If you're not told no, I think the end result is just an average outcome. And average is really the name of our podcast, Up Your Average. We're trying to help you raise your average. And there's just certain things you should say no to.
Welcome to the Up Your Average podcast, where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life. So buckle up and listen closely to Up Your Average. Good morning, Caleb. Good morning. It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
Yeah. It's a little cloudy, but it's warm.
Yeah. I love it. I love it. I've been thinking about the power of no and just learning to process the idea of no. Okay. And there's a variety of ways in which that has become a big deal to me. And if you don't say no to your life, like if you don't say no, you're going to be told no. Like if you don't get accustomed to the word no, you're just gonna get it. Yeah. And why that is critically important is the idea that saying no to the good is the pathway to yes to the excellent.
And it's really, really hard. I don't know if you can think of no's that you've been told no, or you've been said no to a situation, but can you think of anything off the top of your head that jumps out to you? In the meantime, while you're thinking of that, there's during like when we were raising kids, there was a constant no that we would with five kids, we would say, no, you could only do two things at a time, any one of you five, because if we let all five of you do two activities You're saying like sports or after school stuff? Right. Right.
And that was the like even that, we couldn't manage that. Right? Yeah. And so you may not recall, but that's what we did. We consistently said, no, you can only do two things. And so you had to make a decision rather than say yes to everything. That that was the whole principle we taught you guys, but that was that was out there.
Yeah. I can't really think of anything that someone specifically said no, like recently, but I would say in our house building process, there's a lot of saying no to all the fancy things and different things we want, but it just doesn't make sense, so we had to say no.
Right, right. No, it's a hard thing to say no because there's possibilities that you might either hurt somebody's feelings, or you might get your feelings hurt if somebody tells you no. Yeah. I was offered yesterday to be in a volunteer situation with an organization, and I spent a good amount of the afternoon with them and asked a good number of questions. And the two people that were expressing the organization to me were just really kind people, just really good people.
And I ask a handful of questions about what I might be able to do to help. And my initial decision was I'm probably leaning towards telling them no. And when you tell people no, sometimes you hurt their feelings. And if you're not confident enough to say yes, I mean, to say no, then you begin to yield to the good instead of staying focused on the excellent in life. Yeah.
That makes sense. And that's really hard. It's hard for people to navigate life and not get acceptance from other people based on your daily decisions that you make. But the more that you say yes in life, I think the more normal you just accept a kind of a basic life rather than the excellent things in life. And I don't know that a lot of people even say that to you that says, Hey, I'm going to say no to your situation.
Not that I don't want to help you guys, but I only have so much time in life. Right. And that's been a point that's been a long opinion I've given Gimbal over the years that we've just said no about certain things.
Yeah.
Like early on, we would get fired by a client, and that's them telling us, No, I don't want to do business with you anymore. And that's a hard thing if somebody tells you they don't want to do business, it can affect your personality. For early on, I would probably go a couple days without sleeping very well because I was afraid to disappoint somebody else. That's that same idea of learning to say no, that I have to choose the excellent every single day, what that looks like. Yeah.
And you're gonna be a dad one day, and you're gonna have to navigate that thing, how to balance the yes and the no. And like in a basic way, we told you no when we go to a restaurant so that you couldn't have a soft drink. Soda. Yeah. Yeah. And that seems like a very basic kind of a way to say no, but it it taught you some very basic disciplines. And I don't know what if you even recall what that was like initially when when you couldn't get your way in a restaurant.
No. Not initially, but I I think even when you guys started saying yes or birthdays, it made it that much more special. Is that, oh, today's my birthday. I can get a soda. Or I feel like you you guys are a lot more lax now because I assume all the expenses are out of the house, and you're past that stage of life. So it's very appreciated now. I mean, I still get water, but just the concept of that.
Yeah. And just a quick mathematical. Just if we if we went out to eat once a week and and we didn't let let you have soda, And and I plugged in, say, fifteen years. That's like two or three thousand years of money that our family didn't spend.
2 or $3,000 a year? That what
you're Total. I think, yeah. So if I'm doing the math right. Okay. So and that doesn't seem to some people like a lot, but a $2,000 is a lot of money if you don't have good cash flow.
