Episode 11
4 WAYS TO NOT JUST SURVIVE, BUT TO THRIVE!!!!!
Episode Description
In episode #11 of The Big Bo $how, Big Bo (a.k.a. Jason Blumstein, CFA®) takes notice that many people, after a long 2022 with a war, high inflation, and market downturns, people are just "surviving." Well, this is not good enough, we should thrive!
Big Bo discusses tools he has developed in his own life to not just survive but to thrive!
He also shares personal stories on how he has implemented each of the 4 tools in his own life.
Let's give thanks for what we have, and in a humbly confident way foster the proper mindset to believe bigger and better days are ahead!
Hope you enjoy the $how!
Episode 11 Key Takeaways:
00:00 Growth mindset insights from psychologist Carol Dweck and investor Ray Dalio.
06:23 Why a great income alone isn't enough to create wealth — and what investors need to add to the equation.
13:22 How Warren Buffett adopted a growth mindset into his investing approach.
19:04 Is it possible to truly thrive without helping others?
22:32 A story that highlights how the greatest successes start in your own head.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to episode 11 of The Big Bo $how. In my opinion, we have a very, very special show for you today. And I just wanted to share why I am talking about this topic. See lately I've been talking to many people, clients, friends, prospective clients, people around my neighborhood, everyone seems down. Now, why are people down? I mean, there's a lot going on in this world right now. Markets are falling, mortgage rates are up. There's a war outside the US and Ukraine between Ukraine and Russia. And I keep on hearing the term from people. And I asked them, Hey, how are you doing? They say, I'm surviving. And in my opinion, that's a terrible term. It's a terrible way to live your life. So what I thought I would do for this show is to talk about something that is very important for me, something I have instilled in my own personal life, which are four ways to help you not just survive, but to thrive. Again, that's four ways to not just have you survive, but to thrive. Because in life, we need to thrive, we only have one life. And if you're just surviving, in my opinion, that's not the best way of going through life. So let's go through the four ways to help you not just survive, but to thrive on The Big Bo $how brought to you by Julius Wealth Advisors.
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Now, the first way that I think about how to thrive and not just survive, is your mindset. Your mindset is not just what you think, but how you think, from what I have found, this can have an enormous impact on your well being and your life as a whole. Now I'll share a book that I read a few years back that was very powerful. It's a book by Carol Dweck. And it's actually called Mindset. And in this book, she talks about the concept of a fixed versus a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, your abilities, or your abilities. If you fail, mainly, it's because you don't have the ability to succeed and whatever you were trying to accomplish versus a growth mindset. If you fail, it's really just a learning opportunity. I see I'll share a story with you. I was at a meeting a couple of weeks back. And in that meeting, there was a powerful, successful female business leader who moved to this country from a very small remote village in Africa. And seemingly with all odds stacked against her that she talked about. She was able to obtain financing. And now she runs six, iHops, International House of Pancakes and is her own real estate developer and she's young, she's roughly 40 years old. And she said this very powerful statement at the end of her presentation, which I personally wholeheartedly agree with. And I think this goes very well into having the proper mindset. What she said was very powerful. She said that in life. In her mind, there's no such thing as failure. She's either winning, or she's learning. If you're successful, you're successful. But if you have a setback, it's not a failure. It's a learning opportunity. And if we think of our failures or setbacks in life as learning opportunities, this helps you bring in that growth mindset.
This also reminds me of another book I read by Ray Dalio if many people know who Ray Dalio is. He is the CEO and founder of Bridgewater Associates, which is one of the largest hedge funds in the industry or in the world. And if you read his book, The Principles, one of the things that he would learn is that Ray Dalio failed many times, he had to move his family out of out of their house into a small barn, because his company almost collapsed in one time when he misread and misjudged, some investments that he made, and he kept on having small failures and some material failures in his life. And he came up with pain plus reflection equals progress. Again, that is pain. Plus reflection equals progress. Again, this is another example of a growth mindset, where no one's saying you failed. But of course, when you have setbacks, there's going to be some pain. And when you have this pain, the thing you need to do is reflect on this pain. Why am I having this pain? Why is this so painful? Because sometimes if you fail, and there's no pain one Okay, well, then it didn't really hurt that much. But if you reflect on why this is painful, then you can start to see what situations caused the setback and create some progress. So again, pain plus reflection equals progress.
