Noob School - Episode 48: Think Of Your Future Self

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

It can be tempting to give in to instant gratification from time to time. Experience the world’s pleasures, live in the moment. But at some point, you will need to put your foot down and think long-term. In this episode of the Noob School podcast, our host John Sterling talks about thinking ahead and ensuring that the decisions you make today will benefit you 5 to 10 years  from now, whether it be in your personal development or your investment portfolio. HIGHLIGHTSAlways consider your future self Evaluate yourself and your choices every 5 to 10 years Take action today to progress your goals What kind of money do you want to makeWho do you want to hang out with?Think of how to make your income snowball QUOTESJohn's advice for 20-somethings on decision-making: "What I see with the truly happy people generally, is they always consider their future self. 'The decisions I'm making today, where are they gonna lead to? What will life for me be like when I'm 30 years old?'"John on creating passive income and why you need to start early: "Whatever you have extra beyond what you live on, instead of buying things that don't make you any money, try to put it in places that create this snowball to start to get to the point where maybe the 40 or 45 or the 50-year old you. Maybe that thing is big enough where you don't need any income anymore. You don't have to work a job to make income because your snowball is doing this." Connect with Noob School and John by visiting the following links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsterling1/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnsterlingsalesInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnsterling_/Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnsterling_TikTok: https://twitter.com/johnsterling_Website: http://salestrainingfornoobs.com/

Welcome back to Noob School. This is where we interview sales pros that can help you get off to a great start in sales. I'd like you to do yourself, your future self, a favor. All right? So whatever you are now, I'm just going to make it up and say you're 22 now. If all goes well, you know, yourself today is 22. Your future self, you're going to be 30 at some point. So that, you at 30 is a different person, right?

And then you at 40 is a different person and on and on. So each one of these places, you know, it's obviously it's you, but you're older, different experiences, et cetera. And, you know, many people live kind of day to day, week to week, year to year, just kind of, let's just say getting by, for lack of a better term, just kind of living on short term, you know, paycheck to paycheck or job. to job or just kind of surviving. And what I see with the truly happy business people and happy people just generally

is they always consider their future self. You know, the decisions I'm making today, what are they going to lead to? What will life for me be like when I'm 30 years old? And, you know, I saw this happen in my life with one of my friends who I got to know actually a little bit later in life. And he told me the story that he'd gone to a big school up in the Midwest and had a great time, partied, you know, in a fraternity, the whole thing. And while he was there, he was working part-time at a restaurant.

And when he graduated, he just never quite got around to, you know, looking for a real job and just kind of stayed at the restaurant. And next thing you know, he's living with a bunch of people, a bunch of guys, that are all kind of hanging around the same college towns, working at restaurants, service industry type things. So he was hitting the bong pretty hard, you know, partying all night, bonging it up, doing the restaurant thing. And he said, you know, it's fun for a while. But then one day he was about 26 and one of his college classmates who'd gotten out of school and gone to work for, I think it was IBM, right out of school. So this guy who he hadn't seen in five years has had five years now of IBM training,

training all over the country, some international travel, company car, looking good, making good money, expense account. And he took my friend out for dinner. He took him to a place that he would never go to, a real fancy like steakhouse and expense the whole thing. And it was just what my friend needed was the wake-up call to see. kind of what that guy's future self had turned into because of the decision he made versus what my friends was, and it wasn't going to change, right? I mean, that course my friend was on was not going to change unless something crazy happened. And so it was enough that he kind of stopped the presses and said,

what do I need to do to kind of get back on track? And he went back to business school. And once he was in business school, you know, he's hanging around with other people that want to do interesting business things and professors that have done interesting business things and companies come and trying to hire them. And next thing you know, he's working for a really good company and subsequently started his own company and travels all over the world and is doing great. So you'd never know.

This guy, you know, at age 26 was, you know, partying all night and slinging, you know, slinging Mexican food in the evening. So he saw what had happened to himself. versus his buddy, and he wanted to say, what does my 35-year-old self look like versus what it is today and what action is what I have to take? So, yourself, I would give you, you know, one of the things I hear on this subject is people talk about the grandpa test or the rock and share test. So let's say you're, you know, you're 90 years old and you're sitting on your porch and

you're retired, you raised all your kids, and whatever, and you're sitting on the sitting in your rocking chair, you know, what do you want to think about and be thankful for? What kind of things do you want to have done? That's a fine test. If you want to take that test in your mind, that's fine. I've always found I can't see quite that far out. I mean, that future self is so far away. I guess it's closer to it used to be. But I like to go in segments of five or 10 years. So if you think about, if I'm going to assume you're 20, the 30-year-old test, the kind of things, when you piece together, you know, what your future self looks like, I would say, first and foremost, where do you want to live? Where do you see yourself comfortable living?

So that means you don't just get dragged around the world based on some job just because you've got that job. You say, I want to live in Tennessee or I want to live overseas or Asia or wherever it is you want to live, my hometown. Whatever it is, you decide what that looks like when you're 30. and start to take action to move towards it or to cement it if you're already there. The other thing is kind of what are you into? What are your hobbies and projects? And, you know, I cannot tell you how many people, since some of you know, I play the saxophone, and how many people hear me play and say,

man, I wish I could play something like that. or I wish I would have kept up my piano lessons, you know, as a teenager. Happens all the time. And I used to say, well, you know, you can do this. It's not difficult to be an okay player. It takes a lot of work, but it's not like you're going to be, you know, Witten Marcellars or anything. But, you know, you can be pretty good.

