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. 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 we shouldn’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive. This is a quote from Elbert Hubbard, an American Writer, and Philosopher from the late 1800s. I don’t know too much about his life but he did write a famous book that many Marines know, which is a Message to Garcia and I would recommend that you read it. But we are going to talk about the quote today. I’ve been studying the Stoic Philosophy for the past three years now and one thing they talk about a lot is death. You don’t know when death is coming, so don’t be wasteful of your life.
When you take life too seriously, then you can be wasteful of your life. If you need everything in your home to be perfect, then you might be taking that task too seriously. As people, we get to choose how we spend our day, but if having your home in a particular way gives you meaning and purpose in life, then go ahead and do it. But since you spend so much time on this activity, you might be missing out on other things in life. You might miss out on hanging with family and friends or doing another hobby that gives you meaning.
Right now, I’m in an MBA program and I’m going to do the least amount of work to pass. I’m not taking my MBA very seriously because I believe there are other important things that I should be doing with my life. Like focusing on working on my books, doing this podcast, and getting more clients for my Grow With Joe Business. When it comes to financial planning and the MBA, there really isn’t any overlap. I learned pretty much everything I need to know for financial planning from a financial planning course I took five years ago and just working with clients for the past five years. An MBA is really for the corporate world and taking your business to the next stage. If I take my MBA too seriously then I’ll be missing out on things I could for my clients. Most of my clients don’t have businesses and to tell them about accounting practices would probably just bore them.
So you have to look at your life and see what you want to take seriously and what you don’t want to take too seriously. There have been points in my life where the weather canceled my flight, and I said okay, this is what’s happening, what should I do next? So I basically told myself I had to get a hotel and just try to enjoy myself in the town I was in. Life happens and I didn’t want to take in this long ass line just to be told that there are no flights available. That’s taking life too seriously, and it would have just wasted two hours of my life. Plus I might not have gotten a close-by hotel because when I checked-in to my hotel in Dallas on my way to Chicago, I was told that all the rooms have been booked. So I’m lucky I made that decision quickly.
Plus when you realize that you won’t make it out of this life alive, you are going to want to put yourself in situations where you’re enjoying life and not stressing about a situation that is out of your control. And that’s what is quote is really about, not stressing out about things out of your control or stressing about the little things that really don’t matter. One hour spent complaining about the weather, is just one more hour your closer to the grave. The weather is what it is, and you either have to deal with it or move to another location with better weather, but then also learn how to live in that new location.
I don’t like to take life too seriously and I feel like I’m living a great life. I’m focusing on what I can control and what I want to do in life, and I just ignore everything else to the best of my ability. There many things that I take seriously like my career and taking care of the planet. I know that I can just control my life and my actions and that’s really all I can do. Doing anything else is just wasteful and will cause me to have regrets down the road.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive. You only have one life to live, and you want to make sure that you’re maximizing your life, not being wasteful of it. And the way you’re going to be wasteful of it is by taking things that are out of your control or don’t really matter, too seriously. This will just cause you to spend valuable time on things that won’t give you a positive impact on your life. You want to have daily growth in your life. This will just give you a richer life down the road. So when you eventually leave the world, it will be with open arms because you did everything with your life that you could.
So in your journal, ask yourself, what are you taking too seriously in your life? What are you giving up by taking this thing too seriously? I used to think that taking a formal education was the right thing to do, but then I started getting self-education and it changed my life and view on what is important. To help you understand what is important and not important, it’s important to get a different experience and to learn new things. So think about this too when you write your answer. Hopefully, this exercise will let you know what are the things you should take serious and what are the items you shouldn’t take seriously.
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]
I’m also on Instagram at Grow With Joe and Facebook just look up Grow With Joe
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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.
