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Jamie Shilanski  

Your vocation should pay for your avocations. What does that mean? Your vocation should pay for your avocations. Welcome back TPR Nation this is Jamie Shilanski in an episode of Worlds to Conquer and I find myself saying that to my son Lane more and more these days. He’s in his early 20s and of course like most young men in their early 20s he is on fire to go and conquer the world. He wants to go scuba diving in Iceland, where you can touch two tectonic plates. He wants to go shark diving off of Madagascar. He’s constantly wanting to dirt bike, he’s wanting to do all of this high adventurous stuff, but this high adventure stuff is not free. It’s not free. You have to have equipment you have to pay for guide you have to pay for plane tickets. You also have to have adequate time off of work. And today in our unharnessed world of social media, you see all of these young adults going out and living their best life ever. They’re going out and doing all of these adventures and telling everyone in the caption how they too, can make this happen. If they had better work life balance, and it’s created this false sense of reality for people. It’s created this sort of sense of entitlement that your job should be what fulfills your happiness, that your job your career is what should give you that sense of purpose and work life balance and be responsible. We are making employers more and more responsible for our direct happiness. And that blows my mind, because I’ve worked for employers and they can certainly make you unhappy, but for the most part, they’re not responsible for my happiness. I’m responsible for that. It is my responsibility. Your spouse can’t make you happy. Your kids can’t make you happy. Your job doesn’t make you happy. You have to choose to be happy. And a lot of people out there aren’t making that election. They’re not choosing to be happy. And the reason is, most of them aren’t lazy. We’re not talking about a lazy generation of people, are there lazy people? Yes, of course there are in any civilization and anytime in history, there would be lazy people, but for the most part, people want to do a good job. People want to put in effort. They want to give their all, especially if you’re dealing with career minded people now people that punch in and punch out on a clock but they are only looking at things as a job and exchange of labor for a wage. No, that’s a different landscape for us in the financial advisory space. We’re dealing with career oriented people. These are people that are like minded for growth, and they care about the work that they’re doing. And this isn’t just a generational thing, because I hire a lot of young professionals. You know, we’ve got two in our office or Well, we always go in these groups, these batches of individuals. And for a long time the youngest people in our office were in their late 20s and early 30s. But now those are the older people, and we have a young group of under 25 year olds in our office and they’re not lazy, they’re dedicated, they’re passionate, they’re energetic, they want to make a difference. However, however, they are not exempt from bringing in all of the energy drinks and door dashing things over to the office more than they should. In fact I was in the office last week and they had DoorDash breakfast and then they DoorDash beverage from a convenience store and they all pulled together and they do this and about how to connection with it. I started printing out salary deferral forms and said okay, if we’re door dashing that much each one of us should be written inching more and more further to maxing out your 401 K plans. Because your future self doesn’t care about what Redbull you drink today. Your future self wants you putting away money and so kind of you know, took that mom financial advisory tone and really came down on the what I saw as absolutely financial irresponsibility in the office, and I know it because I still cash flow management with my son and in fact, when he was 16, you know, and the rule is if he you know, the golden rule of you are you were in the gold do you make the rules, and so he was working his job he had to pay for his own stuff. And his discretionary he’s got to save you know, we did the 8020 rule, so he had to tie 10% He had to pay 10% towards his future. He had to take care of his bills. But then if money was leftover, then he got to spend it discretionarily as he so chose, and how did he spend it? How did this young man raised in a clan of financial advisors between his uncle and his grandfather and me and everyone? How did he choose to spend his money at the convenience store gas station, and just epic parent failure? And it hurt me so bad that he said, Hey, you get it, I get a choice. I get to, you know, go fill up my tank with gas because he’s running back and forth to his job. And so he’s going in and he’s buying a cheeseburger and a hamburger and chips and drinks and all of the garbage that they serve you inside of the gas station, and we sat down and we were going through it and he can afford it. He was tithing. 