In this episode, we discuss how to overcome bad decisions and setbacks so that we can spend more time in growth mode instead of recovery mode.
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 are going to talk about the need to minimize your bad decisions and downfalls. First off, we’re all going to make mistakes and some things are out of our control, but for most things, we can minimize these two things.
When I first started learning about financing planning, I learned that you don’t just want to focus on getting a return, but you also want to focus on minimizing your loses as well. For example, if you’re close to retirement and you have a portfolio of $2 million and there is an economic collapse that causes a 50% loss and now your portfolio is now at $1 million, you don’t need a 50% return to get back to $2 million, you need a 100% return.
The bigger the loss, the great the return is needed to get back to where you were. This also applies to your body. With the quarantine, I haven’t done pull-ups in a while and before I hurt my shoulder, I was doing about 40 pull-ups a day, now I don’t think I could do ten pull-ups and it took me forever to get to 40 pull-ups. I’ve been hurting my shoulder and wrist over and over again so now I’m implementing shoulder rehab exercise in my day to day routine so I minimize the times I get hurt. The longer I can stay healthy, the more things I can do.
When it comes to decisions, a bad decision can set you back. I’ve made some back decisions with investments where my idea didn’t work out but cost me money. When I first started out as a financial planner, I bought two tablets where I could give to potential clients, but I hardly used them but they still cost me money. Now they are sitting in storage collecting dust.
As I’ve been traveling through Latin America, I’ve made bad decisions with my Airbnb, where the internet was too slow to do anything and it was too noisy to record podcasts. These just set me back. This was my first time traveling by myself in Latin America and making bad decisions are going to happen, just make sure if your wrong, it’s not fatal.
This is why it’s important to learn and ask questions so you know the deal before you accept the deal. A bad decision for me that would have been fatal was to choose to continue to work as a federal employee. I was miserable as a federal employee and I know there are many people who chug it out for 40 years so they can have their secure job. I noticed though that I was complaining all the time and I would take mental days off. If that is happening to you know, find something else, or change your current situation.
You can’t get those 40 years back. If I mess up one month in the wrong Airbnb, then it’s not fatal because I can do other things that are true to who I am, like writing and having phone meetings with my clients. I have alternatives. When you have no alternative to your bad decision, then that is fatal. Luckily for us, we can reinvent ourselves at any age. Just look at Susan Boyle the singer. She was 47 when she got her big break on Britain’s Got Talent. She took control of her life and now is living her good life. A bad decision would be accepting what is around her and to continue living her old way of life. Don’t let this happen to you and you’ll live a life with more purpose and sanctification.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, we should strive to minimize bad decisions and our downfalls. This will ensure that we don’t waste too much time and will have greater control over our lives. So before you do something, it’s wise to consult experts before you do something, but you can also spend too much time gathering information before doing something. This is why I say if you can have 60-80% of the information and overall you think things will work out, then you’re probably okay in doing it, and if you’re wrong, then the downfall is not that bad.
Life is not going to be perfect but it can be more perfect if you minimize your bad decisions and downfalls.
So in your journal, ask yourself, what is a decision that you need to make? What are the potential downfalls for doing this thing? What is the outcome of doing this thing? What can you do to minimize your downfall? As a financial planner, I can give people the numbers but sometimes, the numbers can’t measure the intrinsic things like happiness. So take some time to think about your future and see what you need to do to make it recession-proof.
Thanks for listening today! To get a free copy of my audiobook “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and you can download it right there.
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.
*Music outro
