Ramit Sethi and Ben Casnocha -- 84 min webcast

So today, Ben Kazloka, famous entrepreneur and I'm going to meet Stacy from our teaching bridge. So we are going to talk about writing, entrepreneurship and mentoring as well as.

Other sort of topics that have been emailed in by folks. And we apologize to the people who came in at 11:30, the VIP list. We'll make it up to you. Somehow we had some Internet issues.

Yeah, his Internet issue is freaking back. I was complaining about my Internet. We go up to his house and it breaks down. So.

So now San Francisco. But we will make it up to you guys. But anyway, you all submitted a bunch of questions. We have personal finance things, entrepreneurship things, writing things, Email questions in as you add them into the chat room or to rehearse email address.

So why don't we just get started? All right. You thankfully printed out a bunch of stuff that we can tackle. So what do you propose we tackle first?

Writing. Yeah, okay.

Why don't we do writing, publishing stuff?

And then one question I get a ton that I've been wanting to address and I will in the forthcoming post, hopefully is around Information Diet. So what do we read? How do we read it? And of course, we're always looking forward to hearing what you guys are reading. So add it to the chat when we email it in and then we can talk maybe some business entrepreneurship stuff.

So information diet is a term that people use a lot, but they use it in different ways. For me, it's about being really conscious with what I consume. And because one thing that is really easy online is that you can just consume things all day long. And then you look back at your last week and you're like, I've gotten nothing done. But I read a lot of blogs and there's no point to that in many ways. I mean, let me put it this way. Anyone can be a consumer, but a very small percentage of people can be a producer. And the producer could be producing interesting blog posts, art, music, whatever. It's really easy to be just another consumer, but it's very difficult to be a producer. And I think fundamentally that's where people can get others attention by producing really good content. So that's kind of the way I think about information at what do you think?

So I wrote down some notes and I do it before I post. So I think my take on information is like, some people are really good consumers of information, some are not so good. Some people synthesize really quickly, some not so quickly, Some people read really quickly, some not so quickly. So if you're the type of person who can process a lot of information. The web has been in this boon because there's so much stuff out there that you can read. You could spend all day really interesting blogs and articles, but so there's way more stuff. And most people on this webcast are like that, right? They're committed to like self improvement. They love reading finance blogs, entrepreneurship blogs, and the questions like, how do you parse through this shit? How do you decide what's worth your time to read? So I thought I would just go through a few buckets of information that I consume kind of philosophically. I start with a premise like I don't think keeping up day to day with stuff is very efficient. So keeping up with the day to day news, I think it's usually like overkill or keeping up with every single blog post or every single blog you read I think is overkill. So I try to think about how can I like find sources that provide like digests or weekly or monthly summaries of things. So example, the Economist magazine provides a weekly summary of the news. Or the Atlantic.

Wait, wait, before you go on, how can everyone who reads the Economist such.

A snob about research? I think I just tag on it. It was just about the snobbies after the economies he had published in London so.

Magazine.

But I know it's one of the best. But anyway, all right, so my sources of information first is rss, right? So all of you hopefully have an RSS reader. I separate my RSS feed into three categories. I have high priority feeds, medium priority feeds, low priority feeds. I have 60 feeds, my high priority folder, 50 feeds in my medium priority, 40 feeds in my low priority. That kind of updates somewhat regularly. Once a day, usually after I work out, as I'm cooling off, I'll go through my high priority feeds and then maybe four times a week I'll go through my medium and low priority stuff. And in my high priority feeds are mostly people I know I want to stay on top of as well as other great sources of content. The medium and low priority is usually higher volume blogs that I don't necessarily want to get through. So that's my RSS reader. Some of the meta feeds that I subscribe to, talking about meta stuff is like Slate magazine. Slate.com has a great feature by twice a week called Other magazines where they just summarize what's in all the magazines. Like they'll go through Vanity Fair and Time and Newsweek and the Economist and like pull out the best article from those magazines. That's pretty efficient.

It's good.

Or like Amazon's blog. Amazon has a blog called Omnivoratious where every Monday they go and they summarize all the books that were reviewed in the Sunday newspapers from all over the country. So if you don't want to keep up with the book reception, it's right there. Then on Twitter. Twitter is another source of information, part of the diet. I follow 150people on Twitter. I check that a few times a day, usually when I'm on the go.

But I'm not concerned about missing anything.

And usually that's staying in touch with friends. And then print magazines I subscribe to the Economist, the Atlantic, and then we're both in airports a lot. So I have a whole category of magazines that I buy only in airports. So I buy New Yorker, Vanity Fair, a few others at airports. And then books are the last source of information. So I think books, as I ranked those, like I said, have the highest wisdom density of any medium and often be better off not following the news and reading more books. So I read about a book a week, usually when I'm on airplane. Got it. So that's kind of some.

So I'm just trying to synthesize what's the takeaway from the way you read.

I mean, first of all, it's very personal, the stuff you read.

And you actually have a pretty structured way around it. A structured yet loose meaning you've got high priority, low priority feeds. You read Twitter on the go, but at the same time sometimes you just read X or Y in the airport.

I also think like high level.

I consider it like I believe in high information.

I don't believe in like you should just outsource all your information gathering perhaps like if you're at a dinner party to let someone tell you what the news is.

So very different. That's right, right.

I think that's one of my disagreements. But I think that's because I like self identify somebody who can process a lot of information quickly. And so, you know, if I didn't feel like I could read quickly or something, I would, I would probably outsource it. Like I say, Ramit, tell me what's going.

So anyway.

A lot of people rely on me to send them interesting articles. That's a role that I've assumed. So I think figure out, do you process information quickly?

Can you read quickly?

Do you synthesize? No big deal one way or the other. But if you can, then consuming a lot of information I think can be a good investment.

That's interesting. What you said, realize what your style is. I think a lot of times we feel that we should read certain things. And there's always, you know, blogs and frankly these magazines that are like so high level and people say, I really should read the Economist or whatever. And if that's your style, great. I don't read the Economist because I frankly don't find it very interesting and it's just not my style. However, I read other things that I find super interesting and I know, okay, I'm not gonna have to force myself to do it. At the same time, don't let this be an excuse for some of the lazy asses that I'm sure are watching. They're like, I read one book every two years. That's great. I'm so in the news. No, I agree 100%. Maybe it's that we're both authors, but books are, in my mind, simply the high density use of information. I mean, look at authors, right? We spend years writing a book and you can pick it up for 10 bucks and learn everything that we spent years on. To me, that's a great use of time. And it's funny, I was reading this post the other day about how to save money on books, which I thought totally missed the point because for me, if a book saves me $10,000 or earns me $10,000 or lets me meet an interesting type of person that down the road is going to help my career or whatever, it's just intellectually interesting, then it's worth almost an infinite amount of money. So to me, saving money on books is something that, personally, I don't, I don't buy that. Like, that's something I strategically spend a lot of money all the time. Amazon. Amazon Prime. Airports. I bought a book yesterday. I read on the plane home on overeating. That's going to generate a ton of interesting stuff, whether it's blog posts or, you know, you have some weed. Yeah, I'm having a lot of diet issues.

We try to feed him as much as we can.

Thank you. Thank you. That's why we're doing this in my kitchen, to get the spirit up.

But I also want to say one thing that Warren once told me is like, the what you know is important. So everyone goes around saying, it's not what you know, it's who you know. I'm like, yeah, the who you know matters. But I also think you have to, like, keep up with what's going on. You have to have views on things, and books are a great way to improve you Know, there's ultimately. Oren also has this great word about creating an expert act. So like, if you can become really knowledgeable about something, you can be somebody expert on that topic. Right? So we're me for thousands of people, you're their expert on personal finance. And for a lot of business people I know, for whatever reason, I'm their expert on education or youth issues. And I try to keep up on those things because they usually email me and ask for my thought on that. So if you can develop a couple niches where you read most of the books in the field, you read all the blogs, you're up to date, and you can become an expert on a topic for people. You don't even have to be objectively an expert. All it means to be an expert is to know more than the person who's going to you for advice. So you kind of create that relative effect.

You know, it's funny, a lot of people, we're getting questions, by the way, you can submit them through twitter.com, submit it to Ramit RMIT or email it to ramitichtoberich. This chat room is flaky. I don't know what's going on. So questions either twitter.com ramit or ramitouwish. So we're getting a lot of questions. It's funny because sometimes people will send these questions like what's a Roth ira? And first of all, I want to kill them because once you read my damn blog. But second, there are these general topical questions where you can become your own personal expert. You can know enough. You can know more than 8% of people in like three hours of research. Go online, go to Wikipedia, search on Google, read the first 10 results and follow the links and you can get pretty good. Which always mystifies me that why don't there's something really interesting to you or something that you're about to interview for a State Department position and you need to know about the Middle East. Well, spend a day and learn by reading the first 10 results of Google. It's quite easy. So that's something that I would urge taking action. Also, I want to mention you and I read a couple of the same magazines which are totally fascinating. I think the Atlantic Monthly love it. Then you heard people think it's a women's magazine. This is a recent phenomenon.

So when I was in Columbia, one of the Mexico City bureau chief of the Economist was part of our delegation. We were like, don't talk about journalism and shit. And he mentioned Vanity Fair and I'D only occasionally see Vanity Fair pieces like Michael Lewis thing on Iceland, which is excellent. Or what he's explaining to me is Vanity Fair is half celebrity nonsense. But they also have tons and tons of money. So they pay big name writers like Mark Bowden, who's the head thing on the New York Times Company, and again, Michael Lewis, he's probably getting paid like $7 a word to write like a 5,000 word piece that A. So they have come to my end and hey, Christopher Hitchens write the monthly call. So it's actually high quality. So it's not just celebrity gossip.