And so a lot of times, the reason people get in financial problems is they spend more than they can afford. They Yeah. They feel like they deserve certain things, and they can rationalize, yes, I can do that. But that's basically not having a willingness to say no about situations because I deserve it. I should have that.
Right.
I think one of the I think, and I don't think you ever said this was a bad example, but was it geography at Murray State? Did you is that
Yep. And It was.
You that don't know Caleb yet, he's a little brainiac. And he took just tell him the story about geography. What happened?
I think it was either freshman or sophomore year. We were still in COVID, and I took geography with Judah, my wife, and my brother-in-law, Kevin. And I it was a general studies class that we all needed to take. And I was like, oh, geography was easy in middle school and high school. This should be an easy class to get check our general education studies and move on to the next class, and we can all take it together.
And it was everything but that. It was very complicated, very you just need to know a lot of information that I was not willing to put the effort in to learn. And on top of that, it was COVID, and the professor had a deep accent and couldn't understand him that well with the mask muffling everything too. So it was I think at that point, I just accepted. I was like, oh, it is
what it is. Did the professor have an attitude that he was it a he? Yeah. He he didn't want to give a's to people? Do you have like a
No. He was just strict with his grading. Like, we had can't remember. We had one or two homework assignments a week, and we had participation in class with answering questions on the screen. But his tests were just hard.
Like, one would be, what are some side effects of climate change in The Caribbean? Because you'd go from one section of the earth to the next, like, continents, and I think I it was a short answer. I might have put two different things on the list, and I think I got two out of five points because he wanted, like, four or five answers. Nice. I was like, oh, he didn't clarify that, but oh, well. I didn't know five answers, so I gave you what I knew. But
And if I recall right, that was the only non a you got while you were in college. Is that right?
I think so. Yeah.
And and so you could have said, which I think happens at universities now, you could have said that's not fair. No. And you could have stirred the pot and create a lot of things. And and I think at universities now, if parents get involved with some of the grades, the university will tend to improve the grade even though maybe they weren't hitting the threshold that the professor wanted. Yeah.
And so that you could have been upset. You could have been angry. You could have had a chip on your shoulder because you didn't get straight A's in college. But somebody told you no. Yeah. Very true. And it's so hard to accept no. And I think of athletics, you know, the every kid's winner idea. And we mentioned this when we were talking with Coach a couple three or four weeks ago about how that affects kids. But the more that you hear no, the more you can navigate life.
And the more you can navigate life, the more, I think, fulfilled life is. Like the ultimate no that revolutionized my life was no to the idea that you can't live forever. The idea that people die is a no. You cannot have your word in it was traumatic when I was about 27, and Donna got killed by a drunk driver. I didn't like that no at that point in time.
And that particular no revolutionized my life. It caused me to think, oh, I can't get my way. And because I recognize I can't get my way, I was able to learn more, to live more freely, because life's just not fair. That's probably the first thing I taught you guys. I don't know if you can remember how soon you kept hearing me, but I'm sure you got that in a repetitive
Life's not fair.
Yeah. And and so And it's not. Yeah. I just remember that whenever any of you or your sisters would respond to the answer that life's not, you know, that's not fair, dad. And I'm like, oh, well, I have no emotional response to that at all other than that's life. You you got you just gotta deal with it. Yeah. And no is so powerful. And yet it is hard to say. It's hard to accept. Yep. It is.
Yeah. It's definitely hard hard to say. I know that. Yeah. Probably because the emotions from the other side of the conversation that are gonna come from it, I think just growing up, probably what you and mom taught me, accepting it's a lot easier for me. I'm like, okay. That is what it is. We're on to the next.
Yeah. And it it when I think about me listening to Know, I I think a lot early on at Gimbal when a client would say, we no longer wanna do business with you. No, you cannot be our financial adviser. What it caused me as the leader at Gimbal to ask them specific questions so I could learn, why is it you don't want to do business with us anymore? And then when if they would tell me the honest answer, then I could think about, well, do they have an honest point?
Because if they have an honest point, then maybe we need to change how we're operating our business. Yeah. And if the point isn't reasonable after I thought about it, then I just have to accept that not everybody's gonna love us. They're just gonna be mean to us from what our perception is, and that's a no. You can't have what you want.
