One Of These Mindsets Will Get You Stuck… (2018)

And I was an idiot in the beginning and I didn't know any of this and I ended up in credit card debt because I was a consumer , not an investor .

He said one of my clients reached out and asked me if it was worth investing in a monitor , a secondary monitor they actually messaged me as well and they said can you send me or can you send me your setup ?

and I said the same exact thing I . I said I don't think my setup is optimal for podcasting . Honestly . I think it's more optimal for productivity because my camera's under my TV , it's the whole thing . It's not great for being a guest on a podcast . You and I . It's a little bit different .

But I said , if you're optimizing to get more done , it's definitely worth investing in some sort of secondary screen . And going to what I talked about in the beginning , I think that's why I'm so big on awareness .

If I had the awareness in the beginning that this credit card is 0% for a year , you can buy something that's going to help you make more money and then just pay it off over the course of a year with no downside . There's no punishment for doing that and you're going to get points in the process of it . I think I just would have operated way better .

But I I had way more of a consumer mindset of I buy the thing because I like it , not because it has utility , and I'm still more that way than Alan . But I do think the more I've moved from a consumer mindset into an investor mindset , the more successful . I have been and it makes sense . It makes total sense .

When I was buying a new laptop , we got the laptop that , honestly , I didn't like . I didn't want a Mac , I wanted to do what I already had . But this our belief was it would be better long-term and that was an investor mindset and it has been . I love this laptop now . So that's just a simple example of this .

And tech improves so damn fast , especially especially with computers . That , how old was your old laptop ? What ? Six years or something .

as possible . And that MacBook Pro that we got you , dude , that thing is capable of whatever you need , baby , that thing's good to go , awesome , right .

So this client she had me send pictures of my setup and she's trying to become more productive and she asked me is this the best use of my capital , time , effort , money , what's the best use of your time , effort and's the best use of your time , effort and money ? I said , well , it depends . What are you using ?

Now she has a macbook as well and she said , well , should I invest in this monitor ? I said how much is it ? She said 324 dollars or whatever . She sent me the links . I said yeah , absolutely . I said how much more productive is it going to make you ? And again , it's a hypothetical question , it's very hard to answer that actual question .

I said how much more productive is it going to make you ? And again , it's a hypothetical question , it's very hard to answer that actual question . I said , right now , I have you up on a 52-inch behind me . I don't know where I got this TV . Was this from the studio , I think ? that's mine , this is yours .

So this client let's break this down An investor says , hey , I'm going to buy this monitor so that I can be more productive , so that I can go and earn more money by adding more value . That's an investor's mindset . So I'm going to invest this 330 bucks and then , a month from now , three months from now , a year from now , it'll pay itself back .

And then some Okay , a consumer would go buy I don't know a new , a new . This person likes clothing . And she said it would be a dumb use of my capital to just go buy a bunch of a bunch of clothes just because I like it . I don't need new clothes , I already have nice clothes . I said that's exactly it right now .

It doesn't mean you never , ever invest or spend money on what you want . It just means you have to be intelligent with with your money . And I think of life like a giant chess game . It's what is the best use of my time , what is the best use of my money ?

And if you are always playing that way , you end up with more time and more money and more effort and you get better . She also asked me this . She said should I go to this training ? It's three days . I said okay , let's do a cost value analysis . What are the inputs ? She said it's going to cost me 800 bucks .

I'm going to get certified and I think she gets a certification . I don't know if it's , I think she gets like a hey , you did this thing . I don't know . I don't know if it's an actual cost her three days . It's going to cost her 800 bucks .

I said how many people are you going to meet ? She said ah , maybe hundreds . I said okay , are they in your industry ? She said yeah . I said okay , are you going to learn a lot ? She said yeah , are you going to improve your craft ? Yeah , I said it sounds good . Now here's the part that I want to try to make land .

When she goes to buy the monitor , she's not doing a cost value analysis up against just a monitor versus buying clothes . You're you're basically trying to maximize every dollar and every unit of your time up against anything you could do . That's why it's so overwhelming , brother , it's . It's not a chess game . A chess game has what ?

24 pieces and it's a tiny little board . I'd have to look it up . I think it's 24 , but the point is is in life it's infinite possibilities . I said you need to ask yourself this question and this is overwhelming as hell . Is this use of my money better than any other use of my money ?