10% he was he was putting more than 10% into his K plan. He was putting his bills first and he had discretionary dollars. This is how he was voting with his discretionary dollars, but it hurt my financial planning soul to the core. And so I finally sat down with him and I said okay, I fed you organically. We don’t do a lot of sugar. We don’t do a lot of eating out fast food but you clearly you’re going in this stage where your highest caloric intake in this in the food you’re craving that’s fine. You earn the money you could spend the money how you choose but it is breaking my heart that you’re doing it at a convenience store where you’re paying, you know double what this stuff really costs. Would you please just stop by Walmart and pick up all the energy drinks and snacks that you want to pick up? So we got a good laugh out of that. But as he comes into this profession, and as his peer group begins to change and they’re coming into their profession, we have a lot of talks about your job is not your responsibility to be your only source of happiness. Now, could you find happiness from your job? Should you find happiness from your job? Yes, but it’s nobody’s responsibility to make you happy at the work you’re doing. And a lot of times in this country in the United States of America, we do something completely tragic to people, we tell them go out and find your passion. Go out and live your dream and find your passion and that is the pursuit of what you should be doing as a career but find a way to make money out of it so that you can forget why you loved it in the first place. Do you know what type of people tell you to go pursue your passions? Grandparents and billionaires. That’s who tells you to go do that. Everyone else that still raising you, your parents, your you know aunts and uncles, those in the working class. Those that are entrepreneurs. You know what they tell you go outwork everyone. You don’t. My first piece of advice from a multimillionaire was when I first got my financial planning designations. He said show up before everyone else leave last outwork everyone. Don’t you dare let anyone outwork you and you’ll become successful and guess what? He was absolutely right. You can’t outwork me. I do more before noon and most people do in two days worth of time. Why? Because I’m constantly honing in my time management and my skills. I’ve also begin develop and I’m no, I’m better than most but I’m nowhere near a master of delegation, which is a big saver. You want to find the people that are super successful and affluent, they delegate they buy back there time. And it’s a weird concept, right? Because especially in my early 20s, where this group of young professionals are today, you’ve got more time than you have money. So you know what you need to be doing your own maintenance, you need to be doing your own house cleaning, you need to be doing your own laundry, you need to do those things. You can’t afford to go and delegate but at some point, you’re gonna hit a tipping and when you hit that tipping area, you need to be able to delegate those tasks because I can pay somebody to clean my house for $100 a day and go earn that in this hour’s worth of time. I can do things that I cannot delegate out to other people. So when I’m doing something for any of the five businesses that I’m involved with, it’s because nobody else can do it the way I want it done. Now, here’s an important distinction about that. That doesn’t mean they can’t do it. They just can’t do it the way I want it done. Now, a lot of times people will say to me, yes, but it takes so much time to teach somebody how to do this. I would be far better suited if I just did this task myself. Well, of course you would be that one time, that one time. But if you go do it 10 times, then think about all of the time that you’ve wasted by not taking the time and educating somebody else. So becoming this master of delegation. So I can buy my time back to go do recreational things. And the recreational activities that I love to do with my spouse in my family are critical to my success. They are critical to my success, because I must refill my cup. I must refill my cup and where I see most professionals go wrong. And this was hard. It’s tough, especially when you’re a young adult and you are working eight to five and then you’re taking time off of work to go study afterwards to maybe get some higher learning some higher education, a different designation, and then you get to that Saturday and Sunday and you’ve got this limited block of time we can tack on Friday night to that. So if you’re in this young adolescent stage, what happens Friday night what everyone wants to do. They want to stay up late. You want to stay up late. It’s Friday night. We don’t have to work tomorrow. We don’t have to be up at 5am. We don’t have to be up at 6am We’re gonna stay up late. And so what you did to your circadian clock is you just jacked it and now it’s all out of whack. So you stay up until 1am. And then there is a small very, very small our Chief Operation Officer at Shilanski and Associates our RIA up in Anchorage, Alaska. She falls in this demographic, but there’s a small group of people that can stay up late and then just continue to sleep the next day. She can stay awake until 1am and she can sleep until 