And yet if they were true, and if they were telling us things, then what we would do behind the scenes is go figure out a better way to help in that situation that we screwed up. Because everybody screws up. And when you screw up, you have to say, okay, I screwed up. In my day, the thing that happened a lot probably through my high school career was in I I liked athletics, and they would tell you no in athletics. It's called they would cut you from the team.
Yeah. And it was really humbling because I don't know how they do it now, but the coach would do the tryouts, and then he would have a piece of paper, and he would hold he would just tape it on his door. And what he had on there was the names of the people that And made the my name was always alphabetical near the bottom of the list. And so I'm going down the list, you know, sweating and everything. And there were times when the answer was no, you didn't make the team.
And what I had to decide at that moment was, do I want to participate in this sport enough to improve my skills between now and the next tryout? Or am I just gonna say I'm done with it?
Yeah. Makes you prioritize what you want
to do. And it's so important to get that way because if you say if you don't if you're not told no, I think the end result is just an average outcome. And average is really the name of our podcast, Up Your Average. We're trying to help you raise your average, and there's just certain things you should say no to. And it's so hard in our culture because everybody wants to please everybody.
And I think you're gonna improve your average in life if you learn to say no to the good things in life. And I am thankful that Bob Warren mentored me for a good twenty plus years of my life, and we would talk about things. And I bet a 100 times he told me, Keith, I'm praying that you can say no to the good things and yes to the excellent in your life. And I took that to heart because there's a lot of good things I can do, right? Like there's a ton of good things that are out there.
For And those things are gonna waste the valuable time that you have. And it hurts to find out you're average in things. It is disappointing. But if that average thing gets in the way for you saying yes to the excellent things, there's no reason to keep doing it. Whatever it is, I can't tell you that are watching us what that might be in your life, but it's a fairly reasonable thing to ask is, what do I want to do with the days that I have?
And how do I navigate saying yes to the excellent things?
Yeah. It makes you take a step back and think of, I mean, just your day to day, what you're doing, and what you wanna prioritize in and what you want to spend your time doing. Because sometimes, you know, I just wanna sit down on the couch and watch some TV, and that's alright. But I can't be doing that every day, every time I get home from work for hours on end. I need to say yes to the excellent. I mean, that might be good every once in a while, but, yeah, you can't do that every day.
And it it was most of my twenties, I did the wasting of my time. It was really till I ate down, I got killed, I was probably 27 or 28, and I started asking serious questions about what matters in life and what doesn't, and what is the purpose of life. Because if the purpose is just to eat, drink, and be merry and have a good time, then just bring it on, let's do it. But if there's something more valuable in life, then there's maybe just a chance that I can make my life meaningful and actually change the world over time, which is it's a different way of pursuing things, but it also I found that it makes life more meaningful. Like, one of the times that I said no was as a 17 year old.
I wrote about it in one of the more recent anchors. But as a 17 year old, Indiana University sent me an a letter that said, hey, Keith, we know you're gonna be a freshman here, and we are gonna temporarily put you in a student lounge until enough people drop out of college that we'll get you in a room. And I immediately said, yeah, that's not acceptable. No, I'm not gonna do that. And that's how I found Murray State University is they that's where my sister was going to college, and I thought, you know, it's a smaller place.
I'll call these guys and see if they have an opening that I could have a room to stay in instead of a lounge. And it wasn't necessarily the most mature yes, but it was a no to something good and yes to something a little bit better. And it turned out that that yes was a big deal better for my personality. A smaller university was healthier for me, not only to get my degree, but just for me to learn because the classrooms were easier, and I could learn better in a smaller classroom. When I was at Murray and we had certain classes like psychology, there there were probably 200 people in that room, and it was hard for me to pay attention in that kind of room because the professors were just saying they're just speaking to a crowd.
Right? Yeah. And so they couldn't be very specific or helpful. But most of the classes at Murray, I probably had 20 classmates or less in those classes, and that fit my personality more. Then another you know, a no in life that is choosing the excellent over the good was you chose to say yes to Judah and got married at a young age. And when you say yes to marriage, you're saying no to dating. I'm done dating. Right? Yeah. And that's an excellent decision in life.
