In today’s episode, you’ll get to learn why I choose to focus on growing my mental self and how it can help you out in your pursuit of a better life.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you 10-minute 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.
In today’s episode, I’m going to talk about the importance of working on your mental self. I work on my mental self because I’m trying to make better decisions in my life. I read, listen to podcasts, watch YouTube videos, and go to conferences so I can get information, from that information I am able to determine what I can use for wisdom, with wisdom, I am able to develop strategies and tactics so that I can make better decisions with my life.
I am a big believer that whatever problem that I’m dealing with, there was somebody else that has gone through something similar. I can always make another dollar again, but I can never make another hour again. Once that hour is gone, it’s gone forever. Charlie Munger who is Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway wrote a book called Poor Charlie’s Almanac, which a book about making a decision. How can we make better decisions? Life is not about making great decisions, it’s about minimizing your bad decision. It just takes one bad decision that can wipe out all of your loses.
In Poor Charlie’s Almanac, he discusses the importance of having different mental models to create a lalapalooza effect for making great decisions. It’s not enough to know only one field, like economics because the world doesn’t live in a vacuum. You will need to know psychology, earth sciences, history, business, and other topics. When you have to make a decision, you don’t need to know 100% of the topic, but if you know 90% that’s usually good enough to make a decision that won’t backfire on you.
I also like how learning lets me realize that my ceiling isn’t as low as it seemed to be. One of my favorite books that I’ve read is Chris Gardner’s book the pursuit of happyness, which was turned into a film starring, Will Smith. As an aspiring financial advisor and hearing how Chris Gardner went from being homeless to being worth over $600 million dollars and creates all these foundations to helping out the homeless community in San Francisco. After reading that book, I told myself, if he can do that, I can do that myself. I’m still in the growing phase but reading gives me that growth mindset and that I’m not stuck with what’s in front of me. There is a reason why North Korea doesn’t want its population to learn. By learning you are going to get new ideas and then start questioning, is this reality really the one that I want to have. I left my old financial planning firm because I spent a lot of time researching the financial planning firm by reading articles and listening to podcasts. I realized that I could go out on my own and run the business I want to run on my terms and for less money. I’m excited about the things I’m about to create for Grow With Joe and the impact I can make in my community. This mindset was only obtained by reading.
So the first benefit from working on your mental self is the ability to make better decisions. The second benefit is the ability to innovate. Another great quote is by Pablo Picasso is “Good Artist Copy, Great Artist Steal.” I love taking ideas from different areas and try to figure out how to combine them into something different. There really no new ideas underneath the sun, they are just reorganized to meet today’s audience. I’ve read a lot of self-help books and the ones written a hundred years ago offer the same message as self-help books written today. The only difference is that that have been reorganized that is relevant to today’s audience. So I have no shame when it comes to the content that I put out. I’m never going to say the stuff that I put out is 100% mine, but I use materials from others to serve as a model to help me communicate my message to my audience. I also highly recommend that you check out a Ted Talk by Matt Ridley called When Ideas Have Sex. I’ll put that in the show notes along with a link to Charlie Mungers Book. It costs about $60 but it is worth its weight in gold in the way that it teaches you how to make better decisions.
For me and Grow With Joe, I’m going to combine life coaching with financial planning as a way to help people more because from my experience, just telling people to save money, which is what they need, is not enough. There are beliefs that need to be broken that prevent people from being financially successful. There are not many financial advisors that combine life coaching with financial planning and I feel that is where the industry is heading because the internet makes it so easy for people to get information now. The world is constantly getting more competitive and I have to work on my mental self so that I can keep up.
To help me think creatively, I write 10 new ideas every day. I got this tip from James Altucher. By writing down 10 new ideas every day, it allows me to think of new ideas and see which ideas that I should move forward on. When I do this, people always compliment me on the new ideas that I have. I have come up with a lot of business ideas by doing this exercise for a year and a half. You can also write down ideas for other people and share them with those folks. One of the worst things we can say is “We’ve always done it that way.” and by writing down 10 ideas, we can prevent that scenario.
I love working on my mental self because it opens up opportunities for myself and allows me to take advantage of life so life doesn’t take advantage of me. Hopefully, you start reading and listening to podcasts. If you need a list of how where to get started, just go to my website, growwithjoe.me and click on my top 15 list for my top 15 books, podcasts, and youtube videos.
I want to thank you for listening to today’s episode.
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.
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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.
