EntreLeadership - The Difference Between Good and Bad Success with The Minimalists

Starting point is 00:00:05 On today's episode, we're talking about how success can actually lead to misery and how to make sure you're headed towards the right kind of success instead. From the Ramsey Network, I'm George Camel, and this is the Entree Leadership podcast, where we help business leaders like you grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. Today, I'm sitting down with Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus, also known as The Minimalists. Their Emmy-nominated Netflix stars and New York Times bestselling authors who help people live more meaningful lives. with less. They lead a team of over 20 people and reach millions through their website, books, podcast, and films. We're going to talk about minimalism and business, the difference between good and bad success, getting clear on your why, and how to be a well-rounded, healthy leader. So let's get to it. Here's our conversation. Ryan, Josh, it's so great to have you guys on the podcast. How are you?

Starting point is 00:01:00 Thanks, George. Awesome to be here. So we are talking about the definition of success. And I just rewatched your documentary minimalism. Great watch really holds up after all these years. And everyone wants to know, before we get started, if they're watching this on YouTube, if they ever seen you guys before, what's up with the black shirts? What's up with the Jesus flip-flops? Is this a Steve Jobs vibe here, an ode to Steve? Oh, man, I look good in black. It's slimming. It's classic. It's timeless. I don't have to make any decisions in the morning on what I'm going to wear. That's what my assumption was. Is that true? Yeah, I mean, it's just really simple, right?

Starting point is 00:01:42 And so I guess I could have a simple really brightly colored, but I'm trying not to stand out in that way. I find that if no one's commenting on my outfit, then I don't have to worry about it at all. And by the way, it's sort of timeless. I don't mean like literally timeless. Like people 3,000 years ago weren't wearing black t-shirts and black jeans. But within our lifetime, you can find examples of anyone in culture who was cool who was wearing all black. And while I'm not trying to be cool, I realize, like, I don't have to worry about

Starting point is 00:02:11 like trying to impress other people with the appropriate logos. By the way, I think logos are a big problem in our culture. I'm going to purchase my identity. This says something about me if I have this horse or this checkmark on my clothes. I am in a weird way paying to advertise for these corporations and it becomes part of me. Hey, will you accept me if I wear the right logos? Well, I'll be part of your group, your tribe, if I match the things that you're wearing, or even worse, will I be shunned by you if I wear the wrong logo? And we worry, we have this fear of this disconnection from other people. And so I'm able to declutter all of that. That's true. Most people, as they get dressed, they go, well, you know, someone's going to comment on this. I want to

Starting point is 00:02:54 make sure I look good. And you guys always look good, but it's in a very understated way. Yeah. I like that. Thanks, man. There you go. In our corporate days, I had, I don't know, 12 suits and 25 shirts and 30 ties and man picking that stuff out in the morning was like it was stressful. You're starting your day with anxiety. Yeah, I had like five different pair or six different pair of Allen Edmund shoes and yeah, it's nice to just get up, put your clothes on and like, I'm like, no, I know I look good in this. I wear this every single day. This is why I wear it every single day. And that's part of minimalism is let's simplify the choices we have to make, the decisions where you have to make in our day. A lot of people have different pictures in their mind of what

Starting point is 00:03:31 minimalism is. And some of our listeners, you know, they're coming from the leadership, the business world. How would you define minimalism in the simplest way possible? Minimalism is the thing that gets us past the things so we can make room for life's most important things, which, well, aren't things at all. Oh, that's good. That's the, that's the pithy, you know, response to that question. But really, minimalism is about living intentionally. We see 5,000 advertisements a day is a lot of input. And they're all telling us that we're not complete. But here's how you can be complete. And those messages, they seep in subconsciously. They make us form identities that we probably wouldn't form otherwise. And minimalism is a tool to help us filter

Starting point is 00:04:20 through all of that noise. Love that. Well, you guys have incredible backstories that I think lean towards a lot of our audience as business owners and entrepreneurs, you both started out in corporate America. And in your 20s, you started kind of chasing the corporate ladder and going, how do I get to the next rung and how do I get to the next thing? Where did that come from? Was that just how you were kind of trained? Was that something that was learned? Well, we grew up really poor, and we thought the reason we were so unhappy growing up wasn't from the dysfunctional households with alcohol abuse and drug abuse and sometimes even physical abuse in the household. We thought the reason we were unhappy was we didn't have any money. And so when I turned

