Bautista Planning and Analytics, LLC – Registered Investment Advisor

Tag: Wisdom

  • The Best Time To Plant A Tree As An Investing Strategy

    The Power of Now

    No matter the setback or length of the journey, the best way to get ahead in most cases is to start taking action as soon as possible then make adjustments as more information is revealed or different resources are available.

    I also like to tell people:

    In life, there are the things you know, the things you don’t know, and the things you don’t know that you don’t know. And it’s in the area of what you don’t know that you don’t know, where the real opportunities in life are.

    The more action you take to help you learn what you don’t know, that you don’t know, will help you take advantage of the next opportunity. And if you train early and big enough, it can allow you to coast for the rest of your life.

    The Financial Independence/Retire Early (FI/RE) community is generally about saving as much as possible to hit their retirement goal as fast as possible. Generally, someone needs to save 30 times their annual spending goal in an investment account to reach FI/RE. If you want to spend $50k a year, then $1.5 million is required as a rule of thumb.

    The earlier someone starts this journey, the faster they can hit their goal. If someone doesn’t want to do FI/RE, they should still save up for retirement so something is available in their golden years.

    Here is a classic example of two folks who want to retire at 65. We have Diego and Laura, who are the same age. Laura decided she wanted to start investing as early as possible at the age of 25. She is going to invest $500/mo until she turned 36 then stop. Diego wants to start investing when things settled down. He decided to start investing at age 35 with $500/mo and won’t stop until age 65.

    Most people will assume that Diego will have more money at age 65 because he is investing for 30 years instead of 10 years like Laura, but there is a concept in physics that helps Laura out, which is:

    When Diego starts at 35, Laura would have put away $60,000, but at an average return of 8%, her portfolio balance would be $91,195. After one year of invest at the age of 35, Diego will be at $6,224.96.

    At age 36, Laura, without investing an additional dollar, will be at $98,790.86. This is a $7,317.84 increase in her value from the previous year and now the mass of the account will do most of the work.

    The following year for Laura, at age 37, her portfolio balance is $106,694.12, a $7,903.26 increase in value. Since Laura used her 20s as velocity and contributed $500/mo, in her 30s, she can rely less on velocity and use the mass of the account to help her reach her retirement goals.

    So by the time Laura is 65, her account will be $1,077,367, while Diego’s account will be $755,648. Since Diego started later, he doesn’t benefit from compounded interest like Laura. In finance, there is a concept called the Rule of 72, which gives someone a general idea of many years it will take someone to double their account based on their average rate of return. This scenario had an average return of 8%, so an investment portfolio should generally double in size every nine years.

    Laura has more one more compounding effect than Diego because of when she started, and she has a much larger account that can double when she is in her 60s. If the investment portfolio is at $500k at age 52, it can be $1,000,000 at age 61.

    Having this mass gives Laura more choices for her budget when she is in her 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. Instead of putting $6,000 into an investment account, she can put that money to use in other areas.

    Laura could decide to continue to invest, so she hits retirement faster. She can spend that money on vacations and see parts of the world she always wanted to see. For $6,000, she can probably see two places a year with the right deals. It really comes down to someone’s goals on what they should do.

    Final Takeaways

    The best way to predict the future is to create it, and this happens by having financial, social, and human capital with goals that have an action plan. When you have these resources with the right focus, you can have the freedom to do other things that could be more valuable to you, but they have to be earned.

    I joined the Marines when I was 18 years old, and now I have two bachelor’s degrees in Public Health and Economics, and an MBA, which was all paid for because of my GI Bill and how I created my education plan. These accomplishments required creating goals and then a plan to reach those goals. Some sacrifices had to be made, but now that I’m 35 years old and have less energy, I’m glad I made those investments to give myself the freedom I have now.

    The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but today’s next best time. Putting things off is not an excellent strategy to create a good life generally, but it’s perfectly fine to choose Diego’s method as well. Just make sure it was a thoughtful plan and not something forced upon you. We get to decide what the future can be, but it requires today’s actions to get that future.

    There are people I’ve come across that retired in their 60s but started to run out of money at the age of 72, and they’re not fun conversations to have. So the less I can have these conversations, the better the world will be. So have a plan and figure out a way to increase your assets to have the momentum to reach your goals and not run out of gas.

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  • How To Double Your Results In Life

    One of the best lessons that I learned in life is from the book the 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, where he wrote, “Reality is negotiable.”

    There is a way to get what you want in today’s world, and it usually comes from getting better results from your effort. To negotiate with reality, you need to know the rules of reality and develop a skill set that can help you take advantage of those rules. A big reason why I’m always learning is that I want to take advantage of life, so life doesn’t take advantage of me. With the pandemic, many people are starting to question the reality they had accepted and wonder if life still needs to be like it is.

    Life can be whatever you want to be, but it has to be earned, rarely is it going to be given since the world is not crazy enough to give many under-deserving people everything they want.

