The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 548: Nick Maggiulli - The Power of Compounding, Creating a Writing Practice, Building Your Career, & Proven Ways To Build Wealth

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." Join 10's of thousands of your fellow learning leaders and receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12   https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 What's the Matthew Effect? The Matthew effect explains how two people can start in nearly the same place and end up worlds apart. In these kinds of systems, initial conditions matter. And as time goes on, they matter more and more. Instead of saving a fixed percentage of your income, save more when you earn more and less when you make less. The best way to save more is to earn more, not cut expenses to the point of being miserable. The real question money forces us to answer is what's important to us in life. You should save what you can, when you can. Relying on a fixed, prescribed savings rate is nonsense. The Dolly Varden trout, an Alaskan fish species, puzzled biologists for decades. Despite only having a brief window of plentiful food each year — when salmon laid eggs in their waters — the fish continued to thrive year-round. How did they do it? Eventually, scientists discovered that the fish shrink and grow their digestive organs depending on food availability. When the salmon show up, they speed up their metabolism so they can take in more calories. Then, when the other fish leave, they slow down digestion. This way, they get by with much less food throughout the remainder of the year. Great Things Take Time – Focusing on the long term is more important than ever. The story of the "Dashrath Manjhi Breakthrough" – He carved a path through a mountain. He moved a little bit of rock each day for 20 years. Nick committed to writing one blog per week in 2017. And it changed his life. He learned that storytelling is what captures a reader's attention. And the way to develop good stories is to read a lot, from a wide variety of sources. We all can do this. One decision can change everything. NASA decided that Voyager 2 would slingshot around planets has made it the farthest man-made object from Earth. And it's still producing information for us. The Constant Reminder – How the Right Decisions and Compounding Can Lead to Huge Results. How have the decisions made by NASA 40 years ago had a profound effect on the Voyager missions and success to this day? Once a successful process is implemented, the results can be surprising. The point is to show you that making the right choices and letting things run their course can lead to incredible results. This is what makes consistent actions and the power of compounding so amazing. "When I think about creating a new habit in my life, I like to imagine all of the future benefits from that habit discounted back to the moment when the habit is formed."

Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Text, Hawk to 666866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off. Right. You'll also receive details about how my book The Pursuit of...

of excellence will help you become a more effective leader. Text, Hawk to 66866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. Nick Majuli is the chief operating officer and data scientist at Rittholz Wealth Management. He is the best-selling author of Just Keep Buying, Proven ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth. Nick is also the author of Of Dollars and Data,

A Blog, Focused on the Intersection of Data and personal finance during this conversation we discussed, why winners keep winning, why great things take time, how to make big decisions in your life, and how to build and maintain habits. This was a wide-ranging, story-filled conversation that I really enjoyed. I think you're gonna love it.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's Nick Majuli. Nick, it is great to have you here on The Learning Leaders Show. Welcome. Thanks for having me on. Ryan. Appreciate it. Let's go back to early 2017. You're living in Boston, and I believe it was a New Year's resolution. You decide to start writing a blog, calling it of dollars and data. And you made a promise to yourself that you'd publish one blog post a week.

How did that promise change your life? So, yeah, at the time, I was working at a litigation consulting firm or economics consultant, if you've heard of it. Good business, solid. You're like billing hours, kind of like a lawyer. You're like you're helping lawyers a lot. So I was doing a lot of data work there. And I was like, you know what? I really love personal finance and investing. And I think there's like this weird intersection between my data skills and what the personal finance and investing space has. And I feel like there's, if I can intersect those two things, I can create something new and different than what I've seen before. This is not just me opining on this or that. I'm actually going

to be able to use data to try and back up my arguments. That was the the key insight. And obviously, from the motivational side. I'm like, let's just write one blog post a week, nothing too crazy. That's still hard enough for a lot of people, but I was like, I'm just going to do it. And I did it. I did it week after week. And honestly, the first year was the toughest because you're putting stuff out there. People think when you put work out there and like it doesn't do well, you get a lot of people saying, oh, you're crap, you're this. No, what you hear is just silence. The sound of failure is nothing. And so if you're getting a lot of people saying, oh, this is terrible, that means you probably reached a lot of people. And then there's people that just don't agree with you.

or you had a really insanely like controversial take, right? So I was obviously not writing anything controversial. So what I heard was silence early on. And so obviously I had a couple moments of success here and there. But then even by, I remember September, that first year, September 2017, I was like, am I going to keep doing this? I don't feel like it's going anywhere. Blah, blah, blah.