Starting point is 00:04:59 18, I went out and I got that entry-level corporate job and I realized like, oh, by 19, I was making $50,000 a year. And this is in the late 90s, right? Wow, this is possible. But I need to make more money, right? Because $50,000 isn't doing it for me. So maybe it's $65,000. Maybe it's $90,000. Maybe it's six figures. Then I'll be happy. And so I climbed the corporate ladder throughout my 20s. And with each new promotion, I spent more. I was spending toward the next promotion, accumulating things. I later learned that the average American household has 300,000 items in it, which would be wonderful if it was making us happier, more content, our lives more joyous and complete. But it's doing the opposite. It's incompleting us. It's making us miserable. It's making us go into debt. And it's keeping us away

Starting point is 00:05:43 from the most important things in our lives. And so, yes, I was climbing the corporate ladder, and I was ostensibly successful. I had the big suburban house with more toilets than people. I had the luxury cars plural um what's the plural of lexas lexas yeah lexas i like lexai write that down george uh and so i i found that i was living the american dream it was kind of a nightmare for me it wasn't really my dream it was this new version of the american dream of well if you keep accumulating keep pursuing happiness then eventually it would be happy and it was the opposite for me two events happened to me My mother died, my marriage ended both in the same month. And it was really those two events that forced me to look around and start to question everything that had become my life's focus.

Starting point is 00:06:30 I realized I was focused on success and achievement. And in our culture, that means what? The accumulation of stuff looking successful is much more important than being successful, right? And so I started simplifying. I stumbled across this idea of minimalism and found all these different people living simpler lives. and they seemed a whole lot happier than any of the rich guys who I aspired to be like one day. I had this whole plan. You know, I'm going to be a vice president by age 32, senior VP by 35, a C-level executive by age 40.

Starting point is 00:07:03 Well, I'm 41 now, and I would have continued down that path, but I would have ended up just like the guys who I aspired to be like. As I got closer to them, I realized a lot of them were kind of miserable. I had one boss who was on his third wife and second heart attack. And I realized, like, well, wait a minute. I'm not going to be different. I told myself, I'm going to be different. Oh, yeah, but I'll be different from them. But if I follow the same recipe, I'm going to bake the same cake.

Starting point is 00:07:30 And I decided that I needed to go a different direction. I needed to simplify my life. I needed to declutter, yes, the excess material possessions, but also my idea of success and status and achievement and corporate clutter, relationship clutter, there was a lot of other clutter in my life. I needed to let go on. So success is not in and of itself a bad thing. And Ryan, you've talked about this, that some types of success can lead you to misery.

Starting point is 00:08:01 Yeah. So how do we avoid the bad kind? Because there's a lot of business owners out there who go, well, Ryan, Josh, I'm successful and I have a great life. So what are you trying to say? Success is bad? Yeah. No, success certainly isn't bad. You know, like even climbing the corporate ladder, not bad, especially like morally bad.

Starting point is 00:08:19 I mean, I'm using bad in a general sense here. But it's not that there's anything wrong with that per se. The question is, like, what are you giving up to, like, chase that success? And that's where it can start to be a problem. So for me, I just have, like, a tornado of a lifestyle that I don't know what to do. And the tornado of a lifestyle was me having copious amounts of debt, me chasing all these ephemeral things, drugs, alcohol, ephemeral relationships. and any ex-drug addict will tell you like, hey, the drugs stop working eventually.

Starting point is 00:08:54 And that's what happens. It stopped working for me. That's what I was using to pacify myself to kind of push away these negative feelings. And then when that stops working, you got to ask yourself, I had to ask myself, well, what's really going on here. And so for me, I didn't even know, you know, I'd never heard of minimalism before. I didn't know what minimalism was. I just know that Josh was happier. Like he was doing his job, had a little pep in his step per se.

Starting point is 00:09:21 And I went to, I'm like, hey, man, why he got this pep in your step? What the hell are you so happy? And that's when he told me about this thing called minimalism. So for me, I saw an opportunity for me to get back to the basics. Because when you think about minimalism, living intentionally, staying out of debt, bringing things intentionally into your life, being very deliberate with the relationships you have, it's all common sense stuff, you know? But unfortunately, common sense is just not too common these days.

