In this episode of the Dirty Jack podcast, the host discusses the importance of mindset and personal development for achieving holistic success. They emphasize the need to learn from successful individuals but not to replicate their exact paths. Instead, focus on adopting the mindset tools and strategies they used to navigate challenges and seize opportunities. The host also introduces the concept of essentialism, which involves pursuing less and focusing on what truly matters. They discuss the importance of setting values and making conscious choices in the present moment. Additionally, the host advises against blindly working harder and instead encourages working smarter and finding a balance. They also mention the power law, which describes how a small number of factors often account for the majority of results. Overall, the episode provides insights and tools for achieving wealth and holistic success.
Welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Jack podcast with me, your host Chiyo. The podcast where we focus on holistic professional and personal success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes, all your failures, and everything in between – you. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation, and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. In this week's episode, we are giving you the mindset makeover required for wealth creation. I've made a lot of notes for this week's episode, so you might hear my pages rustling in the background, but that's only in pursuit of giving you the highest possible quality.
There are many quotes that have had an impact on me. One of them is, do not ask for directions, and I could be paraphrasing here. Do not ask for directions from people who have never been where you're going. You see, we often look at other people, especially people who have succeeded, or people that we admire, or people that we're close to, and seek from them direction on how we can achieve the same success. The trouble with that is, often, when you delve deep into the successes that people have achieved, there are factors that are particularly unique to them.
For example, I'm trying to remember, is it Bill Gates? It might be Bill Gates, went to a school that had the only computer in the entire state. That is a part of the story that you cannot simply replicate. The reason why it's important to understand those things is, what we take away from their stories cannot be things that we cannot replicate. What we should be taking away are two things, in my view, inspiration, which is great.
It is the broadening of the mindset. It is the understanding that if someone achieves this, so can you, but also an understanding that you need certain mindset tools and not a replica of someone else's story. You see, when you're traveling your life that nobody else has ever lived to achieve an outcome that no one else has ever achieved because no one has ever lived your life, you are the map and the map maker. I love that description because that wraps words around something I've always thought but struggled to put into words.
Brené Brown says that in her book, Atlas of the Heart. You are the map and the map maker for your own life and for your own success. What you want to adopt from other people's stories are the things, the tools that they used as they came across the different incidents in their lives that led to this success. The tools that they used to navigate, the tools that they used to identify, the tools that they used to get over, through, and to exploit the opportunities that they came across.
Those mental tools, that is, I mean actual ways to use your brain that you break out and you use as appropriate when you encounter life, work, and business situations. Those tools are then what help you to tackle life, business, and work situations in a way that allows you to build your own world, to create your own story, to draw the map that other people will draw on later on when you've achieved your success or that will inspire other people.
But you already know, you already know that in 20 years' time, if you achieve phenomenal success, you cannot tell somebody to walk the exact path that you have walked because you know that it is not possible. And so don't look to others to do that for you. Instead, when you're taking away from the stories of people who've succeeded, take away the how so that you can take that tool and use it as needed and as appropriate for your story as you make your way through life.
And there are many sources of mental tools for this purpose, so it makes sense for me to group them by a source. Today's source is Greg McKeown's Essentialism. It's a book that he wrote, I'm not sure when, but I read it a couple of years ago, and the byline to essentialism is the disciplined pursuit of less, which is an interesting concept in a world where we are inundated with more, more, more, and more. The big ideas from essentialism that I would like to share with you today that I think would add value to your toolkit, that I think would be essential in the creation of wealth.
And when I say creation of wealth, we must remember that the podcast is about holistic success and therefore it is about holistic wealth. Money because we can't do without it, happiness because we can't do without it, and love. And when I say love, I do not restrict love purely to romantic love. You know, we've chatted about this before when we talked about Jay Shetty's book. It's also about the love relationship that you have with yourself, the love relationship you have with loved ones, friends, family, love that you have with a lover in the broader and broadest sense of it.
