In this six-part series, we discuss the six-way to becoming miserable in life. In this episode, we discuss the first way which is to be unreliable as a person.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
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 financial planning with self-development coaching.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about ways to become miserable. This is going to be a six-part episode because there are many ways you can stay miserable. I got these six ways to become from the book, Poor Charlie’s Almanac by Charlie Munger. If you don’t know who Charlie Munger is, he is Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway, which is a company that is worth over $500 billion dollars. They own shares in Geico, Coca-cola, and a lot of other companies.
I loved reading the book Poor Charlie’s Almanac because it is a book about how to make better decisions. I learned a lot of valuable lessons from this book and one of the interesting sections was when Charlie decided to expand on Johnny Carson’s commencement speech about how to be miserable. In life, it is important to know what to do and not to do. I feel like most people are trying to figure out what to do, but I think you should start with what shouldn’t you do. Once you figure out what you shouldn’t do, then that will give you a lot more freedom in your life.
There are tons of things that I could be doing, but most of those things are things I shouldn’t be at this exact moment. So when you’re thinking about your day, ask yourself, what are the things that I shouldn’t be doing and see how much clarity this will give you.
So by knowing the prescriptions to being miserable, it will tell you what you shouldn’t be doing in life. I know I don’t want to be miserable because life is too short to be miserable by own doing. So over the next six episodes of the Daily Cup of Joe, I’m going to go over the six things you can do to become miserable.
I’m going to start with Charlie’s answers because I feel they are more important and will prevent the other ones. So the first way to become miserable is not to be reliable.
When you’re not reliable a person it is just going to cause a lot of issues in your life. I know I value reliable people because time is too short to deal with people that are going to let you down. I know when I let down people, I feel miserable and I want to make it up to folks for not following-through on my promise.
When you’re unreliable as a person as well, what happens is that people stop to trust you and won’t give you opportunities to succeed. Just imagine if you’re at a job, and there is an opportunity to take on a new project, if you’re unreliable, the boss won’t give you the project. This will then cause you not to get experience, and without that experience you want won’t be able to improve your skills, and without improved skills, you won’t be able to get a better job in the future. Without a better paying job in the future, you might struggle financially, and if you struggle financially, then you’re probably going to have relationship problems and that’s what’s going to keep you miserable.
This is just one of many different scenarios that can be played out by not being reliable and nearly all of them are not good outcomes. If you can’t be reliable enough to go to the doctor or take care of yourself, then that is going to cause problems down the road as well.
So how do we become reliable people? The easiest way to do it is to just do what you say you’re going to do. If you do that, then you should be fine in 90% of situations. What usually happens, is that we say we’re going to do something and then we get distracted by something else or we might not want to face that thing we said we’re going to do.
I remember I would tell my ex-wife stuff that I was going to do like clean the bathroom but I was starting a business at the same time and my time to do other things was limited. I choose to focus on the business instead of things that could happen around the house. I know that I was being unreliable as a husband, but that was one of the things that caused us to get separated. I feel fine now because I’m really enjoying working on Grow With Joe because I believe it can make a difference in the world, but I was a little miserable towards the end of my marriage because I was trying to balance running a business and trying to be a good husband.
So I feel like the best thing for us was to get separated so I could stop being an unreliable husband to her. I feel a lot less stress now because I don’t have to worry about taking someone else and it gives me a lot of time to work on my business. I did feel guilty for working a lot and not being able to provide financially like I wanted to do, and I felt like I was being unreliable to her, but I didn’t want to quit. So when you in a similar situation, you have to ask yourself, which area do you want to be more reliable in, with your relationships or with your work.
I chose my work and I don’t think it is not a bad decision and the decision that you choose will be based on what you deem is important. I want to work on Grow With Joe because there is a lack of financial planning within the Latino Community since less than two percent of financial planners are Latino. So if I don’t do it, then who else will? I don’t see many people out there developing content for the Latino Community and I’m happy with my decision.
So when you’re being unreliable to yourself, that can cause you to become miserable. I left my last financial planning firm because I wasn’t working with the people I wanted to work with. I remember my supervisor told me that I should stop working with Latino folks because they didn’t have the assets. That is true for the most part, and I just agreed with him because I didn’t know of another solution to help me working with that population. But then I heard a financial planning podcast, that there is a subscription model where people pay a monthly fee to have access to a financial planner with two meetings a year. And I fell in love with that model because that is that model that will work with the Latino Community.
There are a lot of Latino professionals who are making more money than their parents ever made and don’t know the language of money. So I want to make sure that they have a way to grow their money so they have more freedom in the future. So I love that I’m being reliable to myself and my goals.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode, to summarize it, if you want to be miserable in life don’t be reliable. Don’t be reliable to others and yourself. It will cause people not to trust you and you won’t be living up to your full potential and then we just will be regretting our choices in the past. But I know I want to be happy now and in the future so I’m going to work on being reliable to myself and others.
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe know Dough.
*Music outro