Starting point is 00:09:45 certainly did not have that common sense. So I saw an opportunity for me to kind of get the reins on my life. You know, real quick, I just, I had a packing party. That's how I started. I'm like, Josh told me about minimalism. I'm like, oh, this is awesome. I'm a minimalist. Now what? Like, I don't know what to do. So we decided to pack up all my belongings as if I were moving. And then I would unpack only the items I needed over the next three weeks. So, you know, Josh came over and literally helped me box up everything. My clothes, my kitchenware, my towels, TV. That is a true friend. Everything, yeah, it was. Well, you know, here's the thing.

Starting point is 00:10:18 He kind of tricked me into it because you could put the party at the end of anything, and I would show up. There's a packing party, right? Right, exactly. I'm more of the packer. He's more of the partier. Combine them. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:10:30 So, yeah, after those three weeks, I had, like, 80% of my stuff still sitting in those boxes, and that is what really helped me at least start to realize what success meant to me. Because if you would have asked me before that packing party, like, hey, what's success? Like, what does it mean to live a good life? I would have been like, oh, well, you know, health, you got to be healthy, health is wealth. You got to have good people in your life. So relationships, absolutely, you know, you got to be working on that passion project. You got to have growth in your life.

Starting point is 00:10:56 You've got to contribute beyond yourself in a meaningful way. But like, when I was looking at my 80% of stuff, I'm like, I'm not focusing on any of this. Like, I was just giving those priorities lip service. So, yeah, that's what minimalism helped me do. It really helped me get clear on my priorities and then really helped me forge a path towards my actions aligning with those priorities. Yeah, I love that concept of what are you giving up to have the success? And that helps you define, is this the right kind?

Starting point is 00:11:23 Is this the one that I should be chasing after? Exactly. George, I don't think, and I know no one on your podcast has ever said this before, but I don't think success actually exists. Whoa. Mic drop. And I mean that quite literally, people will call into the minimalist podcast and we'll do this little thought experiment with them.

Starting point is 00:11:42 I'd love to do it with you. as well. So like if someone says, yeah, I'm looking to be successful, I'll say, tell me what you think of when you think of a successful person. And they often pull out the sort of GQ advertisement of a supposedly successful person. Show me some characteristics. And it's almost always a guy wearing a suit, right, with a Rolex or some other watch. They have a fancy car, a big house. Maybe they even have a boat, people will recommend it. They'll say he has cuff links or a tie. And it's all. always about the sort of exterior, right? It's the image. And so in our culture, success represents a whole lot of chasing. But it is that very chasing that makes us miserable. So, yes, I was successful in my 20s. I made really good money, but I spent even better money.

Starting point is 00:12:32 I had a ton of debt. I had a lot of discontent, a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety in my life in my 20s. So was I successful still? I don't think so. If the price for success is misery, I would rather be a failure. Yeah, well, you guys ended up giving this up. You gave up the corporate life and you branched out as entrepreneurs that we see today. And that's the story of most people listening to this podcast.

Starting point is 00:12:59 They said, you know what? This ain't it. And they went and they went and built their own thing and made their own version of success. And a lot of them stand there today. But it may not be the picture they had in their mind. It's hard to be, and you answer this, is it hard to be a minimalist while running a business because there's so many factors outside of your control, it's hard to have a minimal, simple business these days. Yeah. Oh, man, what is a minimalist? I mean, what, you know,

Starting point is 00:13:24 when we think about the, you asked the definition earlier, I mean, it's a philosophy to live intentionally. So let's just call it, you know, let's call it intentionalism. Maybe minimalism is too, too jarring of a word. So can you live an intentional life while being a business owner? Absolutely, 100%. In fact, I would, I would posit that it helps. you be a better business owner because we have only so many resources. And what minimalism does is it helps us be deliberate with those resources. And money is a very important resource. And I don't want to undermine it. It's something that we need in this world. And a lot of people who are impoverished, like I don't want to undermine their poverty. Like that's a big deal. Then we have these other

Starting point is 00:14:01 resources, our time, our attention, our creativity. There are all these other resources that we have that if we're not intentional with, well, you'll end up like a jerk like me when I was in the corporate world and I was just trying to cover up all of my misery, but it's that misery was stemming from not having this intentional viewpoint with those roots. So I was just giving them up all willy-nilly. And the word success, you know, here's the thing. Success is more about like, how am I defining success? Yeah. So that is, that's what I would, you know, ask someone who's struggling with success. I would ask them like, hey, what does successful mean to you? How would you define success? Because yes, there is that, that cliche of, you know, the GQ model that Josh was talking about,