Those are the things that define success. So the first rule that I got from essentialism that I thought was exceptionally useful is understanding the idea that a lot of things simply don't matter. We stress ourselves so much over things that will not matter five years from now. When you're assessing situations, when you're assessing your reaction, when you're assessing how you want to deal with a particular difficulty, ask yourself if it is going to matter five years from now because when you really truly think about it, the things that are truly valuable and truly matter and whose value and importance last the duration of your lifetime are really so few.
And then you work your way backwards from those to identify what the vital few things that mean the most to you are. And from that, build your set of values because everything that you do is informed by your value system. If you don't set your value system, if I don't decide, for example, that being present for my kids is important but also making the most money I can make is important to me but also having a good relationship with my siblings or sibling is important, right? If I don't decide that, every day life will come knocking and give me a priority for the next day.
And when you understand, like we do from Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth, that life is only now. By that, we don't mean YOLO. By that, we mean that life is a string of nows. This moment that I'm doing this is a moment in which I'm not doing something else. We'll talk about that later. But when I use this moment for this thing and I use the next moment for that thing, I am in a now and then I'm in another now and then I'm in another now.
Those nows string together to create my past and the nows that are coming string together to create my future. Understanding that there is only now helps you realize that when you say, I'm going to figure it out tomorrow or I'll figure out what's vital to me in a week, you've also forfeited a week of your life in which those priorities are made by somebody else. You've forfeited a week in time to put first the things that matter to you.
It's when you're deciding if I should go for this meeting or if I should do this and you realize, okay, if I go for this meeting, I'm going to make exponentially more money and that money is ultimately going to give me the freedom to be with my kids in a month or in a year. And then you ask yourself which one is more valuable. Your value system will then inform that. That's number one. Number two, don't just work harder.
I think one of the lies that were sold to our generation is the idea that if you work hard, the results will speak for themselves or the answers will come to you or whatever it is. When I say don't just work hard, we've talked about the TRS syndrome before. That's not what I'm talking about here. Today I'm talking about don't blindly apply yourself to doing more. Do not blindly apply yourself to doing more. When people say don't work harder, work smarter, that is what they're saying.
They're saying pay attention to the amount of effort that you're putting in versus the value that you're getting back. So way back in the day, I worked as a waitress. I worked as a waitress in Scranton, Pennsylvania at a resort there. And when I was working in that job, I earned $8 an hour, $8 an hour. I could have worked as hard as I could have worked as hard as I could have killed myself working hard.
I would still earn $8 an hour. If I got promoted, perhaps I would earn $10 an hour. But that was all I would ever earn no matter how much sweat was on my brow, no matter how good I got at carrying those eight steaks on the one tray in one go. And I was very good at it. Being smart and not harder is thinking, right, this is how much I can earn in this job. In order for me to earn this dream amount, let's say I want to earn $200 an hour, that's a wild amount, but you know what I mean.
Let's say I want to earn $200 an hour. How do I get to a point where I earn $200 an hour? What do I do? Maybe it means that yes, I work hard in the waitressing job, but I only work hard within the specified hours, but I mustn't wear myself out during work hours because outside of those work hours, I'm going to go to class and I'm going to get a degree and I'm going to apply myself to that degree to pass it with the necessary score to open the next door.
That way you distribute your energy. You're working smart and hard. Do not waste your energy purely working hard. Find the balance. Then I think closely accompanying don't just work harder is another law and I thought I would put them close together because they work well together even though they are not the same thing. This one is called the power law. The power law is a power law. It's in mathematics and in statistics and it's about the functional relationship between two variables where one variable's value is proportional to a power of the other.
So in the context of fields like economics and social sciences and natural phenomena, the power law often describes a distribution where a small number of items account for the majority of the result. So if you think about, I think it's Steve Jobs, I think I said Bill Gates earlier, I should have said Steve Jobs. I'm not sure. It's one of the two. The point is that they achieved their success because they got a start at a school that had a computer at a time when computers were rare, wildly expensive and largely inaccessible.
