Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - Why Gratitude Is Your Smartest Investment

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

Sure, your brokerage account might be a pretty awesome asset... but it won't get you the dividends that gratitude will. To celebrate Thanksgiving, Nicole is sharing a recent episode of Help Wanted, the career advice podcast she cohosts with editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine Jason Feifer. In their conversation, Jason and Nicole share true panic-inducing stories of failure, and how gratitude helped them turn that failure into success. Never miss an episode of Help Wanted and subscribe here, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

One of the most stressful periods of my life was when I was in credit card debt. I got to a point where I just knew that I had to get it under control for my financial future and also for my mental health. We've all hit a point where we've realized it was time to make some serious money moves. So take control of your finances by using a Chime checking account with features like no maintenance fees, fee-free overdraft up to $200, or getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit. Learn more at Chime.com slash MNN. When you check out Chime, you'll see that you can overdraft up to $200 with no fees. If you're an OG listener, you know about my infamous $35 overdraft fee that

I got from buying a $7 latte and how I am still very fired up about it. If I had Chime back then, that wouldn't even be a story. Make your fall finances a little greener by working toward your financial goals with Chime. Open your account in just two minutes at Chime.com slash MNN. That's Chime.com slash MNN. Chime. Feels like progress. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancorp Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A. Members FDIC. SpotMe eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Boosts are available to eligible Chime members enrolled in SpotMe and are subject to monthly limits. Terms and conditions apply. Go to Chime.com slash disclosures for details.

I love hosting on Airbnb. It's a great way to bring in some extra cash, but I totally get it that it might sound overwhelming to start or even too complicated if, say, you want to put your summer home in Maine on Airbnb, but you live full time in San Francisco and you can't go to Maine every time you need to change sheets for your guests or something like that. If thoughts like these have been holding you back, I have great news for you. Airbnb has launched a co-host network, which is a network of high quality local co-hosts with Airbnb experience that can take care of your home and your guests. Co-hosts can do what you don't have time for, like managing your

reservations, messaging your guests, giving support at the property, or even create your listing for you. I always want to line up a reservation for my house when I'm traveling for work, but sometimes I just don't get around to it because getting ready to travel always feels like a scramble, so I don't end up making time to make my house look guest friendly. I guess that's the best way to put it. But I'm matching with a co-host so I can still make that extra cash while also making it easy on myself. Find a co-host at Airbnb.com slash host. I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab. Happy, happy Thanksgiving, money rehabbers. Of course, the big theme today is gratitude,

which is something we should hold close not only today, but every single day, because practicing gratitude is good for your mental health and good mental health is good for everything. I know this firsthand. I talked about this on a recent episode of my other podcast, Help Wanted. It's a career advice podcast I co-host with the Entrepreneur Magazine editor-in-chief, Jason Pfeiffer. Jason and I recently had a very honest conversation about burnout and balance, which I have to say was unlike any conversation I've had before. I often talk to girlfriends about this kind of stuff, but never have I gotten the male perspective before. In this conversation, we swap tips we personally

use to de-stress. And spoiler alert, one of my favorite tips is very on brand for Thanksgiving. So I hope you find this very helpful. And of course, I am so thankful for you. This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. And I'm money expert, Nicole Lappin. On Tuesdays, Jason and I answer the helpline and help callers solve their work problems. And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love. And it starts now. I am not usually contemplative on Thanksgiving. It is

usually just a giant meal. But I have to say, I have been thinking a lot about gratitude recently. Does Thanksgiving make you think of anything? I mean, mostly I've been thinking a lot about gratitude recently. Does Thanksgiving make you think of anything? I mean, mostly I've been thinking about whether or not I can email people on Thanksgiving or do I schedule Sunday or are people working or it's like, what's happening? What is the etiquette around it? That is an important question. Well, why don't we tackle that first and then we're going to talk about gratitude. Do you email people on Thanksgiving?