Starting point is 00:14:42 For me, I've been able to rework it into living a meaningful life. So living a meaningful life and being successful, that is synonymous for me now. So that's where I focus. So if you ask me, do I feel like I'm successful? Sure. I feel like I'm successful. It's because I'm living a meaningful life. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:14:58 And that's a lot of what we do here. We call it work that matters because we have a real mission. We're not out there making widgets, and there's nothing wrong with widgets, but we get to really transform people's lives. And, man, there is incredible meaning when you get to. to do something like that every day. So I want to talk about getting clear on the why, because you're saying, let's define success. That really drills down into the why.

Starting point is 00:15:20 We teach that at Entree leadership. It's crucial for every leader. So what did you learn about yourself and your why during that season as you kind of made this shift? You know, for us, it started with the stuff as the minimalist. There was a why question, although we disguise it now as a how question because people are always asking how do I do something,

Starting point is 00:15:37 but it's much more about the why. And so the question we have is, how might your life be better with less? And another way to look at that is like, how might you be more successful with less? It doesn't mean less money necessarily, although when I left the corporate world, I took a 90% pay cut. I was making $200,000 a year in Dayton, Ohio. And that first year in 2011, I made $23,000. Here's the weird thing. I was more financially secure that year than I had been the previous decade because I was more intentional with that money.

Starting point is 00:16:09 I was more intentional with my time. I knew that every time I tried to give up $5 for a cup of coffee, I was parting with $5 of my freedom to a great extent. And we applied that to our business as well. Our first book tour, you and I were having lunch yesterday. We were talking about this. Here was literally our business model. We have a trunk full of books.

Starting point is 00:16:27 We're going to 51 cities for our first book, which is called minimalism. And in each city, we would sell enough books to hopefully have a hotel room that night and a meal. And if not, we would either sleep in Ryan's Toyota Corolla, which we call our tour bus, or maybe a kind reader would let us sleep on a couch or floor or something like that. Now, does that sound like success to most authors? The answer to that is no. But we made some of the best memories, some of the best connections, and also really began to understand ourselves better as a result. By going through some of these really uncomfortable situations, yeah, we got really uncomfortable. That is the place from which we grew the most.

Starting point is 00:17:07 And I think our business grew sort of as a beautiful accident. We started The Minimalists.com in 2010, just as a blog. And enough people started asking, like, are you guys going to – we were adding enough value? Are you guys going to write a book? And we wrote a book? And then, hey, you're going to ever do, like, come to our city and give a – okay, I guess we'll do a book tour. And so we did that. We started publishing things on social media, a newsletter.

Starting point is 00:17:30 And then eventually we made a documentary. We started a podcast. We didn't have grand plans for all of these things. There was not a 10-year vision or anything like that. The question was simple. How can I add value? And that ends up being the why behind whatever we do. Yeah, a lot of meaning in that.

Starting point is 00:17:47 That's incredible. Well, you were talking about selling books out of the trunk of your car, which, of course, reminds me of Dave Ramsey's story. Okay. Which is a scrappy business owner, you know, who's Dave was in, he was going to video stores saying, hey, put my book out on the shelf. I'll give you a cut. That was his business model at the time. And so, but I think there's something to the scrappiness and the sacrifice that creates meaning and makes the success really feel like it was worth it. Do you think there's a connection between that kind of grind and sacrifice and the household that we see with, you know, people getting out of debt?

Starting point is 00:18:20 It means more when you had to sacrifice than when someone just handed you a blank check and said, hey, your debt's forgiven. Both beautiful things, but one really changes your character. Ryan, it didn't feel to me at the time like we were sacrificing, though. No, no. In fact, I was thinking we were so excited and passionate about what we were doing, like sleeping on the, you know, Harvard floor or sleeping in the car or whatever we had to like, you know, sacrifice. It was worth giving up for like the greater mission. You know, it's, I hate the saying that is like propagated so much in our culture, which is if you find work that you love, then you never, or if you, yeah, if you do things you look, yeah, you'll never work another day. your life. And that's just not true. Like, we work a lot. And going through that tour was working a lot. But, you know, just because you're doing something you love doesn't mean that you don't have to work. So I think, you know, we were able to accept that. And yeah, I mean, when you're doing something that you can't not do, like, you'll put anything ahead of.