The other important part about a growth mindset which is touched upon in this book, which I would encourage everyone to go out and get or if you want to discuss it more with me, please reach out to me Jason Blumstein, CEO and founder of Julius Wealth Advisors, reach out at info@juliuswealth.com is that even if you have ability, you need to put forth effort. Now, there's a lot of people in life that are born with a ton of natural abilities. They're born with athletic abilities, they're born with good brains. And though a lot of people that have a lot of natural abilities are also not as successful as they can be, because in order to have true success, if you have a proper mindset, you have to know that you have to match ability with effort.
Now I can compare this in many different ways. But the first I compare this is when I see people and trying to create sustainable wealth, because this is what part of this show is about food football finance. Now, there's a lot of people that have great incomes, they have gone to great schools, they have natural ability to get into schools to get good degrees, they get great jobs that provide great income. But in order to create wealth, you need to put in effort that doesn't necessarily matter what your income is, you can't just have a great income, you have to take that income to produce cash flow, which then goes into producing growth in your net assets or your net worth. So you can go along and have a great salary. And if you're not putting the effort to generate cash flow from your income, and properly grow your net worth, you will stay on that perpetual hamster wheel. And eventually, unfortunately, if one day, if that income runs out, which either it happens, because you'd naturally happened, you get older and you in new age out of the workforce where you can't work, if you haven't taken the effort to grow your net worth, but yet your lifestyle has grown for 30-40 years, that will then probably cause a lot of pain at that point.
I'll give you another example is that many people know that Michael Jordan got cut from his high school basketball team, if you watch the latest last documentary documentary on ESPN about all of the effort that he put in to practice and keep on putting effort to get better, and to go on to win a championship at North Carolina and eventually win more than a handful championships in the NBA. And in my opinion, being the greatest of all time in the NBA. Now. That's something that Michael Jordan knew he had this growth mindset. He knew that listening, if I get cut from my high school team doesn't mean that's my abilities. It 's just one person's opinion. That was just that high school coach's opinion that he wasn't good enough to make that. But he didn't let them limit that and said, Well, I have a growth mindset, but I'm also gonna combine that with effort, and let me share a statistic with you. It is also from another great book that I read, by award winning writer Malcolm Gladwell, which he discussed in his best selling book Outliers when he was studying all these various outliers and I won't go into it. You can go ahead and read that book as well. What he found is it takes 10,000 hours, or approximately 10 years of deliberate practice to become an expert in something. So 10 years, you got to put in that effort. It's similar to again, creating wealth.
Now another thing I see when I go and I talk to people that are young or people that I call HENWYs, I show them mathematically it's fairly simple, mathematically with time and discipline squared, aided by the miracle of compounding, to become a multimillionaire if you have high earnings. And you're young, because you have the power of high income, which you can then translate into cash flow. And then you got the power of time mixed with the miracle of compounding to become a multimillionaire, but most people fail to see that I'm not making those look like good statistics of this country. Because again, pointing back to that reference from a mountain globules book, it takes 10,000 hours or 10 years to become an expert. So if it takes 10 years to become an expert in something like basketball, like the best doctor, imagine how long it's going to take to truly create sustainable wealth. So again, things take time, they take discipline, take a growth mindset, and you need to put in that effort.
Now, I thought I'd share some personal stories of failures in my life, because nobody's perfect. And I want to show you how I put forth this concept into my own life. So I will talk about sports. And I'll talk about finance. Now, the first one about sports is as if you've heard this. If you've listened to this show in the past, I transferred over halfway through my sophomore year, my junior year, and played at a powerhouse football program in South Florida, St. Thomas Aquinas. And we ended up making it to the semifinals of the playoffs my junior year, and I actually gave up a sack to end the game to end the season for my team. Now, this was extremely painful for me and I didn't give up a sack the entire season. And if you understand what a sack is, I played offensive line, which are those big O's that helped block for people. And a sack is when a defensive lineman or the people are trying to get to the quarterback or trying to get the quarterback on a passing play. If they tackle the quarterback before they throw the ball. That's called a sack. So I didn't give up one sec in my entire career until that play. And that was extremely painful for me. I felt like I left my entire teammates down to quarterback that they ended up sacking was actually the person that helped bring me over to that school. This was extremely painful. But I didn't let that get me down and say, Well, you know what, we can never win a championship. I'm not good at offense, wine , I'm not good at football. I use this to fuel me and to fuel every other member on my team the next year to say, hey, let's use this as a learning opportunity to get better pain plus reflection equals progress. And then the next year, we ended up having one of the most powerful offenses in school history. And we ended up winning the state championship, we won the championship. So there's that mentality, there's an idea for you to have a growth mindset.