    How Results Lead To Wealth

    To get the reality you want, you can either minimize your needs where your current resources cover all those needs, like what is going in the minimalist movement, or you can ensure the results from your effort can give you all the needs you desire.

    To be wealthy is to have discretionary time, and being rich does not mean you’re wealthy. You can be a lawyer making $300k a year, but if you have to work 100 hours to get this lifestyle and deal with important phone calls at 11 pm on a Saturday, this person is just rich but not wealthy. I would argue that a person making $60k but covering all their needs is more wealthy than the person making $300k. Of course, the lawyer will probably have nicer things, but are they actually using them to the full benefit, or are they just sitting idle and taking up space?

    Know the wealthy outcome you want, and then start working backward. A person who works 100 hours per week and makes $300k per year is only making $60/hr. There is plenty of work at $60/hr, but if someone can learn to make $150/hr, instead of working 100 hour weeks, they are doing 40 hours per week to earn the same income.

    It takes more skills to earn $150/hr, but it can be done. It just requires someone to show the value that they are creating for someone.

    When it comes to pricing goods or services, this can be done in three ways.

    • Competitive pricing – pricing based on what the competitors are doing
    • Cost-plus pricing – pricing based on the margin you want to have – item cost $10, so you sell it for $20 and is a 50% margin.
    • Value-based pricing – pricing based on the value that someone is receiving

    The person who works 5000 hours a year and makes $60/hr is pricing their services competitively. They probably can’t demonstrate the value that they are providing to their employer or contractor. So the employer is only looking at this person as an expense in the income statement. They don’t see how this person is contributing to the revenue. People are busy and don’t know if someone is contributing to the value chain. So when value is not understood, people rely on price to determine what they should do.

    How To Show Value

    To demonstrate value with work, it usually comes in three areas.

    • How much can my service lower the expenses?
    • How much time can I save the organization?
    • How much revenue can I earn the organization?

    These metrics are objective rather than subjective, like customer satisfaction. With the right skills, you can turn the subjective into an objective metric to show the value you’re providing.

    If you’re providing a service that will make someone 10% faster in how they do things, which will save the person 15 hours a week, or 60 hours a month, which is the person values their time at $50/hr, then the value increase is $3000 for the month or $36,000 for the year.

    It’s not enough to be an advice-giver. You have to have the expertise to show people how to take advantage of it and not rely solely on you. 

    For the subjective, if someone can increase customer satisfaction by 10%, which results in 10 more sales a day, then this result can be turned into an objective metric that can be measured. It requires documentation of the value provided and then translated into a message the employer or customer can understand.

    To show this value, it will take work, but if you can show how your efforts are contributing to 25% of the revenue, a good rule of thumb is that you should get a third of that. It is not the entire 25% because  the 25% is not entirely your total effort. This usually applies only to direct sales since the sales orders can be tied to your effort and doesn’t require a lot of effort from others in the organization.

    Very few people want to work 100 hours, so you have to understand the life you want to have and what activities it will be filled with. If you’re going to go to every available child event and go on four vacations a year and retire at age 65, then this might only take $125k/yr and working 30 hours a week, then you need to average $86.80/hr, or you need to show that you’re providing $860.80/hr in value to your employer. The details will differ in each situation, but here is the framework for getting the reality you want.

    If you’re making $40/hr and want to your income from $80k to $125k, you don’t want to work more hours at $40/hr but figure out how to get $86/hr for your efforts. Another way to hit this mark is to learn not to trade your time for money and leverage the internet to make sales. If you sell a monthly newsletter at $20/mo, you need to find 521 people willing to buy your newsletter, but with a newsletter, you need to show you’re providing $200 worth of value a month. If there is no way of showing people how they can implement the lessons and it’s up to them to implement, then going for 100x in value provided is a good start. So in this example, you need to show someone can get $2000 in value each month. It just depends on how strong your brand is as a business or person and how you can market the value.

    How To Think About Increasing An Employee Salary

    If entrepreneurship is not your thing, then growing your salary is required and if you want to double your salary, you need to average a 25% salary increase every year.

    Salary Year 0 – $50,000

    Salary Year 1 – $62,500

    Salary Year 2 – $78,125

    Salary Year 3 – $97,656.25

    So you need to learn how to increase your value by 2.08% every month or 0.48% every week. Anything above a 25% growth rate tends to be very unstable, and people cannot keep up with the growth and will either burn out or create something very messy that will fail soon.

    Remember, if you go by the yard, it’s hard, but if you go inch by inch, it’s a cinch.

    If you’re going for subscribers, ask yourself how to increase your base by 25% every month. How can you get ten more every month, and in one year so that you will have 120 and then 240 in year 2? What usually happens if you’re good, then things start to grow exponentially.