So let's talk about moving on from the information diet. By the way, I'll just say one thing. Look at your past experience is a pretty good indicator of what you're going to do in the future. So if you're like, oh, I really should read books on healthcare and you haven't read any books in the last three months, that's probably an indication that you're not going to read any. For me on an information diet perspective, it often comes back to productivity. I think that's the domain which it's used. Note that Ben is drinking water out of his wine glass. I mean, why are you reading the things you do? Often some of it is just habitual. You open up Reddit.com or you read Twitter and you gotta ask yourself, what's the goal? I will tell you that as I got really busy with my book launch, I started decreasing my use of reading Twitter and Facebook and some of this other stuff. And it's actually been great. I have something going on that's keeping me really, really busy. And what I realized is when I come back to it, people are still going to be there, the world is still going to be the same. But at this moment I'm focusing on producing. So it's something to think about. All right, next we have a bunch.

Of questions that came in about writing.

Rafael is looking at those. You can submit questions through Twitter.

All right, so we have a question on the writer. What do you do stand out from the pack to your agent was your query folks and credentials and content. So maybe we can just talk high level about the publishing industry.

Yeah, let's do that. And let's also. Sorry, guys, I know the sound quality is somewhat weird, but we're working on a ghetto system. Sorry. Just bear with us. I appreciate it.

Yeah. Okay, so publishing industry, let's first say.

This, you wrote a book. Yeah.

Publisher John Wyman Son's book was called My Startup Life is Bio. Entrepreneurship much more.

Probably more of a niche book than.

Yours, focused probably on young people who want to start businesses.

Let's talk about what you just said later on, because that's really interesting. Why do some people, they want to be bestsellers, yet they write a book on ant farming?

Well, not everyone wants to be best sellers.

That's true. All right, so let's talk about this. So tell us about your pubchines.

All right, so I mean, I think my big picture thought on, like writing is that or writing books. Is that like, I think a survey around that 80% of Americans feel like they have a book in them and said everybody wants to write a book.

Right. I've never done that. I've never.

And so my usual personal advice is like, why you want to write a book.

Right.

It's like, what are your goals?

And the goals.

There's tons of possible goals.

Once you're a role play, I'll be the 80% and you'll be an author who's asking me this question. Okay, all right, then you're a published author. He'll call me to meet you in my presence. But second, I feel like I have a book inside of me. I really do. I've been thinking about this thing for 10 years, and I really want to write a book. So what do you suggest I do? How do I get this book in Barnes and Oven?

So first for me, what are your goals with your book? I mean, why do you want to write?

Why do you want to write a book? What do you mean? I have it in my head. I have to get this out. Of.

Pause on the roleplay for a second. Just to speak. I think one really good goal, one really good reason to write a book is because you have an idea that you want to spread. And a book reaches an audience that blogs do not, articles do not, tweets do not. So if you have a really compelling idea that you want to get out in the world, it reaches a different hyperbole. I think that's a good reason to write a book. Bad reasons to write a book, make money, be a bestseller.

Maybe another good.

Reason to write a book is credibility. So if you're a consultant, basically 99% of business books are written by people who are consultants who want to be speaking. And consulting and books are credibility.

Let's continue with the roleplay. So you just told me this, and I'm saying, well, okay, okay, I understand I need to have some goals. I'll write that down later. But I really want to get an agent what should I do? Thinking the process of getting an agent.

As like writing a business plan and trying to pitch it to investors or customers. You have to have a plan set up that would present your book idea in a way that is compelling, will stick out, and it's like raising money or selling products in the sense that you have long lines. Right. Agents get it overwhelmed with queries. Your chances of getting an agent are quite, quite low.

But I really want to write this book. I think the best way to approach.

Agents, most people approach their first agent by contacting their author friends and asking the authors to introduce them to their own agent. And I've introduced like three people, for example, to Lisa, someone we worked with, and all three of them have gotten booked.

So you want to get 8,000 emails.

For people around you. The agent process works. So you got an agent and you have to sell the agent on your book, and then the agent will in turn sell your book proposal, which is like a business plan, to publishers.

What I was dealing with that role play was just because you really want.

It, does it mean it's a good idea? Thank you for not picking up.

But just because you really want to do it doesn't mean it's good. Just as the same in business, I really want to start, you know, Aztec and mortal creations of, I don't know, dung. That makes no sense. That's not a business. Think of your book as a business. When you write your book proposal and you can just search for sample book proposals online, the content is important, but that's not all. Your platform is super important. If you have a huge platform and a mediocre idea, you're going to be able to sell that book a lot easier than a brilliant idea. And zero platform ideas are cheap. The other thing is, do you have experience? Have you written before?

What have you written for?

Do you have contacts with journalists?

Have you written articles like you.

I mean, if you had to get.

Into freelance anywhere or write a blog or get no other writing, you don't.

Start with the book.

Yeah, the book's kind of the peak of the. Absolutely.

Why did you start with a book? A book is really a dimensional process to write. It's years and it's pretty hard. And one way to cut your teeth. I'll give an example from. I will teach you. Rich. If I had written a book the first year I started the blog, it honestly would not have been as good because I hadn't got my ideas as sophisticated as they later became. And the blog let me do that. It was A testing ground to let me figure out what people responded to, what were holes in my idea, etc. And it also gave me great comments and stories. So there are other ways of working up towards a book. The problem is that often writing a book is like losing weight. We want to lose weight. We don't want to go to the gym to do it. So if you tell people, well, why don't you start a blog? It's free. That quickly takes away all the excuses. And that's what a lot of people will say, oh, I'm not so interested in that. So try to do something where your barriers are low, because if you're targeting here for writing a book, your barriers are quite high. And it's often a good example of just using excuses.

And one last thing I said, and then we move on, is I think Penelope Trump wrote a good post on why people shouldn't write a book. And I've written a post on why people shouldn't go into speaking. The book writing process and doing speaking. These are highly romanticized pursuits that are often much grimier than they appear. And that's why I think both Ramit and I are not. We don't kind of always evangelize people or always. Can we try to tell people to write a book? Right. Well, usually it's not the best thing for you to do.

Yeah. First of all, everyone. Okay, first of all, we just reduced the volume. So I hope that helps. Let me know via tweet if it's good or bad. There are a few industries where everyone.

Who does it.

They always say exactly what I did. So it's like MBAs, doctors, authors, aka and there's a few other ones. So there's something to be said for that.

Think about it.

And one thing I hate, by the way, is people say, oh, authors don't want to do it because they don't want competition. Yeah, that's fucking bullshit.

All right, let's move on.

We're getting some tweets here. Yes, it helps a lot. Okay. All right, again, twitter.com ramit you can submit stuff there or submit it through email. Let's take some more questions from there.

Okay.

We have a bunch of personal finance.

Stuff that maybe we should.

Oh, yeah, let's quickly dispense with that.

Do you want to do some specific personal finance?

I'd love to hear thoughts on the economy and spiraling downward interest rates on savings accounts. God, I'm going to kill you, whoever wrote this. In my book and on my blog, there's something called don't be a rate chaser. A lot of people are like, oh my God, my ING account went down 1%. And if you actually ran the numbers on that 1%, even on a $10,000 balance, it's something like $8 a month. You don't want to chase rates with savings accounts. Your savings account, really, the point is not to accumulate money through interest. It's really to accumulate money through principal. So I think, first of all, I'm just joking about wanting to kill you for the question. It is a decent question because I.

Get it a lot. I'm pretty.

That's true, that's true.

I do use Internet record.

If you're asking that question. I think it's a good question. But it shows a fundamental sort of lack of understanding of how savings accounts work. Your real money is going to be made through investing and entrepreneurship, primarily investing. So what I prefer to do is pick one good savings account and stick with it. And again, that's like my tripod of stability, as I recently wrote. And then let me be ultra aggressive on other things like investing or entrepreneurship. Don't think that your savings account, because it dropped 0.5%, is going to kill you. It's variable with the industry, and so it is what it is. Don't worry too much about it. My 401k is invested all in stock mutual funds. I have a limited number of funds, and most of the funds have high fees. Do you have any suggestions? Yeah, talk to hr. Most people never talk to HR at all. HR wants suggestions, but since no one respects them, no one talks to them, go tell them you want better funds and make some suggestions like a Vanguard, T. Rowe Price, tiaa, Crep, and try to get the wheels in motion. Often you may have to get some other people on board with you, but most people do whatever you tell them because they have no idea about investments. Okay, I have a Roth ira, but it appears to be a dog. If I move, what type of fund should I try to move it to? Okay, so this is again showing a lack of understanding about how a Roth IRA works. So let me quickly break it down. A Roth IRA is simply an account. Once you put your money in a Roth ira, you have to invest it into something. It can just sit there as cash, or you can pick index funds or even stocks or bonds. If it's a dog, as you're saying, what you probably mean is that the fund in your Roth IRA is a dog. So you could move funds, you could actually sell it and buy a different fund. You may have to pay, you may have some tax consequences. Or you could simply stop investing in that and take the next cash that you put into your Roth IRA and pick a different fund like a Vanguard fund, which I really like. That's really up to you. You may want to run some numbers using the investing calculator online from dinkytown.net and see what makes sense, especially from a tax consequence perspective. But if you're young, probably not that much money in there anyway. So it's really up to you.

Can I ask you a question about personal finance? Someone recently tagged Delicious that Jim Cramer blow up that he ran on some of that.

So you often espouse investing in index funds.

And that's what I've done and what a lot of people do, the s and P500 over the last 10 years has not delivered the type of return that it historically has. What's your response to Kramer? Jim Cramer Gusto's, you know, fuck index funds. I'll see you in. You know, if you want to wait 20 years to get your 11% return.