1pm but if I stay awake till 1am What time does my circadian clock wake me up 5am. 5am. That’s what time I get up. That’s what time my body knows it’s time to go. It’s time to conquer it’s time to move on. With our day. And so if I stay up until 1am on a Friday night, man, I am tragically tired by 10am the next day, because I’m still going to get up I’m still going to do things. I’m not much of a Napper. A lot of people do that and because I take a little more. I’m super tired especially as much time as I sit on my computer sometimes or reading, I’m an avid avid reader. So I might listen to an audiobook and just close my eyes alumni is you know, ward off that fatigue. One of our coaches told Micah one time espresso nap, so you get a shot of espresso. Go ahead and take that and then lay down for 20 minutes. And by the time that caffeine hits you, you’ve already had this little cat nap if you will, and your body is raring to go. So that’s a little hack that we do sometimes we’ll do that in between meetings in Surge. So if we wrap up out of one, and we’re in time, it’s enough time to do something but not enough time to do a big something. So we might go ahead and take a little espresso nap and get ourselves recharged for that so that we have the endurance and stamina to get through the rest of Surge. And remember, Surge is a time block period in which we do nothing but focus on delivering massive value to clients and seeing our appointments back to back in a concentrated fashion. Much like a surgeon runs an operating day you have clinical days and you have operating days. So if we were surgeons we are in that surgery suite and that is what we are doing. But when we are not necessarily in the operating room, we are recovering in the best ways possible. And that’s why we have to treat our weekends. That’s how we have to treat our blocks of time off when we go into the month of July in Alaska. There is no greater place in the world to be you want to plan a conference and have zero attendance for Alaska plan in July. Why it is luscious green the rivers are flowing. They are a think God while while subject to a little bit of debris and pollution. We have a lot of it here. We have such a small population of around 700,000 people. And so we get out into these places. And I mean, you could go and not see another person for as long as you wanted to. And that is an incredible part plus a Sockeye are running and when you care about people putting up Alaska fish for the wintertime is normally the sockeye, the coho that we’re after. It runs about it’s a 10 to 15, maybe 20 pound fish, but each fillet gives you about five pounds of meat. It’s a little more oil, it’s a little thinner meat and it just grows up really nice and comes in by the 10s of millions of coho hit our rivers streams every single year. So we are all out there fishing and putting away and getting ready for winter and being part of that, you know, hunter gatherer kind of lifestyle that appeals to most Alaskans. And so July is a huge recovery month for us. Why is it an entire month does that mean we do no work? No. Absolutely. Not. That means we’re strategic about the work that we’re doing. And just like on your weekend, when you’re jamming out and you’re thinking you’re so focused Monday through Thursday, then Friday, you kind of start taking you out of high gear and putting you into lower gear and then you jack your schedule up by staying up all night and you give the next day and you’re not running at 100%. And then what are we doing? We’re doing all of the chores on Saturday, we’re doing the lawn maintenance, we’re doing Gosh, birthday parties, the three o’clock birthday party, so you have no time to do anything because it’s in the middle of the day. And so then our whole day is skewed around doing all of these other things. And then Sunday, what do we have to do? We got to come home, we got to do our laundry and our house cleaning. We got to tidy up we got to get ready for the rest of the week. We do not spend enough time strategically focused on our recovery and our recovery is just as important as our grind. If you do not know how to recover, you will not sustain growth. I told you in the beginning nobody outworks leave but does that mean every single day I wake up feeling fierce and conquering. Okay, mostly. No, I’m just teasing you. I don’t wake up today feeling fear. Some days. I know my body is saying hey, you better chill out. You better recover. You better give me some nutrients. You gotta get that bone broth go and you gotta get outside. You’ve got to do something to refill your cup and take you out of high gear. I want to sustain I want to be enduring. And in order to do that in a way for me to give away a lot of my energy and that’s what a lot of my focus is on is giving other people my energy so we can get big things done then I’ve got to know how do I refill my cup. So when is the last time you you have sat down and said what really refills my cup? What really does it so for me I love hanging out with kids. I really really enjoy it. Not necessarily infant baby because they don’t have a lot of personality coming in. But I love sort of that three to eight year old category where the life is full of