The second is in finance. So when it comes to finance when it comes to investing, as everyone has heard, I've been doing this since since I was 10 years old learning about this and is constantly learning is that I grew up learning about and reading about Warren Buffett and if people understand who Warren Buffett is, people say Warren Buffett is the best value investor of all time. And not to get into the technicalities, but a lot of value investing principles, say we'll just buy something that is statistically cheaply priced, whether that has a low multiple, whether it be a price to earnings, multiple price to book multiple, whatever is statistically cheap, you should buy that because it will eventually have reversion to the mean, that's also known as what's called cigarette butt investing for Warren Buffett's original mentors was Benjamin Graham. And early on in my investment career, this was how I started investing. Okay, great. Um, they just find something that's statistically cheap, buy it, and work for Buffett should work for me. I did make a lot of investment mistakes when I was younger, when you make mistakes, pain plus reflection equals progress. I started on our standard, what is this? Why am I still making these mistakes? And then I really started to study more and more about Warren Buffett and if you understood and studied Warren Buffett, Warren Buffett actually changed his investment mentality when he met Charlie Munger, Charlie Munger said to him, hey born instead of buying these statistically cheap companies, which if you really understood the history of Berkshire Hathaway, Berkshire Hathaway was one of the worst one of the last value investments Warren Buffett made because he kept on buying this Berkshire Hathaway, which was a textile mill. And he wrote that into bankruptcy and ended up being the largest equity and debt holder, which he then converted to owning the company. Charlie Munger came along and said, hey, hey, Warren, but we shouldn't be doing it, we should be focusing on owning the best businesses, the most profitable businesses, the highest quality businesses, and let those businesses do the work for you.
Now, when I was also at a large investment firm, this was something that one of my former bosses and mentors had to drill into me as well, because I've made some investment mistakes that were statistically cheap, not necessarily focused on the quality of the business. And he also drilled this into me, you sort of like the Charlie Munger, to me and not saying I'm Warren Buffett, but just trying to draw the parallel. The point here is that to take these opportunities to learn you have to have a great mindset, a growth mindset, but also put forth the effort.
Now, number two, the second way to help you not just survive, but to thrive. Number two is having what I call swagger or what I define as humble confidence, that confidence that you know you will succeed, but being humble enough to continue to put forth that effort. Where does the term swagger come from? And where did I develop this in my life, it was being a huge Miami Hurricanes fan growing up in South Florida, in the 80s through the early 2000s. So if you studied and you watched the Miami Hurricanes, and there's a great ESPN documentary on them, as well called you, I'd watched the first one they made, they made two. I'd watch the U number one they talked about and studied the Miami Hurricanes and this swagger. And they knew when they would go forth and they would play teams, those teams feared playing them. And the hurricanes knew that. But they always still put forth the effort. I mean, on those teams, you had stars, absolute stars, not only in college, but eventually in the Pro Bowl. Sorry, invested in the Hall of Fame. People like Warren Sapp, Edgerrin James, Andre Johnson, Ed Reed, Ray Lewis, just to name a few. So the number two way to help you not just survive, but to thrive, is to have some swagger, have the humble confidence, have the confidence to know that you will succeed, but the humble ability to know you must put forth the effort for you to succeed. And when we get back after this quick break, I'm going to go into the number three and the number four ways to help you not just survive, but to thrive.
Okay, welcome back to episode 11 of The Big Bo $how, four ways to help you not just survive, but to thrive. And we are now on number three. The third way that I believe to help you not just survive as a person but helping you thrive is to help others. So if you think about us as human beings, human beings are creatures of a pack. We need people, we rely on others. And this is going back through our ancestry going back to our cave people days, even as far back as then we are creatures of a pack. So we need to help others whether that be within a community in order to feel that you are not just surviving but the thrive you need to give back and also be selfless. And these are just ways that I've felt that I've learned to help myself, and not just survive, but to thrive.