Or whatever, do that.

But if you had invested according to my advice, you would have.

So there's a couple things I need to look at that tape a little carefully because Jim Cramer did something very interesting. Daniel Solon, who wrote this great book, the smartest investment book you'll ever need, he was talking about one thing and.

Jim Cramer refocused it on another.

And I'm not remembering the exact details, but one of them was talking about passive investing. That's what Solyn was talking about. And Jim Cramer came back to say index funds, which is a certain type of investing. It's a very small department and most people didn't catch that. The other thing is if Jim Kramer says you want to wait 20 years. Yeah, actually I do want to wait 20 years. That's what long term investing is about. It's not about picking things and hoping for two years, 75% bump. The third thing is when Jim Kramer says if you had invested at X date, well, there are a lot of X days where you could have invested. And you look at the Kromer Watch, which is a site online, and you could flip a coin and get better results. So I met with John Vogel yesterday, who is the founder of Vanguard. Guy has a ton of money. Passive investing. What he points out, and he's been pointing out for 35 years, is that it's not necessarily only the returns that matter, but the costs. And when you're talking about hiring someone to manage it for you they're instantly taking 2% off the top, which means they need to get 12% returns or 13% consistently for 20 years, 30 years. They can't do that. It's mathematically shown.

And by the way, one other thing Kramer said is the S&P 500 and obviously that's just one exact hyperdrive.

Exactly.

But I think it comes down to what your definition in the long term is. Right.

I think it's an important qualification to.

Say the long term is 20 years, not 10 years. For some people it might be 7 year horizon, 8 year horizon, 15 year horizon.

So what does it mean to be.

Investing for the long term? And historically people kind of used 10 years as that long term horizon. If it really is 20 years, fine. But that should be the advice. That's prosperity. I completely agree.

And remember, anyone who reads this site or reads my site in my book knows that it's misguided to say that there are only two options for put your money in the market or take it out. That's not true at all. You can change your asset allocation, you can change your time horizon. I explain all these in chapter seven. So just recognize that what's offered in the media is often not exactly, it's overly simplistic. All right, Let's continue working. Now we got personal finance. Let's take one or two more questions. We've got someone that says, I'm in grad school. I'm going to be on the wrong side of six figures in debt once I get out. How do you suggest you balance debt and investment when debt is going to be an exorbitant amount of money? First of all, I've been thinking about education a lot in terms of debt, as a lot of people go back to school and rack up 100k in debt because they can't get a job. I think it's worthwhile to spend one day before you go back to school running a calculator to see how much will my loans be when I graduate. I mean, frankly, if you go back to get an English degree and it costs you $100,000 and you're going to make exactly the same money as you would without it. You just need to be informed about that. I mean, my opinion, I'll just tell you I don't think you should do it. But there are more reasons than just money for education. Absolutely more. In fact, I'm very much by the book for personal finance, but for education I throw it all out the window and say get the best education you can with that said, a lot of people come out and I get these emails all the time. I never realized that I would have to pay $700 a month for my loans. Well, you never realized because you didn't take one day out of your damn life to run the numbers. Okay? So it's worth it. When you're in school, one of the things you can do is obviously start saving and investing. The other thing is, I know grad students have a ton of free time. Think about how you can earn more money on the side, particularly as a consultant. If you're doing a PhD, there's a lot of people that want to hire you as a tutor in other ways. That's easy way to make a few hundred a month. You can save that, you can use it to pay down debt, or you can start investing. So there's a number of options on that one question that just are we.

Done with personal financing for a second. Some guy just asked a question on Twitter. Being 20 somethings, how do you go about getting people to value your expertise?

Yeah, and this is a question I.

Get a lot which is like, how do you gain credibility if you're young and starting a business, or you're writing a book and you're young or trying to do other things that generally speaking are the domain of adults or older people. And I think my answer would be there are like 45 year olds who present themselves like they're 20 and there are 20 year olds who present themselves like they'RE 45. And if you present yourself professionally and have a professional attitude about things, then being a 20 something or 30 something, 40 something is kind of irrelevant. And there's been some chatter on the blog about these Gen Y blogs and people who really talk about their generational identity a lot. And I think in general how old you are shouldn't really matter. If you're a professional person with an interesting idea or a professional person starting a business, that's solving a real problem.

It doesn't matter.

When I was starting my business, I was in my teens, but the problem that I was trying to solve was acute enough that it was able to attract the attention of customers who cared. So I just seemed like the age was kind of irrelevant at some point.

And you just said the key point. I think if you are solving a problem, the age question goes away. If you are simply talking about how old you are and how interesting and cool you are, then nobody cares. I don't care. You have to ask yourself. In fact, I was talking to my.

Publisher and one of the things that.

They said that was pretty interesting to me was they said, yeah, Workman tends to be pretty good at not just identifying the readers, but the buyers. And I thought that was very interesting. The same is true of your stuff. When you started Homecake, it wasn't just like, who's gonna read my blog? It's who's going to buy, who's gonna buy the product?

And so I think people. Somebody once did a post or something about how one bad reason to start a business when you're young is you have a great excuse to fail. It's like, oh, I was, you know, I was 24 and no one took me seriously. That's why I failed. Like, I think it's kind of overrated. I mean, I don't think. Again, I don't think any age can be irrelevant. If you want it to be irrelevant, present yourself professionally. If you write well and you're solving a real problem.

I heard about a story about a.

Guy who wrote a book.

He was like 19 and he had won a ton of money for college and he wrote this book on how to get money for college. The problem was who's the audience for that? So he wrote it in a style that was like a 19 year old writing. So it's like written for like, you know, young people, which are of course never going to buy that book because.

They don't care about paying for college.

And then it wasn't comprehensive or written in the right way for older parents who are really the people who would buy it. So he stuck in this middle ground, this area where in limbo, and no one's taking him seriously because his content does not deserve to be taken seriously. If you solve a specific problem right, that can really get people to value your credibility.

One other suggestion I have is you can sometimes gain credibility through osmosis. So when I was first, in some of the early business meetings I was at, I would bring along gray haired advisors and perhaps overstate their involvement in what was going on. But nonetheless, by having them aside next to me in the meeting.

They use.

Credibility because they're older and established and professional. And through their endorsement of me, the others in the room kind of endorsed me. So that's another way. I think if you have an advisor board, you have older advisors, you have credibility. Try through osmosis to kind of glean something. Well, we'll talk about mentoring as well.

Yeah, that's a big thing. I want to spend. We'll talk about that in a minute. But I want to spend at Least a good few minutes on it because we get questions. Aware of that. Mentoring. All right, let's quickly take a look@twitter.com ramit and see what questions people have submitted. Okay, so here's an example of a question that I don't quite know what to do with. Hey, Ramit, I asked a question about branding for a small custom PC company. What can I do on a shoestring?

I think here's a question you submitted earlier.

Is it in here? Because that question to me is like.

Okay, here we go. Here it is. Yes. He's just following up.

All right, my niche is selling custom computers. How do I brand and sell, sell. Considering it's a very competitive market.

This is too specific.

I want to read. Yeah, let's tackle this one later. I'm not sure we have much to add on this one. Here's another question this guy talks about. He's writing a DVD for preschoolers. How do I reach beyond this marketing and sales plateau to reach greater awareness in sales? Now, this is an example of a question that there's no way we can answer because it's way too broad. You're basically asking, how do we sell more copies? And this is the kind of question that I've been getting a lot. And I've been really urging my readers to rethink the way they ask questions when they're talking to busy people. So let me tackle this for one second. You and I get a lot of emails and we send them back and forth. We share them about good emails, bad emails, how people write. In fact, you guys who are watching today probably saw this post I did earlier this week about a guy who wrote me these long, random emails. Now look at the comments on there. A lot of people got angry and thought I was being an asshole, but actually his emails were rambling. They were really long. And actually afterwards, I ended up helping him with his resume and introduced him to a company that wanted to talk to him. But the point is, if you write really long, rambling or irrelevant questions, you will not get good answers, especially from busy people. So when someone comes to me, you're.

Very busy, extremely busy and important.

So several things. Yeah, you're so important. So I think the first thing is that if you ask a really broad question to a busy person, you should just expect to getting more. Okay, if you say, how do I get more sales?

Now, to be fair to this question, I mean, I agree with your overall balance, but his specific question is about a plateau.

I understand.

And I was going to mention crossing The Chasm by Jeffrey Moore, which addresses the plateau concept because there is a phenomenon selling things.

We should talk about that. When you send a question, you should spend that one day of research. And if you have a question about a Roth ira, it's much better for me to say ramit, I've reached my income limit. These are the three options I've researched. Which would you recommend best versus what should I do about my Roth ira? That shows a complete lack of time investment spent on your so when you go to do an email to somebody, it's really, really important to show that you have done your own research. Do not go and try to get the broad based information from someone who's busy. It just doesn't work. I can tell you that right now because I ignore a lot of emails like that each week.

So this is a great book if you guys. It's probably more for tech companies, but Jeffrey Moore describes this great phenomenon where he describes that a lot of products are able to secure early adopters or sign up early adopter customers. People who are on the cutting edge, people who want the DVD for their preschooler because they always want to have the latest DVD or someone who wants to buy a piece of software because they always want to be on the cutting edge. So there are these early adopter customers, one of those more mainstream the laggard customers, people who won't buy a company until they're social proof their peers have bought it. They don't necessarily want to be on the cutting edge. They want to make sure it works. They don't want to use anything that has buggers and and there's a chasm between early adopter clients and mainstream clients.

And the reason that such a difficult.