So historically, I've actually always worked on Thanksgiving. As you know, I don't really have a family. This is not a sob story. This is just fact. And I have always been like the plus one at a significant other's house or at Friendsgiving, mostly over indexed on the Friendsgiving. But long story longer, I would always volunteer to work when I was at news networks in particular. Because they always need somebody to fill that spot. Everybody else had a family. This sounds so dark, but it's true. Everybody wanted off and I didn't. And I got bigger opportunities. I anchored bigger shows. I filled in on shows where people were off, you know, doing Thanksgiving type things. So I was always working and I was just like

in that mindset. And I assumed other people would want to respond to me because they would want a little distraction from whatever Thanksgiving festivities that I was not part of. Hmm. And did that turn out to be true? That is your hypothesis. People want to hear from you. Do you hear back from people? Do you send business emails now on Thanksgiving? I don't know. So now I'm not working on Thanksgiving. So I don't know. If I email you, will you email me back? I most certainly will. Of course I will. On Thanksgiving. Yeah, Thanksgiving. Text me on Thanksgiving and we're going to be in touch. I am usually with family on Thanksgiving, but that does not consume all my time. Often there's a lot of

sitting around and then I just end up looking at my inbox and I don't have any emails coming in. I kind of half wish that I did. You know what I do though? I will often step away at some point to just try to get a few things done because that's how I'm oriented. It's like if I can get some stuff done now, then it's less stuff that I have to do later. But I don't hit send on those emails. I hit schedule on those emails. So I will write people emails on Thanksgiving, but I will set them to send the Monday afterwards because it feels more respectful.

But if someone reached out to me, I would totally respond to them. That's so interesting because if everyone is schedule sending on Monday, then everybody's gonna be bombarded on Monday and it's gonna stand out less. So it's kind of counterintuitive. If I send you an email on Thanksgiving,

you're looking for an excuse to get away from the fam for five minutes, true or false. And you're like, Nicole sent me this important email. I got to duck out into a quiet room. Yeah, that's totally true. Well, look, I don't have any particular stats on this, but I was just reading a newsletter for creators, shout out Jay Klaus of Creator

Science, about whether or not creators should send out content on holidays. And what he said was that there is still a significant readership out there for content on holidays. And that sometimes because there's less competition for attention during holidays, that actually sometimes if you send out a newsletter or you do a social post, it can do better than average, which definitely does tell you that there are a lot of people who are just sitting around with their family, perhaps avoiding their family, and they're looking at social or they're checking their email. And so I don't have a hard rule here, but I guess my rule would be,

if you're going to reach out to somebody literally on Thanksgiving, you're going to hit send on Thanksgiving, that person should be a friend or friendly. Therefore, it doesn't risk coming across as trying to intrude upon their holiday. Like if you sent me a note, that would be totally fine. But I wouldn't send a note to somebody I didn't know because it would come off, I worry, as if I don't recognize that they have other things to do. And that's why I would rather hit schedule send. Interesting. I mean, you mentioned the content too, and that's something else I've been thinking about.

Back in the day when you and I were starting out in newsrooms, we would have a content calendar and it would be around major holidays. Now there's a holiday for like- Everything. Donuts and bunnies and I don't even know. Actually, National Donut and Bunny Day is a great combined holiday. It's delightful. It's actually bunnies eating donuts. I was gonna say donuts eating bunnies, but that's actually Easter. It's just called Easter for non-Jews. Do you think we should talk about the thing that Thanksgiving is actually supposed to be about, which is not social media posts? It is gratitude. Yes, you have been having deep thoughts about this

and I want to hear them. Okay, yeah. Yeah, follow me down the gratitude rabbit hole where there are donuts. Perfect. So, all right, there's some context that needs to be known so that you can appreciate this moment that I had with gratitude, which was very recent. So about a week or two before we're recording this, I launched this premium version of my newsletter where I am now asking people, after spending years building a newsletter list, I'm asking people to pay. It's $15 a month or $150 a year. And I'm going to be doing all this stuff. It's going to be a second newsletter. It's going to be more responsive and answering people's questions. And also it's going to be doing all this stuff. It's going to be a second newsletter. It's going to be more responsive and answering people's questions.