    Going For Leveraged Results

    In physics, momentum is mass times velocity, so when you’re first starting, you have little mass, and all you have is velocity, but eventually, with enough time, the mass will start to grow. You can’t keep velocity to zero because zero times anything is still zero. So nothing is passive, but if you have enough mass, you don’t need to rely on your velocity as much, and it will give you more free time to pursue other things like family, hobbies, and causes that are important to you.

    If you’re in a business and want to double your results, you don’t want to focus on one area and double its results. You want to look at seven different areas and make them 10% better. There is usually a bottleneck, and you could have an area that has the capacity, but if the bottle is only allowing five units to go through instead of 50, you’re only going to be able to process five units. 

    A big reason why lumber prices increased by 400% over the last year is that there is a bottleneck at the lumber mills. There is wood that could be processed, but the lumber’s capabilities are not there and cause supply to not keep up with demand, and then prices increase.

    If you’re only processing five units at $20, your revenue is $100, but if you can process 50 units at $5, you made $250. So getting the highest price for your goods and services might not be the best strategy. You probably want to go for volume. It just depends on how involved you want to be. If you enjoy working one on one with people, you have more time to demonstrate the value you’re providing and charge more. If you’re going to sell a product, the volume game is probably what you want to play unless it is a very niche product.

    Playing the volume game requires marketing and focusing your attention on the customer most likely to buy, or otherwise, you’re wasting your time and energy. So spending time segmenting your customers and understanding the needs and wants of your buyers will be crucial to your doubling your results.

    Keep The End In Mind

    I’m all about getting more results for my time because life is short. Remember that today is the oldest you’ve ever been in life, and today is also the youngest you’ll be for the rest of your life, so take advantage of life and don’t go to the grave with any unfulfilled desires. Even if you don’t get everything, at least you knew you gave your best effort and didn’t settle for the reality that you were given. You took action to make a difference for yourself and chose to pursue your best life.

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  • How To Accept The New Order Of Life

    I just finished my second to last semester of my MBA, and now I just have 12 more weeks until I’m done and can get 16 hours a week back to apply to other parts of my life. I’m also trying to see people one last time here in Oregon before I head off to Latin America in November for the next two years. My goal is to to become 95% fluent in Spanish so that I can work on the next part of my business plan.

    My life has not been a straight line based on what I thought would happen, but it has been like an explorer trying to make a map. I’m just trying different things and seeing what I can do to help me make the best map possible and help me live my best life.

    One of the new things I’m getting into is finding ways to combine data analytics and data visualization with financial planning and personal development. Here is how I’m apply data visualization with a sample budget. I feel this tells someone a better story to ignite positive behavior change than looking at a spreadsheet.

    I’ve been an entrepreneur for the past 7 years, and if I wanted complete order in my life, I would have quitted on day 1. Entrepreneurship is absolute chaos, but I love it. No day is alike, and I get to decide which direction I want to go in. Even if I wanted a life with complete order, it would be a fool’s errand trying to accomplish because it would require more than 24 hours a day. Complete order also requires me to control other people. And if I could control other people, that would mean that other people could control me, and I don’t want this.

    Some paths can be taken to give more stability, but they require more work to create the order since it’s like a garden. You have to spend every day watering the garden, weeding it, adding fertilizer, and protecting the crop from the animals to get your reward.

    Or you can take the path of a wolf. A wolf needs to average seven pounds of meat a day, and it requires a wolf at least nine attempts before it can secure a meal. But this path allows the wolf to rest, play, and explore, but it’s always keeping an eye out for the next opportunity.

    A wolf can roam around and be where they need to be to succeed. A farmer has to stick it out. They already put so much energy into their piece of land that starting over can cause a considerable amount of stress. Especially if a natural disaster happens and wipes out everything. Hopefully, if this happens, the farmer has a backup plan to handle the setback, but it goes back to trying to establish more order in life, which takes up more time and resources to make happen.

    In life, it is not as easy as do this thing, and you’ll be successful. There might be times when you have to be the farmer before becoming the wolf and vice versa, but there is the price for whatever decision you make.

    Though, we shouldn’t want things to completely be known to us about the future. Instead of advancing in life, we would simply be standing in place and having the world rotate around us. This will never happen, but what’s beautiful about advancing through life is that conditions of the new order of life can only be created through our own labor. We learn about the unknown and adapt our actions to the new knowledge we gain, which creates many of the delightful things we enjoy.

    This is why I learn so much so that I can help shape the future that I want for myself and society. And if you’re going to change the world, start by changing yourself. But realize that it’s going to be chaotic, and if you can train yourself to be strong enough to handle the heat, that heat can burn away the impurities that prevent you and your future from shining.

    PS.

    Take my personal development quiz if you want to get a baseline to see if you’re physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually strong enough to handle the chaos and accept the upcoming order of life.

    PSS

    If you want to get emotionally stronger, I recommend reading Amy Morin’s book, “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.”

    Also, this blog post was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s book, “The Kingdom of God Is Within You.”