Chasm to cross and why many sales trajectories plateau at a certain point after they sign up early adopters but are not able to sign up mainstream customers is because mainstream customers only want to buy products if there are other referenceable customers. They want to see testimonials and references from people like them. So they don't want to call the early adopter and say hey, how do you like this product? Is it working out for you? Because they don't. They distrust the early adopter because the early adopter is an early adopter. So they want to talk to other mainstream customers to hear how their product experience was. But how do you get a mainstream customer until there are other mainstream customers of Chicken D Egg Buff? So you describe that problem.

So there is. So I do think.

I don't know if It's a specific question but there is a phenomenon I think when starting businesses and selling products where you can sign up for a lot of early adopter clients but you're not able to causing in the mainstream. So I recommend Jeffrey Moore, his follow up book that describes that and how to solve that problem.

I recommend going to my delicious tag marketing and looking at a bunch of.

Tactics there as well.

You tackle the strategy side of it, which is super critical especially if this is a serious business, especially if it's a technology business. And then you look at the tactics as to what can I do creatively for quick wins. All right, again we're taking questions on twitter.com ramit you can also email ramit@iwillteachtoberich.com and we'll answer those questions. What do you suggest we go on to next? Let's do mentors in about five minutes so everyone can get prepped up for that. That's what I want to spend a.

Lot of time on.

What else do we have today? Questions we had someone asked a question. A lot of people are saying good thing you dressed up for today's webcast. Thomas, did you put aside in the sub savings account for that? I don't get a question.

I recently wore a blazer somewhere and I had like 10 people asking me what was the occasion?

Okay, somebody asked about can you guys.

Talk about starting a business in college and basically balancing doing stuff in college. So we were both active, we've both been doing a lot of shit while we've been in school.

My thing is very simple. My answer is my priorities were number one, in college, friends, meet people, hang out. Number two, my own businesses. Number three, classes. That's it. Yeah.

I think my take is that there are always trade offs. So if you're in school and you want to start a business, you have to rob Peter to pay Paul. So you're either going to have to have a really shitty business because you're going to all your classes and doing really well academically or you have to do get shitty grades and start your.

Business or you have to watch less tv.

Of course, assuming you optimize. I nasty every day in college I.

Would wake up, I swear to God. Let me tell you a story. I would wake up, okay? I had a roommate who was, who's now a PhD student in computer science at MIT. So this dude worked a lot. Okay. I wake up at like I wake up really early but I watch ER from 10 to noon, two hours in the afternoon.

If you have that Last time. Of course there's things you can do.

But assuming like your joint and I'm.

Not a ton of of like people who are starting who are driven like organizing stuff like that.

Okay then I think that this is.

A basic fact for someone now is going to be you're not going to.

Be able to be an A plus.

Student, ideally starting a business. So be prepared to make trade offs for my trade off was classes. Right. I did very poorly academically but that was an acceptable trade off for me. But I think it's important to go into that that situation with open eyes. Like don't delude yourself that you're able to have like this great business and have a really hedge fund but also.

Have 100% social life and 180 plus grades.

Like you can't do it all. I agree.

In fact the best advice I got my freshman year was take the minimum amount of classes. You can take 12 units because there's much more important things than taking classes. And that was my freshman first quarter. I totally agree. You will quickly see afterwards that grades become less relevant. Grades are important if you're going to grad school or you are an automaton who's going to work in a box. If you are doing something entrepreneurial, then by definition your grades are not as important.

The average GPA itself made millionaires in America in college.

2.6 out of 4. No kidding.

Got a question?

The guy who writes a Yankees blog, how do I stand out? My best suggestion to you to stand out from the competitive market of Yankees blogs is write really good content. Most people, not most, a lot of bloggers, they have like top 10 ways to blah or link Roundup. Nobody cares about that. That's not something you can be proud of two years from now. Write stuff that is original and interesting and thoughtful and then make sure you tell people about it as well. Okay, let's. Let's talk about mentoring, man. So let's first set the context. I've been waiting a long time to talk about this on camera. So I don't know if you guys are excited, but I'm very excited because personally I have had mentoring make a huge difference to me. I think you have as well. And it's something that's not well understood. One of the. We may do another role play again. So everybody get ready. What are you thinking? Because so far you've done and somehow I'm an expert. What does that say? Here's the thing about mentoring. We get these emails every week that are like either Will you be my mentor? Or what words do I use to ask someone to be my mentor? Which is like someone asked a question.

Here about.

You said basically, yeah, I.

Don'T want to actually. The person with software said, he said, I don't want honestly ask. Won't you be my mentor?

Yeah. So let me first suggest, like what I think about mentoring, why it's useful and what the misconceptions are. And then let's just kind of chat about how we're going through. So mentors can be older, they can be younger. They are typically people who have been successful in something that you want to do, but it doesn't always have to be directly relevant. So I've got a mentor who works in a totally different field and he's just been successful. He knows how to run meetings really well. Okay. And he taught me a lot about how to send effective emails. That is not directly relevant to personal finance or whatever. But it's something that I want to learn how to do better. How do you meet them and how do you get the most value from them? We'll talk about the tactical stuff, but just at a high level. You shouldn't just have one mentor. Mentoring should be something that you have many mentors and it's a repeated thing. You don't just get a mentor and then now you can say you have a mentor. It's actually a relationship that you build and you learn from each other and mostly you learn from them. So that's kind of my take on it. I think that if you don't have a mentor today, you can get one. We'll talk about the task for that.

Okay, so my high level Hodges number one.

Yes, it's very important.

Like, studies show there's a famous Harlem Business Review article published in 1980 that looked at successful executives. And they asked these successful executives, like, when you look back on your career, what was maybe the most important thing that got you here? And many of them said mentor John Doe. So mentoring is a different one. And that being said, I feel like network mentoring is a word, a concept that's thrown around. Like, networking is as this like kind of super passion, right?

Like these words like you have to.

Find your passion, you have to go network with people. And like, yeah, it's an important concept. Like any mentors are important, but let's not overstate that one. It's like, it's not like a cure all.

You're not fantasy for anything.

And nor should like one's whole focus be on the guy. Gotta like sign up mentors. That's the wrong mentor.

Actually, it's kind of like getting. Raising venture capital. People often think that that's the goal, but that's not really the goal at all. It's simply, it will help you on.

The path to direct.

So I think the other high level.

Strategy thing I would think about when it comes to mentors is that you.

Think about mentoring a relationship like you.

Think about any relationship. These are not.

Relationships are relations.

Whether it's romantic. What you're reading next week on friendships or mentoring, you have to take the long view. Like, you know, have you ever, have you ever had a friendship with somebody where after 30 minute coffee you're like, hey, were you my friend? Can you be my friend?

That we find totally. It doesn't happen that way. Or do you want a first date? Do you ask, you know, do you ask for them?

First date?

No. Like it takes a long time for.

That relationship to develop.

And the same is true with mentoring. So there's nothing, there's nothing more annoying.

Or less attractive that somebody has a very transactional short term view of a mentoring relationship or any relationship for that matter. So when it comes to mentors or friends or interacting with people, my attitude is always, you have to cultivate a natural, genuine love for people.

You want to meet with your mentor.

For coffee, not because you want something from them, because you love hanging out with them or her. So I think high level, that should be the frame.

That cannot be overstated. That. Just talk to your friends after today and ask them what they think about mentoring or networking and you will easily get people talking about transactional relationships. Oh yeah, I need a network so I can close this deal. Well, you're not going to close the deal.

I want to keep score. I posted some notes on my blog on the conversation I had about friendship and they said most friendships are. And I would say this is true for all relationships are bi directional. And how about he's fine. I know that sounds like the. But each part you're not keeping score. You're not trying. Not Cliff, it's not.

You scratch my back, I scratch your.

This is how a lot of people treat relationships. It's like I introduce somebody to somebody and then they respond, okay, thanks for the introduction. Can I introduce you to somebody right back? Actually not good book on this.

I always recommend is never eat alone. I like it. I think it's. I actually wish I had written that book, but he did a better job.

Than I could have.

Okay, so let's talk about mentoring and Stuff like, when did you first get your first mentor? Okay, so I think there are two ways to find mentors.

One is work within your network. And people often underrate the size of their network. If you say you're a young person in school or something like your networking system, your friends and your friends, parents, your teachers and your teacher's friends, your parents and your parents friends, your extended family, the people in your neighborhood. Like, the first guy I met who was kind of a true mentor to.

Me, I grew up near.

He was in my neighborhood, and he was retired by Cooper's partner, and he's just in the hood. I actually saw him at a funeral once and started talking, and we realized I lived near him, and then I started seeing him on the weekends, and it kind of grew from there. So that's one bucket of your existing contacts, and the other is cold calling. And that is the process of looking up interesting people in your community and trying to figure out who might have valuable things to teach you and reaching out and writing a really killer email saying, hey, I've researched you, I know what you're about, and I'd love to take you out for lunch. The question's not, will you do mentor?

It's can I take you out for.

Lunch and pick your brain?

Okay, that is super interesting. And by the way, a lot of what you just said is in your book in more detail. My startup life. I have it in my room. I'm going to go get a copy so we can show it on screen. One simple thing that you can do, and this doesn't just apply to mentoring, is sit down on a piece of paper and. And build a simple process map or an engagement funnel. I know this is super weird. It's good. But, like, I mean, this is the thing. I wouldn't recommend this for everyone because some people will take this advice wrong. Like this, I can tell you this video is going to get cut up into a small tactical post. Someone's going to be like, I'm going.

To build an engagement funnel for my.