And also, it's going to be a monthly office. Whatever, anyway. So I did not know. I have 45,000 subscribers. I did not know how many people would subscribe. But I had it in my head, I don't know, maybe 100 to start. That seems reasonable, right? And then I was like, OK, wait.

Lower your expectations. 50. Just brace yourself for the possibility that it'll just be 50 out of 45,000. Anyway, I launched. I was very nervous about it. The next day I looked and it was 14. 14 people had chosen to pay money to subscribe to this thing. So 0.031%. It's not good.'s not ideal the numbers are not good i had a real like panic moment when i saw that i i i think i audibly said well that's

not good and then i uh i was just sitting there like you know i'm sure you've had this you're just like it's just like like i don't know just, just, just the blood is moving through your body in a different way. And you're, you're having trouble kind of deciding what to do. You feel like everyone's seeing you. Nobody's seeing you. I was just in my office. What I did was I, I went to LinkedIn, which sounds pathetic, but that's what I did. I went to LinkedIn and I was just looking for a distraction. I was looking for somebody to write something that, yes, it was my happy place. My happy place is LinkedIn. Don't judge me. And I came across a post about how every scar is earned and every challenge is sort of basic stuff about failure. But I connected with it. I read it and I was like,

I needed to hear that today. Those are words that came out of my mouth. I was like, I needed to hear that today. And then I thought, oh my God, oh my God, that is something that people say to me. Like I write a thing about failure, about going through some struggles. And those are the words that people say to me. They say, I needed to hear that today. And I realized I am rarely in the position of feeling like a total failure. It's really valuable to be there. It gives me ideas for how to be useful.

It makes me more empathetic. And then I thought, oh, this failure was useful. This failure was useful. And that is a powerful thing. Because I think the problem with failure, I came to think about, is that failure often feels final, right? It's like we did a thing and we failed. Now we have to carry it around. It's like just a giant weight that we can't put down somewhere. But when failure is useful, then we know what to do with it. And we are, you and me, and I would assume everyone who listens to this, we're people of action. We want to do things. So failure is hard because it feels like inaction. But what if failure can be action? What if it can lead you to something? And I thought, this is great. This is really useful. I should communicate this. And so I

wanted to write a newsletter, the next one, about this moment of failure that I had and how I came to reframe it and what I think is important about failure and how failure can be, if you can find a way for failure to be useful to people, then that's great. So anyway, so I wrote this whole newsletter out. And the thing that I didn't do was acknowledge the 14 people who spent money on me. And very, very fortunately, I showed it to a few friends. One, my friend Dave said, you need to acknowledge the 14 people. So I added some things in. And then late at night, the night before sending this email,

it was like almost midnight. I was like obsessing over this email. And I texted my friend Tara, Tara Mackey, shout out. Tara's in California. And I just figured she'd be awake. And I was just like, can you read this? Because I just, I needed that. Tara's got a good like gratitude vibe about her. She's like, she carries it. And I was like, I feel like I just, I needed that. Tara's got a good like gratitude vibe about her. She's like, she carries it. And I was like, I feel like I need

your eyes on this. And so, to send it to her and she sent me this voice memo back, which actually, I'm going to, I have a bit,

I have a bit of it. I'm going to just, you want to hear it? Yes, please. Okay. It felt like, and tell me if I'm wrong, it felt like you've been so focused on the failure

that you haven't taken the time to really just sit in gratitude about the people who did buy something that they have never experienced before. You know, they're buying into an idea of something. They don't get a physical product out of it. You know, they are paying to get more of you. Yeah, it went on like that for two minutes. That's so nice.

