There Is An ROI to Everything

This video is about two things. It's about return on investment on your time, your energy, your focus, and it's about chest hair. It's an early morning here in Driftwood, Texas, where I am scoping out compounds. The reason for that is I have a dream of buying about 50 acres somewhere here in Texas, building out an intentional community. And we're having our quarterly 3 retreat for capitalism dot com. We were going to have it at one of our offices. We've got three offices here in Austin. And I decided instead that I get into the zone when I am away from the city, away from big buildings, and I'm in nature and I don't have any schedule. Those are things that put me in the zone. Now, I tell you that because this Airbnb wasn't too expensive. It was like maybe $2,000 for the week. Rented it all week. And there was a little bit of tension, like a little bit of hesitance that I had about spending the $2,000. Like, did I really need to spend $2,000 to go 20 minutes outside of town? It's actually 20 minutes from our office, right? Like, we're in the middle of nowhere on 12 acres on this ranch just outside of Austin. But if you literally go 15 minutes east on the main road, you're at my favorite breakfast spot. Like, I mean, we're not that far from town. Like, do I really need to spend two grand to get get away for a week? And then I realized, well.

If I'm here for a day beforehand and all I do is relax, is it worth me relaxing? Well, when I relax, I tend to get really good ideas. And when I go into a meeting with really good ideas, I give that idea to one of my team members and they end up using it and making us $10,000. So if we just do that once this week, that means I've quintupled my money. My money has grown 5x the $2,000 here. If one of those ideas creates $10,000 for my team, well, then we've 5x. Oh, and right. This is a write off. So when you factor in taxes and everything, it's actually less than $2,000. So now here is where this all comes back. There is an ROI to everything. I was sitting in this chair here, this one right there, doing some think, a tating, if you will, thinking and meditating and focusing on nature. And the reason I do that is because I notice that when I'm in a stressful mood, if I'm in stress response, if I haven't had daily time to kind of come back to center and listen to the birds. I don't get as many good ideas, and when I don't have as many good ideas, I don't make as much money. There's really an ROI to two main things. There's an ROI to time and there's an ROI to money. You can put your time into things. You can put your money into things. And obviously the things that we ultimately want are exponential returns on investment for our time and for our money. Now, the way you get an exponential return on your money is not by. I'm sorry, the way you get an exponential return on your time is not by trading your hours for dollars. You get an exponential return on your time by putting it into something that's scalable, like a business. That's why you might be attracted to entrepreneurship. Because if you work hard enough, smart enough at the right things, make the right relationships, make the right connections, do the right things, you might have a multi million dollar payout one day. I did that. I've helped a lot of students do that.

One of my students recently sold a business for more than $30 million. Another one just sold. You know, that's an exponential return. And I've got stories, I've got several stories similar to that. There can be an exponential return on time. It doesn't mean everybody gets an exponential return on time. If you're making $15 an hour, you don't get an exponential return on time. There can also be an exponential return on money. Now, I try to put my money into things that have that exponential return. Because right now I have more money than I have time.

That comes from the places, the bets that you make. That could be investing in another business. It could be in employees. It does not come from expenditures. So what I try to look at is what are the things that are going to give me an exponential return on my time, the time I do have, and the money that I do have. And sometimes that means clearing room or getting away for the exponential idea. Because that's my job right now. My job is to clear room, to create new ideas so that my team and I can pursue them. And under those two umbrellas of time and money, there's a lot of different things that end up supporting that. The relationships that you have, the mentors that you spend money on or the mentors that you spend time with.

The sales letters that you spend time developing and the money that you spend testing.

The education that you spend time going through, and that you spend money to get these are the things that end up giving us an exponential return. I had some really good advice from my Uncle Tom when I was growing up. And Uncle Tom gave me.

Two pieces of investment advice. He said, one, spend your time and money on things that people can't take away from you. At the time I was learning guitar and he pointed to me and he said, no one can take away you knowing how to play guitar. They can come into your house and they can steal your guitar, but they can't take away your ability to play guitar. I had recently gone to Europe for the first time and he said, they can't take away your experience in Europe. They can't take away how that has changed you. They can take your pictures, they can't take your memories. So that was the first thing. Spend your time and money on things people can't take away from you. And number two, when in an investment, your target is 1% per month cash flow. I don't know why, but that always stuck with me. So when I'm looking at real estate or I'm looking at options trading, which is something that I do, I trade options on the stocks that I have. It's called covered calls and naked puts. It's worth a Google. It's actually core piece of my strategy. There you go, there's a freebie for the day. We'll do a video on that one day. But 1% per month was the cash flow that we targeted. Now when we start to look at the world and we start to look at our time and our money as having roi, we start to make decisions differently because who we spend time with ultimately creates an ROI. The relationships we keep having ROI stuff like staying on a ranch, a 12 acre ranch with deer on the property. There was some deer fighting over here.

While I was thinkitating. And spending time here all of a sudden is not an expense, it's an investment. And what is that investment? That investment is in.

Where I'm going to spend my time, which is creating ideas for our quarterly meeting, which on Wednesday it's going to be where we're going to be on fire. Because we've spent the time and the money to get into that creative zone. I am realizing that my highest earning potential comes when I am just lit up in the zone. And so all the things that take me out of that email, meetings, buffer work, those are the things that have to go because the ROI on them is negative. It's negative. It's not even like, it's not even break even if I come out of my zone of genius. Anything that takes me out of that loses money because there's an opportunity cost of what I could be doing. Even if that trade is me playing video games and not doing anything just so that I have funds that I'm creative against. So that when I come back at it I'm sharper and I'm realizing that everything is easier and everything happens faster and we make way more money when I'm in that creative zone and that's my highest point of ROI right now. So the more focus you can get into thinking about what creates that return on investment of your time and your money, the more you'll act like a filter of the opportunities and the decisions that you make moving forward. There is an ROI on everything. Pursue the things that have exponential ROI with your time and with your money and then I'll say one asterisk that when it comes to investing for cash flow you want stability and 1% per month. Thanks for that bonus tip Uncle Tom. Hope you enjoyed this. Let me know what you are investing in in the comments.