HS 210 - Becoming a Leader with Gregg Murset

Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

Welcome to today's show. This is Jason Hartman, your host. And as you may or may not know, every 10th show, we kind of do a special tradition here that originated with my Creating wealth show where we do a topic that is actually off topic on purpose, something just to do with general life and more successful living. And that's exactly what we're going to do today with our special guest. Again, 10th show is off topic and it is very much intentional, just for personal enrichment. And I hope you enjoy today's show. And we will be back with our guest in just a moment.

Greg. It's my pleasure to welcome Greg Merced to the show. He is the founder and CEO of MyJobChart.com this is a real innovative product or service, I should say, to help teach work ethic at a young age and leadership skills. Greg, welcome. How are you?

I'm doing great, Jason. Thanks for having me on.

Well, good, good. It's good to talk to you. And you're coming to us today from beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona, right near me. Yeah, fantastic. But let's talk a little bit about leadership. And first of all, is it lacking and why is it important? What do you mean by it? If you could define it and then let's talk about how to develop it.

You know, I think leadership in and of itself is lacking. I think you can look at it on lots of different levels. I think leadership's lacking sometimes in the country with our elected leaders. I think there's leadership lacking in the home. There's just across the board. It seems like nobody really wants to take charge and everybody wants to be along for the ride. And so leadership is one of those things that needs to be developed and it needs to be focused on. And it's a really super important characteristic, especially in kids, that needs to be nurtured as they grow.

You know, I wrote an article several years ago about the concept, Greg, of being a host rather than a guest in Life. So many people, they act like they're a guest, they want to be entertained, they want to have stuff done for them, but very few people act like a host. And I think that would be sort of analogous to what you said about leadership. People want to be along for the ride.

Yeah. Isn't it amazing? People just want to sit there and flip through Facebook and be entertained and watch funny things.

It's almost like people want to just live a movie star lifestyle without doing anything. And it's really a problem. I mean, there's such a lack of not only leadership, but work ethic. Right. I mean, the day of just busting it out and working hard seems to be something that is just lacking. And people don't want to go for it anymore. And so they want to be entertained, watch Facebook and be, you know, with YouTube and all these different things, entertain 247 and not really put any effort into it. And it's a problem. It's trickling us.

Yeah, I agree. But in one respect, you can't really blame people for being that way because it's just permeated our culture, the media and the entertainment culture. It's really ridiculous. You mentioned Facebook, so, you know, some people post memes, of course, on Facebook, and you see them in your newsfeed. And. And one that I was looking at recently, you know, it had a black and white picture of, you know, how kids used to entertain themselves. And. And it had kids playing jacks, the old game jacks, and. And, you know, playing baseball with a. You know, with a stick that they found not even a bat. And. And. And things like this versus today. You know, you got a bunch of kids sitting around looking at their cell phone screens.

You've got it.

You've got.

You're absolutely right. The average kid, by the time they're age 18, will have spent 20,000 hours in front of a video game. I mean, that is a big problem, Houston. I mean, that is a problem. I don't care how much thumb coordination is a skill these days, but that just in and of itself is telling that we need to change this. I mean, we've got to kind of go back to the old school a little bit and teach kids that they can't just sit around and do nothing. That's a big problem.

Yeah. Well, I guess, Craig, what they're gonna do is if you want to instill these ideas, they're going to, you know, constantly ask themselves what's in it for them? Why make the effort? Why bother? Why knock yourself out as the Old phrase goes, what is in it for them? I mean, you know, is it all long distance or, you know, everybody's looking for instant gratification nowadays. Is there anything that we can show people that they get right away?

Well, I think a lot of it comes back to a parent. I mean, I think a parent needs to be able to teach their child delayed gratification. And it's not that everything in your whole life has to be delayed, right? There's nothing wrong with working real hard and getting something fast. There's nothing matter with that. But delayed gratification is one of those virtues that you really have to work on. And kids struggle with it these days because, you know, they have everything kind of at their fingertips, literally. And so you just have to try to teach them in a way that's meaningful to them why it is good to delay that. And it's tough, and parents are struggling with that. But I think. And that's why we really have kind of created my job chart is because it teaches, all right? You got to set a goal and you got to work towards that goal. And it might take a little time, but if you do that and you reach the goal, that builds you. That builds you as a person, that builds your character.