It was so nice. But you know what? The thing that really struck me the most was when she said that they're paying for an idea. It caught me because we can get so caught up in the things that we want that we forget what it means for other people to make decisions. And until then, I was like, well, I've been thinking about this newsletter for a long time. I know that I can deliver a good thing to people. But when Tara was like, they're buying an idea, what I heard was, dude, they paid for what is currently nothing like it doesn't exist they've never seen it before it's not a product that like you could try and then buy you're not in

whole foods sampling things like this is literally air and it's air that you haven't even produced yet and 14 people which is not nothing it's not nothing and haven't even produced yet. And 14 people, which is not nothing. It's not nothing. And they paid the equivalent of $150. That's a lot of bucks. It's a lot of bucks. So I wrote a bunch of stuff for them. So first of all, I added a whole bunch to the newsletter that I was going to send out where I wrote,

for example, I wrote, let me honor the importance of this. These 14 people, and then I stole some of Tara's language. These 14 people bought something they've never experienced before. In fact, they just bought the idea of something. They're paying because they trust me. That is humbling. It is an honor. I never, ever want to forget or diminish that.

And I've written them directly to say so. And then I did. Stick around. Help Wanted will be right back. One of the most stressful periods of my life was when I was in credit card debt. I got to a point where I just knew that I had to get it under control for my financial future and also for my mental health. We've all hit a point where we've realized it was

time to make some serious money moves. So take control of your finances by using a Chime checking account with features like no maintenance fees, fee-free overdraft up to $200, or getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit. Learn more at Chime.com slash MNN. When you check out Chime, you'll see that you can overdraft up to $200 with no fees. If you're an OG listener, you know about my infamous $35 overdraft fee that I got from buying a $7 latte and how I am still very fired up about it. If I had Chime back then, that wouldn't even be a story. Make your fall finances a little greener by working toward your financial goals with Chime. Open your account in just two minutes at Chime.com slash MNN. That's Chime.com slash MNN.

Chime. Feels like progress. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancorp Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A. Members FDIC. SpotMe eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Boots are available to eligible Chime members enrolled in SpotMe and are subject to monthly limits. Terms and conditions apply. Go to Chime members enrolled in SpotMe and are subject to monthly limits. Terms and conditions apply. Go to Chime.com slash disclosures for details. I love hosting on Airbnb. It's a great way to bring in some extra cash.

But I totally get it that it might sound overwhelming to start or even too complicated if, say, you want to put your summer home in Maine on Airbnb, but you live full time in San Francisco and you can't go to Maine every time you need to change sheets for your guests or something like that. If thoughts like these have been holding you back, I have great news for you. Airbnb has launched a co-host network, which is a network of high-quality local co-hosts with Airbnb experience that can take care of your home and your guests. Co-hosts can do what you don't have time for, like managing your reservations, messaging your guests, giving support at the property, or even create your listing for you. I always want to line up a reservation for my house when I'm traveling for work. But sometimes I just don't get around to it because getting ready to travel always feels like a scramble, so I don't end up making time to make my house look guest-friendly.

I guess that's the best way to put it. But I'm matching with a co-host so I can still make that extra cash while also making it easy on myself. Find a co-host at Airbnb.com slash host. Welcome back to Help Wanted. Let's get to it. And I wrote this thing about how the words thank you, they're so small that they can't begin to carry the amount of weight that they sometimes deserve. You know, it's funny. It's like if you drop something on the street and somebody picks it up for you, you say thank you. If somebody does something incredible for you, if somebody spends money because of an idea, the words are still thank you. It's like I started to think about how it's almost impossible to jam as much meaning as you want into that.

I wanted to stuff 20 tons of gratitude into these words. And it's so hard to, but the thing that I did that I think was most important was that I was forced to recognize what it meant for other people to make a decision. other people to make a decision that until that moment, I was so focused on my decisions that I hadn't really appreciated theirs. And so I feel gratitude towards them, but I have to say I also feel gratitude toward being forced to recognize that. I think that we don't often spend enough time or we're not forced to spend enough time stepping back and saying, you know, for someone else to have done this thing for me was for them to fill in the blank, put an incredible amount of faith in me, spend their money on me instead of something else, make a calculation that I am a positive

force in their life. Anything. It's not just buying, right? It's somebody deciding to spend time with you. They bet on you. They're confident in you. It's actually pretty incredible. But it didn't feel incredible at the start. And now it does. And doesn't that just show you like it's I wrote in the newsletter, failure is a matter of perspective, and I had to change mine. And that is the thing I want to hold on to. That's the reason why I was thinking about gratitude going into Thanksgiving is like, I am better if that's how I'm thinking. It's not easy though. So you're grateful for those 14 folks. I hope I have made that clear. But the reason that I'm asking you that is because there are gratitude exercises where