Business and my relationships. No, please listen carefully. Sometimes it just helps to break down every point of interaction before if you've never done it before. So, for example, you just said something really fascinating. You said, when you email someone, Colby, knowing you would like them to be your mentor, you don't say, will you be my mentor? You break it down further and you say, can I take you out to coffee? So if you wanted to meet someone to potentially be your mentor, what is every step you could take? Maybe first Researching them, then checking LinkedIn to see if you actually know them. Then email them and ask them out.

Checking Google News to see if they showed up in an article and say, hey, I saw you recorded saying this.

And actually I find it provocative for.

High and so follow people to express.

A really professional disagreement.

People get flattered all the time.

So you don't say, oh, I love your work.

Say, hey, I love your work. But I actually have a question about this thing.

I think maybe I have a different perspective on it.

That's often more important.

That's really good because I know we both were watching somebody online who has been interviewing a couple people and he's very open to talk and his effusive praise. And I'm like, all right, that's not. I mean, he's interviewing great people. But at the same time, there's something to be said for having your own values and saying, you know what, I really like what you do. But there's one thing that I don't.

Agree with you on that shows that.

You are confident in your own knowledge.

And by the way, I know we're kind of jumping all over, but I think we should also define what a mentor is. My definition of a mentor is somebody.

Who is helping you both intellectually and.

Emotionally on professional and personal issues. So for me, a mentor is somebody that you go to not just for tactical business advice. To me, my term for that is an advisor. Business advisor may only get caught up.

In semantics, but I do think there's.

A difference between somebody who can offer really good business advice versus a mentor where your conversations tend to be more expansive and wide ranging. You might talk long term career issues through, you might talk about those types of things. You might talk about work, life, balance issues. Those are the types of conversations I think you have with a mentor and then you can have. And because of that type of emotional engagement, I think there's necessarily a maximum number of people who can have that relationship. So I don't think you can have like 50 mentors.

I think you have an infinite number.

Of advisors and people who give you advice or who you go to on specific things. But for a mentor, I would say.

If you can have a few people.

With whom you feel like you've known for a few years, with whom you have conversations that transcend normal business boundaries, that I think you have a genuine mentoring relationships.

Okay, let's go to a couple questions and then we'll get back to some of the stuff. Great questions. On twitter.com ramit what are some of the most valuable things that happen as a result of your mentoring relationships. This is from Max Marmor. Good question. Personally, I can literally look back, as Steve Jobs said, and connect the dots from some of my earliest mentors. And these were in college. I remember. I mean, it will take me all the way back from college to writing a book and starting I will teach for Village. I got into a freshman seminar, which was a small group with one professor called Armando Fox. And he was super helpful. And he once said he took us to one of his research areas, which was called the eye room. And afterwards I stopped him and said, hey, I'd be really interested in doing research here with you. That one decision, to just come up.

To him and talk to him actually.

Had a lot of impact because he introduced me there. I later did research for someone else in that room. I later found BJ Fogg, who became one of my mentors at the Persuasive Technology Lab. He encouraged me. He said, people are looking for thought leaders. There's a lot you can do. And he encouraged me to do that. He also taught me how to write emails and run meetings. And I met tons of other people. Omidyard Network Consulting, VC Consulting, worked for Seth Godin. All these things because of kind of a few simple decisions back then. The point, of course, is that one simple decision isn't enough. You have to maintain the relationships with each person. So any of my business can be traced back to a lot of that stuff. A specific example, I found mentors really.

Good at giving the cliche advice that we all hear a million times.

But when they give it because it.

Comes from them and because it comes with such authority, it actually means something. So how many times have you heard things like, you gotta be persistent and work through the hard times. You hear that so much that we're basically numb to that message. But when it comes from somebody who you know, whom you have a personal relationship and who's authoritative, it really makes a big difference. So, for example, I remember having an email exchange with a guy who was mentoring me when I was first starting my company. Said the line.

Good things come from.

The desire to make them happen.

And that's kind of like cheesy.

We hear it a million times. Like, Twitter quotes are always like these self help things. And he got my eyes glazed open. But when it came from him, it made a big difference. Another example, when we had a kind of a. It was a bunch of deals I was working on, Sales leads were falling apart and the pipeline was drying up. And I felt like this whole business concept was kind of not working out. No one wanted the product. Remember having a phone conversation with this Pricewater scoopers retired guy who lived in my neighborhood and going through the pipeline, I'm like, it's dried up. I don't know who. It seems like this is all falling apart. And he said like, well Ben, this is, you know, this is where, you know, I don't think he said it this cheesy, but he's like, this is where like great men are. Will you endure and keep going and will you just give up?

And again, cheesy one written the self help book. But when delivered by somebody who knows.

You, I think it's easy to underrate how much of an impact that can have. So to me, I find that those are really valuable things that came from my relationships.

Here's a great question. This comes through twitter.com rameet if you were already a mentor, what would you expect in specific from the other person? Great, great question. What should you be expected to do as a mentee? So I would say first of all, at a minimum, you should be expected to communicate with them regularly. Regularly means every X weeks. Okay, it's a weekly thing, maybe once a week, maybe once every few weeks, whatever. But it's frequent and it's repetitive. The other thing is don't just put yourself in a position of always asking questions. Add value as well. Never eat alone talks about this. Ben talks about this on his blog as well. But let's pretend that Ben were mentoring me. I mean there might be. Of course I'm going to be having Ben's blog on RSS and I'm going to be having Google alerts on your name. And when I see something about how you just wrote this huge article in the American magazine, I may think, wow, that was really great. I really love that. It reminds me of these two articles I've read because of course we're in the same domain. And by the way, I noticed something here if you have some time. You mentioned that Americans are blah blah blah. Well, one thing I noticed about my.

Friends is they're not blah blah blah.

So how do you reconcile that? Adding value, forcing them to think as well? I would say that's one. So being communicative, challenging them. And actually I got a couple of.

I think I did a post. If you search my blogger blog and just search mentee M E N T E E I did a list of like seven things. I remember brainstorming that post with Frank Calminford who writes A great blog. I love. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of California. But anyway, I listed some topics there. Here's one kind of thing that most.

People want to talk about when it.

Comes to being a good mentee.

Again, this is kind of the larger.

Theory I have on interacting with busy people. I mentioned earlier you might want to express disagreement. Another approach you might want to take is to engage them on areas they're not often engaged on. So I remember having breakfast with a guy who was CEO of a very large company and very, very busy, and it took a long time for me to get this meeting. He was somewhat advising me and I could have peppered him with the same bullshit questions that everyone asks him. You know, what are the keys to success? Or how does one go about building a business? Or how do you sell customers? But I know he thought he'd get very quickly bored if we had that conversation.

So what did we talk about?

We talked about religion because I knew he had some interest in like spiritual systems. We found out that I had done research on it.

But recently I met.

With a VC here in Silicon Valley and we're talking about various companies and stuff. Halfway through I noticed that he seemed kind of disengaged. So I totally switched gears when we talked about European politics. He's originally from Europe and he got much more engaged. And it doesn't mean that every interaction.

Can'T be about what you're ultimately looking.

To talk about like you're a specific business diagnostic.

Sometimes in the heat of the moment.

Talk about things they're not used to talking about, engage them in that way. Then later on in the follow up email, you can say, hey, great talking about religion, by the way.

Do you think you can introduce me.

To Joe Blow, who can help me with my business?

So if you're a mentee to somebody.

Who'S busy and gets hounded with the same bullshit questions, try to engage them on different topics.

I love that. So we got a great question here on Twitter saying, where did it go? Here it comes. It says, is a loose, predetermined exchange of pro bono work for advice or mentorship. Too formal. So this is actually directed to me because I know the questioner and I will tell you right now that I offer mentorship to a lot of people that work for me for free. And what I've actually told people is, so I get a lot of people who offer to work for me. And it's a great thing because one of the things we can talk about.

Is working for free.

I think it's one of the best strategies you can do to totally accelerate your career. But when people often offer to work for me, sometimes I have the need or sometimes I don't. But if I do, what I'll do is basically give them a quick test and see if they're good. 50% of people quickly wash out. They're totally worthless. They don't last a week. Others will quickly show that they're really good. So they pretty much want to work for me for free a lot. But at a certain point you have to start paying something, right? So what I've said is you can, I can pay and it's the value of money. Or it can be a mentorship and advice kind of thing as well, or some combination thereof. I learned how to do this in college from one of my mentors who said, you can either get paid for doing research or you can get credit. If you get paid, you're going to have to do a lot more menial work because you are paid employee. If you get research credit, it's going to be more intellectually interesting stuff. So I would say that find the people that are doing interesting stuff. I mean, just look at your own behavior. What blogs do you read, what magazines do you read? Find the people that you want to work with that you think you could learn from. And I often do work for them for free.

I did a blog post called Search My Blog for Looking for a Summer Job and I was talking about Reach out to your. Actually, I just got an email this morning from a guy who said he read that post and reached out to a venture fund in Silver Valley using that exact approach script. And he has kind of a free internship, I guess. Yeah, I don't want to pick semantic hairs here, but I do think if.

It'S like, if it's pro, if it's.

Transactional instead of actual mentorship, I would say you're advising people. It's like an exchange of services. You're in a bartering relationship. I think a mentoring relationship can be bi directional. I think mentors do get value from the mentee in some way, but it's not as defined as I think some of your relationships.

That's probably actually a pretty good point. Not to split pairs, but yeah, that's a good point. That's the tactic I've used quite extensively in my career, which is working with people I think I can learn a lot from, but making sure I can offer value to them. Seth Godin, I learned so much from him. BJ Fogg, a number of other people I've worked with and, and some of the people that I'm working with now, like Charlie Hohn, are scraping up a lot of knowledge from me and I'm teaching stuff. Matt Chaney, who's here on the call today. Hey Matt. But I'm also learning a lot from them as well. So they're some of the people who helped me with my book launch and they've learned stuff that no one else in the world knows. But they also are doing really interesting marketing work and sometimes they come to me with an idea that I would have never thought of myself and I.