But anyway, back to this rule, back to the power rule. Steve Jobs came in at a time when he worked out as he was running Apple and I could stand corrected in the finer details but I know the principle is right. When Apple was struggling, he realized that 80% of their product came from, 80% of their profit came from 20% of their product. They were meddling in lots of little things but 80% of what they were meddling in was costing them money.
Only 20% was making them the bulk of the money they need to be making. A lot of people often refer to the power law as the 80-20 rule. They also sometimes refer to it as the Pareto principle and the Pareto principle suggests that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes and understanding that extends to you understanding that roughly about 80% of the results that you seek come from about 20% of the things that you do.
So you need to pay attention to the things that you're doing and work out which of the things that you're doing are producing the 80%. What Steve Jobs did was he eliminated the products that were not producing, the products that were chowing up 80% of value but only returning 20% of value and kept the products that were only 20% of the product line but producing 80% of the revenue and then Apple shut up because now focus could be placed on the things that had the power.
The power principle was being applied, the power law was being applied to the benefit of the person consciously approaching the situation. Understanding that for yourself is immensely freeing. Then number three is trade-off. I've already touched on it multiple times. It is implied by the other rules. When you say yes to one thing, you are saying no to another, simple, right? So when you lose what you are getting, so for example, if you do something, if I decide I'm going to go out with my friends tonight, what am I not doing instead? I'm not recording this podcast.
What do I get more value from? It depends, right? Could I do this at a different time depending on how close I am to the friends in question? Is this a high-quality engagement? High quality for me is am I meeting people I love? Am I spending time with people I rarely see? Am I spending time with people who I love speaking to and who love speaking to me and when we hang out together, we leave there feeling more filled up, our cups are full? Is that the type of engagement we are talking about? Then I might find myself moving the podcast to the afternoon, forfeiting a nap which is worth less and then recording the podcast.
What you do is you understand that for everything that you say yes to, you are saying no to something else. When you overemphasize purely saying yes to something, you sometimes lose sight of what it is costing you. So the question to ask yourself is, what do I lose relative to what I am getting? When I guess that thing, is it worth the loss? This is how you need to make your decision. You heard me essentially running through a trade-off scenario in deciding the meeting versus time with kids versus earning more money, etc.
That's rule number possibly three or four, but I know we're going to get through ten. Become unavailable is the next one. Become unavailable. All of these rules speak to each other. So everything that I've told you, every podcast episode, every idea that I put to you is not meant to be a tool in isolation. All of these things work together and complement each other to produce the results together. The more you are able to apply these things or to pick the set that works for you and apply it holistically, the more powerful the results will be.
In other words, the power law will work for you. You will get 80% of the results. Become unavailable simply means pause to think and reassess. Pay attention to the things that you are doing. So there's the day-to-day tasks of, have I spent time with the kids today? Have I done this? Have I gone to work? Did I do well at work today? And so it goes, those are the everyday things. Become unavailable invites you to think bigger picture.
Think of it this way. This example is actually not from this particular book. The example I'm giving you now is from Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I read it and it was a huge aha moment for me. The way Steve Covey presented it was the best quality ladder and the greatest possible physical fitness can get you up a wall at amazing speed. You can go up and down and carry things up and carry things down and build that wall higher and higher and higher, but become unavailable and pausing to think and reassess is leadership because what it requires is for you to take a step back from the ladder and the wall and say to yourself, is the ladder against the right wall? Are we building the right thing? Am I working on building the right thing? The next rule is decision fatigue.
Decision fatigue is understanding, we discussed this in an earlier episode as well. Decision fatigue is we often think that we have an infinite amount of willpower and that we can decide whatever we want to decide whenever we want to decide it. The truth is we don't. You wake up every morning with a new can of willpower and every time you make a decision, you deplete your little can of willpower for the day and that's why you find that later in the day, especially after you've had a long day.
