PODCAST EPISODE 259 – Talking Beyond Finance

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0:10

Hello, and welcome to your business, your wealth. My name is Paul Adams. I am the CEO. I’m the founder, of course, Shepherd, who have put a blue shirt on today. No, I’m going to start over. Hello, and welcome to your business, your wealth. My name is Paul Adams. I am CEO of sound financial group, I’m joined by the President of sound Financial Group, a man you all know and love, in dark blue. That’s Corey Shepherd. He was telling me earlier today, this is a very different blue shirt. Normally, it’s French periwinkle or something. And now it’s dark blue. I don’t know. I don’t know what you do with your shirts.

0:50

Well, I figure you know, if it works for Steve Jobs, it’ll work for me, I just didn’t want to wear a black turtleneck all the time.

0:59

Fair point, fair point. And everybody knows Cory loves showing off that tattoo on the back of his neck. You guys as clients never get a chance to see it. But that’s why the turtleneck wouldn’t work. So today, today, we’ve got a little bit of a follow on on last week where we were talking about Thanksgiving, talking about gratitude, really being aware of what we’re thankful for this year, so that we can put in habits, practices structures in our environment, such that we can repeat those things we like most from 2022. Today, we’re going to talk about some of the things that are a little bit hard to deal with things that might upset us in the normal everyday life, and how we might consider being able to appreciate them from a different angle. That is a big part of the practice of cultivating contentment, we’re going to use one of those great little YouTube shorts to make that illustration today. And then we’re going to talk a little bit about what to what was part of 2022, I don’t want to repeat in 2023. Now we’re getting a little beyond finance today. But trying to help everybody pause long enough, while we’re here in 2022. To really set up 2023 The way you want it to be and let some of these things just kind of germinate in your subconscious. As many of you are already making your plans for 2023. And let some of the thinking we hope to provide you with today to be a contribution to that

2:20

anything about money. But money is not about money. It’s about what it does in our lives and what we can or can’t do with limited resources. So we’re talking beyond finance to get back to finance and who would do that all the taboo. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. At the end of that, yeah, that’s right.

2:41

Yeah. TM at the end of that talking beyond finance for the sake of finances that we said, no. Oh, wait, you said.

2:49

I think I said talking beyond finance, to get back to finance. So finance, talk back, back, back finance. I know something but workshop it? Well, wood chipper, it

3:01

wood chipper is more like it. All right. So for everybody listening to the podcast, which of course we know, we have a lot more people engaged on the audio only podcast than on YouTube. So we’re gonna take some time with this little video clip and make sure all of our podcast listeners get the full sense of this. This really kind of a neat experience. This guy had that his wife or friend caught on tape. So kicks off. And this guy. Oh, I’d say he.

3:34

I don’t actually say anything about it. But I’ll say within seconds, I thought I knew exactly where this was going. Yes. And we’ll talk about that. Yeah.

3:43

So he’s got he actually I thought he was maybe from Pakistan or something like that when I first saw him and heard his accent. But you’ll see where he’s from in a minute. So he says, Are you filming? He says Be sure to film me. Are you filming? Look what I’m going to take out of my pocket. He says, of course this is all and not English. So he pulls out of his pocket a piece of paper.

And he says, my first American paycheck with the greatest amount of enthusiasm I’ve ever heard grin on his face. Yeah. And yeah, you can see he’s wearing brown. It’s got the UPS logo on it. And the UPS logos on the check. And he got off onto on a yogi so he writes down how much are on the screen. It says how much did I make? And now he’s like celebrating. I mean, he’s like pumping his fist. Like Yeah. gives him a big kiss. And then she says look at the taxes.

4:57

And this is where I thought it was going From the beginning, and like, whoa, the paycheck What about those withholdings, and like, and now it’s going to be some record record. We’re ever in government mother. You know, I was gonna be like, Oh yeah, how are you? Welcome to America.