It's not like you're at the store going I want this jar of jelly versus this one . I don't know why I always use jelly . There's a psychological study they did with jars of jelly and how there's too many options and it doesn't matter . But the point is it's not like you're doing strawberry versus blueberry jelly . See , that would be easy . Ah , blueberry .

It depends on your goals .

I don't know what it's like to like , just wake up and do stuff you know , whatever you do , you kind of do whatever you want , regardless of consequence yeah well , there is no consequence because there's no goal to measure it against .

Yes , yeah , back in the day , back in the day , Back in the day , I would be in New Jersey for work . My two buddies would be . I left a key to my place . They'd be at my place waiting for me . I would get home at like 6 o'clock at night .

We'd hang out , we'd play Call of Duty , we'd order pizza , sleep in , and the next day it was like we just did whatever we wanted . We went to the gym , played video games , hung out , watched a movie , whatever there was . No , the goal was relaxation . That was the goal . The goal was relaxation . That was the goal .

So I think he is an engineer , but again , correct me if I'm wrong , brother . But he and I were talking about how , back in the day , we would calculate the exact amount of alcohol per unit of calorie , per volume , per cost . So I'll give this tiny example and I think this will be of value .

So back in college he and I were at college at the same time , he was in my fraternity and Miller High Life was $9 for 18 bottles and it's alcohol per volume , per price point was optimal . Volume per price point was optimal .

So I went with that and him and I were talking yesterday on the phone on Zoom about how we've never not calculated everything and how weird it is to live in a world where other people aren't doing as many calculations .

And he's someone I would consider kind of a math genius and he's an AP Cal teacher and a lot of his students aren't calculating things quite as accurately or as optimally as he thinks they should , and that kind of thing , and he's awesome , he's great . But him and I have never not done that . We've never , like I , calculated the exact amount of drunk .

I wanted to get by the exact moment , in the exact amount of money , with the exact type of alcohol , because each alcohol is a different type of drunk and I would purposely eat a certain amount in order to make sure that I could sustain it long term throughout the night .

But everything's equations and math and I know you're laughing , but here's , here's the thing , right to make this relevant to anyone watching or listening . What are you calculating like are you ?

You got to make sure what you're doing is building toward a bigger , better , brighter future , and I don't I don't want to project on anyone and say you have to , but you're definitely in trouble if you're not doing that . I mean , if you were still just playing video games , you know , going to the gym and getting drunk , you'd be screwed straight , straight up

, screwed .

Next Level Nation . We are very , very excited to announce that we are doing our first purely virtual Next Level Live . On April 5th 2025 , from 10 am to 4 pm Eastern Standard Time , alan and myself will be live streaming from Worcester , massachusetts .

Because I , time , effort and money are the resources we all have and we all have to make choices based on what we want to build in our life , career , calling business success , relationship . It's all by design . How would you explain that ?

This is a really powerful place of awareness when gas , when there's a gas station , let's say , gas is expensive and gas they do like a giveaway , and it's 50 cents off a gallon for a day and there's a four hour line to get gas , if we really sit and think , okay , we're going to save 50 cents per gallon , awesome , we have a 12 gallon fuel tank .

Okay , you're going to save $6 . $6 ? No $4? .

One I'm going to sit in line for seven hours on Black Friday , get there first so I can go in and buy a big screen TV that I don't really need , and I'm going to get 30% off . Okay , that's one . The other one is I'm going to sit in line for seven hours so I can go buy six new PlayStations and then I can flip them and make money on all those .

Now , six PlayStations would be a lot of money . You'd have to have some cash on hand for that . But that's the difference between a consumer mindset and an investor mindset . Those are two very , very different things .

Taryn came to me . She sold me my wife sold me on something Well , very , very well . She said , hey , I think we should get a deep freezer , and I was like what , where the hell is this coming from Nice ? Get a deep freezer ? And I was like what , where the hell is this coming from nice ? And she said , well , it's like 140 bucks .

We'll split it and I'll be able to buy food way more food . When it's on sale , we can freeze it and you'll never run out of ground beef , and you'll never run out of ground turkey , and we'll always have frozen food available . Smart , okay , I'm in . I'm in .

Probably like six , I'd say probably six months yeah , this is a good long-term investment , assuming you take it with you when you get a home yeah , well , it's coming . It's going to come everywhere so let me ask you this , so .

So if people were to ask me like , hey , what are the most important character traits for success , I would say number one is self-belief , number two is humility , number three is work ethic and number four is intelligence . In that order , intelligence is just making smart decisions .

