In this episode, we discuss the importance of not living a lie just to protect your ego.
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 the willingness to test one’s beliefs. One of the things that Jeff Bezos looks in his employees is the ability to admit they’re wrong and quickly pivot to the thing that is working.
In life, I’m trying to figure out what are the truths that everyone thinks are lies, and what are the lies that everyone thinks are truths. If I can figure this out before other people, then I can save myself a lot of time and money.
I feel that one lie that everyone thinks is true is buying a home. Buying a home is not for everyone. There are a lot of taxes, fees, maintenance costs, and the amount of time spent on the house that most people are not aware of. I’ve seen a lot of folks as a financial advisor get burnt by their home purchase.
Like with everything, it all depends on what you want out of life and what you’re willing to deal with. If I bought a house and you need to move away for some reason, and you can only rent out your home for what your mortgage is. Then you’re putting a lot of risk on yourself. It only takes one major repair or one month of not receiving rent to put yourself in a major hole.
If you plan to stay in the home for a long period of time and don’t have to make a lot of major repairs, then that is something that could be beneficial. You just have to look at the numbers. It’s not the cause of I need to buy a home because I’m wasting my money on rent.
This is just one case. Right now I don’t want to buy a home because I don’t know where I’m going to be in the future for a long time. There are things with your principles, virtues, and beliefs that are wrong, and you have to be okay with changing them when you discover they are wrong.
There are tons of things in my past that I thought was correct but turned out that it was false. I thought that you had to work out a lot to impress the other sex. That was wrong, you can look good but if your personality sucks, then you’re going to be stuck in the same place but at least your healthier which is a start. I can be upset that I put all this time at the gym, I need to go out and find other skills to help me out. This is why I took improv classes. That class has been amazing for me and being able to communicate with others.
You also don’t want to hold on to something in business for too long. With the Textile Industry in the United States, businesses were being urged that they needed to buy new machines in order to keep up with competition from overseas. So some companies bought new machines and use debt to finance the purchase, but prices kept being push down, and then you had to buy another newer machine to keep up. If this keeps happening, you’ll just go bankrupt down the road because you’re never getting ahead of the debt, you’re just staying stagnant. The best thing is just to quit and move on to something else.
This analogy reminds me of student loans. Now you need a Ph.D. or Masters to compete for some jobs, so you just take on more and more student loan debt that most people won’t get ahead of. Then they become slaves to their situation. Right now you can get online education from MIT where you take all the classes and exams but in the end you won’t get a degree. So how much of our education is just a check in the box versus actually learning skills?
Going after a higher degree can put you back hundreds of thousands of dollars that you might not be able to get back. I feel that in this new economy, you need to focus on putting together a portfolio of work and know-how to market yourself. It doesn’t matter if you’re an artist, a computer programmer, a lawyer, or an office manager. You should have a body of work that says how good you are at your job, and you should know how to put yourself in front of the right people that can give you opportunities. Places like Google don’t look at degrees anymore, they just look at what the person can do. If they can produce good work and don’t have a toxic personality, then they get hired.
Somethings like being a doctor, I can see need an education, but for other things, you just need to focus on building up a portfolio. That’s what I’m doing with Grow With Joe with all these podcasts, blogs, and videos I’m doing. I’m just trying to put together a portfolio that people can see and then trust that I will do a good job for them. I’m so glad that I didn’t take $160k in student loans and went into the Marines instead because that debt would have crushed me. Like I always say, you have to know the deal before you accept the deal, otherwise, you’re going to be taken advantage of.
So be okay with having to change your mind, because it will save you a lot of time and money and those are two things that we should strive not to waste.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, can you be okay with being wrong? You have to let your ego be okay with not being right. We are all wrong about something right now, but when we discover the truth, we need to let go whatever lies that we are holding on to. This will make us better as a person and make society better as a person as well. Holding on to something like racist thoughts is helping no one. So make sure you live the truth as much as possible. Living under any other condition is just a wasteful life.
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.
I have a quiz on my website that grades your inner circle, so if you want to find out if your inner circle is an A, B, C, D, or F, you can take that quiz at growwithjoe.me/quiz
I’m also trying to do a feedback Friday episode, so if you have a question that you would like to have my answer on the air, just e-mail me at [email protected]
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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