5:18

Cory was picturing all of a sudden his English would get perfect and he’s just cursing up. Right? But this is what surprised us and why we’re sharing it with you today. But if you’re elected, and he just closed his eyes, took a deep breath. And he says, I prefer this to Fidel Castro. So now we know is he’s an immigrant from Cuba. Got the monkey Tama. He said, Fidel took more. Communism took more, leave him and he thought it was okay. You know what I mean, is he he said this, I’m not even going back through this again, I didn’t get emotionally activated. Like I’m noticing now Cory, like even talking about it. But what he said next there, I didn’t translate it says this is my first hourly paycheck, as he sits in the passenger seat of the car, still got his sunglasses on just staring at

6:18

it. He looks he’s probably 35 plus or minus, yeah, five, five years, depending on how hard or easy he’s handling life. But so his whole life, however long he was in Cuba, working, but just it never connected with me the like how much a disconnect could be from his work and his time and what it was, what it was worth, like he’s celebrating getting to work, maybe a minimum wage hourly job. That’s like, incredible,

6:54

which, incidentally, let me give a quick shout out to at real doc rich, whose channel we took this from says this is my first hourly paycheck. And he says, I feel every hour counted, that every hour has an importance in my life, which is applicable. And I know I can work hard for something. Now the pause on this is in and why we talked about it in the context of cultivating contentment is just consider how often it is easy to get pissed off about taxes. Yeah, to feel as though you know, you finish the workday and you didn’t get as much done as you want it. But to this man, who may have never his entire life he wrote he said this my first hourly paycheck meaning I had I me had to do something to create this outcome of me getting this check and I did it. And we it is so easy to forget that for billions of people on this planet that is not an easy that is not like something they can just go do. And here our teenagers get to go do it.

8:18

And then we can be you know, disheartened, frustrated about taxes coming out even be not totally happy with how the government chooses to spend those taxes but at least we get a line item accounting of it and and it doesn’t come out in a way that’s invisible and completely inescapable. Right? Like, like he experienced in in communism, like the withholdings of Fidel were worse than the United States federal government. Yep.

8:54

Then he says, this is an emotion that I can’t compare with anything, because I never had it my country in Cuba, that emotion doesn’t exist. Now, this is not an repudiation of Cuba, or any other communist government. Although their own actions indict them, I’m just not meeting this as an indictment. This, I’d really like you to hear as a little bit of an indictment of how comfortable we are and how easy it is to be frustrated or pissed off about little things that we enjoy as having being an American living in America privilege. And this guy, never even had a chance to have this emotion before.

And here I have proof Now, I mean, that just gets me choked up. I’m glad it’s not a longer video where I would have cried. So I pulled this up, Cory, just because I thought it’d be great to put context. I know many, many people listening this, you know, are way further along in their career.

10:17

Can you zoom in on that a little bit?

10:19

I don’t know. I didn’t try. That’s probably a good idea. So here is a UPS based of I found, and you can see that this is 80 hours of wage, it’s $1,400. For many of you listening to this up, like two weeks 1400 Gross. Yep. Yep. And now this is 2015 paycheck. So it’s hired now by inflation, or whatever it is. And yet the deductions on that $1,300 check, were $250 for a working class person out there trying to get it done. And hopefully there’s a refund for him at the end of the year. But the mere fact that he took one look at that and said, like he had reason to celebrate, getting that check with that level of deductions. And so while we do a ton of things, both on our show, and in our practice of helping people avoid taxes that are unnecessary, or that the IRS allows us things to do that we can plan ahead and pay less taxes, things like tax free accounts, etc. But it’s hard to get away from the fact that a big part of our aims, in fact, Miranda was just saying that she had a conversation with a friend of hers that reminded her brother, yeah, brother. Yeah. Yeah, I wasn’t gonna say it was there, brother. I didn’t have permission to tell the story. But now the court gave it away. It’s

11:53

you started telling the story? I don’t see why No, I’m

11:57

changing names to protect the innocent. So, but Miranda’s brother said, you know, you actually want to get to the point that you have to pay taxes.