Starting point is 00:19:24 You'll pay any price. Yeah. Exactly. And it's always worth it. Yeah. That's awesome. Success means different things to different people. And that definition may mean, you want the nice car and that's okay as long as you do it with a lot of intention uh and as long as you don't get to the end and go that wasn't it right which is what most people do sure we're not against stuff we're not against things the problem with the things that they often get in the way of the things that are important right and so success doesn't exist in the traditional sense now can we all define it differently sure it becomes really nebulous and postmodern if we're all we all have our own individual thing that we mean by success but

Starting point is 00:20:08 But culture generally means one thing. And they mean that successful person, that image that you see of someone. And that's when I say it doesn't exist. But there is something else there. There's contentment. There's tranquility. There's happiness. There's peace.

Starting point is 00:20:22 And if those things are synonymous with success for you, wonderful. I just think most people don't, they don't ever associate peace with success. In fact, it tends to be the opposite. Hustle culture, being frantic, multitasking. Business has become a badge of honor. Whenever I used to say like people say, how you doing? Oh, real busy. Like that was a good thing, right?

Starting point is 00:20:45 But the problem with busyness, what am I really saying when I say I'm busy? My life is out of control. I don't have control of my schedule, my calendar, my activities, my days, my life. It's controlled by all these other people. I'm not living a responsible life. I'm living a reactive life, reacting to everyone else's urgent tasks that aren't necessarily urgent to me. Yeah. You talked about someone going down that path and then getting in there, they're like, oh, this isn't it? I mean, that is a, that's an unintentional path. Anytime you embark

Starting point is 00:21:19 on major life changes, like you have to get clear on what are you trying to get out of it. Why? Getting back to that why. But if, you know, if someone listening to this right now, they just run out a gigantic dumpster and threw all their stuff away, I mean, it's possible for them to come home and sulk and be completely miserable, miserable, because now they've just gotten rid of all their pacifiers that they had in their life. And, you know, Josh and I, our message isn't, get rid of your stuff. Getting rid of your stuff for the sake of getting rid of your stuff is, A, it's not intentional. But B, like, that's not going to bring you happiness. That's not what Josh and I are promising. In fact, we're not promising anything. What we're doing is, is we're just

Starting point is 00:21:57 sharing our story. We're sharing our recipe on how we got from student tie corporate guys to simplifying our lives. And, yeah, there are ingredients there that people can certainly tweez out. out, but, you know, we had two different paths, and, you know, I wouldn't recommend anyone follow our path directly. I mean, unless they can look at the why and say, that's exactly what I want to do more power to you. But often, we don't ask why, we go down the path, and then that's when we get to the point where we're like, oh, no, that didn't work. Now what? And then we try to latch on to the next thing. Yeah. And I think one of the reasons, you know, Ramsey has been so successful because Dave's been preaching about financial peace. And at some level, we all crave that

Starting point is 00:22:35 peace and if we crave it on our finances, we also crave it in our marriages, in our careers. And so we've started expanding our message to go, we want you to have peace in every area of life. And that's been really cool to see because we found that you can be crushing it at work and your business is doing great, but man, your marriage is falling apart. Yeah. And so we've got to be healthy in all of these areas of life. So when it comes down to it, how do you be kind of that well-rounded, healthy leader? I think people often, they respect you when they see that you are congruent, right? Integrity is the word, right? Integer, the one-oneness, right?

Starting point is 00:23:17 And people will often come up to us, whether it's an event or we're leading people that way, or we're leading our team of 20 or 30 people, much smaller team than the Ramsey team. But we're appreciated because we're the same person, whether we're on a microphone. or a camera or just sitting down with you for a cup of coffee, right? Like Ryan and I are a bit more jokey when we're not on air, but like, and we'll be silly, but we can be silly on air too. If you're asking some silly questions, I'm going to give you some silly answers, right? And people respect that.