  • How Business Analytics Improved My Understanding of Personal Development

    Last week, I signed up for my last semester of my MBA, and I’ll be taking marketing analytics and a Capstone. In the Capstone I’m going to work on building a business plan and pitch it to investors for a Dia de Los Muerto Altar concept I’ve been dreaming about doing for two years as a side hustle.

    The concept
    The concept
    The artist I want to use
    The artist I want to use

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    Overall, I’m excited to finally be done with my MBA in December to have more time to implement the ideas from my analytic classes. I have fallen in love with analytics, and I feel that there are many opportunities to combine this with the financial planning, business consulting, and personal development coaching that I do. I’ve already created an analytic cryptocurrency dashboard and I want to add other features to help me think of strategies to implement in this space. If you’re not familiar with analytics, it’s taking data to do one of three things:

    • Descriptive Analytics – Trying to find miss opportunities or threats that happened in the past, like knowing which cashier has the most voids, which can signal fraud and should be explored more.
    • Predictive Analytics – Trying to predict what will happen in the future so that you can be better prepared for it, like knowing how many people will show up at a farmers market on the weekend when the weather is 80 degrees.
    • Prescriptive Analytics – Using past data with criteria to optimize a situation, like creating the upcoming work schedule for employees by saying you can only spend $2000 but need these many workers for the week. Then the analytics will tell you if you can do it or not.

     Even after spending 225 hours in June to pass my CFP exam on July 6th, I can’t stand still because I’m excited about these opportunities with analytics. Right after my exam, I enrolled in a bookkeeping class and Google’s Data Analytics certification program because of what I’m learning in my Syracuse Business Analytics class this semester.

    How Using Business Analytics Is Helpful

    From what I noticed, many small businesses don’t keep outstanding books, but if they do, they’re not using analytics to help them make better decisions, which can significantly boost sales and reduce costs. I wouldn’t be able to make this connection unless I took my MBA and then took accounting and marketing analytics by accident because the other electives were filled. After I took these classes, I immediately made the connection to personal development. If you can get the right skills or insights, at the right time, it can really speed up your results or cause you to be on a growth path that you didn’t think was possible. If I can have the correct variables in place, I won’t be two times better. I can be 29 times better than the average financial planner and business consultant. Two years ago, if you were to tell me to do the things that I can do now with business analytics, I wouldn’t know-how. I had the tools of excel and Access back then, but I didn’t know how to fully optimize them until I spent time learning them in my classes. Last week, I learned how to optimize my excel spreadsheets to save myself 8 hours a month of data entry, which saves me money and 96 hours a year. Without tracking my time and looking on how I spend it, I could have wasted a lot of time. And if I can save myself time and make better decisions, then the analytical skills are the moderating effect that speeds up the results that I’m seeking.

    How To Think About Moderating Effects With Your Personal Development

    Think about moderating effects when it comes to your relationships, what are the skills, mindset, or frameworks you need to ten times the power of your relationships? But first you should ask yourself, what happens if you don’t seek out great relationships? To get a great outcome requires having the correct variables at the right time to get that moderating effect. If you’re in a relationship, then going to therapy might be the moderating effect that increases your emotional intelligence to be a better communicator and makes you emotionally stronger to handle the conflict in your relationship. Now instead of having distress when it comes to communicating with your partner, you can have the power to make every conflict a five-minute problem that can get resolved.

    moderating effects picture 1
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    With analytics and moderating effects, it’s not a one-and-done type of thing because things are constantly changing. Just continue to monitor the situation and realize that if you want things to stay the same, something has the change. With constantly changing variables, you want to learn how to stay ahead of those changes. This will come from asking questions and then pondering those questions while you review the data to see what you need to do next to get the results you desire. My original moderating effect with personal development was books. Without the 247 books that I have read, I would not be doing the things I’m doing today. These books add to my knowledge bank which creates a lallapaloosa effect where I can pull insights from different authors to make better decisions. And this is what analytics is all about, to get more results with less effort or make better decisions for your life based on the resources and capabilities available to you internally and externally. And if you have shortfalls, the data will show you what areas you should act on. As a person, you get to decide what is enough, but don’t be fooled into settling and living the rest of your life in quiet desperation. Have the self-awareness to know what you need to do every day and what needs to be added or removed from your life to help you live your best life. It’s all we can do.

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  • Only The Educated Are Free

    In this episode, we discuss how we should constantly educate ourselves so that we don’t get taken advantage of.