And it's hard to navigate that because you're making a decision for which you've never experienced before. You've never been married before, and you're just jumping into a scary place. But marriage is a great place to find life and to find reinforcement and excellent in what's your purpose in life. Like to encourage one another, it's a big deal. Yeah, it is.
So the homework I gave you was to talk about the Pareto principle, which takes the saying no to the average and or to the to the good and yes to the excellent. That's kind of the Pareto principle. It's kind of how we've managed the business at Kimball over the years is is focusing our time and energy on what is the most important thing. Are you able to explain the Pareto principle from just the top of your heads?
Don't know if I'll do it well, but it essentially is 20% of your efforts yield 80% of the product. And just a lot of aspects of life. Like, in your business, maybe 20% of your customers make 80% of your revenue. I I was googling different examples, and one funny one that popped up was you probably wear 20% of your clothing 80% of the time. And it's it's true when I was thinking about my closet.
I'm like, oh, I've got these select shirts and select pants that I like wearing, and the other ones are very selectively chosen. But you think about a lot of things in life. There's a very select number of things that produce a lot of your time or, like, you probably spend the majority of your time with friends and family on a select couple of people. You might have a friend group of, say, 50 or a 100 people, but the majority of the time you're hanging out with five or 10 of them.
It's it's unbelievable once you recognize that. Right?
Yeah. I mean, it helps you on a business side. It helps you prioritize your time. And if your goal is to make money and as much money as you want as you can, you're gonna probably prioritize the 80% of the profit. And if it takes less time than the 20% remaining, If you spend a little bit more time on that, it could probably increase your business by a lot. Right. And
think I've probably told you this a number of times is that how I've chosen to manage my time for probably twenty plus years, is I manage my time by the roles that are important to me. Yeah. And so I can't do every possible role. I can't serve on every board of director that somebody's asked me to be on. I can't let you guys do every extracurricular activity when you were younger.
I I couldn't do all those things and have excellence in some of those roles. And for me, I can only do five or six roles in an excellent way, which means I just have to say no to a lot of things. Like to be I've spent a good amount of time learning to write better over time. And so one of my roles as a writer, I just try to improve the way I communicate ideas by writing more concisely, using more common words than long words when I communicate. I try to make when I communicate in writing, I try to make it helpful in a way to people where they don't have to look up every word every And and I try not like, if it's if it's if it's an article about financial things, I try not to use industry language because I understand that I'm not communicating very well, and that's a poor way of communicating.
So I have to think about what the index or the industry term is and use an example of what that means rather than what I would use talking to you about the industry. So so that excellent thing takes time more than just being average about things. And you have to choose what roles you want to be important in your life. Right? You can only be so many roles.
Right. And over the years, one of those roles was before I was married, I prioritized being a son, because as a family, I've always valued family, and so I had to value grandparents and parents. And then when I got married, I had to lower the value of those roles because they didn't get as much of my time as they did before I got married. And then when I was a dad, I only had so much time for being a husband and a dad as opposed to being a grandchild or a child. And it wasn't that I didn't like those other people, is if I tried to please everybody in that, then I'd be poor at a lot of things that so I would acknowledge that I wanted to be a brother, a grandchild, or a son, at the same time, they weren't gonna get the same amount of my attention and my time as my children and my wife get because I still had other responsibilities, had to run a business, had to understand what was going on in the industry.
And all of that is learning to say no, which is just unbelievably hard. When I was thinking about this, I I wrote down that capitalism says no until it says yes. Capitalism is just harsh that it says no to you. It's it's not giving you easy things. But if you can conquer the no that it gives you, then you start getting yes.
You start finding success. Yeah. Like when I was cold calling, I don't know how many no's I got, and it hurt so bad to my soul, and my feelings got hurt so much, but I wasn't gonna let that no conquer me. And so I just kept going ahead and getting plowed over and plowed over. But eventually, I would get the yes, and I knew that I wanted to be in this industry and it was excellent.
So I had to accept a lot of no before capitalism gave me a yes. And when you think of socialism, what socialism does, it does the exact opposite. Socialism tells you, yes, you can have everything. You can have everything until it blows up the economy with inflation, and then only the top politicians get the yes. Everybody else gets no.