12:08

He wants to know something. Yeah, yeah, you want

12:10

and I think there, there might be something to like, that’s whether or not it’s right or not, I think it could be very operable. For many of us and myself included that when tax time comes around, we just pause long enough to go at least I get to pay the taxes in this country. You know, like that, that is that is a rare opportunity. And so we look at this, we look at the things that we can easily get dissatisfied about etc. This is the somewhat, this is gonna be a difficult homework assignment, I think for all the listeners, but might be an interesting thing that will open up something new for you. Now be to talk to your spouse and say, Is there anything you can think of that I was super pissed about this year? Because I’ll probably remember, it might be something that they did. But there might be things this year that you had to do, maybe because the economy was picking back up, it required more work from you. It required you answering more emails on the weekend, had you miss a T ball game, whatever that is. To really take some time and pull those things apart. Because frankly, there’s all kinds of things in our life that we can end up doing year after year. That’s anything from you know, somebody’s not going to the gym, which has been my struggle, lifelong struggle with weight. Those of you listening at one point my life I weighed 245 pounds, and it was not six inches taller than I had a 48 inch waist when I was 22. And it’s been a con even when I was in young kid just yo yo weight all that and I’ve kept working at it. And it’s really just the last year that I kind of found a cadence with eating and working out. That’s working really really well for me. But what it took was every single year me saying I’m unsatisfied with this damn thing called my weight and then trying something different each year until I found some that worked for me. That is so now I’m 44 I’ve been working on that 22 years and maybe now I’ve got something that’s working for me or has worked for a year that I think what happens too often too many, many many people’s they just quit before it’s 22 years of working on it right? Yeah, that yours might be the relationship with your spouse. Maybe it’s gonna be really important this next year to be like you know, we we have intended to do date nights for the last decade and we haven’t done it you know the the taking Cory has done an amazing In job with his daughter of just making sure that there’s activities in time, for the two of them to spend together every single week, that’s not normal. And of course, those things all change or modify as the kids get bigger. So your plans for 2023 might be a little different than they were able to be in 2022. Or the family gets bigger. And there’s more of them in 2023, than there is in 2022.

15:24

And there’s, there’s a difference between, let’s say, contentment and complete satisfaction, meaning you may not be happy with your your weight, you have some things you want to be working on, but we can be, we can have contentment, where we are now and still be working on a year on a thing. And that’s important, because otherwise, you know, it’s like Scott Adams talking about goals versus systems, a goal, you’re in dissatisfaction, you’re not achieving it every single moment until one day when maybe eventually you do versus a system, you can be executing it perfectly. It can be working perfectly every single day, even if you haven’t hit the goal yet that it was it was that

16:11

well, and maybe to speak to that just a little bit before we wrap up and thinking about your 2023 Because I love that you brought up Scott Adams goal versus systems that’s in his book, How to fail at everything and still win big. I think I fail at nearly every nearly everything and still win big. And the thing that’s neat about the systems, if you guys don’t get a chance to read that book, is you do have a goal. But use the goal not to strive for the goal, you use the goal long enough to sit down and build the system that you think set up the parameters for the system. Yeah. And so that might be like for me, one of mine is I just go to the gym five days a week. Now in my case, this is not a gym where I have to produce the workout the workouts already there. There’s a group of people there already, the owner of the gym has already programmed all the workouts. So my system for working out is I just show up five days a week, no matter how I feel short of an injury, I show up even with an injury, I show up, and they just make me modify whatever I’m doing to get around the injury, but I still get to work out. Now for me that’s worked really well. And something I didn’t realize about why it works so well when I missed one workout back in 2021. Because I didn’t sleep good. I love my sleep. I sleep really, really well. Almost all the time. I just had a bad night’s sleep. And Kristen, my wife went and told everybody there that I hadn’t slept well. And so I was staying home to sleep. Cory the rat. The way people made fun of me like Paul, do you need a nap? Like I mean, just all friendly, joshing, but it, it made me like I’m not going to miss for that reason again. Now, if I missed because I didn’t go by myself to the gym like I used to. Nobody else. So that’s an example of I have a system. And that system comes with an environment that produces some kind of consequence to me that keeps my attention. You might have a system might be the date night for spouses, like whatever we do. We leave the house for two hours, every two weeks with each other. When you leave, that’s going to be our system. We might just