    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 discuss how we should constantly educate ourselves so that we don’t get taken advantage of. I’m a big believer that only the educated are truly free. My goal is to read for at least 30 minutes every day, to listen to podcasts for 45 minutes while I go on my walk in the morning, and to watch an hour of educational YouTube videos in the evening. I realized awhile ago that the more I educate myself, the more opportunities that I’m going to have.
    Once I turned off the television, I was able to turn on my life. I don’t watch many television shows. I have watched television in the past two weeks. I tried to watch Schitt’s Creek but I stopped during the third season. And I only watched it because I was stuck in bed and was tired of reading. I haven’t really watched television since 2012. Once I discovered non-fiction books, I just became hooked.
    The reason why I’m here in Colombia is because of the book the Four-Hour Workweek. In that book, he discussed how if you can make dollars but spend in pesos, you can live a really great life. Right now, for every dollar I make in the United States, it’s like making four dollars here in Colombian pesos. So live a great life, and I don’t have to work that hard to maintain a very similar standard of living that I would get in the United States.
    Plus I read a lot of philosophy books and biographies and see how people lived and realized that in my previous life, I was chasing a lot of things that weren’t worth it. I live a very simple life and I’m happy with it. I do my reading, I workout, and I work on my business. Plus I go visit different sites in the cities I’m in. Life is good.
    I feel very free because I’m pursuing who I want to be and I’m not tied down to anything. What I didn’t like about my last firm were all the rules and high expectations. When I was first searching to become a financial advisor, I just thought there was one way of doing it, and that was by joining a major firm and selling their products. Then I kept learning about the industry and realized can switch from being a commission-based to a fee-for-service advisor and I can travel the world while doing it. Because I educated myself about my profession, I feel very free.
    Plus studying the stoic philosophy has kept me focused on what’s important to me and not to get distracted by the unimportant and there are a lot of folks who get distracted by the unimportant stuff. And only education about many different things can give us freedom. Seneca was given a lot of money to educate the tyrant Nero, and Seneca was willing to give up his fortune to escape but Nero didn’t want that to happen and eventually forced Seneca to kill himself. So let’s be aware of the situation we’re putting ourselves in and having an education will help us in that area.
    And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, only the educated are free. So make sure that we are educating ourselves on a daily basis. Reading or watching the news is not always educating ourselves because we are only getting one viewpoint, so we need a diverse set of ideas so that we can understand the truth the best that we can. This can prevent us from going down a path that will trap us. I would also recommend that we don’t read recent books that haven’t stood the test of time. What’s important now, most likely will be important a year from now. So make sure you’re gaining wisdom and not trivia. Do this and life should be a lot better to do.
    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.
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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.

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  • The Granny Rule “Eat Your Carrots before You Eat Your Dessert”

    In this episode, we discuss how we should do the hard but good for us stuff first before we reward ourselves with the bad stuff for us in overabundance.

    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 discuss how we should do the hard but good for us stuff first before we reward ourselves with the stuff that is bad for us in overabundance. Charlie Munger said we should follow the Granny Rule: “Eat your carrots before you eat your dessert.” This is a great rule to follow. If you start with the dessert first, what typically happens is that we will eat more than we should of that dessert, and we probably not going to touch the vegetables.
    Now if we do this for a long period of time, then it’s not going to be good for us. It’s best to eat the carrots first, then wait a little bit longer so our stomach and brain and see how much we ate, before we indulge in the dessert. It takes about fifteen minutes for the brain to realize how full it is. This is why chewing your food 20 to 30 times before swallowing is a great strategy plus it’s better for your stomach.
    Now this applies to our personal lives and our career as well. Before sitting on the couch to watch television, ask yourself if you exercised first or did your reading beforehand. Before you go to that happy hour with your co-workers, did you make your phone calls, and did you work on the project like you said you were?
    If we neglect these carrot activities, how is our future going to look? It’s not going to look pretty. This is why we should learn to love the carrots first and no expose ourselves to the desert too much in the first place. Every morning I like to read for 60 minutes. Then I like to write in my journal and write a podcast episode, then I record my Facebook Live at 9 am, then I exercise and eat breakfast.
    This way, I did all my self-care stuff for the day, and I can have a clear conscience. I work for myself and have the luxury to take this amount of time in the morning. But I also tell myself that I need to do the hard stuff for my business first like doing client meetings, doing videos, and working on my course.
    Doing these hard tasks over a long period of time allows me to eventually like doing them. So then I actually start to prefer eating my carrots.
    In the Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss, he talks about people following the slow-carb diet to lose weight where people eat a high protein diet that basically is a protein like chicken, beef, or pork, and supplemented by beans and vegetables. You’re not allowed to eat anything white like potatoes, rice, and bread, and you get one cheat meal a day. If you follow this routine, you might gorge out on cheat day, but you’re going to feel sick.
    I remember finishing boot camp and I ate a lot of skittles and dessert, and I felt sick afterward because I was not used to eating these things for three months. So once you’ve used to being healthy, being unhealthy will be not so fun. This is why I don’t like all-inclusive resorts because I just feel awful afterward. But this feeling will go away and it will be a temptation to do it again and we can easily slip back into a dessert first mentality.
    To establish rules for eating your carrots first and delaying the dessert so that it actually feels like a treat and not something we feel entitled to. Do this and you will have more control and flexibility over your life.
    That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, follow the granny rule, where you eat your carrots before you eat your dessert. Life is filled with temptations and it’s really easy in this new environment to want to eat your dessert first, but once you take a lick from the lollipop of mediocrity, you’ll suck forever. I don’t want to suck forever and I don’t want the same thing for you. To establish rules for eating your carrots. I tell myself that I won’t do anything else until I finish my morning routine first. Then I can do other things. This helps me do what I need to do and stay healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Do this and life will feel amazing. And remember, just focus on getting one percent better every day, and eventually, you’ll reach your goal.
    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
    I’m also on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook just look up Grow With Joe
    If you’re on iTunes, don’t forget to give me a five-star rating if you liked this episode and hit the subscribe button as well.
    The greatest way to support this show is to share it with someone else.
    Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.

