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 be so good that we can’t be ignored. This is a Steve Martin quote, and that good worked hard on his craft in order to build up his skills and it’s skills that will give us the three things that we desire in this world, control over our day, autonomy to choose what have in our day, and creativity to mix our ideas into something new and innovative.
One of my favorite books is by Cal Newport, which is called “Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You” and in the new service economy that we have, skills are very important. I think his book is one of the reasons why I like to accumulate a lot of different skills and then work on them so that I can be so good people can’t ignore me.
I’ve been a financial planner for 5 and a half years now and I say my skills are good, but they could get better. I recently took a managerial finance class and I learned so neat things that I can share with my clients to help them make better decisions.
I need to constantly work on my skills because if I want my clients to do well and have them stick with me, then I constantly have to be showing them the value. And as they get better, then they are going to have different problems for me to solve. Earlier this year, I got my first client with stock options and I had no clue had they worked but I knew people who could help me and then I also researched how they worked. I was able to create a nice little spreadsheet that calculated their value of the stock options and what would be the estimated tax bill for exercising those options. The clients were very happy and now I can use this tool with other folks.
I can also charge my clients a premium for getting this information because I was able to tell them that if they exercised their options next year versus this year, they could avoid jumping into another tax bracket and save a lot of money in taxes. This is what happens with you’re an expert, you’re able to see what is invisible to the amateur and then save them a lot of time and money. So I can charge $300/hr but show people that I can generate at least ten times this amount in value.
If I’m making $150 – $300/hr, then this gives me more control over my day because I don’t have to take every project to make a living, only the ones that I feel would be a good fit. This then gives me more autonomy since I’m only working with people that are a good fit and will take my advice without much resistance, and I have the freedom to actually do what is important for my clients. And then when I’m thinking about solving the problems for my clients, I can come up with creative solutions to solve their problems faster and better. I usually create a lot of spreadsheets.
I love my life now because I don’t have to trade my time for money or work on things that I don’t think are important. I live in Colombia and the cost of living is so low compared to a place like DC. Every day I wake up, is a day that I designed for myself. I either work or play depending on the day. I choose to work a lot because I believe in what I do and by living in Colombia where I can pay for all my monthly expenses in a few days worth of work, it gives me so much freedom in my day to be creative and have the autonomy to choose what I work on next. Of course, not every day is like this but the majority of my month is shaped by what I want to do.
I feel like I’m not wasting it and the way you don’t waste life is by having control, autonomy, and creativity in your day. And the way you get these three things is to be so good that people can’t ignore you so you can charge a premium for your services. And if you can get a 100 people to pay you a $1000 a year, then you made $100,000/yr. Here in Colombia, you only need $25k to live an amazing life. There are many ways to live your perfect life, but it starts with us building up our skills first.
And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, be so good they can’t ignore you. Don’t focus on the outcome at the beginning where you think about the stuff you can have. Just focus on doing the work first and building up your skills. Way too many people are amateurs and when they try to go to the next level, they just fail because they don’t have strong roots and fall over during the first storm. This takes some balance between taking the next leap and waiting until your skills have improved but if you do take the early leap, you can just dust yourself off and then try again but this time with more time on developing your skills. Then keep trying out this cycle you get the control, autonomy, and creativity in your life that it deserves.
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 more wisdom. You can get this offer at growwithjoe.me/journal
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