Say, great, run with it. So we got about 15 minutes more because we started a bit late.

Ask people again to ask if they have questions. Where's the twitter.com ramit or email ramit. Yeah, here's that. Put this screen up here. Here we go. All right, so we talked about mentoring, we talked about writing information diets. We had a question here on this is a quick question. I quit my job. What healthcare insurance should I get? Well, two things. First of all, this is a good one to research on Google. But second, because I've done it myself, I know that researching healthcare is impossible. I'm coming out with an e book on health care insurance for self employed people. So stay tuned. That's probably about a month or two out. Let's take some more questions off Twitter. Hey guys, with so much to do, how do you keep reading so many books? I mean, I think there are a lot of places to read books. Honestly, audio books in the bathroom. Okay, there's a ton of places. I'm kook to say that, but to.

Everyone loves reading his album. I've always been able to minimize the time you spend in the bathroom.

Dude, I have like a Library of Alexandria in my bathroom.

Since you're the thought though on this question, I hate being suicide prime linking to my blog or whatever, but I did do a post on why you should optimize your reading based on locations. For example, I've never understood people who work on their laptop and airplanes. Like you're stuffed into a little seat.

It's not really comfortable, but you feel.

Like you need to work on your computer to get stuff done. Reading a book on an airplane is the best. It's a great place to read a book. Right? Because it's comfortable. Being in a squish seat doesn't really affect the reading experience. Whereas you're much less productive working on a computer on an airplane than working on a computer at your desk with A keyboard and mouse.

So when it comes to reading, think.

About the physical places that are conducive to a good reading experience. To me, that's like in bed, on airplanes, in buses or trains. And occasionally I always bring like a book to a meeting in case I'm on relayed or something.

So here's something I've been thinking about as I've been meeting different my readers in different cities on my book tour. We've been talking about people. Some of them love the videos that we do. Some of them hate them.

They're like, yeah, I don't watch videos.

I actually think that in a video we reveal stuff that we would not normally reveal on the blog. I mean, I revealed a couple things today that I. Some people have said, can you transcribe it? Can you do audio? And I would just say that think about the different modalities and how they work. So like some people told me when they're cleaning their room, they put on a video and just listen. That's a great example of adapting things.

To what you need.

You may figure out a way to.

Be able to rip audio off of video and put it on your ipod, whatever.

If I had the time, I would convert all these things and get it transcribed. But later is not free. So just think about the down times you have and what you often do. And this is a pretty introspective thing. Do you go and watch tv? Do you go to the cupboard to start eating food? Or is there potentially five or 10 minutes where you can watch something from? For example, mixergy.com where I did an interview recently. I thought it was one of my best interviews. I told a bunch of stuff I'd never told before. And there's Seth Godin and Tim Ferriss and all these people in there. Where are the places where you can get really high value content that will cause you to take behavioral change? Ultimately that's what I care about. We've been quite involved in the books. If you're not into books, I don't.

Think you have to be reading books. If you read slowly or whatever, it's hard. I mean, get your content in other ways.

I think people who love books often.

Like think it's the only way. Just want them anyway.

Absolutely. Okay, so let's see. We had a question about someone asked about side projects.

How do you go about asking your employer to. Okay, okay, so how do you talk about side project with prospective employers? So this relates to our article. You can check it out my blog. It's a pretty long Article on the role of side projects and innovation. A lot of really interesting innovations started as side projects. That is they're unexpected.

I think if you're working in a.

Big company, it's much harder than if you're working in a startup, which probably has a more liberal attitude towards these things. So I'm not sure what the question or what the situation is, but generally working for somebody else.

In my article, I'm sandwiched between two.

Types of side projects. There are authorized side projects where you go and request permission to spend 20% of your time hatching some new idea. And then there's like bootlegging, which is kind of moonlighting stuff on the side, which is more problematic from a legal perspective because sometimes you have agreements where like any stuff you do on company time or at a company office is the. Is the company owns your ip. So I think first I would approach the topic casually with HR people at your company. What are your policies around how employees can spend personal time? Do you have side project policies, bootlegging policies? And get a sense. And it seems like they're really strict about it and you probably have to do it on your own time and kind of secretive. But obviously it's convince them to allow you to do it on company time while you're at the office, assuming it doesn't impact your primary responsibility.

So let's also point people to your long article which is you search on Google for Ben success on the side. Again, Google search for Ben success on the side. Now, the problem is that it's actually pretty long and for some of the readers I have who cannot read more than three goddamn lines, it may be problematic. Learn how to read long articles, please. There's often really good stuff in it. Okay, let's see what else we have. I love cursing my readers. They think I'm kidding, but I'm not. Alright, What do you wish you could do better that could have a big impact on your future success? I think for me it's all about scaling. Can I scale out? This is a great example of scaling today. So you and I sit down and we all can talk about stuff one on one and we are like, wow, this really interesting. Whatever. For me this is an awesome opportunity because we can have a conversation and scale it out to. There's about two or 300 people on this thing.

Great.

And hopefully 10 or 20 of you will actually do something amazing. And we can, you know, we can say, wow, that was great. Hopefully we lit a flame. So how do you look at this question? What do you think what is a weakness?

Something that you could do better that you think would have a big impact. Do you have any weaknesses on.

Yeah, I mean I think delegating is a classic. No, I have no weaknesses actually. I work too hard, I get too many emails. Yeah, I'm so important. I think delegating is one. I think focus, you know, I do a lot of things so Susie, Sara and all that stuff. If I were a strict focused business only business, I would not have done that. I mean there's pluses and minuses to that. But I think delegation and focus would be probably some.

Yeah, for me I would say something. I think I also have the focus problem. Actually there's a great New Yorker piece I'm looking forward to reading on the plan tomorrow about neuro enhancing drugs. Have you read that? I have it typed if you can.

Have it in the.

It's about neuro enhancing drugs and it's like, you know, there's like this epidemic right now in school and workplaces where people are popping pills that help them focus and so anyway, that's an interesting topic but I think focus for me.

Is the same thing. Right.

I mean I think focus is overrated generally speaking and hence maybe my self rationalization of all the side projects piece like justifying spending 20% of your time screwing around on projects to which the ultimate outcome is unknown. That being said, I would like to get to a point where I can sit down at my computer and spend 45 minutes and write something without jumping around, changing screens and so forth.

I used to do that before there was like 8 million things that would catch your attention. I was reading this book last night that I got. I forget the name but it's basically something about overeating and the guy. I found it fascinating because I see a lot of parallels as I write my book about between personal finance and food overeating. We feel guilty, we know we should do more, we debate minutia, all these things. Well, this guy was talking about how the industry has literally engineered food to be more addictive and all these things. And you know, sugar, fat and there's one other thing, salt that gets people to. So it becomes a self fulfilling upward directional loop where if you eat these things you will eat more, you will eat more, you will eat more. So I think. Where was I going with this at all? I have no idea.

Oh, we're talking about focus.

Yeah, I don't know where I was going. So speaking of focus. Okay, so we'll take a couple more questions on twitter.com ramit and then we will, we're gonna wrap it up.

How do you cope with mentoring? I think with PMB I someone asked about the personality. I did a 10k for TV piece with Josh Kaufman, also a friend of ours who's a great guy who. Well, I won't spill the beans on that.

That way you get a good website.

And I think Josh would agree that mentoring is really important. So I think mentoring is very much part of the self learning process and it's often a great way to supplement, especially if you're outside of the classroom, you're reading tons and tons of books. Supplementing that with an intensive in person interaction where you can kind of talk to somebody about what you've been learning, I think is a great way to reinforce what you've been learning.

No, just thought sometimes mentoring, part of mentoring is not just the tactics of finding a mentor and stuff. It's the concept of willing to let yourself be taught. And if you can't, if you're not comfortable doing that, if you've never got a mentor before, the simplest way to get one, not a mentor, but someone to let yourself be taught is to pay someone in whatever form to teach you something. So whether that is taking a class, hiring a coach. Josh Popkins just does coaching@personalmba.com I think his rates are pretty. Actually he charges way too little. I always scream at him like, dude, raise your rates. Quadruple them. You're charging way too little. So Josh is a great guy that if I had never been mentored or I was looking for opening myself up to being taught and seeing how far I could take myself, I would probably hire him to do some coaching. Another person that is pretty good is Pam Slim. Pamela Slim. She just wrote a book, Escape from Cubicle Nation, which just came out. It's great. It's actually really, really good. I was telling you this. I thought it wouldn't be right for my audience, but it's good. So Pam Slim, Josh Kaufman, don't hire me.

I charge too much for this now. Thank you.

Thank you. I think Josh cocktail or penciling or anyone, it doesn't matter. Would be interesting to say, you know what, I'm going to put a few hundred bucks and invest it in myself and see if I can open myself up to being taught. All right.

But I do think this is like one other weakness that I think I have or I'm trying to get better at is improving my ability to take and absorb critical feedback, honest critical feedback. And especially if you're Kind of a self confident person and you disagree with the criticism or the feedback. It doesn't mean the criticism or feedback was invalid or that it wasn't a good move for the person to give it to you. And so I think learning is kind of related to the you have to be able to be taught, you have to be able to take feedback, especially when you don't agree with it. Because often people will bounce back and be super defensive as opposed to kind of absorbing it, internalizing it, thanking the person for giving the feedback, thanking the person for trying to teach you, and then maybe expressing your disagreement if it's appropriate for if you're in the habit of immediately rejecting or accepting feedback or teaching based on whether you agree with it. I think that's not the smartest long term approach.