    Additional Resources

    Get my personal development book for free

    Take my personal development quiz

    Schedule a discover call for one-on-one coaching

  • Drowning In Information But Starving Of Wisdom

    In this episode, we discuss how we need to avoid being distracted by the noise and focus our time on the signal to help us live our best lives. 

    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 avoid being distracted by the noise, and focus our time on the signal that will help us live our best lives. I don’t watch the news and I rarely read the news because to me that’s just a bunch of noise. It keeps me informed on what’s going on right now but that information is most likely not going to help me live my best life.
    I could look at the covid death toll every single day, but how is that helping me live my best life. It can come helpful during election time but I should be focusing my time on other things. This is why I focus most of my attention on long form podcasts and reading books. Consuming these sources will give me the wisdom to live a better life.
    I’m training my mind to look for opportunities in this world and to overcome obstacles that come my way. The news is just telling us what is happening but doesn’t tell us how to fix it for the most part and how to prevent this issues from happening. And it’s real easy to be distracted by all this news because it’s urgent but it’s not really important.
    By focusing on stuff that is urgent but not important, it’s pulling us from activities that give us growth. Every morning, I read for about 45 to 60 minutes on books that have been around for a long time. I just finished this really interesting book called the Five Rings, which about the five different areas of strategies that Japanese samurais used to become great warriors back in the day, and I could apply the lessons in that book to help me today, even though I don’t plan to become a samurai in the traditional sense.
    The biggest lessons I got from that book is “A life where we have unrealized intentions, is a life that is useless.” and that we need to train and then train some more. Plus when you read a store for ten pages, the lessons are going to stick a lot more than just seeing the quote for a brief second on some news feed. While you’re reading the passages, you’re ruminating about the lessons and thinking about how they apply to your life. Or this is the way I think about things. Then this gives me clarity and focus in my life to help me realize all my intentions I want to manifest.
    It’s real easy to be distracted by the noise because every day we get bombarded by thousands of message a day to focus on someone else’s needs. If this happens for too long though, you can end up drowning.
    And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, we are drowning in information, but we are starving of wisdom. So look at your day and life and see if you’re taking in the right type of information. The right type of information should give you clarity and focus on who you need to be as a person. Gives you strategy on how to handle life and accomplish your goals. Everything is else is just trivia, and won’t come in handy unless you play weekly trivia. Even then the prize for winning trivia is a lot small that winning at life. Wisdom can help propel your life forward and overcome any challenges that come your way because you have the tactics to parry, block, and juke them. Don’t get wisdom and you can just end up drowning and watch your life just wash away. And I don’t want this for my life or your life, so don’t do it.
    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 www.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 www.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 www.growwithjoe.me/quiz
    I’m also on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook just look up Grow With Joe
    If you’re on iTunes, don’t forget to give me a five-star rating if you liked this episode and hit the subscribe button as well.
    The greatest way to support this show is to share it with someone else.
    Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.

    Additional Resources

    Get my personal development book for free

    Take my personal development quiz

    Schedule a discover call for one-on-one coaching

  • You Never Step Into The Same River Twice

    In this episode, we discuss how, when we step into a situation, it might look the same, but things have changed internally.