That's when you're more likely to make a poor choice. That's when you're more likely to make a decision that you will regret because your willpower is depleted. What people have worked out by research is the more stuff you automate, usually the things that you do every day, the more stuff that just works the way it's supposed to for you automatically in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, the more willpower you're able to preserve on a day-to-day basis so that you can apply it to things that contribute to 80% of the outcome.
The automation itself is the thing that contributes to 80% of results. For example, understanding that you wake up at the same time every day, understanding what you're going to wear in advance. When you decide what you're going to wear in advance the next day, remember if you decide what you're going to wear in advance the next day, especially if it's at night, you're not wasting any willpower because the day is pretty much done. You put out what you're going to wear.
You decide what time you're going to go to the gym. You decide what your routine is going to be. You decide what the kids are going to eat, what you're going to eat. You've got meal plans, etc., etc. Those are all decisions you've taken off your plate for tomorrow and that the trade-off, what you get in return, is the will and the strength to make decisions that matter to drive you towards the bigger goal. When you leave your house at 8 a.m.
in the morning and 9 a.m. in the morning to get to work, you're not already depleted from trying to get everybody sorted, everyone out of the house, etc., etc. Automate as much as you can and it's from understanding this principle that things like meal planning and outfit planning and people, I think it was Obama, these presidents who wear the same outfit, the guy who owns Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, he wears the same outfit every day. All of this is to control the amount of willpower that they use every day and to preserve it for the things that matter and you are then invited to do the same thing.
Then one of my personal favorites is asking high-quality questions. This I've read in this book. I've heard even in church from Stephen Furtick preaching on YouTube. I've heard it from multiple psychologists. Your brain answers what you ask it and if you're asking disempowered questions, it will give you disempowered answers. Why is this happening to me? Oh my God, this is so hard. Your brain is going to answer you. We don't know why this is happening to you.
I mean, life is crap. Oh God, we're all so sad. That's the answer that you get. It's not that it's not true. It's just that it's useless. But when you ask yourself questions like, I don't like what's happening to me. How has it come about? Is there a way I can avoid it? Is there any way I can mitigate the results? Is there a way I can eliminate it? What is this thing that is happening to me? Does it bring me any value? Is there something I'm supposed to learn from it and have I learned that thing? If I have learned that thing, why am I still here? How do I move from here to the next place? Oh, is that how? Okay, cool.
Do I have the tools to do the how? No. What are those tools? Let me go get those tools. I am moving. That is the power of empowered questions. A disempowered question is a question that does not move you from the difficult situation. It's okay to feel sad about life's happenings. It happens. I'm telling you this. I am an orphan. I've had a torrid relationship or two and consequently a torrid heartbreak or two. I'm raising two kids by myself.
I am, listen, life has happened. I've been destitute. I buried my own mother. All this is for me to tell you that I understand that life can be really hard and that life can be really unpleasant, but what has brought me to the point where I'm sitting here holding this mic and saying these things with the confidence that I am saying them to you is not parking somewhere and saying, why is life so unfair? Life is unfair.
What now? Ask yourself empowered questions and empowered questions will bring you empowered results. Next one, sunk cost bias. Oh my God, sunk cost bias. Sunk cost bias is we hold on to things that add so little value because of what we have already invested. This we see in relationships. This we see in work, in things that we've purchased. It's maybe buying a designer item and realizing it's impractical, but you've already spent all this money on it.
Now what must happen? Sunk cost bias is an idea that you simply need to recognize. I can't tell you what to do with it, but you must understand that when you hold on to something purely because you've already spent on it and, you know, you want to get your value for money, but this thing is not giving you any value. If you hold on to a relationship, whatever it might be, because you put in a lot of time into it back in the day, but now it's a horrible experience.
When you stay because of your sunk cost, understand that that doesn't necessarily change the future result. It simply means that you keep putting in more costs that will sink. It might be then time to ask yourself if you should be doing something else with someone else, if you should be letting go of that item that is taking up space. Remember that dress that you bought and you thought you would fit into it, but you don't fit into it, maybe you should sell it and use the money to buy something that fits you and makes you look and feel beautiful.