18:26

go down the road we have we’re cars out of gas. That’s all right, honey, we’re walking.

18:31

That’s right. Yeah. Yeah, that would be a perfect idea for a system. Another system he talks about that book is really simple that if your commitment is I’m gonna go to the gym X amount of days, the week says the only thing you got to do is walk in the door. And even he said that what two three times a year he’ll walk into the gym, walk in the door, and walk right back out, walk right out. But But he goes every time he commits to going with your money, a money system might be something as simple as we’re not even going to worry about budgeting the first six months of the year, we’re just going to sit down as a couple and look at what our spending was. For the risk. Might be just little baby step new system, new habit. Try to think of another one Cory of let’s say you’ve got to do some business development. It’s been, you know, two years of lockdown and people aren’t quite out doing the things they used to do, etc. For you. It might be you know, I’m just gonna go to every networking event I get invited to just get me out. That’s gonna be my system. If if I’m available on the schedule, somebody invites me I go in might have it with your spiritual development. It might be I’m going to read my Bible or religious text of your particular interest. I’m gonna go to church, and I’m just gonna go to church. Every week. I’m just gonna go I’m gonna pick a service time but I’m going to pick same church I’m gonna go to a church Once a week or whatever, whatever those things are, you just get that little step and a little system a little something most of the time that will fit in your calendar and put you in the position that you have the highest likelihood of at least engaging the system now, Cory, as people consider this step into it, talk a little bit about the reassessment would you have like, so let’s say I’ve done this system for three months? And the pause, and like, okay, is the system doing what it’s supposed to do? How do they, because we don’t want somebody who has the fitness thing, and they pick a system and the wrong because they’ve never been successful in this particular area before? Turns out the system they picked isn’t given the results they want? What does it look like to pause, reassess. And decide on a new system, from your perspective?

20:47

Well, you know, three, depending on the system, and depending on what you’re working on three months, may not may be barely enough to even assess what’s happening. But we’ll take you know, we’ll take you exercising. I you know, after three months, if you’re doing any amount of working out consistently, you should notice something different. So I think that’s, that’s fair, although, you know, our, we’ve had some good friends in the fitness space that, you know, someone’s like, what’s the perfect workout? So do anything, every day for a month, and then come back and talk to me, and we’ll talk about it. Because that, right, so little,

21:30

little shout out to Eric Davis, former Navy SEAL that I had asked one day, Eric, I was like, I was like, Hey, there’s this navy seal workout thing on TV I saw where it’s all like calisthenics, it’s all your body weight. Have you ever seen this? This something Navy SEALs do? And he literally wrote me back on a text and he says, I’m not answering that question. When you work out for 30 days in a row? I’ll answer that question because we can’t work out for 30 days in a row. Nothing will help you.

21:58

Yeah, like, which is so true. You know, people. This is why the whole like exercise equipment industry, and before the peloton, it was the bow track and the ThighMaster and the Bowflex. aspirator, the ensinar, at what at name

22:19

pulled towards you like a torpedo, that if you let go, if you had, if you had chicken grease on your fingers, not that I’m speaking from experience, but that thing would shoot across the room and get your drywall should have been a class action. Yeah.