And then I kept going with it. I went to a conference, met Morgan Halsel, met some other people. And they gave me some advice. And it really helped. It made me like really focused more on storytelling and realizing how much a story, you need to use a story to hook people. Right. So like the data is great and they're like, Nick, you're doing the data stuff. No one can do that like you. But like the problem is you're not getting readers hooked at the beginning. Right. You're just starting in a roundabout way. So start with stories, try and get people with a narrative. I'm like, okay, I'll try that. And it worked. And so I really listened to that. I've left my job in consulting. I joined a wealth management firm still there. It's been over five years now. It's been like over almost seven years now in terms of writing. And I came out with the book and the book's done well. So that book's called Just Keep Buying and actually just. recently passed 100,000 worldwide sales.

So I was not anticipating that at all. I was like, okay, I think I can get 20 to 30,000. That was even a little bold and stuff. But like it's done much better than I thought. So yeah, that's where we are today. Kind of a big change. But yeah, I just had to kind of push myself and go from there. Morgan Howell, one of the most popular guests I've ever had on in the past eight and

half years, having him on again, actually, in a couple months for his next book. What did he tell you? I'd love to go inside that meeting or those meetings with him and how it helped change how you approach writing. Yeah, so actually it was, so I met Jason's wife and Morgan Housel at the same time at that conference. And I said, what advice did you give? Imagine yourself like my age.

I was, I think 27 at the time. I'm 33 now. And I said, hey, like, what advice would you give to your 27-year-old self about how to become a better writer? And he said, read a lot, but not about investing. That was the key insight. He's read about a bunch of stuff, nonfiction stuff that's not investing. And your brain will sort of make connections, that multidisciplinary stuff.

And he's like, the reason I think he didn't. really explain this, but I figured it out later just from how he talked about it. But the reason why that writing is so, I guess, entertaining and useful and provocative for people is because when you start with a story that's not about investing, you can get the people that even know investing really well to like it. Right. That's what Morgan does probably better than anyone. So even if you understand the investing concept of compounding or saving more or whatever, if you start with the story that no one's ever heard before, you're going to get the people that understand compounding, right? If I just start with compounding and I don't have that story,

like the investment people will be bored and the people that don't know anything about investing, maybe they'll like it, but like the story helps connected to because they can usually understand the story. Almost everyone can understand the story. Not everyone's going to get the math concept. So when you can blend those two together, that's what works. So Jason told me that. You read a lot, not about investing. And then Morgan didn't necessarily tell. There wasn't anything Morgan told me specifically. And I think even in my acknowledgement section in my book, I said Morgan Housel, like I want to thank him because like he taught me so much without saying a word. And what I mean by that, he never said anything to me.

I just watched him as a model of like how to behave like online, how to behave on Twitter, like how he does writing. I remember just reading his post and one day just like a clicking. And the post in particular, which really got me, which I think he used it in his book and the psychology of money, but it was called a frequently strong base. And it was this idea of the reason we have ice ages isn't because of like really bad winters. It's actually because of like relatively cool summer.

So there's like this base layer of ice that builds up and then that becomes an ice age, right? And so that was the story he used. But that base layer, what he was talking about, he related that to Warren Buffett and how he started investing when he was 13 years old. And so, yes, Warren Buffett was very rich, all this, all that, but it's the reason he got there is because he started investing so early. So by the time he was 30, he had a net worth inflation adjusted of $9 million. And so if you would put him at and he says, let's say Warren Buffett had had a net worth of only whatever, the median person at age 30, and you run

his same returns going forward. Like he has, I don't know, a 10th or maybe a 50th of his net worth today because because he started so early, that's what allowed him to kind of get to where he is. So that's a great story there. It's Morgan's story. And it really taught me. It opened up my eyes, like, wow, you use, you find something cool that no one knows about. You then teach that and connect that to an investment story. And I think that's what's really interesting or a thought experiment.

So it can be recommend people do. It can be done in all industries, all facets. Like I said, if you're leading a finance team, you're leading a sales team. You're the CEO of a company. I think probably one of the more important role. that you have to be reading widely to uncover and find, and they're all out there, but find stories to tie them back to constantly reinforce and motivate and inspire your team. That's one of the biggest elements I think of being a good leader is communicating really

well about the mission because it gets hard, it gets tiring, people don't want to listen, but when they know that you're really thoughtful about it and you're really working on it, I think it inspires people to want to come back. I want to go back to you briefly said it, but it's pretty cool to hear. Riddholtz management is a pretty, pretty well-known place. Barry Ritholtz, I've listened to his podcast. I've read his stuff. He's been around for a while.