Now I’ll also share another personal story with you. And if you go on my website, www.juliuswealthadvisors.com and you read my initial blog called 10 year old investor, you'll learn a little bit about my history, and my past and what drove me to start and found Julius Wealth Advisors. And within there, there's a story about essentially, since I was 10 years old, I always wanted to get into a goal was to eventually work for a major institution and help run a successful investment strategy. And I did, I got to that point, I got to that point. I worked at a major firm for 12 years, and I helped run a successful strategy for them for about six years. And as an analyst on the team, and about three to four years into the role, I started to no longer enjoy it. And that was because I realized that I didn't know who I was helping, right, I would sit in an office all day, I'd get in to the office at around 8:00-8:30, send my office, analyze companies stare at a screen, look at a spreadsheet, you pick a stock and go up, you got a pat on the back, you go down, you get yelled at by people. And at the end of the day, I really didn't know who I was helping. So this really weighed on me and it got me into a very bad mindset and not a not a good mindset that I've had throughout my entire life. And so I realized that in order to not just survive, but to thrive, it doesn't necessarily matter how much money you make. Or if you think you're doing what you want to do, since you're 10 years old, if you're not helping others, and there's no one to also share your knowledge with and share what you know if it doesn't allow you to thrive as a person. So I would encourage you if you want to not just survive, but to thrive, to help others, whether that's not necessarily in your day job or taking the knowledge that you know that you have in your day job to help other people, I think you'll get a sense of thriving, and not just surviving.
We've made it to number four, the fourth way to help you not just survive, but to thrive. And this one is also personal, and originally just happened in talking with my son. Now I'll share this with you the fourth one that I've learned to help you not just survive, but to thrive is simple. If you don't believe in yourself, who will? Again, if you do not believe in yourself, who will, you must believe in your own abilities. It doesn't necessarily matter what other people think your abilities are. It only matters what you think your abilities are, and what you want to accomplish with your life and with your abilities. Where did this hit home recently? So my son came home when he's in fifth grade. And like his father was fairly good at math. And he enjoys math. And he was in the second highest math group in his class. And he came home about two weeks ago and said they want to move me up to the highest math group. But I don't know if I want to go into it. And I said to him, why, like, why wouldn't you want to go into the highest math group? Like that's a huge accomplishment. And he said that I'm nervous and that I'm scared. What if I fail? What if I, what if I'm what if i What if I'm not successful. And I said to him, I said the only person that you need to please is yourself. And if you do not believe in yourself in your own abilities throughout your life, no one else will. So I would encourage you to go into the higher math group. And don't think about the word failure and believe in yourself and your abilities. And now he's in that higher math group. And he's learning and he's growing and he's excelling. So that's a powerful statement again, and believe in yourself. If you do not believe in yourself, you can't ask others to believe in yourself. Believe in yourself if you don't even believe in yourself.
And I'll finish this segment up with a quote that I read recently. It says, Your progress in life begins in your own mind and ends in the same place. Every great accomplishment began with the germ of an idea and the mind of a great person, then was shaped by practical usefulness, and finally transformed into reality. Make your mind the fertile ground for ideas through constant study and learning and condition through constant practice to discipline yourself, to follow through on your good ideas, the most brilliant concept in the world is only a dream, unless you take action. Even a mediocre idea that is put into practice is far more valuable than a flash of genius, that languages follow an undisciplined mind. And I think this entire reading that I just stated, encapsulates all of the criteria that I talked about, of ways to not just survive, but to thrive. The first one is your mindset, you have to have growth and not a fixed mindset, and put forth the effort. The second is swagger, or the humble confidence to know that you will succeed, but also know that you need to put forth that effort. Number three is help others by helping others, you will have a bigger self worth accomplishment. And number four, if you don't believe in yourself, who will. So again, while there's a lot that's going on in the world right now, with markets, declining wars, a lot of I would say disagreement within our country as a whole by not being able and having the mindset of, well, I'm just surviving. In my opinion, that is not good enough.
But I hope this show has given you some powerful tools to help you not just survive, but to thrive. So with that, I will end the show as I've ended all my other shows by saying thank you for listening to The Big Bo $how. Always live a life of integrity. Always live a life of knowledge, obtaining as much knowledge as you can. And always live a life that you're passionate about. Until next time, all the best. Thank you for tuning into The Big Bo $how.
Disclosure:
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