    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 to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and have a better career, better relationships, and better personal finances. At the same time, 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 Grow With Joe founder, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
    In today’s episode, we will talk about how we never step into the same river twice because the river has changed, and so have we. Growing up, every summer, I would head to my local river in Oregon and go tubbing or do something else. There were even cliffs that you could jump off from that were 40 ft high. And to me, even now that river looks pretty much the same, but it’s not the same. There are different animals and organisms inside of it now than when I was a kid, plus I’m so much different as a person now than when I was a kid.
    Today, I’m braver, stronger, and wiser than when I was a kid. And this is a good thing. I’ve been overseas for 10 months now, and I’m much different as a person today than I was when I first landed in Mexico. I realized that I could withstand operating in a country where I don’t know the language and actually survive. It kind of reminds me of my dad’s story, who came to the United States in the 70s from Mexico and did not know the language. I’m a much better person today than I was in the past.
    We are always going to change in some way. We might think the same, but our bodies are definitely not the same. I’m 34 years old now, and my body takes more time to recover. I was watching the NBA playoffs last night, and I was so sleepy at 11 pm. I also haven’t been drinking coffee because of my teeth whitening, so that might be the case. But I remember when I was 21 years old, I could go out, and then still operate the next day. Now I won’t do that. I’m taking the day off. And this is okay because I’m so much wiser and mentally stronger today than I was at 21 years old. So there are some trade-offs. I feel I look the same from when I was in my mid-20s, but I’m different internally.
    In this new economy that we are entering into, the ones that will thrive are the ones that can handle uncertainty the most. Things will look the same, but there are going to be uncertain things that are going to happen. As I look outside, it looks very normal, but with covid, it’s different when you look up close. So internally, we have to learn how to make good decisions, handle uncertainty, and have the courage to make moral decisions when necessary.
    Since the new economy will require this mental resilience, it’s why I love to read books and listen to podcasts. It’s better to have one Socrates than a 1000 Hercules in this new economy. We need to learn how to make decisions quickly that are good ones. And not allow the head trash in our minds to hold us back from pursuing the person we need to be. Since I took a speed reading course, I can finish a 225-page book in three hours. Now I can consume information twice as fast and apply that knowledge to the real world faster.
    If you look at me, I still look the same, but I’m not the same person. And the key thing is that we don’t want to be the same because if that happens, we’re not going to keep up with the new economy. There is plenty of room for improvement since the largest room on this planet is the room for improvement. So next time you step in that river, ask yourself, are you better or worst off than the previous time you step in that river. Hopefully, you can say the right answer.
    And that’s it for today’s episode. To summarize it, you never step in the same river twice because the river has changed, and so have we. The key thing is that we can hopefully say that we are a better person physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually than the last time we step into that river or when we wake up the next day. One thing I like to ask myself is, “Am I a better person today than I was six months ago? And I’m on track to become a better person six months from now?” If the answer is no to any of those questions, I need to change something in my life, but thankfully, my routine doesn’t allow me to develop myself. We have one life to live, and we might as well make sure we can fill it up with as much dope stuff as possible. And if you stop developing yourself, you will never reach your full potential and get swept down stream, which is not a good thing. So go to bed a little better than how you woke up, and things should be fine.
    Suppose you would like to get the journal questions for today’s episode. In that case, you can sign-up for my monthly journaling subscription newsletter, where you get daily journal questions Monday through Friday. 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,” 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 on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Just look up Grow With Joe.
    If you’re on iTunes, don’t forget to give me a five-star rating if you liked this episode and hit the subscribe button as well.
    The greatest way to support this show is to share it with someone else.
    Thanks for joining me today, and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.

    Additional Resources

    Get my personal development book for free

    Take my personal development quiz

    Schedule a discover call for one-on-one coaching

  • The Two Ways To Become Wealthy

    In this episode, we discuss how we can either get everything we want or be satisfied with what we have, to be wealthy. And which is one is probably the best path to take.

    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 the two ways to become wealthy. And those ways are to get everything you want and to be satisfied with everything with you have. Now the quickest way to become wealthy is to be satisfied with everything you have. I used to live in Washington, DC and it was so expensive to live there. With rent, car payments, food expenses, and every other expense necessary for living, it requires me to work really hard and do stuff that didn’t really satisfy me.
    I hated sitting in traffic in order to make a meeting in DC. 395, 495, and 66 are some of the worst highways in the world for traffic. Now I live in Medellin, Colombia and I love my life. I live in a great neighborhood where I can walk to all my restaurants and cafes. I can take taxis and they cost me $2-$4. My rent costs $425-$450 based on the exchange rate, and I only have to work 8 hours with my clients to pay for all my expenses for the month here.
    This allows me to work on so many creative projects and do my MBA Syracuse without stressing that much. I love my life and I feel very wealthy. Even though I’m not making as much in DC, dollar-wise, my purchasing power here in Colombia is much higher. I definitely could be chasing more stuff but it’s not necessary for me. I’m chasing other things than stuff. And stuff can be materialistic things and it can be status. For myself, I’m just focused on how many people I can help out. If I just focus on this and live my best life, and my best life is about creating and taking care of myself. And I’m doing what I want to do for the rest of my life.
    I feel wealthy because I have a lot of control over my life. If I need to go to the doctor here in Medellin, it cost me $65/mo to be apart of their health care system. To go to the dentist it costs $25 for cleaning. I don’t like cars and I’m not interested in getting the fanciest stuff, and I’m satisfied with my one-bedroom apartment. The way I see it, the more stuff I have, the more it can weigh me down. There are somethings I like. For example the latest Smartphone, mostly for performance. I can’t stand when things slow me down. And on my computer. I will buy software to help me out too. They are investments in my eyes. So I’m at the point where I’m satisfied with everything in my life. There are some life experiences I would like to have like front row blazer tickets to a Lakers Game or another big matchup. Plus I want to travel more.
    But when you’re constantly trying to accumulate more stuff and more titles, most likely, there is always going to be someone with more and doing better. And why spend all this time chasing those things because once you’re gone from this planet, you can’t take that stuff with you. In my mind, it’s better to have experienced. Then you will have a memory bank of experiences that you can draw on, and those are things you can have forever. If you want to chase things, then that’s fine but just make sure that you’re heart is in the right spot.
    Any time we do something, it can be for the right reasons or the wrong reasons. And it’s real easy to lie on why we need these things to be happy. And lying to ourselves is the worst thing we can do to ourselves. It causes a lot of problems that aren’t necessary. I’m so glad I got out of the rat race in Washington, DC, and moved to Latin America because when you win the rat race, you’re still a rat. And is this a prize that we really want to win? I know I don’t.
    And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, the two ways to become wealthy are to get everything you want or to be satisfied with everything you have. It is much easier and faster to be wealthy if you are satisfied with everything you have. Obviously, there is a balance between the two and there are things we need to have in our lives, but as people, we get to decide what that level is. Just make sure you’re choosing the path that is of most virtue to yourself. If you end up getting a lot of stuff in your life, then make sure that you won’t be devastated if you lose those material things or status. Plus if you think about it, when we pass away, we can’t take these things with us, so why don’t we focus more of our time on experiences. If there is an afterlife, then these are things that we can remember. So pick wisely and continue living your best life.
    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
    I’m also on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook just look up Grow With Joe
    If you’re on iTunes, don’t forget to give me a five-star rating if you liked this episode and hit the subscribe button as well.
    The greatest way to support this show is to share it with someone else.
    Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.