I think you obviously impressed him. But you become the C.O., which you currently are for him, I guess initially primarily based on him reading which you've written and published online. Is that accurate? Is that how it all came about? So it was actually Michael Battenick, who's a managing partner there, that found me on the blogs. And then I guess Josh heard about me as well.

It's obviously our CEO, Josh Brown. He's on CNBC a lot. And so we were talking and I met them at that conference. I was their conference, evidence-based investing conference in, I think it was November 2017. And I met them as a hey, I love you guys, love to work for you guys. I'm just not exactly sure. Like I have a really good data set skill and I understand computer systems and all the

stuff. I'm not sure if there's a role there, but maybe there's something we can work out. And they said, and we basically end up talking like, yeah, we have tons of data and We don't know what to do with it. We don't know how to analyze it all this. So I came in and started kind of taking over that piece. And slowly I started doing like everything technology related at the firm. So like I run the firm websites or I run.

I do analyze all the data in our lead funnel and get leads coming in that are reaching out to us from the blogs and the podcast and the YouTube and everything. And so as I slowly just started getting more integrated with the firm, I started doing more and more stuff. And that's kind of how I became the COO. It's a it's different than a traditional COO role like at like a steel manufacturer or something. It's very technologically oriented because, tech's really taking over a lot of stuff, and especially at RIAs, like tech is like the future. And I think we believe in and we demonstrate it. Like that's where everything's going.

And so being on top of that is kind of what allowed me to do that. So it's really my data skills that got me there. Of course, they noticed me for my writing skills, but I'm not at the firm specifically for my writing. Yes, I brought in a handful of clients from doing this, but it's not like my core responsibilities to put out the writing. I do that because I love it and I enjoy it. And of course, it helps us as our brand as a firm, right? In general, like there's a bunch of content creators we have as. So that's kind of made a would you, would they even be aware of you though without it?

No, definitely not. Without my writing, there's no way. I could have gone to them and said, hey, and maybe they would have talked to me. They wouldn't know anything. But it's much easier when you have a public facing thing. In this case,

writing, it doesn't have to be writing. But in my case, like I had some sort of content vehicle that could showcase my skills. Not just like, hey, like, I didn't have to send them. Here's the example I gave.

I didn't have a resume. They didn't ask for my resume. I don't know. It's not that I didn't have a bad resume. I went to a good school. Like, all that's fine. Like, they didn't need the resume.

People just saw my work and said, yeah, I want to hire this person. And actually a fun, you brought up, we talked about Patrick O'Shaughnessy before this. He's one of the people that you like respect and admire. Funny enough, I actually interned for O'Shaughnessy for two months before I started with Ritthold's. And that's all because they found my writing. So like really it is. I'm only saying that. I'm not saying that to brag.

I'm saying that because writing and putting content out there is a way to get people's attention. And people, you don't have to have the resume anymore. They will come to you, right? That's, it truly is a resume. Like my online resume is 362 posts of just writing every single week. Well, how else can I show, oh, I'm a hard worker? Everyone says they're a hard worker. Like, how else can you demonstrate that?

It's just there. Like, proof of work is much easier that way. So something I recommend people do. It doesn't have to be writing. It could be anything. Like, even if you fail at it, it just shows some sort of, and when I say fail, it's relative. But like, it shows great. Shows determination willing to try.

Like, David Perel, who's one of my favorite, like writing guys, one of my friends. He put out YouTube videos, like I think a hundred in a row, like a long time ago. They didn't go anywhere. but he just kept going. And he's one of these people that just keeps working even when it's not working. And he tries stuff. And he's like an amazing entrepreneur. And I don't think people like talk about those types of stories because that was like

technically a failure. Now his YouTube, he has a completely different approach and it's actually succeeding. But you have to realize like there's a lot of times when you're going to fail. Even very successful people will fail at times. And that's completely okay. And so just accepting that and realizing maybe you should need a change approach. Just keep pushing forward is the key. Well, writing slash creating and publishing.

