successful, like you, have done exactly that. And I think that's a really big lesson for people listening that may be wanting to start out or starting out their small business, their entrepreneur. Get really good at one thing. Become known for being good at one thing, and then you can branch out from there.

Let me ask you this, Josh. When it comes to now that you've built this out, the podcast is successful, the website is bigger and better and helps and a great asset to that. As far as other social media platforms go, do you use those to help push the primary core focus of the podcast and the website?

And if you do, how do you use social media to get traction? So as far as marketing my brand, what I have learned is that my personal, I use three social media platforms for producing content that's different than consuming. But at the moment, I just use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

I ignore Twitter because I don't enjoy the platform. I don't like it. I think it's pointless. But I do it because it's easy. And we could talk about that if you want to go into it. But I just do it because it's easy. I publish some tweets every now and then.

I enjoy spending time on Instagram. That's the only of the major social, the only networks I spend any time on are YouTube and Instagram. But Facebook is the most important for me as far as connecting with people. And so Facebook is where I have the largest community. Facebook is where people can interact with me in a way that is impactful.

So that's where I focus my time and where I have focused my time is building better marketing through there. Now as far as marketing the show content, there are two aspects to it. Marketing the show content, what I try to do is build everything off of Instagram and use similar content that goes, starts in Instagram, passes through to Facebook where I also do it on Facebook, and then passes through to Twitter automatically.

So that works for me because I enjoy that. And as far as the biggest value of Facebook, however, is engaging with other people, specifically in the group for my show. I have a paid group that I've set up. And that's where I spend my time. I'm using it as basically a forum for me to interact with my listeners.

And that's where I spend the most time on a social network. It's really, really good. And for everybody listening to the podcast today, I mean, the key takeaway there is it's a very – Joshua understands his audience. He understands what works and what doesn't. And once you get that clarity, it's much easier for you to get traction on social media.

If you know who your target audience is, then you can start to identify where they live. But also just understanding what you're passionate about and where you enjoy being because if you don't enjoy being on a platform, your audience is going to – at some point going to notice that as well.

And I think that's a really big takeaway there. Joshua, let me ask you this because most businesses, most people, at some point we interact with someone that, for lack of a better term, is that angry customer, that someone that is reaching out to us and thanks to social media, it's so easy for people to just vent their frustrations without a filter and without thinking about it and sleeping on it.

Is there a strategy that you use to deal with people that vent to you on social media? So I get a good amount of this because of some of the topics that I cover on my show. I don't mind controversy and so I cover subjects that are controversial. I interview people who are tax protesters.

I interview people with strong convictions. We talk about subjects that are uncomfortable in mainstream life and so – and I have opinions that are uncomfortable in mainstream life. And so when I talk about it, I get a lot of feedback. I think that my way of handling that is simple.

Number one, I'm going to be a person and I'm going to be straightforward and honest in all that I do. And so if somebody is angry because I made a mistake, I'm going to acknowledge the mistake and I'm going to fix it. I'm not perfect. None of us are perfect.

We're all going to make mistakes. If I said something that was inappropriate, if I did something that was wrong, then the only standard that I can handle is simply to make it right. And so I believe that the best thing to do is simply to make it right and that the normal people of life will recognize that you're doing that.

Now on the other hand, if I didn't do something that was wrong or I didn't do something that was right, I just – I think in general, just ignore it because the internet has a bunch of – I mean the world has some crazy people in it. But the internet somehow allows the crazy people to come out of the woodwork where there's no filter between them.

And so most people who are rational, reasonable people recognize that and they just simply filter and tune out – they filter and tune things out. And so I don't see any reason to try to control what people say. I believe that – so the world that we live in in 2016 is amazing.

And I love the fact that anybody in the world can establish a platform to communicate with other people. This is the greatest time in human history to be alive for many reasons. But one reason is because of the openness and freedom of speech that is available. This has never been there before and it's accomplishing a dramatic transformation of our society.

It also comes with some difficult things. One of those difficult things is crazy people are given a platform for things. And so I think depending on where you're at, you just move on and ignore it. But I'll tell you, there are certainly some leaders I go to and I go and read other people's Twitter replies.

I go and read their comment sections and whatnot, people who have it far worse than I do just to get a sense of what's going on. I think the reasonable way to handle it is based upon the brand. There's no reason for some brands and some opportunities to have just junk on your page.

And so I certainly do not allow things that are obscene on any of my stuff. But I don't mind a good debate, but I don't allow things that are obscene. And I think a good way to filter it out is by eliminating public comments at some times and moving things into a paid version.