wonder you don’t have to go buy anything. They just want your time. You know and we will go on hikes and we will you know get out specimens from the riverbed and look on the microscope and see what’s out there. My spouse and I for reasons that still escaped me yesterday took two to four year olds and two pups out fishing and gale force winds here in Alaska. And those little four year olds fish until we told them we were done. They didn’t stop they didn’t get bored. They didn’t get annoyed and nobody got hooked, which was a miracle in its own. But they fished for two hours straight because as soon as we got there my spouse is a master fisherman and ended up hooking into the pike and then got the four year old over there really it up and it was incredible. And of course the tug is the drug so as soon as they had one on they had to get more and they just fish through so baby guts out and to hear their excitement and their joy and their laughter and you know as my niece Ayla she’s really not to her friend. Okay, you standing on the other edge of the dock and you hear on the video go: This fishing is really tricky. Says bewilderment about life and wonder and joy. That doesn’t mean but what does that for you? Is that is that biking? Is that golf? Is that hiking? Is that just taking two hours to read your favorite book on the patio? Like what do you have to do? To get the time and especially ladies, I am speaking to you that does not mean cooking for the entire family that does not meen cleaning the house for the entire family. That does not mean going to see mom and dad that does not mean showing up at the recitals and doing all of the extra stuff. What refills your cup? What time out of the week are you carving to for just you and don’t tell me it’s grocery shopping? Because that’s not just for you. You’re not grocery shopping just for you. You’re buying more than wine and popcorn. You’re doing it for everyone else in that household. So when it comes at what time are you in? A lot of people say well, I can’t do that because I haven’t these kids. I have my husband blah blah blah. I don’t know you’re talking to you but I love hanging out with men. And then tell me all the time how much they wish their wives would carve out time stop feeling that they have to be there for everyone every second out of the day and go I have husbands that call me and say oh my god, get her out of the house. Take her kayaking, go biking, go hiking, go do something. I’ve got the kids. It’s no problem. Just go. Just remember what it’s like to have fun and be silly and be around people that are asking anything of you other than your presence. And so we give ourselves a lot of reasons why we can’t. But we give ourselves no reasons why we can go do these things. The worlds your world will not fall apart if you take one or two hours out of the week and do something exclusively for yourself. If you’ve got an iPhone, you’ve got settings where you could have just important things call in important messages. You could set it up to say Hey, Mom, wife, whoever you are those people that you love most and do everything for I am out of communication for the next hour and a half. If you need something call your other parent. Call your grandparent call your aunt, call somebody else other than me as long as it’s not an emergency. You have to set that up for yourself and you know what’s going to happen when you do that your family is going to rejoice. They might be inconvenienced the first one or two times, but the energy that you bring back the level of positivity you’re going to bring home with you is worth so much more than you answering a phone call about where so and so’s jersey is at and if you are listening to this and shaking your head and saying yes that is my wife that is my wife to a tee. She will not listen to me she will not do these things. Then share this podcast with her have her call me up I’m gonna tell her she’s got a lot more time in her day than what she thinks she has. And does that mean everyone stops wanting things from her? Nope, sure doesn’t. But it does mean we start teaching other people to be more self sufficient. It does mean we start establishing boundaries because what happens gentlemen when our wives don’t do that, when wives don’t establish boundary and they don’t carve out time for themselves, and they just allow all of this to stack up. They become absolutely unbearable to deal with and they have all of this aggression and it’s no longer about what happened that day. But it’s about all of these layers that have been stacking up and stacking up and stacking up inside of them. Until they finally break and have some sort of major meltdown about how you’re not helping enough. But they haven’t told you what you need to do. And ladies, I know I get it. I hear it all the time we couples right. It’s I shouldn’t have to tell you to do the laundry. I shouldn’t have to tell you to help me make dinner. Well guess what you do? You do. We’re wired differently. Men are very black and white. If I need help from a guy, I don’t say Hey, is it possible? I say hey, I need you here at this time. Can you do it? Yes or no? And I leave a yes or no into that. If I need even I’m talking to my son. Hey, I’m working late tonight. Please have dinner done. Okay, great. Is there anything you want in specific? Nope, Open Pantry, you decide. Okay, done. Dinner’s done. You have to be very direct and specific. And with women, we rely on each other to be intuitive. And when we’re raising daughters,  we’re so annoyed that they’re not picking up on that intuition and just doing things naturally are annoyed that they’re coming to us with questions that they need to know, because we’re raising them to one day be in our position to have to answer everything to everyone. These are all choices. These are all choices, you know, 20-30 years ago, like it might have been longer than that. What is that book? Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Does this apply to every single man and every single woman out there? No, it doesn’t. But for the most part it has a lot of truth to it. stereotypes have a lot of truth to them. That’s why they become stereotypes. But we have to recognize that we have to embrace it. We have to empower us. We have to be our best selves and we cannot be our best selves if we are grinding out keeping things held in every single day of our lives every single minute. We are trying to be something to someone else. And I see this in the men, especially the big business owners that I know. They try so hard to be like strong and successful and take care needs, problem solving in their fire putting out and they’re doing all of these things until one day they just slap they just snap because every single day is multi decision and they hit decision fatigue where they don’t care. They don’t want to have to make another decision. They need to be doing something fun for themselves. So if you’re running a practice, regardless of which gender you are, you need to be adapting these principles. And once you’ve adapt them once you’ve dedicated yourself to recovery, because remember, I told you, your vocation should pay for your avocations you should grind so hard professionally that you’re able to become the best and whatever you choose to be. So you can go do the things you want to go do with your discretionary dollars. Do not fall victim to chasing your dreams and passions and making money out of it until you forget why you dreamt and why you’re passionate about it in the first place. If you find that you’re like super excited and you love what you do great bonus, awesome. And I’m not saying commit yourself to being miserable, but find other ways to stop always looking for your occupation, or your employer to be directly responsible for your happiness. You get choices in this life. This is a choice. You must make a choice. TPR Nation, we are all about giving you action items that you can take right now and change the way that you operate your business, your employees and your life. So right now I want you to think about this. When’s the last time that you did a self assessment for ways that refill your cup? What ways refill your cup when do you get the most joy? When are you planning? I’ve got a big wall calendar. In fact, I was just confirming today before I started, I was dealing with a guy that I do some business and social things with and I said Hey, before we kick off this business, when have we planned this side by side trip up to conduct glacier and he said, Oh, it’s gonna be on this date. Oh, wonderful thing. So I just want to get it on my calendar. So we’re intentional about planning those times. I’m intentional about planning my recovery tasks. I don’t break down and get burned out and somebody gets a less of me. Second thing, your spouse, your life, your family, who are you surrounding yourself with? Where are they applying these techniques? How are they doing this in their own lives so that they can continually be their better selves towards you and who in the rest of the family. This is so critical is a conversation we don’t have until a fight ensues and we need to we need to safeguard and protect the people we vowed and made a promise to love, honor and cherish. This goes part of that. This goes into the self recognition of saying hey, we got a lot going on this week. What do you need from me? How am I of greatest help to you during this process? Hey, I see this whole month is playing it out with family vacations and sporting events. God forbid they do a sporting event like softball or baseball and then it’s every single weekend. What do you need from me and you know what, maybe I’d take over this one and you go and refill your cup. Why don’t you go plan, whatever date with your girlfriends go drink on a porch, go to a spa, go on a bike ride, whatever this is that we feel is your cup. You go do that and I’ll be here and you want to talk about transformational change in your relationship. implement this, implement that safeguard your spouse’s time, like you showed your own, safeguard their time and be a proactive part in finding solutions so that they don’t have these massive breakdowns. I’m not saying that they wouldn’t have breakdown for something else. I’m just saying that this is helpful in this capacity. All right, TPR Nation. This is Jamie Shilanski in an episode of Worlds to Conquer. Go find people who share your values and change the world.