I think as two primary benefits, I'd love for you to touch on both. We've already touched on one of them is how it can be the greatest tool for serendipity networking. Networking gets a bad rap, but in a way, it's a much better version of networking because you're putting it out there. Anybody and everybody can read it. And it has created multiple opportunities, probably some amazing relationships for you. We've already mentioned some of those people. But the other part about it that I'd love for you to go a little bit deeper in why I believe every leader should have a writing practice is I think it's the ultimate tool. for clarity. You may have a title of a blog post or a title of your book or a title of a

chapter and until you really dig in to write a useful story and the science and evidence to back up the story and then the practical application to weave it all together, that's when you really learn. That's what I found from writing a few books and writing online. And I'd love to hear your thought process when it comes to writing as a tool for clarity. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I mean, there might be some writers out there that can just like Mozart, it all just comes out perfectly right out the gate. But I think most writers are more like Beethoven. You're like, you're at war with yourself.

And if you actually look at the cool things, you've actually looked at a Beethoven transcript or a Mozart's written perfectly. Like you just see one draft. That's it. Right. Beethoven's is rewritten done this. And I think that's how most creators are. Like we're battling ourselves about what's the right way to do something. And so you might think you have a great idea.

And as soon as you go to write down, like, wait, this is way hard. or why is this harder than I thought? And so maybe it's because you haven't thought about it enough. You haven't really gotten to the nuance. And when you start to write it, you, that's where you get the clarity. That's where you're like, actually, maybe this argument doesn't make sense. Maybe I need to do more research. Maybe I need to find another story. And so I think the writing process itself is where you're actually doing the thinking. Thinking is tough and it's really hard. I think most people, most of the time, myself included, are on autopilot most of the day, right? Because the thinking is tough. No one wants to do that because it's mentally taxing and it's difficult. So I think we try to outsource thinking in terms of like,

I'm not an expert at health or something. So I'm like, okay, I trust Peter Attia. I assume this guy is going to know more than me. So I generally outsource certain parts of things, am I thinking to them? And that's fine sometimes. You've got to be careful. You have to still be somewhat rational and be like independent in some way. But I think it's okay to outsource you're thinking a little bit, but you can't outsource it everywhere.

So in your domain of expertise, you need to be very critical at what you're thinking about. And again, you mentioned to the second part of that, which is it's the ultimate tool for serendipity for creating relationships for networking. Instead of you going out there, it brings people to you. I know this from a podcast perspective, because I get asked about my business. I do a lot of advising, consulting, working with leaders and building out leadership developed programs. And I'll have a strategic planning guy meet with me and he'll say, so what's your sales process like?

I'm like, there is no sales process. They listen to the podcast for four years. And then they call and say, we want you to do this. And then you figure out whatever the rates are. That's it. There's no process. There's no sales happening. The sales happened for four years.

years of diligent listening on their part because they got value out of the thing that you published. And that's another cool thing that I could have never envisioned that is doing so much work for like me and you, following your curiosity and then getting the words out, whether it's on a podcast or on the page, is the sales process. That part, it's amazing that I never thought about prior to doing this type of work. And I think it's pretty cool to see it in action. Yeah, I completely agree. I think that when you talk about the serendip vehicle, just like there's other ideas on this, maximize the service area of luck, right? So you're just more, you're more like, imagine like your content, like right now,

your brand is like a spider web. And so the more content, the more stuff you have out there, the bigger the web gets, the more likely people are going to catch into it. Right. And so most people don't put out any content. So their reputation is very localized, known maybe within a community, maybe within a company, maybe from college, right? So their network is, I mean, could be very tight.

But it's small and has a couple different nodes versus as you start to put out content, you might have a little bit of a weaker net, but it's much bigger. And so you can get something where you get someone that, what you would never meet in normal life to kind of find you. So that's another way of thinking about it as well. That can be helpful. So I want to dig into what I've done, Nick, is read through Just Keep Buying, which I love. Great book.

There's a reason it's sold a ton and people love it. As well as I've gone through every one of your posts, but a lot of your post because I've been reading you for years. And I just wanted to bring to the surface some of the ideas and have you share and expand. You've written about the fact that winners keep winning and why this happens. And one of the stories is about Stephen King and Richard Bachman. I may mispronounce that last name. Stephen King and Richard Bachman.

