In life there are the things you know, you don’t know, and the things you don’t know you don’t know. Find out in this episode why it’s so important to understand the things you don’t know, you don’t know.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you 10-minute 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.
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about what you don’t know, you don’t know and you need to know the things you don’t know you don’t know yet. In life there are the things we know, the things we don’t know, and the things we don’t know, that we don’t know. And it is in the area of what we don’t know, that we don’t know are where the real opportunities to succeed. I’ve been a financial planner for the past four years, and it is crucial for you to understand what you don’t, that you don’t know because it can be a $300,000 mistake that you realize that you’re not even doing. Be delaying five years of investing because you have to wait for the perfect time might be reasonable now but when it comes to your personal finances, time is your greatest resource. The power of compound interest is very powerful but it requires you to start as young as possible for it to have a great effect on your retirement accounts. There is a lot of valuable information out there and dabbling in personal finances or some other field can provide you a lot of opportunities.
When I moved from Oregon to DC, it made me realize, there is a lot about stuff that I don’t know and if I can understand it, I can provide myself with opportunities. I love to learn because it allows to expand my horizons and get to know the unknown unknowns. I thought I wanted to become an economics teacher, and this was after going through the Marines, working as an office manager at the Pentagon. I thought that being a college professor was a pretty safe track but then when I went back to school, I realized that college professors are on adjunct teachers and not paid as well as the tenure teachers. You have to go to where the openings are and that might mean South Dakota. I don’t want to have to deal with that winter. Plus they had to deal with a lot of bureaucracy. I saw that position as one like the federal government and I knew it wasn’t for me. I love to be my own boss and I love to have the creativity to do what I want to do. I didn’t get this realization until after seeing a teacher and talking to some folks that were on that track and they were not as excited. I got to learn about what I didn’t know, that I didn’t know and prevent me from making a huge mistake.
I constantly learning from podcasts, books, and youtube videos, and it provides me a lot of great opportunities. On one podcast, they were giving away free tickets to the Heroic Public Speaking conference, and I jumped on that. The conference was amazing and it taught me a lot about the public speaking realm. After that conference, it got me working on my hour-long keynote and I finished it right away. When I go to a conference, I use Evernote to put all my ideas so that I can go back and reference them later. When I went to growth con 3 last February, I had over 150 ideas that I could implement in Grow With Joe. I’m working on some of them now, but I’m at least I have the ideas written down so that I could reference them.
Once you know what it takes to become successful, you realize that it’s simple, but it’s not easy because success requires consistency but at least I know the path. Now I just have to choose if I’m going to follow the path or find a different one. The distance between your dreams and reality is the action you take. As a kid, I knew I wanted to be successful so I wouldn’t have to worry about finances. I grew up in a small town in Oregon and I didn’t see that many opportunities to succeed but then I went into the Marines and that exposed me to a whole new set of things. If you know, you know, if you don’t you don’t. This is why it is important to join groups where you can ask people what is the best option to take. If you don’t know everything you’re getting into, I would recommend that that you reach out to a network like a Facebook group that can give you advice, a friend, or a coach that can give you solid advice. This can prevent a huge mistake like buying a timeshare in Cancun. Give yourself a cool-off period.
Don’t be the person that doesn’t know because that is when you can be taken advantage of. I’ve made $10,000 mistakes with business because I thought something was going to work but it didn’t. I guess I got a $10,000 education but it could have been a $500 mistake. When you’re starting a business, there are going to be so many problems that you’re going to have to solve, and sometimes it’s better just to do something and figure it out as you go. I’ve been grinding for the pass 15 years since my high school graduation trying to figure out what I want to do. So many things I didn’t know, but I’ve made progress because I keep on learning. I just took this marketing course, I realized that marketing is so important. When I was a personal trainer, I thought people would come to me for personal training, but I was wrong. I needed to ask like 20 people if they wanted a complimentary workout and then I would have to convince them on buying a package. Unless you’re in a field with a very limited niche like petroleum engineer, you’re going to need other things like marketing because it’s a competitive market out there and the squeaky wheel always gets the oil. If you’re a petroleum engineer, you will probably need to know other skills if you want to move up the ladder, but at least the pay floor is pretty high.
To help me know stuff, I made sure I read at least books in different fields. Then I listen to about 20 hours of podcasts a week, and then I try to go to two conferences a year so I can interact with other folks. There is going to be a time where an opportunity presents itself, if you’re not aware of it, then it’s going to pass you by. Warren Buffett says that everyone is a card with 10 opportunities on it, the goal should be to get every hole punched, but we need the skills and wisdom to grab that opportunity. Like the Biggie Smalls quote, if you don’t know, now you know.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode.
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