I pay very little attention to what people say about me who aren't paying customers. I pay a lot of attention to the members of my community who are paying customers and I listen to them very carefully. Love that. Great, great advice. All right. So before we wrap up the strategy portion of the podcast here, I do want to ask you, but if someone listening today, let's say they've listened this far and they're like, "You know what?

I mean, the whole podcast thing is great. What Joshua's doing is fantastic. I need to be more involved. I need to – my business, I know I'm not going to grow my business without getting more involved on digital, on website, on podcast," whatever the case may be. What's the first step for them?

What's that first thing that someone needs to do in order to get moving in the right direction? You should never get involved with something that you don't know about. I can't stand the advice of, "Well, you got to be on Facebook." People ask me this all the time. You got to be on Facebook.

Listen, if you don't use Facebook, don't get involved on Facebook. If you want to get involved on Facebook, start just by becoming a user. Don't try to take your marketing message there. What people have often gotten confused on is they've confused the idea of a platform and a tool with the ideas of content and strategy.

A podcast can serve many different functions, but there's no difference in a podcast versus all the things people have done before except that we're simply delivering the content digitally. You could build a very successful local marketing arm for your local real estate business by having a Saturday morning radio station show on the AM radio station.

You can also build a very successful, effective marketing platform for your message by having an answering machine recorded message listed on your Yellow Pages ad. Depending on your business, you probably should be doing both of those things still. What podcasting is, it's simply a way to communicate verbal content in a very inexpensive format.

What I believe will be the future is many people will be using podcasts in an effective way, but it's got to be appropriate to your business. So if I were starting, a simple example, my show Radical Personal Finance is intended to be a large public market show. That's the space that I'm choosing to compete in.

I'm going after the large markets, trying to establish myself as an authority on a broad scale subject. However, if I were running a local community group, I would also have a podcast and I would just simply use it as a way of connecting with the 10 or 15 people in an effective, simple way that connecting with those people with the content that we're trying to distribute and share among ourselves.

And so the podcast is not the benefit. It's just simply the tool that we're using to convey written, excuse me, verbal content. And the same people have effectively used in the past, again, that recorded answering machine line, the radio show, the podcast, and they'll be using whatever it is tomorrow.

But the podcast is a tool that we're using to communicate with the people that we're trying to reach out to. And so the key is to recognize first, what am I doing? And then what skills and attributes do I bring to the table? And how should I get involved with it?

And then the other question you have to ask is, who is the right person to get involved with this? One of my favorite examples, he's a total curmudgeon, but if anybody is familiar with direct response marketing, they'll know this name, but a man named Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy is a copywriting coach and advisor and direct marketing expert who has written and influenced more content in the direct marketing industry than almost anybody else.

But as far as I know, to this day, this was the case a couple of years ago, Dan Kennedy does not have email. He doesn't take phone calls that are not pre-scheduled. The only way that you can communicate with Dan Kennedy is via fax. And as far as I know, that's still the case, but in about 2012, 2013, that was the case because I wanted to contact him.

I had to send him a fax, but he replied to me by fax. Now Dan Kennedy has a massive online presence, but as far as I can tell, he is not the one running it. He is the man who's responsible for the content, but he's not the one running it.

And so what I love about that example is he has chosen to spend his time on where he's most effective and for him to go out and give public information in a Facebook thing and say I'm going to go and troll this Facebook group, he is the world's leading expert in his space.

And if you want to communicate with Dan Kennedy, you must fax him. That's how you do it. But it works and he's sought after and he's made a lot of money doing it. So this idea that somehow the platform is the magic is nonsense. It's you and your message and your content and your strategy and you choose the platform that's going to most effectively serve your purposes and then you adapt over time.

And so you go from writing a, forgive me for going long. It's just that I get frustrated. No, no. This is so great. This is awesome. So, okay. So just to expand it for just a moment. When you look at, for example, the experts industry that I'm a part of, the strategy has never changed.

The most effective people write columns in newspapers, they write books, and now they just simply take that writing and they bring it over to blogging, they bring it over to their Facebook posts, they bring it over to a slightly different format, but it's never changed. It's always been the same.

You wrote brochures and pamphlets in the 1700s. Today you write eBooks and Facebook posts and brochures and pamphlets and you create some YouTube videos and whatever we're doing 30 years from now, there'll be no difference of what you're doing. You're just using a slightly different medium and you're adapting to the medium that's there.

And once you grasp that, I think it allows you to make a much better decision and you're seeing the principles rather than the current tools and tactics, whatever they happen to be. Love that. There's so much gold there. And I love how you put it, the podcast is not the benefit, it's simply the tool that we use to deliver the content.

And as you pointed out, can it be applied to any platform? You know, the platform is not the benefit, it's the content and what you're teaching people and sharing with people and how you're serving them, that's the benefit. And once you stay focused on that, the platforms take care of themselves.

