In this episode, we discuss how need to be disciplined with our day by focusing on the important stuff and removing the unimportant stuff.
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.
In today’s episode, we are going to talk about how we need to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I feel the institution that prevents this separation of chaff and wheat is our education system.
I’ll start with school though. I hate the way our education system trains us. They just throw a bunch of facts at us and expect us to remember them. I used to follow this model until I started reading books and realizing that I learned a bunch of useless stuff for an exam that I later forgot. I follow the philosophy that good stuff sticks. Now in my MBA, I don’t study, I just go to class and do the homework, and if something sticks out to me, then I put it in my Evernote as something that I should follow-up in the future. I don’t know when in the future, but I know if a situation comes up, then I can go to the place where I can find the information because where to find it.
And if you want to be even faster in your implementation, don’t ask yourself how you can do something, find who can do it. I’m trying to be a generalist and hire a specialist to do the in the weeds stuff. I want to know how the systems work with each other. So I don’t spend that much time studying and I don’t care what grade I get in class. It won’t matter in the future. And this is learning how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
If obtaining more information was required for success, then we would all be billionaires and have six-pack abs. I remember at my last firm, two of my co-workers were discussing how one of their sons wasn’t studying for their exam to memorize all the states and their capitals. I remember saying that seems ridiculous with Google in your pocket, but they just dismissed me saying that’s what he needs to do to be successful in class.
After I heard that, I knew there was no point in arguing with them. I get it, they want to make sure that their kids are successful, and an easy way to do that is just to play the game. But after reading a lot, and starting my own business, you don’t need a lot of that stuff to be successful. And I also read in a book, that when you rely solely on the system, there might come a day where the system doesn’t need you.
And this is what today’s lesson is about, separate what is not important, and keep what is important. To consume wheat, you have to remove the chaff. If you try to eat chaff, it is indigestible. It’s worthless to you, but to farm animals it’s important. A majority of what I learned in school is chaff, and that chaff is important to the education system. That’s how colleges charge so much money and then people end up with over $100k in student loan debt and then end up taking a job that they hate because they have to pay back their student loans.
I’ve taken courses from business owners, and some of their courses that cost me $50 bucks were way more valuable than the $4500 my GI Bill covers. If I had to pay my MBA tuition, I wouldn’t go, and would just read books and hire experts to help me out. My MBA is not worth getting a $100k in debt. But I do have my GI Bill to pay for everything and gives me $900 a month tax-free. That goes pretty far here in Colombia.
To separate the chaff from the wheat, you need to have wisdom. And this is why I like following business owners and reading their books. I recently just finished reading John D. Rockefeller’s biography and he learned a lot about his business on his own by getting a self-education. He didn’t rely on a system to tell him how to create an empire. Now John D. Rockefeller did a lot of shady business practices to limit competition, but you can still learn a lot from him on seeing what is valuable to do and what isn’t. And you learn how to do this well, you’re going to have a lot more control over your life and deal with a lot less nonsense.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, we have to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff. We have to know what is valuable and not valuable to us. And is valuable to me, might not be valuable to you and vice versa. There is a negotiation story where a baker and a bartender are fighting over the last orange. Then after a while of fighting, they start asking questions, and it turns out that the baker just wants the skin for the zest and the bartender wants the orange for the juice. So they end up sharing the orange and everyone gets what they want. This is the same thing you have to do with your life if you want to have less frustration and more joy in your life. So ask questions and then from there, figure out what is valuable and what isn’t valuable.
If you would like to get the journal questions for today’s episode, you can sign-up for my monthly journaling subscription newsletter, where you get daily journal questions Monday through Friday, and as a bonus, you will also get my time management course and my personal development cheat sheet. You can get all this for $13/mo, which is less than the cost of an audible subscription and it’s less work to gain wisdom.
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
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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
