In this episode, we discuss the importance of embracing uncertainty and how you should read Spencer Johnson’s book about it.
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 that you can reflect on in your journal so you can grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and have a better career, better relationships, and better personal finances while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.
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.
At the end of today’s podcast episode, I’m going to give you a prompt question to reflect on in your journal. The idea is to take one to five minutes to reflect on today’s lesson and write a minimum of one paragraph on how you can apply the lesson in your life life. You can use an actual journal, a word document like on Google Drive, or your note-taking app like Evernote. The idea is that you’re actually thinking about how to process the information to help you improve your life.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about how the book Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. This is a great and quick book to read to let you know that things will go wrong in your life and it’s up to us to go find out cheese again.
The book is about some mice who find this big slice of cheese that they enjoy for a while and then all of a sudden, the cheese disappears. One of the mice gets upset and doesn’t want to move since they think the cheese will come back one day. Two of the other mice have already left to search for their new cheese and there is one mouse that is one the fence about searching for the missing cheese and ultimately leaves to go find it.
This story is about how things in your life will change and that you just can’t wait for things to get better, you have to go out and make it better for yourself. And sometimes the thing you enjoy will get moldy and you will have to go out and search for new fresher cheese.
When you go search for that cheese, it’s going to be scary. There is a lot of uncertainty since you don’t know how long it will take you to find your new cheese. It might take a little bit of time or it might take a lot longer. The key thing is that you just need to keep moving until you find your piece of cheese.
When you get your piece of cheese then you can rest for a little bit but not for too long because you don’t know when it will be moved again.
After reading this book, it made me realize that I can’t stay too stagnant for too long. I have to continue to work out, keep learning new things, and to try out new ideas. When I first got started a financial advisor, I was a broker-dealer and I kept seeing these things in the news that said my way of business was going away. More people were taking their money out of active managed investment accounts and putting them into passively managed accounts, which is something that my company didn’t offer. Plus a lot fewer people were getting life insurance, and it was just harder and harder to sell to folks. So once I heard about the fee-for-service model, I jumped on that boat.
My last company was established in 1959 and has about 500 financial advisors now in 2019. The association I joined has over 1000 members and has been around since 2013. A lot of people are leaving to broker-dealer model and going to the fee-for-service model because it is more transparent in the fee structure and it can be seen more as a fiduciary model for clients. Plus when I left, my expenses decreased tremendously and I’m happy with what I’m doing. I have to do a lot of different work but it is something that I enjoy.
One of the reasons why I left DC to live in Latin America is that it is so much cheaper to live here and I don’t have to deal with the traffic of DC. I’m also improving my Spanish every day by one percent and I know this skillset will help me tremendously in the future. I see where the future is heading and I’m making sure I’m going to be ready for it. I could have easily just try to stick with my old way of life but because of the book, Who Moved My Cheese? I know that I couldn’t do that. There would come one day where my way life would have been shaken up and I would be struggling. It’s better to struggle a little bit right now when I’m young than to struggle a lot more in the future when I’m older.
It’s scary to do something new but it’s required to have a more stable life in the future. I’m fine because I have a lot of practice in the past with uncertainty with my time in the Marine Corps and what I’m going through right now is not that bad. So when you constantly spend your life going after the cheese, it will still be scary at times but it will be a lot easier to do than starting from scratch. It never gets easier, there is always going to be some type of resistance that will tell you to not go look for your cheese but you need to know to get over those feelings so that you don’t end up starving down the road. For me, I just go to the place that will provide me the most opportunities to succeed. If I always go to a place where I’m provided a lot of opportunities, then I’m giving myself fewer ways to fail in the future. The future is an uncertain place and we just need to build up our skill sets and assets so we don’t become stuck in the future. Plus when you constantly do this, you will get more out of life and will just know that you did all that you could and that’s a good feeling to have.
That’s it for today’s episode, and to summarize it, you have to realize that your cheese is going to be moved. Whatever you’re enjoying today will probably go away sometime in the future, and when that happens you just have to find new cheese. This might be with your job, certain hobbies, and with certain people in your life. Nothing lasts forever, so don’t get too upset when it happens. Just dust yourself off and start searching for the new cheese in your life. If you do this, you will stumble around but at least you won’t fall down and stay down. That not a place where you want to be in life is down and out. So don’t let it happen to you if you can.
So in your journal, ask yourself, do I need to quit something in my life and pursue something else? How can I do that new thing? If the answer is no, then explore somethings in your life that could possibly be different and how you can prepare for those events. They might not happen but if they do, then you’ll be prepared for it. Plus it gives your brain the ability to make a new connection and might cause you to start searching for a new cheese in your life. Just write one to two paragraphs, more if you live to see how possibly your life needs to change. By doing this exercise, you’re just setting your future self up for more success and less disappointment.
Thanks for listening today! 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
Who moved my cheese link