That's why people are afraid of ai , because it can make smarter choices than than them and it'll take their jobs . Essentially , um , I have a client who uses chat gpt to coach him all the time yeah and I'm like , oh , I better keep my shit together here , right , but I'm honestly not .

I'm being playful , but at the end of the day , I do understand why people are scared of that right . Intelligence is a threat , because if we create a machine that's smarter than us , we're in some trouble potentially , and again , that's terminator stuff and all that . We're gonna be all right .

But the point I'm making is and I I'm asking you this , kev I've always considered intelligence the most important thing . The ability to make an effective choice is the most important thing . I mean other than self-belief , work , ethic and humility .

But like , if you can't make intelligent , long-term choices , you basically are winging it and you're going to end up in a bad place . That's just mathematically true . How do you sell people on how to make more intelligent choices ? Like all my failures in the past were my own dumbass choices .

It's like , again , I keep using credit cards as an example , but for every 10 people that are in massive credit card debt and they don't know how to , how they got there , there is one person who knows exactly how to use it for the benefits that you can have from it . But it's not set up that way . It's set up so the well it is .

It's set up so the people who really know what they're doing can benefit from it . But the the vast majority of us have never been taught about what an eight , what apr , means . I still don't know . If somebody said explain apr , it's like I couldn't possibly I don't know annual percent rate or something . Yeah , it's like I don't know it .

It runs in a certain cycle and that's how it gets . The interest accumulates in a certain jeffed way , but for every , for every 10 people that are stuck in credit card debt because it's like , well , I'll just pay the minimum and I'll get out , no , it's gonna take you like 25 years , depending on what the amount is .

There's somebody else who Matt's a really good example . My buddy Matt would get a card because he had really good credit . He would go spend $10,000 on something that he needed for his investment property , get a bunch of points for it and then say , okay , I spent $10,000 . I got to pay this off within 12 months .

I'm going to pay $950 a month on auto pay and then it'll be done . Cool that way .

There was a snowstorm a couple years ago and the complex was plowing and if you don't move your car , it gets towed , like that's the thing you got to move your car , it's going to get towed . And taryn knocked on the office door and said , hey , you got to move your car . And I said I have a call with like a very warm potential client .

I said let him fucking tow it . I'm gonna get this client . And she's like what I said babe , you gotta think about it . This client is 500 bucks a month . If they stay for one month , I mean how much is gonna cost for me to go get the car ? A couple hundred bucks . Let me see if I can get this client Assuming .

That's a whole different . So there are layers to it , but I think that's probably my best example of like . I don't know , that's not a typical story , but that was very much me saying all right , I'm going to invest my time into this call where I can make that money back today and let me see what I can do . And luckily it paid off .

But if we're , and I try to make this land and maybe it'll land differently this time . But one of the benefits I think of working so much is you're not spending as much no , no but seriously real talk , brother . When you're working you're not spending I .

work more , you're going to spend less .

I wanted to be a math teacher when I was a kid and I loved math and I said I can't be a math teacher , quite frankly , just being very honest , because they don't make enough money . And that was my decision when I was very young . I decided not to do that and I figured I'd be a professor , maybe one day in my 70s or 80s .

And now I get to teach math to business owners and to podcasters and to listeners . And this client I know we got to go . This client . She asked me well , how are you calculating all this ? And I said that's the hardest part . I don't know how to explain it because unless you understand the mathematics underneath it , it's very hard to calculate .

So the simplest way I can give it to our listeners now is what are the inputs of time , effort and money . And what are you going to get out of it long-term ? Because that freezer example that's not going to actually pay off until six months from now .

That's a decision you're making now that will pay off in six months from now and only if you use the freezer optimally

, right ? So that's just . It's an investor versus a consumer mindset . Consumers are in trouble if you don't also invest . I'm a consumer too . I bought a couple new hats . They're seven bucks each , athletica . Thank you so much . Awesome hats .

Okay , I bought four of them , all in different colors , because I don't need much and I use them every goddamn day in the gym , every day . I go to the gym now because of this long hair , but that's an investment , because I can focus more . It's , it's , everything . Is is either building towards your bigger , better , brighter future or destructive everything .

And so just get a little bit smarter , a little bit more intelligent , make a little bit of better choices over time , and your life will get better and better and better Little by little .

As always , we love you , we appreciate you , grateful for each and every one of you at NLU . We don't have fans , we have family . We will talk to you all tomorrow .