That's a human nature thing too as well. I mean, go watch someone getting feedback, listening to the grocery store or coffee shop or whatever, instantly people will become defensive.

I actually related to the thing I Robert Rubin, who wrote a great book called in an Uncertain World, he was a former treasury secretary under Clinton and he said you have to evaluate a decision not only by the result that happens from making the decision. So you can make a really good decision with a bad outcome and also make a really bad decision with a good outcome. And you can't conflate those things. Right. There are some times where you made a really bad decision and the outcome turns out to be good, but you still need to update your decision making processes to be more rigorous next time around.

Yeah, yeah. I want to talk about one thing that I've gotten a number of people. They don't comment on my blog, but they comment on their own blogs and link back and they say this is not often, but it's interesting. I think, oh yeah, these guys only succeed or people only get guest posts on other blogs because they know somebody. It's all about knowing somebody. Which drives me nuts. Because first of all, knowing somebody is important. It's really important. Yeah. But the second thing is why is it that you and I both know Josh Kaufman? And why is it that we both read similar things and why do we have the same Cal Newport? Why do we know some of the same people? It's not because there's some cabal of like, you know, some conspiracy. It's that when you get in a market, if you're doing your job right, you have to know the key players and doesn't mean you're being friends with them just to get something from them. It doesn't mean that at all. It means that you're going to come to know people that are doing similar interesting things, especially if you're taking the initiative to reach out. So if it were me and I were writing a personal finance blog, for example, and I wanted to get attention, I would start writing really good content. I would occasionally send an email to me saying, hey, just thought you'd like to know this. Thought your readers might be interested, but of course it would have to be really good. And then occasionally I would say, ramit, I'd be really interested in writing a guest post. Here are three ideas. Would you mind if I sent over a draft and if you think it's good, I'll send it over to you fully written up. You can just drop it into WordPress. That is how I would go about building a really good relationship, as well as getting a ton of traffic. Why don't people do that? Because mostly the content is not very good and it's weird to reach out to bloggers and I don't know, I don't know why else.

I think also it's true that there is this myth and there's a whole debate, debate in the box. I remember Jeff Jarvis and Fred Wilson had this whole like, is there an A list? Is there not an A list? Is this kind of self reinforcing cacophony of opinions of people who agree with each other or who are like reinforcing each other's personal brands and want to like have this grip on power or something? I don't think it's like that at all. I think, you know, everyone's meeting new people all the time. Some friendships wane over time, some grow stronger, some mentors come and get different bloggers rise in prominence and depending on the quality of their content. So I do think it's relatively open market and the way you stand out is the way you stand out doing anything through doing something really high quality and then letting people know about it. And there's that two pronged. You can't just write good content and be a hermit. You have to do outreach. But I think if you do that, it's very possible to write a blog that's one day be as popular as zero the death and l people the person you've always wanted to meet.

That's interesting. I mean, Tim and I talked about this last couple weeks ago on the blog, which is getting readers depends on your goal. Do you want to be a really large blog? Do you want to have a book or do you want to have A small blog of really influential readers that are exactly what you want to talk.

About is actually to contrast our blog.

Oh yeah, that's something that probably have.

Probably more people on here read Alpha TP Rich than my blog. But I think our friend Chris has a theory that if you want to have a popular blog, you have to have a. You have to have two characteristics. One is you have to focus on a topic so you can become a domain expert. So for you, it's personal finance, right? You're the go to guy in the blogosphere on money and personal finance. Or you have to have massive cult personalities so you can be like one.

Of these, why can't I do that? You have a book.

But there are like certain celebrities who like write shitty content. They don't have a domain expertise, but they have tons and tons of readers because there's just this cult around them. Now, my blog.

So I don't.

My blog is not focused on really anything. It really is your blog. By the way, what's the URL? It's just gonna beg.com and essentially it's about entrepreneurship, but really it's very wide ranging. And so because it's so wide ranging and varied, it limits my audience, but it limits my audience in a way that I'm okay with. So I'll have fewer readers. But to my mind, the readers that are higher quality and also widely interested like me. And so the comments I get and.

The relationships I build through it are.

People who I like hanging out with. Like, generally I don't like hanging out with somebody who's only like obsessed about business and has no other interests. But if you're reading my blog, it means you must at least have some interest in these other things that I'm blogging about. So it's a trade off, right? So for me, I'm not trying to maximize readership. I want to have, you know, healthy number of readers. But I'm happy to limit it and to get the demographic that I'm looking for.

Well, in some ways you are actually. You actually put up small barriers to people participating. You don't, your newsletter is like weird and hard to find. You don't email regularly and I always.

Scream at you about this.

Whereas me, it's like, dude, sign up for my newsletter. And then, you know, and of course I don't do enough with it as well, but I email people and stuff. My take has, I get a thrill out of writing something and then starting to get comments and then it quickly turns into rage when I see stupid Comments, which I then mock. But, yeah, my take was personal finance, although I will teach you, rich, as I've emphasized over and over again, is.

Not just about personal finance, but whatever. That's how it gets pigeonholed. That's how it's seen in the minds.

Of the unwashed masses. They know it's like there's negotiation, there's automation, there's entrepreneurship. It's about living a rich life. So, I mean, the real dealers are not stupid. They're actually really smart. And if you look back at the first two years, three years of posts, they're really long. Now note this, because the type of content you produce determines your type of readers. If I had written Top 10 Ways to Do blah, I would have gotten a bunch of morons. Instead, I got a really intelligent, amazing group of readers. I had done YouTube videos and other things that's opened up the funnel to people who may not be able to read a really long, nuanced post, but they can certainly click play on a YouTube video. So the quality may go down, but the quantity certainly goes up. You have to think about carefully, what kind of readers do you want in Tim? The video I did with Tim, which is on my YouTube page, we talked about some people in Silicon Valley who have relatively small group of readers, but they're very influential.

Yeah, I think another your needs blog is almost a business of sorts. I think it's okay to write a blog that's just a way for you to practice writing, a way for you to develop a repository of things you're reading or things you're thinking about. I don't think you have to be so ambitious where you treat it like a business. So if you're totally involved in your own business or you have a day job or whatever, and a blog is very much a side thing for you, I think that's okay if you have a limited readership, so long as you view the exercise of blogging as something independent from feedback that you get. Like, if you're okay getting no comments, and I think that's fine. Right? It's a mechanism for you to post your thoughts out there and that will make you a better writer. And the return, in my opinion, is it makes you a better thinker.

I think that what you said is directly related to the I will teach, be rich crowd, which is being brutally realistic with yourself. So when we talk about weddings, for example, we talk about how, look, the average wedding is going to cost about 25,000 bucks. The average guy is going to get married at X Age and the average girl at Y age, let's be brutally realistic and say, I'm not going to have a small wedding. I'm probably going to have a really big wedding. Once you do that, then you can start to make moves based on honesty. The same is true of blogging or writing. If you are getting no readers, be honest with yourself. First of all, is that intentional? And if so, are you? If so, that's fine. Be conscious of it and then give it up. Don't be anxious about it. The whole point of GTD Four Hour Work Week I will teach Rich is in part to reduce anxiety. The second thing is if you're not getting comments and you think you should be, then ask yourself, what am I doing wrong? And perhaps to end this part, most unsatisfyingly is that I didn't get a lot of comments for the first six months, and then one day it just magically picked up and I don't know, I didn't do anything.

Brian stopped. And the therapist doesn't smoke.

Yes, that was a side benefit.

But you can get richer.

Absolutely. But sometimes there are no reasons for why changes happen. All right, so we got time for one more question, then we'll go. Okay, let's see here. Just looking at questions out there to find our drive.

Yeah, I learned by doing. I think experimental activity is the best way to figure out if you like something.

I had a friend that had never worked when we were getting out of college and she had gone to law school and she was like, convinced, I think wrote this in my book. She was convinced that she could not work at a corporate job because she wasn't like, she wasn't good at politics and she couldn't stay in her nine to five. And I'm like, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. You've never worked at one job. Never. You can't come up with all these decisions unless you try it once or twice. So what happens a lot of times is people sit in a room and they get these crazy ideas, and then as you said, when they're not bound to reality, they tend to get more extreme. Ground yourself by doing it. If you think you're going to start a business on block, it's important to be strategic about it and stuff. But the most important and the most learning you can get is from actually doing it. Like Steve Boyk once said, if you.

Want to come up with your business idea, don't sit in the conference room.

Yeah.

Think about it.

Go out, hit the street.

Talk to customers.

I think this is the same way.

Like Gretchen Rubin, as a happiness project, once had a good line about it. You want to figure out what doing you're passionate about. Ask yourself what you like doing on a Saturday afternoon. Don't ask yourself the question, what am I passionate about? Right. That's like this overwhelming question.

So ask yourself a simple question.

Or if you want to understand what floats your boat, go try a bunch of shit and see what floats your boat as opposed to getting all anxious and thinking in the abstract about, like, guys, what do I like more? Do I like writing more? Do I like traveling? Do I like working in big companies, small companies? We're traveling both. We're going to work for a big company or a small company. And as David Bruxell said, spend your 20s wandering the Odyssey years. And when you turn 30, figure out how you want to spend the next 40, 50 years, but be experimental early on.

So let's talk about what's next as we wrap it up. What's coming up for you next? And is there anything you kind of want to talk about? You want to plug yourself?

I don't think. I don't think. I'm not going to announce anything right now.

Okay. Okay. Keep me on the DL.

Well, there's more to come. All right.