22:31

So the So number one, you have to always go back to your aims, like, what are you aiming at? What are your goals, and after three months is it hasn’t moved you in that direction at all. And I think that’s the first the first step, don’t go buy new equipment, don’t go anything crazy, don’t sign up, sign up for as little as possible as you can and just beat zero for a while you’ve been doing nothing, do something. And that may be that may be enough. And I would even say that you might not if you’re saying fitness and you feel out of shape, you might not be fit to set your own goals for fitness, like you may not know what’s a reasonable amount for you to be able to lift or run a mile or any of these things. So do it for three months. See if something’s working? And then at that point, maybe you go find some outside help if you’re still interested in that aim. Yep. And maybe, you know, like, fitness has changed. For me, I used to run cross country competitively. I do like to compete in tennis, but my biggest aims are like, Can I not hurt myself playing with my children? And can I keep using my body actively for as long as possible? Like, those are my biggest aim. So I don’t have to do a whole lot of tracking for that, like really my new tracking or anything like that for right now something new might come along. And then I will, but you got to make your make your tracking and assessments match your your aims, or else you may be doing way too much work for what you’re what you’re after.

24:15

I think that’s a great point. Because you’re right, that you’ve also had a child’s sense in some of those prior athletic endeavors and all that. And so it’s what what are my aims? What are the systems I’m in to meet each of those aims? Like when my spouse date night with church Sundays, or like my home group for church, like everybody comes over Thursday and there’s 10 plus people like that creates a structure I gotta pay attention to there’s you know, some amount of work to do prepping for it. That and for some of them, the system might be perfectly maintaining what you’re content with. But sometimes it might be gosh, you know, I want to do this serve on this nonprofit board, let’s say and then I don’t have time anymore for my system for To Thursday night home groups, and then you’ll see those kinds of things switch. Because anytime you set up a new system, you have to assess, do I have the resources to put that in my calendar and do that thing once a month, once a week, whatever it is, and make sure you’re assessing those resources properly so that as you revisit a name, it might be it’s like, oh, this fitness things working good. I’m working out for three months, but I think I need to change your food intake. And I don’t know enough to do that. So that’s what I’m gonna go talk to one of my friends who’s really fit, who knows something about who lost a lot of weight, or I’m gonna go get a professional, to, if anybody wants help with that. If he wants somebody to try it, almost everything, just call me, email me. Just tell me listen to the podcast. And I’ll be best help as I can at least point you in direction resources, as the guy who struggled his weight mightily for decades, with and so that’s what I’d say we send you off with today is just the idea of a is there anything that perhaps ticked you off in 2022, that would just be a recalibration in the way you think about it much like our UPS driver? To second think about what are the things that just went on and 2022 that you’re, you’re not going to do or you’re not going to put up with in 2023 things that because sometimes you don’t need to improve your life that much. In terms of net positive, sometimes just deleting several negatives, will really help a lot. And then lastly, would be when you’re setting your aims for 2023, underneath every aim, every goal, what is the system? What are the things that you could objectively answer to somebody outside of you, whether it’s a spouse or just somebody, a friend who’s helping you with accountability, that you could say, I made this many phone calls, I went to the gym every day, I swept my floor, made my bed, whatever, whatever is your system. Can you objectively see it so that you can know whether or not you did it? Because then all you have to do is that system every single day, and you don’t have to be out in the 20 or 30, your future fitness, financial or marriage goals. You just do the things right now that are serving it, event that system execute on the system, revisit the system in the future, when you’re ready to see if you can increase your performance. That’s it. And there’s a lot there’s a lot less to it than a bunch of the psychological stuff and get your mind right and all that I would highly encourage anybody who wants to take on a different look and 2023 to pick up Scott’s book. Yeah, can you say the title again, how to fail at nearly everything really. And still win big and still win big. So with that, we’ll make sure there’s a link to it on Amazon here in today’s podcast notes. And with that, Corey. Now once you know Cory, especially more than anybody else’s sound financial group hopes that this episode has been a contribution to you being able to design and build a good life.

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