That is fantastic. Joshua, let's move into the success round here. And I've got five questions I want to ask you because as I've been interviewing people, what I've come to understand is there are a lot of similarities among successful people. People that achieve their goals on a regular basis do so in very similar ways with other successful people.

So I always like to kind of see the similarities and maybe the subtle differences as well into how the things you do on a daily, weekly basis to be successful. So the first thing is, the first question is, what do you do each day to avoid distractions and focus on your goals?

You're not going to like this one. I don't follow anyone on social media. And by that I mean, by Facebook feed, I have unfollowed every single person on there. On Twitter, with the exception of about a week ago where I added eight or nine people, I don't follow a single person on Twitter.

The only, and Instagram for months I followed nobody. I recently went ahead and added some more people. But I don't follow anyone on social media. And the reason is it's so easy to get lost in the social media tunnel and you find yourself exploring all kinds of different things.

And so what I have learned to do is for now, at least for this stage, maybe I'll change in the future, but because I have far more work than I have the time to be able to accomplish, I don't want to lose those minutes and wasted passive time. I want to use those minutes in focused effort.

So the only social media platforms that I actually engage with is some I follow people on YouTube and some on Instagram. But beyond that, I follow nobody. And that eliminates those passive rabbit trails from my life. That is, you know, it's funny you brought that up because I think a lot of people do get very distracted with social media and it just, it sucks their time away.

But that's not a bad way of fixing that. I mean, I've heard a lot of people say, well, you just need to block out time on your calendar and only do this for 15 minutes and then move on to something else and block times. But if you unfollow everybody or don't follow anybody, that's just as effective because there's nothing to see when you go there if you're not following anybody.

I love that. Question number two is what is your number one goal right now? My number one goal is to fix my business. And by fix, I mean in this way. When I started the business, I didn't know if I would be able to build an audience. And so I focused exclusively on the front end business.

So the front end revenue of my business is the only revenue that exists. So front end revenue is advertisers and then listener support. I have a tips model using a website called Patreon that people can support me financially in exchange for the work that I do. But I don't have the back end business built.

I don't have all the products, courses, seminars, books, e-books, all that stuff. None of that stuff is built. And I knew that if I simply built an audience, I could build the back end stuff. So I focused on doing the audience first. But at this point, I'm laser focused on fixing the business and building out the back end products.

What are you doing each day to achieve that goal? I am dramatically reducing the things that are on my to do list. So it took a little while, but I've pulled myself out, for example, for me of most of my podcast production process. I've pulled myself out of doing anything on my website.

I'm pulling myself out of a lot of the social media marketing stuff. And so pulling that out so that I can focus on what I do, which is creating the content. And so I've hired a few people. I have a web developer who runs a website. I have a graphic designer who does that.

I have some other people who are helping me volunteering with some of the other back end stuff. And it's taken me a while to be able to put that into play. But now that I've done that, it frees up a lot of time where I can focus on my $10,000 an hour work instead of my $200 an hour work.

Absolutely. It's the key. It absolutely is key to success. What roadblocks or obstacles slow you down from achieving your goal? Emotional variability is my biggest challenge. I go through all of the same daily emotions and ups and downs that a lot of people do. And what I find is I have a tendency to ride the cycles.

And so I work, work, work, work, work, work, work, and then I get a little bit burned out and then pull back, pull back. And so what I'm working to do is to be more proactive and to implement what Dan Sullivan teaches about entrepreneurial time management. Basically the functional difference is this.

In the bureaucratic world, in the corporate world, what we do is we work, work, work, work, work, work, work so that we can justify the free time and justify our vacation. But the problem is in a creative endeavor like I have, I need that creative edge. I need that sense of being fresh and refreshed in order to accomplish things, in order to create.

And so you flip that model in the Dan Sullivan model, you flip it on its head and you first schedule your free time and then you schedule your buffer days so that you have your days where you're going to be dealing with the minutia, dealing with the email, and then you schedule your focus days.

Where on this focus day, the only thing that you do is create this project, do this project. And so that's what I'm working to implement to control those emotional ups and downs. I haven't perfected it yet, but I'm working on it. I love that. I absolutely, because I think a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, you've got a business and you've got clients, you're dealing with people and you almost maybe feel guilty about scheduling even a half of a vacation day or a long weekend or worse, a full week off because you're afraid that people are going to be, "You know, you're not taking care of me.

You're off taking care of yourself and not taking care of me." And, you know, maybe that fear is in our minds, but knowing how important that is to the process of personal growth and business growth, I absolutely love how you describe that. Fifth question, name a resource like Skype, like we're using for this interview today, or something, some sort of digital tool that helps you achieve your goals.