    Additional Resources

    Get my personal development book for free

    Take my personal development quiz

    Schedule a discover call for one-on-one coaching

  • The Secret Is Realizing That Wrong Isn’t Fatal

    In this episode, we discuss how we need to know that making mistakes and learning from them is one of the greatest lessons to see growth in our lives.

    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 the secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal. I know for some people, that can’t admit that they are wrong. One of my favorite things is to say I don’t know. There are also things that I used to think were right, but now I know were wrong.
    I’m not going to fight to keep that identity because it’s going to prohibit my growth as a person. I placed myself in a box and that box is going to be smaller. Like a goldfish, it only grows as big of the pond or bowl that it is placed in.
    Some people can spend forty years thinking one way, and it could be wrong. So they just double down on their beliefs and keep going. I was recently watching a documentary on Netflix about people who believe that the world is flat. To me, these people are just doubling down on identity because it gives them a tribe to talk to.
    Flat Earthers have conferences that they go to and they do experiments in groups as they try to prove that the world is flat. They have podcasts, Facebook groups, and other forms of community where they can share their beliefs and feel like they belong. At the end of the documentary, they show everyone at the conference and they cut to a bunch of speakers on how they appreciated that they had a group to share their ideas.
    In the group, they are important and feel valued, and outside of the group they can lose all of these social benefits that we desire as humans. We all want to feel like we belong to the group and some people just find a group. That group can be chess, music, or a belief.
    Plus if you’re wrong and admit that you were wrong and work on improving yourself, then people will forgive you. For myself, I don’t like our two-party system for politics, and I don’t even like the other parties. There are things that I like about all the parties, but the system as a whole, I don’t agree with.
    To me, it’s weird that when a President gets impeached, all the Republicans decided that he needs to stay in office and all the democrats decide that he needs to be kicked out of office. People are voting on political lines and if they don’t, they might not get from the DNC or the RNC.
    I’m studying the systems and seeing what is truth and what is a lie, then I’ll make the best decision I can. I know I’m going to be wrong about things, but I’m not going to play along with things that I know are wrong.
    I’ve also been wrong in relationships, and I try to admit my mistakes. And when I’ve admitted my mistakes, it wasn’t fatal. As people, we can always redeem ourselves, but we just have to follow the process to make it happen. Then we can expand our box and grow to new heights.
    And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, the secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal. We can always rebound from being wrong if we admit it and then work on things to choose the right path. It’s probably going to be difficult, but it can help you grow to new heights as a person. Then when this happens, you won’t even miss your old life. You’ll realize that it’s much better to live the truth than to live a lie. And the worth thing we can do is to lie to ourselves that we’re right. So many problems in the wrong come from living these lies and thinking they are truths. So do the right thing admit things when you’re wrong. It makes you a better person and the world a better place as well.
    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
    I’m also on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook just look up Grow With Joe
    If you’re on iTunes, don’t forget to give me a five-star rating if you liked this episode and hit the subscribe button as well.
    The greatest way to support this show is to share it with someone else.
    Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.

    Resources

    Get my book for free

    Learn More about me

    Schedule a discovery call