So for me, what's coming up is I'm continuing on my book tour. The book is doing pretty well. I'm pretty fortunate about that.

You thank Jesus Christ for it every day.

Yeah, I think my publishers were actually asking me what's coming up next. And I think there's two things. One, I want to do more online stuff, so I'm actually continuing the blog, of course. I'm actually building some products that are really, really high quality and are going to take quite a while to build, but when they come out, they're going to be awesome. So one of them, for example, is how to earn your next thousand dollars as a freelancer or hire your first thousand dollars as a freelancer. So working on that all the way from the emotional part, which is like, why am I scared? Should I be doing this all the way down to the tactical. What email should I write to my boss? Or what email should I write to negotiate price? There's that I'm doing a couple more courses, an ebook on health care insurance for the self employed, and a bunch of other stuff. So that is what I want to do, is kind of build up a business. And then on the publicity side, I want to become world class at pr. So understanding how pr, media, all that stuff works without getting dumb.

Dumb and being shrunk into sound bites.

Yeah, and that's a challenge. I mean, I've already gotten, you know, interesting stuff from TV people and I'm.

Kind of like, ah, if a TV person thinks you're favorable or smart, then maybe that means you're smart, normal or something.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Flatters you. Like nobody's business. They send out the hottest people and they're like, oh, you're so great. I'm like, yeah, sure.

All right, cool.

So anyway, that's that. All right, so if you guys have.

Any questions, obviously you can email us and apologies to the 1130 people. We'll figure something out.

Yeah. All right, well, thank you guys and I'll talk to you later.

All right, take care.

And it's weird to reach out to bloggers and I don't know.

I think also it's true that there is this myth that. And there's a whole debate about. There's always debate in the blogs. I remember Jeff Jarvis and Doug Wilson had this whole like, is there an A list? Is there not an A list? Is this kind of self reinforcing cacophony of opinions of people who agree with each other or we're like reinforcing each other's personal brands and want to like have this grip on power or something? I don't think it's like that at all. I think, you know, everyone's meeting new people all the time. Some friendships wane over time, some grow stronger, some mentors come and get. Different bloggers rise in prominence and depending on the quality of their content. So I do think it's relatively open market and the way you stand out is the way you stand out doing anything right through doing something really high quality and then letting people know about it. And there is that two prong.

Yeah.

I can't just write good content and be a hermit. You have to do outreach. But I think if you do that, it's very possible to write a blog that's one day be as popular as you are. The decanel people, the person you've always wanted to meet. That's interesting.

I mean, Tim and I talked about this last couple weeks ago on the blog, which is getting readers depends on your goal. Do you want to be a really large blog? Do you want to have a book? Or do you want to have a small blog of really influential readers that are exactly. What you want to talk about is.

Actually to contrast our blog.

Oh yeah, let's talk about probably more.

People on here read Alpha Rich than my blog. But I think our friend Chris has a theory that if you want to have a popular blog, you have to have other people. You have to have two characteristics. One is you have to focus on a topic so you can become a domain expert. So for you, it's personal finance, right? You're the go to guy in the blogosphere on money and personal finance. Or you have to have massive cult personalities. So you're going to be like one.

Of these, why can't I do that? You win a book.

But there are like certain celebrities who like write shitty content. They don't have a domain expertise, but they have tons and tons of readers because there's just this cult around them. Now my blog. So my blog is not focused on really anything. What is your blog, by the way? That's the URL. It's just get back as sensibly. It's about entrepreneurship, but really it's very wide ranging. And so because it's so wide ranging and varied, it limits my audience, but it limits my audience in a way that I'm okay with.

So I'll have fewer readers.

But to my mind, the readers that are higher quality and also widely interested like me. And so the comments I get and.

The relationships I build through it are.

People who I like hanging out with. Like, generally I don't like hanging out with somebody who's only like obsessed about business and has no other interest. But if you read my blog, it means you must at least have some interest in these other things that I'm blogging about. So it's a trade off, right? So for me, I'm not trying to maximize readership. I want to have, you know, healthy number of readers, but I'm happy to limit it and to get the demographic.

That I'm looking for. Well, in some ways you are actually. You actually put up small barriers to people participating. You don't. Your newsletter is like weird and hard to find. You don't email regularly and I always.

Scream at you about this.

Whereas me, it's like, dude, sign up for my newsletter. And then, you know, I don't do enough with it as well. But I email people and stuff. My Tate has. I get a thrill out of writing something and then starting to get comments and then it quickly turns into rage when I see stupid comments, which I then mock.

But.

Yeah, my take was personal finance. Although I will teach you, Rich, as.

I've emphasized over and over again, is not just about personal finance, but whatever that's how it gets pigeonhole. That's how it's seen in the minds.

Of the unwashed masses. They know it's like there's negotiation, there's automation, there's entrepreneurship. It's about living a rich life. So, I mean, the real readers are not stupid. They're actually really smart. And if you look back at the first two years, three years of post, they're really wrong. Now note this, because the type of content you produce determines your type of readers. If I had written top 10 ways to do bra, I would have gotten a bunch of morons. Instead, I got a really intelligent, amazing group of readers, as I've done YouTube videos and other things. That's opened up the funnel to people who may not be able to read a really long, nuanced post, but they can certainly click play on a YouTube video. So the quality may go down, but the quantity certainly goes up. You have to think about carefully, what kind of readers do you want in Tim? The video I did with Tim, which is on my YouTube page, we talked about some people in Silicon Valley who have relatively small group of readers, but they're very influential.

Yeah, I think another Ramitz blog is almost a business of sorts. I think it's okay to write a blog that's just a way for you to practice writing or a way for you to develop a repository of things you're reading or things you're thinking about. I don't think you have to be so ambitious where you treat it like a business. So if you're totally involved in your own business or you have a day job or whatever, and a blog is very much a side thing for you, I think that's okay if you have a limited readership, so long as you is you view the exercise of blogging as something independent from feedback that you get. Like, if you're okay getting no comments, I think that's fine. Right. It's a mechanism for you to post your thoughts out there and that will make you a better writer. And in return, in my opinion, is it makes you a better thinker.

I think that what you said is directly related to the I will teach be rich crowd, which is being brutally realistic with yourself. So when we talk about weddings, for example, we talk about how, look, the average wedding is going to cost about 25,000 bucks. The average guy is going to get married at X age and the average girl at Y age. Let's be brutally realistic and say I'm not going to have a small wedding. I'm probably going to have a really Big wedding. Once you do that, then you can start to make moves based on honesty. The same is true of blogging or writing. If you are getting no readers, be honest with yourself. First of all, is that intentional? And if so, are you? If so, that's fine. Be honest, be conscious of it, and then give it up. Don't be anxious about it. The whole point of GTD Four Hour work week I will teach Rich is in part to reduce anxiety. The second thing is if you're not getting comments and you think you should be, then ask yourself, what am I doing wrong? And perhaps to end this part most unsatisfyingly is that I didn't get a lot of comments for the first six months. And then one day it just magically picked up and I don't know, I didn't do any.

Ryan stopped. And the therapist visits, yes, that was.

A side benefit, but you could get richer. Absolutely. Sometimes there are no reasons for why changes happen. All right, so we got time for one more question, then we'll go. Okay, let's see here. Just looking at the other way to find our drive.

Yeah, I learned by doing. I think experimental activity is the best way to figure out how you like something.

I had a friend that had never worked when we were getting out of college and she had gone to law school and she was like, convinced, I think I wrote this in my book. She was convinced that she could not work at a corporate job because she wasn't like, she wasn't good at politics and she couldn't stay in the 9 to 5. And I'm like, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. You've never worked at one job. Never. You can't come up with all these decisions unless you try it once or twice. So what happens a lot of times is people sit in the room and they get these crazy ideas. And then as you said, when they're not bound to reality, they tend to get more extreme. Ground yourself by doing it. If you think you're going to start a business on blah, it's important to be strategic about it and stuff. But the most important and the most learning you can get is from actually doing it.

I think Steve Blank once said, if you want to come up with your business idea, don't sit in the conference room.

Yeah.

Think about it. Go out, hit the street, talk to customers.

I think this is the same way.

Like Gretchen Rubin, as a happiness project, once had a good line about it. If you want to figure out what you're passionate about, Ask yourself what you like doing on a Saturday afternoon. Don't ask yourself the question, what am I passionate about? Right. It's like this overwhelming question.

So ask yourself a simple question, or.

If you want to understand what floats your boat, go try a bunch of shit and see what floats your boat, as opposed to getting all anxious and thinking in the abstract about, like, God, what do I like more? Writing more? Do I like traveling? Do I like working in big companies, small companies we're trying to build. We're working a big company, work a small company. And as David Bruxell said, spend your 20s wandering. Those are the odyssey years. Then when you turn 30, figure out how you want to spend the next 40, 50 years, but be experimental early on.

So let's talk about what's next as we wrap it up. What's coming up for you next? And is there anything you kind of want to talk about? You want to plug yourself?

I don't think.

I don't think I'm going to love myself.

I'm not going to announce anything right now.

Okay. Okay. Keeping on the DL.

Well, there's more to come. All right.

So for me, what's coming up is I'm continuing on my book tour. The book is doing pretty well.

I'm pretty fortunate about that. You thank Jesus Christ for it every day.

Yeah. I think my publishers were actually asking me what's coming up next. And I think there's two things. One, I want to do more online stuff, so I'm actually continuing the blog, of course. I'm actually building some products that are really, really high quality and are going to take quite a while to build, but when they come out, they're going to be awesome. So one of them, for example, is how to earn your next thousand dollars as a freelancer, or how to earn your first thousand dollars as a freelancer.