Well, I love what Zig Ziglar said about that. The late, great Zig Ziglar. He said it's not what we get by achieving our goals that counts. It's who we become by trying to. And that's exactly true. You know, so the ability to delay gratification in a culture that has instant gratification everywhere we look, it's. It's pretty tough to sell that it is.

And it's, you know, at the end of the day, it's a little boring. And it's. And it's a little bit, you know, it's not the sexiest thing to talk about, but it's an important characteristic that you have to instill. And it's tough for even adults to do that sometimes, right? We all want stuff, and we want it now.

You look at the days of paying off a mortgage, right? People don't even think about that hardly anymore. You're 65 and 70 years old and you still have a mortgage because you don't want to kind of stay at it and.

Keep putting away money towards your mortgage to pay it off.

Why do that when you can use your house as an ATM machine, take money out, get a tax incentive to do so, go on vacations, buy expensive gadgets and goodies, and then, you know, when the market goes down the tubes again, just default on your mortgage and, and let the bank take the hit. And it's really not the bank because it's really just the government through the next TARP bailout, you know?

Right. Isn't that great?

You know, it's just, it's just an absurd, it's an absurd world in which we live. I mean, there's, you can see why people don't have good, traditional work ethic, good traditional values, because they're not rewarded for it anymore. Greg. I mean, it's, it's, it's sad. However, I do want to make a point, just since you brought it up, on paying off the mortgage from an investor perspective, as long as it's not from a consumeristic perspective, I think paying off your mortgage is a very bad deal, you know, but, but that's sort of an investment philosophy. And I get what you're saying about saving, developing capital, capital formation, working for a distant goal. I get the concept.

Absolutely. There's two sides to that coin.

But you're right. On. This whole 2008, 2009 bloodbath that we went through in the economy was, at the end of the day, irresponsibility. It was irresponsible on the, on the banks, on the government, on people making decisions. All of that kind of boiled up to, you know what, it's just a bunch of irresponsibility. And that's.

And I think you're being extremely generous there. I would call it a bunch of criminality.

Well, you know, I think I'd agree with you. It just was out of control. And I don't know that it's totally in control now.

It's definitely not. I mean, you know, Wall street is the modern version of organized crime. The banksters, you know, they're just, it's just unbelievable. You know, you can be a crook nowadays if you're big enough because you have a lobbyist, a PR firm, and a huge law firm working for you to help you be a crook. It's unbelievable. But that's another subject.

Yeah. That just reinforces the fact that we need to kind of go back to the basics here and get leadership to make decisions that are good for people and kind of go back to these fundamentals of work ethic and smart money decisions.

Yeah, no question. Well, what do you think the cause of money problems is for most people nowadays? You know, if you look at someone who's in their 20s, for example, you can probably bet that they're struggling. The employment market's Pretty tough. You know, Obama isn't working very well in my opinion. We're in this sort of fake recovery, as I've long said. But you know, even when these people, you know, in their 20s, they get a job and they've got a decent job, they're still broke. You know, I mean, of course they're saddled with ridiculous amounts of student loan debt. That's a whole nother scam that we don't need to talk about.

That's a whole nother thing. I think at the end of the day, I think the reason why so many people are struggling is because they see on tv, they see on Instagram, they see on Facebook, all these people living this fancy lifestyle and they all want to live this kind of Justin Bieber lifestyle and they don't have the money to do it, but there's trying to do it.

They have to have, even though they have the average $45,000 in student loans, they have, they have $45,000 in student loans,' but they have a BMW.

It's just bad decision making and it's trying to live beyond your means. I mean this is, I feel like I'm a grandpa talking here. But the bottom line is it's living beyond your means. It's spending more than you make. And that's a big problem.

And what it boils down to too, Greg, is the concept of spending money on the appearances of wealth rather than things that create actual wealth. You know, so people will, they will sell their dreams for small desires. You know, they want to be wealthy, they want to, you know, they want to do all this stuff. But each little decision to be more consumeristic to, you know, go out and lease that BMW, they can't afford to buy all the fancy new clothes really puts off their ability to create capital to do things like buy rental property and grow a real investment portfolio. They're faking it. You know, they're spending money on the appearances of wealth.

And it's not a fake it till you make it. It's almost fake it. But you might not make it because you're faking it. And I think back to my grandfather, right? He owned several apartment complexes. He did very well in real estate. He was the millionaire next door, right to Thomas Stanley's.