Remember the item that you've been waiting to, I don't know, give to your grandkids. Whatever it is, whatever it is, assess whether you really want it or you are holding onto it purely because you are biased on account of the investment you have already lost. The longer that you hold onto a thing on the basis of an investment that you have already lost, the more you continue to invest and the more you continue to lose. I think I'm at number nine now, and I have a very long list, which means I might do a subsequent episode, but I'm going to do two more that I think would complement today's list very well.
The one is confidence. Your self-trust snowballs. The more you give yourself evidence of your ability to do things and to follow through, the more you trust yourself. The more you trust yourself, the more you back yourself when you do things, the less insecure you become. Let me tell you the world of pain that comes from not trusting yourself, from not having self-worth, from not having a good relationship with yourself, from poor self-esteem. A wealth of pain, and that's not the kind of wealth we're trying to build, a wealth of pain comes from that place.
I have gone to great lengths to explain that the relationship with yourself is not too different from your relationship with other people. So the more you let yourself down, the more you disappoint yourself, the more your subconscious understands that you cannot be trusted, and it acts accordingly. In other words, it directs your actions in line with a consciousness dealing with a person who cannot be trusted, which means the more you follow through with little things, and these are little things, the more you follow through with little things, the more your subconscious says, hey, who's this new girl, and I like her a lot, and I trust her.
So when she says we're jumping, oh, we're jumping, and you can build your self-trust in many ways. I did this by saying to myself that I was going to run three, four, five times a week, every week for 12 weeks, and I did that. I didn't have to run 100 kilometers. I just needed to show up and to run. The distance and the time and the strength and the stamina took care of itself, and then I continued with that habit because as I learned to trust myself more, as I did it more and more and learned to trust myself more, showing up for that activity started to feel good.
Every time I show up, I feel good because my subconscious, my conscious, and my body are aligned, and this is a thing that we do. I identify as a runner now. When I started, it would take me about an hour to run five kilometers. Just the other day, I ran five kilometers in 23 minutes, not necessarily because I was attempting to run faster. I've just naturally got stronger over the last three years, and this is what happens with your self-esteem and your self-trust.
For some people, it's getting into a cold shower. For some people, it's an ice bath. For some people, it's saying, I will read two pages a night and then reading it. When you keep promises to yourself, little promises, when you say, I'm going to stop and breathe halfway through the day, every day, and then you follow through, when you say, I'm going to automate this process, and then you follow through, you build trust in yourself and your subconscious aligns with that and pulls you in the direction of your dreams.
Start small and then build up consistency. I've actually combined confidence in the last one, which is start small. The last one, and I am sure I'm now at number 12 or something, I just have a problem. I cannot help myself. Tiny stuff. Try stuff. Sorry. The last one is just try stuff. We talked about this in a very recent episode. Try stuff. Before you decide what you are going to do and be finally, give yourself space to play and explore and taste life, and then you can work out which tastes appeal to you, which are the things that say to you, this is who she or is, or this is who you are, and then you can focus on applying the Pareto rule to those things, to applying sunk cost bias to the things that don't fall into that category.
You can focus on preserving your willpower for those things. You can focus on becoming unavailable for the things that don't matter and being available for the things that matter. You can focus on your trade-offs and understand that when you are trading in, you are taking this in, and when you are trading out, you are taking that out because you've worked out what your value system is. This is how these things come together. Thank you for joining me this week.
Thank you for joining me every other week. I truly appreciate it. New episodes go up every Tuesday. If you like the episode, please like, subscribe, share, leave me a comment, send me a WhatsApp, send me a DM. I received some beautiful WhatsApps from a friend in Dubai, I think it was yesterday or the day before, and it inspired me so much that I'm recording my episode early this week. That's just how much of an impact positive feedback has.
I think my love language is affirmation. I think it is. Thank you and have a beautiful week.