Voice dictation. So one of the things that's so helpful to me is having voice dictation. I have a new, and this is probably the best productivity tool I bought, I don't know, some months ago. I went ahead and bought the newest iPhone 6S Plus. That thing has been worth its weight and, I mean, it's been worth a ton.

As far as the productivity that's allowed me to do, just having a phone that just works well, it's been a tremendous resource for me. One thing that's great about it is its voice dictation works really well. And then also getting and having Dragon naturally speaking on my computer is the other thing.

And voice dictation has often been a frustration for me in the past. If you've tried past versions, it's not been all that good. And you feel like you spend more time correcting it than using it. But at the current iterations of Dragon and at the current iterations of dictation on the phone, it's really good.

And that helps so much, especially with social media, to be able to respond, to write those Facebook posts, et cetera. Voice dictation has made a huge benefit for me. I love that. You know, I remember back in the days when I would call and leave myself a voicemail on my phone at work because I'd be driving down the road and would think of something and I'd be like, "Well, I can't write it down right now." So it was just really easy to call the voicemail.

But now with dictation like that, it's so, so easy. All right. So final question for you today. If money was no problem, what is the one thing you would want to do each day? So I hope this doesn't – I mean, I'm already doing it. And so money is not a problem.

And I'm not saying that in a cavalier sense. I'm simply conveying the reality that money is not a problem. And as a financial advisor, it's something that you have to work with and you have to figure out the constraints of it. But money is generally not the problem. It's usually something else.

So for me, the one thing that I want to do every day is have the ability to linger over breakfast with my family if I want to. Years ago I read a book when I was working in the corporate world called Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It.

And it was a new book at the time and the authors were talking about how the difference between self-autonomy and the corporate lifestyle was that if you – it was how you approach Saturday versus Wednesday. On Saturday, most adults have a list of things they want to get done and they know what's going to be required.

But if they want to sit down and have blueberry pancakes with their kids on Saturday morning, they can do that and then they know they're going to get to their work and they can choose when they want to do their work. And sometimes you choose to linger over blueberry pancakes and you choose to work during kids' nap times or after you put the kids in bed to get your work done.

But the difference between that versus the corporate world was that if you do that on Wednesday morning and if you want to linger with your kids over pancakes, then you've got to come up with some kind of excuse to make that work in your job. Well, sorry, there was traffic or I had an appointment.

Half people wind up lying. And it's ridiculous for an adult to have to lie and just – why can't you just say I lingered over pancakes? And so what I learned – I mean the book was good, it had good thoughts. But what I've learned is that for me, the biggest benefit of entrepreneurship or of anything is having control over your day and having control over the time that you do things.

And so I'm doing now what I would be doing if I had 10 million bucks in the bank. There would be some a few adjustments. I'd probably do a couple fewer shows. I'd probably hire more stuff done and get rid of more of the junk work that I don't love doing.

But you know what? Give me a couple of years and I'll have that done. I'm working on it. But to me, the biggest thing is simply the control over your time and being able to linger over blueberry pancakes if you want to. I love that answer. That is fantastic.

How can people get in touch with you, Joshua? Best way if anyone wants to check out the show, just search the App Store on your phone for Radical Personal Finance. That's where I do the show. I do it probably about three to four episodes a week right now. And it's all about living a rich life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

And then also I do another one that's a hobby. It's called Encouraging Christian Fathers. If there's any men in the audience who are Christian fathers that would be interested, I do that one with my 73-year-old dad. And so it's two fathers that do the show together. 73-year-old father of seven adult children.

That's my dad, ages 30 to 50. And then me, a 30-year-old father of two children, ages eight months and two and a half. And so there's free apps to both of those shows in the App Store. And that's the best way to check out the show. That is great.

We'll get links to those in the show notes for everybody today. Joshua, thank you so much for joining us today. It was a fantastic conversation. My pleasure. Thanks for listening to the Youversation podcast. Youversation is an online training community devoted to inspiring productivity and profit through meaningful conversation. To start growing your communication skills and building lifelong relationships, visit youversation.com today.

Big Boyz Comedy Kings is coming to Yamavai Resort and Casino Saturday, December 9th with D.L. Hughley. That sweater so tight, look like a snot between the legs. Cedric the Entertainer. Once we stopped running, I found out what it was we was running about. And Paul Rodriguez. What is it about old Mexican men?

They could be missing a leg, they still want to get into a fight. Hosted by my man Eric Blake in a special performance by Mario. Big Boyz Comedy Kings, December 9th at Yamavai Resort and Casino. Tickets can be purchased at AXS.com. This is a 21 and over event.