Sorry about your luck. And we've seen some of that economically with the inflation. Whenever you have inflation, that's socialism coming at your culture and inflating things because they can't say no. If you look at the you look at the level of debt that our federal government has put us in, it's a result of them never saying no. And what it does is it deletes the value that all of our clients have with money because of inflation.
And so again, capitalism says no until it says yes. Socialism says yes until it has to say no. And usually how it says no is with inflation that starts devaluing the things you have. And I think you're gonna find that in most things in life that if you want something really badly, you're gonna get no at the beginning.
Yeah. And are you gonna do you want it bad enough to keep on hearing that until you eventually and maybe you won't hear yes. Maybe you'll just hear now. But how long will you will you fight for that yes?
I'm gonna go. I'm gonna tell this story because I Alright. This is a long story. It's probably five minutes, so we're gonna run over a little bit. But I just had a blast repeating this story.
And one of the things that I've kind of talked about is living in abundance and what that looks like. And I've got a friend that's been a long, long term friend, and we've had some fun stories. And he called me Sunday, and I couldn't get back to him. And I returned his call on Monday, and he asked me if he had talked to me about a friend of his that's name is Allen Levi, and he described it a little bit. And Neb had talked to me about his friend Allen Levi, and Allen was really active in entertaining groups with kind of what I gathered with was singing and some comedy thing, a little like old fashioned shows, like the Red Skeleton show or some things like that.
And so when Neb had told me about Alan, I wasn't that interested in it because that wasn't kind of my vibe. But he said, Hey, Keith, know, Alan is 70. He's been single his entire life. And one of the things he did regularly that was valuable to him, he would go to the local school and wave at the students every day for the last thirty years. So in his life, he defined that as excellent.
And a lot of people might say, That's just good. Like, what are you doing there? But thirty years of youngsters, somebody caring enough to wave to him is pretty unique. And so he hadn't pursued the life that a lot of people had. He's 70 now, I think.
And probably when he was late, mid to late sixties, he decided he was gonna be a writer, and he started writing a book. And then last year, he self published it. And a 180,000 people bought the book. And it's like, wow, that's that's a lot. Like, know, that's almost $2,000,000 if he sold it for $10 apiece.
So then Simon and Schuster came and bought the book from him and started publishing it for him. And so that's the background. And so what happened was that when last week he called my friend, Neb, and said, Hey, you know, just catching up as friends do. And he said that he was coming back from Hawaii. And Deb's like, well, what are you doing in Hawaii?
And so I was visiting with Oprah. And he goes, what were you visiting with Oprah about? Well, she wanted to talk to me about my book. And I was like, what in the world? What's the name of his book?
And the name of his book is Theo of Golden. And so I was hanging out with Connie and some friends Monday night, and I kind of just told them the story because I found it really fascinating. And as well as I communicate with their mom, I had no idea that Theo of Golden was one of her favorite books. And she was excited to hear the story, and she not only read it on her Kindle, but she had bought a copy of it because she wanted to have a physical copy. And then everybody that was at our house that night showed interest in it.
And then the next morning, Doug, who's on vacation called, and he said, hey, what's going on? I told him about what was going on at Gimbal. And I said, let me tell you this story that I was just telling, I was excited to learn about Connie's interest. And he goes he kept saying, can I interrupt you? Can I interrupt you?
I go, just let me finish this story, and then you can interrupt. And he said after I finished the story, he said, as they're down in Florida, the Caroline and her dad were there, and they started their morning talking about what something they had in common. And they were both animated and excited, and and they were talking about how they were gonna spend their day. And when they finished talking about how they spent their day, they they were courting coordinating the book, Theo of Golden, and they were both reading it and were fascinated by it. And they were both trying to say, how far are we gonna read today?
So when we come together at dinner tonight that we can share what we learned on that. And Caroline said to Doug, You remind me of Theo. As I thought about it, I haven't read the book yet, but I think that Alan Levi's attitude in life is that he had to say yes to the excellent for a long time to be able to write a book. I don't think he ever published another book. To write a book that the world has found valuable, he had to practice and practice and get to that point.
And in his late sixties, the world said yes to him. And so all of that to say that today is the day to say no to the good and yes to the excellent. And hopefully you guys can pass that on to the people you love and they can find hope in the middle of discouragement and build a future that really matters.