Starting point is 00:23:49 And so leadership for us has a lot to do with understanding how we add value to the people on our team, how we're able to contribute to them. And it's also a symbiotic relationship. They're not just, we're not just taking for. them you know our last book was called love people use things because the opposite never works and it's become the core of our message too often when we lead people we try to well it's transactional i'm giving you this money so you will do this for me and okay i understand that's part of of a company i need i need to hire you to do some things for me but i'm still going to treat you like a human being

Starting point is 00:24:24 i'm still going to love you and understanding what love is most of us don't really understand love is the problem. And so maybe the best way to lead people is to love them. And that's missing in our toxic leadership culture today. Yeah. And that's why a lot of people are leaving, they're leaving bad managers. Not really leaving companies. They're leaving poor missions. They want something with meaning. They want people who care. It's that simple. Yeah. That's the recipe. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because my old corporate job, definitely some managers I didn't look up to and who I wanted to run away from. But, you know, I I remember driving from Dayton, Ohio to Cincinnati, Ohio, and there's a stretch 75, the interstate there.

Starting point is 00:25:05 And it's always backed up with traffic. And I remember, like, just always being in traffic on my way to my job, just, like, being so resentful of like, oh, I got to go and, like, sell these cell phones and deal with bad bosses. And, man, if I could just find something where I could help people, like, that would be amazing. And that's where my focus was. And that's why we started The Minimalists.com. It was to help people. But I've had this realization over the last decade of doing this. Like, even in my old corporate job, there was like 5% of it where I was helping people.

Starting point is 00:25:33 Like I had employees that I was getting ready to fire and then I could like put them on an action plan and like a very caring action plan. Not like here's how we're going to get you out of the company. I've helped people go from, you know, getting ready to get fired to becoming employee of the month. And like that stuff was amazing. So over the last decade, what I've realized, you matter what we do for a job, like we're helping. Like even that cashier of McDonald's, like they're helping you with the transaction of getting food. I don't recommend, you know, eating McDonald's, it's unhealthy. But anything we do is really helping people.

Starting point is 00:26:05 So I guess what I'm trying to say here is like for someone out there who is like maybe struggling with what they want to be an entrepreneur in or like what they want to do for their living. It's, you know, think about the ways that you want to help people. Like that's what a good entrepreneur does. They help people. They add value. And when you add value to people's lives, people are going to go way out of their way to support you. Yeah. And we say if you help enough people, you don't have to worry about money. Yeah. And that's the truth. Yeah, amen. I love it. So we're not saying it's not great to make a profit. We're not anti-business here, clearly. But if you neglect these other areas of your life, your life will suck. That's kind of what we're saying here. So we need to be well-rounded. What is an exercise? Let's say a leader's listening. They're going, all right, Josh Ryan, I like what you got to say. I don't know how to take that first step. Yeah. Well, we asked the question already, how might your life be better with less, right? How might your business be better?

Starting point is 00:26:54 with less. How might your relationships be better with less? And understanding that, and then the question is, like, how do I let go? Right? Well, letting go is not something that you do. It's something you stop doing. It's just like if I am holding onto this mug, how do I let go of it? I just simply stop clinging to it. I set it down. If I, when you get real stressed, nervous, you breathe in, you hold breath and you breathe real shallowly, all you have to do is let go of the breath, right? There's no how to there, right? It's simply understanding what you're doing, understanding the excesses in your life, because the happiness isn't going to come from the next thing that you pursue. The contentment, the completeness isn't going to come from the next achievement.

Starting point is 00:27:37 You can happily achieve, but the happiness, the peace, is already within. I love what you said a second ago about it's financial peace university. It's not financial success university. And that is the key. The peace, the happiness, the contentment, it's already here. And we just cover it up with clutter with business clutter, relationship clutter, material clutter, financial clutter. There's a lot of clutter that we have in our lives. It's getting in the way of that piece that is preexisting.

Starting point is 00:28:06 Yeah. Yeah, I mean, anyone who's maybe feeling like they, you know, need a little direction or a step to like figure out how to be a good leader, it goes back to those values. Like, we got to get clear on our values. You can go to the minimalists.com forward slash v as in values. and there's a values worksheet, and there's instructions on how to fill that out. And you'd be amazed at what people learn about themselves when they just get clear on what it is actually value in life. That's so good. Yeah, we're always preaching about mission values and having those clear as day and communicating that to the team so that we're all in alignment of what we're here to do. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:42 So good. Well, you guys, it's always a pleasure having you on. And before you go, we have partnered with you in a really cool way. Tell us about that. Yeah, Ryan, you want to talk about what we're doing? Yeah, sure. So, man, we have a, we have this big problem in our society. Most of us are financially illiterate. And it's not our fault. The problem is as kids, we weren't taught how to manage our money. So because of that, when these kids become young adults, they get preyed upon. It's easy for corporations to talk these young adults into going into debt, to buy things they don't need with money they don't have, to impress people they don't even like. And then they spend years and years just, you know,

