In this episode, we discuss the Ja Ma quote about Monkeys, Bananas, and Money, and how you need to choose the option that will give you the most control over your life in the future.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about this one Jack Ma quote. If you don’t know who Jack Ma is, he is the richest man in China who created Alibaba. He has this interesting quote that hits home to me because I’m starting a business and it goes like this.
“If you put bananas and money in front of monkeys, monkeys will choose bananas because monkeys do not know that money can buy a lot of bananas.
In reality, if you offer a job and business to people, they would choose a job because most people do not know that business can bring more money than wages. Profit is better than wages, for wages can make you a living but profits can bring you a fortune.”
As a kid, I thought you wanted a job because that’s what everybody else was doing. Then I got into the real world and realized that having a job sucks. I think I’m unemployable because I want three things in my job, creativity, control, and autonomy.
I want creativity in my job because I know there is something else that can be implemented in my career to make me better so something in the company to help others out. I also believe that we have to constantly be challenging old ideas because if we don’t, we can be left in the past like so many other businesses and people.
I want control over my day in how I can pick the technology I want to use to what meetings I want to be apart of. When I was in the Marines and Federal Government, and my last job, I was doing things that I didn’t want to be doing because I thought it didn’t really fit me. Now that I run my own business, I have way more control over my activities. I have to work more because I’m in the start-up phase but I’m someone who loves control. I lose motivation pretty quickly if I feel like I have a lack of control.
I crave autonomy as well because I don’t want someone to micro-manage me. I want to be able to be free to choose what I think is correct. I don’t want to be forced to do something I don’t want to do. I know I don’t have all the answers as well and when I have employees in the future, I will give them autonomy to come up with solutions to the problems that we are facing in the company. They might know something better than me and I want to make sure they have the autonomy to bring that solution to the table. At my last job, I wanted to get more into social media and blogging but I was told no. So I created my own firm to start getting into digital marketing.
I feel like digital marketing is the future, and I don’t want to be stuck in the past so I’m going to focus on it one way or another.
To get everything I want, I pretty much need to focus on growing this business. I will also get profits vs a wage. My profits are low now but in the future, I expect them to be a lot higher. This is not easy and there and been a lot of ups and downs over the past four years and I expect more in the future. I have to choose the profits over the bananas aka wages to get control, autonomy, and creativity over my day.
You don’t have to start a business to get control, autonomy, and creativity in your day, you just have to be so good that people can’t ignore you. That is another path but both require mastery in the end. So you’re really going to have to really good if you want to succeed in business or to be a level A employee. You can’t take it easy in both but if you play the game right, you can have more freedom in your life.
So don’t choose the banana, the banana is only a distraction from what is really important. With the banana, you can enjoy it right now, but after it is gone, you’ll be searching for another banana. The same thing with a paycheck, you get it on payday, spend it on your bills and entertainment, then you’re back at your job going through the cycle to get another paycheck. I didn’t enjoy this process because I felt I was limiting my true potential in life and I needed more time to focus on Grow With Joe. There are sacrifices that I had to make to focus on Grow With Joe but I’m fine with them because I know this is required to get the future I want. I’m going after the profits so I can get more bananas and then I can share those bananas with those that need it and hope to teach people to choose profits over bananas.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, monkeys will choose bananas over money because that is all a monkey does. If the monkey knew that it could buy more bananas with money, they would choose the money. So if you want to have more control, autonomy, and creativity over your life, you need to choose profits over a paycheck. This is not an easy journey but it is very rewarding to do so. You could also have a business that pays you $50k a year where you work 80 hour weeks, that’s not a system you should play either unless that is temporary for bigger growth down the line. The key thing is that you need profits. You can also have a very high paying job where you save 30%-40% of it. That’s another path to getting profits.
You are going to want more bananas down the road, so make sure you don’t put yourself in a position where you can only have one banana at a time.
To get a free copy of my book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and just pay for shipping and handling.
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
*Music outro