And by the way, just explain what you're talking about. You know, Thomas Stanley's book, the Millionaire Next do talked about how the average millionaire drives a five year old car. Okay, they don't have. Or an eight year old car, I can't remember. But you Know, they don't care about.

8 year old, 8 year old F150 Ford pickup.

Yeah, right. I mean, a modest, a modest, you know, that's the most popular pickup in the world, the F150. And it's, you know, it's a modest, modest vehicle. And it's old, it's not new. And you know, they're not wasting their money on silly stuff. They're, they're, they're spending their money on the things that actually create wealth, as Stephen Covey calls it, production capacity, things that can do something for them.

That's exactly right. And I think back to him and I think he was the typical, you know, he had this Hawaiian shirt and he drove around this minivan. Right. But he had millions and millions of dollars. So that's the thing. And you know, kids, adolescents, 20s, 30s, everybody nowadays is trying to fake it and they're leasing everything and they're overextended on everything and it's really inhibiting them from actually achieving real wealth and real security.

Well, Madison Avenue has done a great job of selling Americans things they don't need and getting them to debt they can't afford, haven't they?

Absolutely. It's crazy.

It really is. What else do you want to touch on before you go? You want to talk a little bit more about the leadership side of the equation.

Yeah, I think maybe this is just something that I think is just a problem in America as well, is that it seems like some time ago everybody had to be a winner.

And I don't quite understand that. I mean, one of my kids ran in a track race last fall and he was not first place, but he got a first place medal. And it was like, it was kind of confusing to him, like, hey, I got a medal. And I was like, oh, yeah, you did. And it's just like, why do we do that?

Because that's the participation prize. You know, you're in first place, you're a winner just because you showed up, which I guess should get some reward. You know, I think it was Woody Allen with the old saying, 80% of success is just showing up. And there is something to be said for that, but come on. Absolutely.

We need to get back to a meritocracy, don't we?

Yeah, we can't praise failure. I mean, and it's not that we have to say, boy, you were the worst runner out there. I mean, of course that's not what I'm saying. But I mean, you think back and you know, Michael Jordan was cut from his High school basketball team. Bill Gates first company was a big old flop. And then Steve Jobs was fired from Apple. I mean, that stuff happens and that's okay. And that's how you create a leader. That's how you become a leader. You're running on the track, you fall down, you might not get first place, but you dust yourself off and you go again. So that's real leadership. And you're right, we need to get back to that stuff.

We sure do. Any tips for doing that?

I think it all goes back to getting back to the basics. I think it's good decision making. I think it's being fiscally responsible. I think it's, you know, never giving up. I think it's striving to lead out. And if you're, maybe if you're in a class in college, if you're in your first job, if you're in whatever predicament you're in, take a leadership role. Try to drive something, get your passion behind it and don't give up.

Now, Greg, you founded a company, MyJobChart.com that specializes in teaching these skills, these old fashioned values, if you will, to kids, right?

That's right. I mean, I started that because I recognized I wanted those kinds of values instilled in my kids. And now we have over 600,000 members and we have a new member joining every two minutes. So these are things that are resonating with people because they recognize what we've been talking about, they recognize the train wreck that's essentially our society in many respects and the fact that we need to get this back on track. And so it hasn't been an easy thing to start this and kind of lead this revolution in this thought process. But just like we just talked about, you can't give up and you keep pushing and things happen. Next thing you know, there's 600,000 people following and it's a great thing.

Give us just one example of how this works. You know, just a quick little elevator. Elevator speech.

Sure. So my job chart is, is a free online chore chart for kids ages 5 to 15. And parents assign chores to their kids. They earn points for doing the chores and those points represent money. And then they can use that money to save in real savings accounts, share with charities, or spend on things they need or want.

Fantastic. Fantastic. And 600,000 members now, huh?

Isn't that crazy? We're on our way to a million people and beyond. And it's because parents are waking up and don't want their kids to be laying on the couch and just wasting their life away. They want to empower them and they want them to become better.

I wish we had this. The last generation.

Would have been a great tool. Well, where can they find that? It's my jobchart.com right.

Got it. Yep.

All right, Greg, well, thanks so much for joining us today. And leadership and good old fashioned values. It's great to hear about this stuff. Save Invest, that good old richest man in Babylon philosophy I think is a very good one. And that's essentially what we're talking about today.

Thanks for having me on. Jason.

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