Starting point is 00:29:19 buried and drowning with the mess that they've made for themselves with credit card debt and student loans and car payments and all these other million of different ways that we can borrow from our future here's a crazy stat man uh the average indebted american household owes 97,775 dollars in non-mortgage debt yeah 100 grand it blows my I mean when I saw that I was like that can't be right it's just like when I saw that the average person who's indebted with credit cards it's their average like around $16,000. I mean, it's like these are staggering numbers. And, you know, there's just a lot of suffering that is compounded by debt. And that's what Josh and I, well, that's what we've been doing for the last 10 years. We're trying to help people. And we're trying to help them suffer a little bit less in life.

Starting point is 00:30:03 So what we're doing, we partner with Ramsey Education and Josh and I, we are going to provide basically the foundations of personal finance curriculum, these proven money principles. We're going to teach these principles to every single middle school. and high school student in and around the Dayton area. So it's real simple. If people want to help out, like they can just purchase, you know, donate 25 bucks and purchase the curriculum for one middle school student for $25 for $45 that pays for a high school student. Or you can donate five bucks. I mean, it doesn't matter, you know, what someone donates. They, you know, they should just know that they are contributing to really helping these kids start their lives off. Right. I could not

Starting point is 00:30:42 imagine if I started with some amazing tools like this when I was, you know, 17 or 18 years old, suffering I could have avoided. Oh, it changes the trajectory of your life. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, George, the thing that we have struggled with in the past is contributing feels really daunting because I don't know where to start. I don't know who to give to. What makes the most sense?

Starting point is 00:31:01 I want to be giving, but I'm not really sure what to do. And so Ryan and I have used this model over the last decade or so. We've contributed to about 10 different other philanthropic projects. We've built a couple orphanages. We've built a nonprofit grocery store in Dayton, Ohio, which has one of the largest food deserts in the country. We help hurricane victims who were unhoused by hurricanes in America. So we've helped different people. And the way we did it is we said, hey, instead of us being able to, Ryan and I are going to help 1,000 people or 100,000 people, how about we go to our

Starting point is 00:31:34 audience and say, why don't you help just one person? And so $25, 100% of that goes to help one student avoid going into debt for the rest of their lives. Forty-five bucks for a high school student or we were on Dave's show yesterday. He said, or $4,500 for a hundred students. Well, you know, Dave's big on generosity. So he'll put his money where his mouth is, I'm sure. Yes, indeed. And so what Ryan and I have done is we decided, you know, we took our own money. We helped the first hundred students, but if you can help us out, the minimalists.com slash education is where to go. Yeah, that's awesome. Help these kids start their futures, right? Yeah, what a worthy mission. And we're talking about peace and the true meaning of success.

Starting point is 00:32:13 And I found that the most joy and meaning I get is when I give to others. It's not by consuming. It's when I have output and I'm helping other people. So what a cool way to end talking to my generosity as one of the key ways to get to the true success. Well, you guys, thank you so much for being on. You've got so many great tools and resources. We'll link all of those in the show notes to documentaries and books and the podcast and all of that good stuff. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:32:37 But I'm honored to have you guys in studio today. Thanks so much for having us. Big thanks to Joshua and Ryan for coming by. Always love hanging out with those guys. If you want to read one of their books or watch one of their films, you can check out their website. We've got a link for you in the show notes. Now, as we talked about, what you value both personally and in your business is how you define success. And if those values are not on paper and haven't been consistently communicated to your team, you've got some homework to do.

Starting point is 00:33:04 And our team has made it easy for you with a free resource on how to create core values. We walk you through a simple framework to create those core values for yourself and your team. To get this free download, just use the link in the show notes. If you enjoyed today's episode of the show, do us a favor, follow or subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. And if you're feeling extra generous, talk about this episode with your team, with your friends, or on social media. That all helps us make an impact on more leaders like you. Be sure to follow us at Entree Leadership wherever you hang out on social media. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, edited by Jacob Harrison, and mixed and mastered by Will Rutter.

Starting point is 00:33:41 I'm your host, George Camel, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thank you for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading.

EntreLeadership - The Difference Between Good and Bad Success with The Minimalists

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