you explicitly have to say that. It's not like implied that I'm like generally grateful. It's really important to create new neural pathways around gratitude by actually writing down a specific thing. And the more specific, the better. And the more specific action, actually, the better. So traditionally, a gratitude journal, and there are a lot of different varieties, and I came out with a companion one for my third book, is write down three things you're grateful for every day and then something that would make today great. And typically,

the reason that people stop doing this is because they write the same things over and over again. I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful for my wife. I'm sure you're grateful for Jen. I'm grateful for my wife. I'm sure you're grateful for Jen. The way to make this more sticky is to say, I am grateful for the hug Jen gave me on my way out the door when I was having a shitty day or whatever, like being really, really intentional about the action that you're grateful for. So in this case, the reason why I asked you what you're grateful for is because there's a lot of things you could be grateful for. Like if you break that down, you could say, and I'd actually love for you to do this exercise if you would indulge me. her day to send a voice memo. It's the three minutes that Tara Mackey took out of her day that's very busy and she's creating a big company and has all of these things to do to send me a

thoughtful three minute long voice memo. It is, you know, it's very like intentional actions that have happened during your day that you're grateful for and what that ends up doing is that it trains you to start looking for those moments moving forward so it becomes almost like a flywheel effect of i am starting to train my mind to look out for these little moments that i'm grateful for and i will spot them and then I will have more moments to be grateful for and write down. What I like about that is how it what it feels like it's doing is kind of forcing you to drop little anchors throughout your day into the present to live in the present or whatever these are sort of language language that feels like a cliche to me. But I have been thinking a lot recently about how some people live in the past and how I don't think that's a good thing to live in the past. But also that to live in the future too much is perhaps equally bad.

And I think I do live in the future a lot. Like I think of the things that I do as setting up for the future. That's often how I justify the hours I might work or the reason to do something that I don't want to do is because like it will set up a better thing in the future. But to just live in the future is also not to appreciate the things that you have now. To live in the past, the problem that I have with it is like, oh, well, then you don't appreciate what you have now. But to live in the future, it creates the same problem. And the gratitude things that you have

now and why they're valuable to you now, which is very useful. And science shows that actually to be present in a certain moment that creates a memory, you have to be present for about 20 seconds. Now that sounds like no time at all, but like really not thinking about any other thing or being distracted by a ding or a buzz or anything for 20 seconds, like is actually quite hard until you train yourself. So yeah, so staying present for you, it sounds like means that you are grateful for the things you have now that you had long wished for, Jason. I know that it has been years in the making

that you've been thinking about how to create a subscription offering. You've been really, really thoughtful about not launching it too soon. You've tried to collect data and information and you've talked to all the people and you've been planning for this moment where you had no subscribers last year. You had no subscribers the year before, but it was something that you wanted long before they were born, so to speak.

And it was the moment that, you know, former Jason would have been excited about. Yeah. Right. And so I think it's important. There is like a me me type cliche of these are the things that like your former self dreamed of. Right. And so sometimes I get in the same habit. Right. I get really frustrated with myself and I feel like a complete failure and that I haven't reached my goals or I haven't reached my revenue markers or like all of these things and I totally suck. And then I remember like, oh my God, I remember the time that I had no revenue. And I remember the time that I would have dreamed to like run a company or be my own boss or whatever else.

I think a lot of the nitty gritty stuff that we are so hard on ourselves about takes away from a bigger picture of the fact that we should, our present selves, be proud of ourselves. Our former selves are really proud of ourselves, if we're being honest. And you're setting yourself up for an awesome future, Jason. I love that. I was thinking as you were talking about how the problem that we often create for ourselves is that as soon as we have something, we instantly... Move the goalpost. Do we move the goalpost? We treat it as if we always had it. We treat it as if we always had it. And therefore, there isn't the satisfaction of having gotten it. And now we're only looking

ahead from that starting point. And the gratitude exercise, the thing about it, like what is the moment of gratitude? Tara said to sit in gratitude, which is not a phrase that would have naturally ever come out of my mouth, but I appreciate that it's what she was asking me to do, was to recognize the value of adding those things. You didn't always have those things. Recognize the value of adding those things. You didn't always have those things. You can't just act like you always had them when you get them and then not appreciate them. Yeah. It's the moment of addition.