You can play the guitar. I play the ukulele, play the piano. There's a lot of things you can get okay at. But it won't happen in year one. All right? We're talking about, you know, your future self year 30. So that's 10 years. So if you really want to be able to play the guitar and you've got 10 years to do it,

you know, don't you think it's just a no-brainer that you can make that happen? You know, A, get a good guitar teacher, B, get a guitar, C, you know, put it on your calendar to practice 30 minutes a day. you know, put it on there early in the day, knock it out, and, you know, it won't take you 10 years before you like the way you sound. I would say within a couple years, you know, maybe a year or two, you're playing tunes that you kind of like. So anyway, it just frustrates me that people don't understand that they can absolutely do it,

and it's a lot easier than they think. So your future self, think about what hobbies you want to take on, and, you know, do something to make that happen and remember that we're not going to have it done by this weekend, right? We're just going to put the things on the calendar. We're going to start working towards them for 10 years from now because when you're 30, you're going to look back and you say, I heard this video and I took these actions and now I'm playing the guitar. And I'm living in the town I want to live in. So two things you can do to make that future self happy.

The next one is income. You know, and what I don't want to hear is just as much as possible because that's, that rules out a lot of things. And let me tell you what I mean by that. Like, if all you wanted to do is just make as much money as you possibly could, you know, you should probably go to Wall Street. I mean, that is probably your best bet for just maxing out the money you can earn particularly at a young age. Now, you live in New York City, and you're working about 100 hours. hours a week and a lot of people burn out, whatever. You might not even like, you know, being in the financial game, but just in terms

of just earning money, that's probably a place you would do it. But I think in terms of just your lifestyle, if you start to think about, you know, if you've been smart enough to do a budget already, how much money do I need to have coming in from some source every month to have a comfortable life that I enjoy, where I can take a vacation, I can pay my bills and my rent. rent or my mortgage or whatever it is, figure out what that number is and then start to work toward that, particularly if you're thinking about when you're 30 years old, what does they have to look like?

And that's the kind of job you want to be looking for. And sales, of course, is a place where you can, you know, depending on what you're selling. You can make plenty of money. The next one is who you want to work with. And, of course, we've covered this at length. But, you know, if you're looking at this 30-year-old person, do you want that person, this version of you to be working in an industry they don't like with people that they don't really like hanging out with that there's no natural reason to be hanging out? So, you know, in my company, I sell and talk with salespeople all the time. sales managers, salespeople, business owners that are very interested in the sales are kind of the people I talk to.

And gosh, those are the people I like to hang out with. We have a lot in common. We do a lot of the same things. So for me, that's pretty aligned. So I would just make sure if you're thinking about this regardless of where you are now, maybe you're slinging hash at the Mexican place. But when you're 30, you know, who do you want to be hanging out with? And again, start to arc towards that. I would also start thinking about, if you haven't already, to use a Dave Ramsey term, I think it's a, it calls it a revenue or an income snowball.

So I'll just use some just rough numbers here. But, you know, let's just say a normal person getting out of college has got no income. And you're about to have some expenses. So you're going to have rent and car and gas and all these things. So let's say maybe that adds up to $5,000 a month and you've got no income. So, gosh, that's why we have to find a job. And we want to find the best job we can to match up with us and maximize our income and everything else. So maybe we're bringing in $7,000 a month.

And so here's where the snowball comes from is if you take that extra $2,000 or whatever is left over after taxes and you put it, let's just say, be real simple in dividend stock. So you buy some UPS stock or some AT&T stock or IBM or something, pays you a dividend. You know, that will start to throw off some money to you every quarter, every year, that you don't have to do anything for. Your money just sits there owning that stock and they bring it to you. And over time, you know, you're going to have a larger and larger percent of that 5,000 union every month coming in automatically. You can also do that with rental property, a little more complicated, but people have just crushed it with rental property and Airbnb and things like that. If you choose to go that path, it's a little more complicated, but you can do it very easily.

And you can also create more money with side hustles and things you do on the side to generate more money. I suggest you, whatever you have extra beyond what you live on, versus instead of buying things that don't make you any money, try to put it in places that create this snowball to start to get to the point where maybe the 40-year-old you or the 45 or the 50-year-old you, you know, maybe that thing's big enough where you don't need any income anymore. You don't have to work a job to make income. because your snowball is doing this.

Now, you learn a lot more about this online with financial planner. There's plenty of ways to do it. But the key thing is to get started and start to understand the concept for this 30-year-old you that you're starting now. Even if it's small, if you put $1,000 into AT&T stock, you know, you're going to be getting, you know, $50 a year for doing nothing, 5%. So that doesn't seem like a lot today. But by the time you're 30, if you do the math, if you put that money in every month, it comes out to a decent number. Yeah. And so the last thing I recommend you do for this 30-year-old self is once you have these general areas, whatever you see this person as, you're like, I would be real happy if John looked like this when he was 70 years old.

You know, if this was how much he weighed and how much his snowball was and his hobbies and his businesses and if this is just kind of how it all looked, how do I back into it? You know, what are the things I have to do to make these things happen? And again, you got 10 years. So we're not having a hustle list thing. We just have to simply start a process on each one where we're going to chip away at it every day, every week, every month, every year, and get a little. bit better. And I think the music thing is a great example because you can imagine if you just do this every, you know, every week for 10 years, you're not ever going to say again, boy, I wish I could play the guitar. You're going to be playing some pretty darn good guitar. Same with your snowball. You know,

that thing will build up and it adds to itself as time goes on. There's a lot of stuff you can do. But it doesn't happen automatically. You need to see yourself the way you want to be. And let's say age 30 in all these categories. And what are the things you have to do now to make all that happen? So good luck to you. Good luck to your. And be kind. Do your future self a favor.

Be kind. Start these processes to make it happen.