It's recognizing the moment of addition instead of letting that moment slide right past you. Let's bathe in addition. Bathe in addition. What? Tara wants us to sit in gratitude and I want us to bathe in addition. Bathe in addition. Tara wants us to sit in gratitude and I want us to bathe in addition. It's Nicole's new body wash line. So let's do the exercise. Okay. And it can include this story or it doesn't have to, but pro tip, I think it would be nice if you could sort of deconstruct the areas of this story that you're grateful for. Because it's, you know, yes, to be grateful generally is really nice. And that's like progress and you're sitting in it.

But like, if you really want to bathe in it, like get specific, Jason. Okay. To go with the story, I mean, number one, the 14 people that cannot be overstated, those are 14 people who don't know me and who just believe in me. And, you know, it's hopefully easy enough for people to be able to point to someone who, you know, you know and love, a family member, a dog, something. There's something in your life where you could say like, that creature believes in me. But to find strangers who do it, that's actually a pretty remarkable thing.

That this shouldn't be overstated. And also, I have to say, I feel like an incredible obligation to those people because it's one thing to just put something out in the world for free and like take it or leave it. These people can enjoy it. But like now they spent money. They expect something and I have to deliver. And that feels like, and I don't know if this is the same line of,

if we've moved into the second thing that I'm grateful for, but I will say that I am really grateful to have discovered that as a feeling. I don't have a lot of people who pay me for things outside of maybe there's a client relationship or somebody paid me to show up at a talk or something. but like, I know I can deliver that. I know exactly what that looks like. This is like some sort of ongoing relationship now that I have with people. And I'm really grateful for it because it gives me an opportunity to, to learn what that's like and to rise to the occasion. And I think that I will be a smarter creator and person because of it. Uh, so grateful for that. You know what's really fortunate about, I think about like Tara and sending me that voice memo is I have, I mean, I'm grateful that Tara did

it. Tara was like, Tara had just gotten her kid down. She was like sitting in bed and now whatever the hell she was doing, she wasn't doing that because she was like reading my bullshit. And so I like really appreciate that. But also, I, you know, I have to say like, the thing that it also just makes me feel grateful for is that, is that I have, I have like a, I have just a great network of people. Like a really great network of people. Like there were, I turned to Tara in that moment and she totally delivered. I could have turned to you. I could have turned to other to like there were, I have a lot of people who I trust and who I know will set aside whatever it is that they are doing to help me. And that's like, right. It was like, it was Tara in that moment. And I'm really grateful for her for

that. But like, I'm actually really even more grateful for like what terror represented in that moment which was the number of people that i can turn to that's a powerful thing any given sunday jason's network and you know why that is jason is because you show up on so many people's gratitude lists no doubt you've shown up on mine. You are the one that's also there in the middle of the night after you get your kid down or maybe as an excuse to not get your kid down.

I've taken that. And I'll do it again. And you responded. And just remember, you show up on a lot of other people's gratitude lists. Oh, I appreciate that, Nicole. Well, you show up on mine and very soon, so will your new line of body wash, which I'm going to be very grateful for. I'm

going to smell the gratitude every morning. So you could text me about it on Thanksgiving. Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason Pfeiffer. And me, Nicole Lapin. Our executive producer is Morgan Lavoie. If you want some help, email our helpline at helpwanted at moneynewsnetwork.com for the chance to have some of your questions answered on the show. And follow us on Instagram at moneynews and TikTok at moneynewsnetwork for exclusive content and to see our beautiful faces. Maybe a little dance? Oh, I didn't sign up for that.

All right. Well, talk to you soon. Thank you.