I won't spoil it because you brought this story to me through your great writing. Can you talk about winners winning and why they keep winning? And what this has to do with Stephen King and Richard Bachman. Yeah, so Stephen King, he had a publisher at the time he was using and he was publishing two books, or he, I'm sorry, he was writing two books a year. But his publisher told him, hey, like, we only, we think for marketing purposes, we should only publish one of these a year. So Stephen King has an extra book every year. What am I going to do? He's like, you know what? I want to just try something. Remember, at this point, Stephen King had already been pretty popular. He been well known. His books started gaining traction. He's like, I want to do kind of an experiment. So he started writing under a pen name Richard Bachman. And so he put out, I can't remember the name of the book right now, but you can look it up Richard Bachman. He put out this book, and it did relatively well. I think it had sold like 15 to 20,000 copies, which is like, for an author, that's very good. If you sell over 10,000 copies, that's like incredibly good, especially, and especially back then. I don't know what the book industry was like back then, but it still, that's good sales.

It was obviously good quality work, but it wasn't selling the millions that Stephen King was selling. And then someone was like doing research, like, who is Richard Bachman? They couldn't find any info. They started looking into stuff. And I found, like, it was registered to an address that like Stephen King had. So someone, a reporter asked him like, hey, are you Richard Bachman? And he fessed up to he said yes. And as soon as that story broke, like that book for Richard Bachman's book,

a.K. King's book, just shot to the top of the bestseller list. It went crazy, all that. Same thing happened with J.K. Rowling. She was writing under, I think, something Galbraith. I can't remember. I think it was called like the cuckoo's nest or something. I can't remember the name of the book. I can't remember the name.

But she was doing the same thing where she had a secret book or a secret pen name. And as soon as people found out went to the top of Amazon's bestseller list, et cetera. And what that shows is once you have this network effect of this cumulative advantage over other, of others in the space, like, you're going to keep having that. Unless something really bad happens that you do to tarnish your reputation or something like that. But even Stephen King wrote a terrible book, that would sell more than if I wrote a very good

book, right? It's going to sell more than just keep buying, even if it's not good, because his name's there, and he's been putting out such quality work for so long. Now, I don't think Stephen King is going to write a quote, terrible book. Maybe he'll write one that isn't as well received as others. But I think the whole idea here is, yes, quality matters, but there's a little bit of, once you start having a little bit of, like, good luck in your favor, it kind of keeps tending to happen. So there's just like cumulative advantage. And we see this not just in writing,

but like in a lot of industries, this is true. This is how monopolies become bigger. Now, of course, they don't stay around for forever. Things will slowly degrade them. But it is how things grow. And once you have an advantage over someone else, you have more resources. You can use those resources to further your position, et cetera. Let's say somebody's earlier in their career, Nick. And what's the key learning? Because some of them say, oh, man, this kind of sucks. I'm up against it here because I haven't had that yet. And to me, is almost inspiration or motivation to get that ball rolling. And he did the work, right? Stephen King earned his way there. So what's the key learning that your takeaway for someone maybe who is not either at that level or even near

that level? And because to some, that might be demotivating. To me, it was actually very motivating. I'm curious how you viewed it. Yeah, I think the takeaway for me is like you have to realize that yes, luck is there. And so not every person, even people, same quality, one might out, compete someone. So there is a little bit of that going on. But the motivation, part is you have to keep at something for a very long time before you necessarily see results. It doesn't mean you should obviously take feedback, take input. If you're not seeing any result, zero results after years, that's probably a bad sign, right? But you want to see some sort of progress, even in a small way and just keep going at it. And it's really just doing like the boring,

simple stuff every week. And that's what kind of leads to success. And so people like, oh, wow, you wrote this book. And all this is like, no, like 60% of my book came or was inspired from blog posts I wrote. The other 40% was brand new material, but 60% of it was like a blog post and I said, okay, hey, how can I take this idea and make it better? How can I really refine it? What you saw on my blog was the rough draft. Let's take this idea and bring it to its logical conclusion, right? So when I'm thinking about it, every week, I'm just putting out a blog post. That's all I've done. That's it. I do one blog post? People are like, oh, do you want to start a podcast? You want to do a YouTube? Do you want to do this? And I'm like, no, those are

distracting me from my core thing that I'm getting really, I'm getting really good at it now. And I wasn't good at it. You go read my second or third blog post. My first one was decent, but read my second or third blog post. You're like, what the heck this is terrible? And I'm like, yeah, That is. I wasn't good. I got better. So that's the key here. It takes a long time. And in terms of just like the monetary side of it, like for three years, I didn't make any money on the blog. And so I wasn't doing it because of money. At least when I started, I wasn't doing because of money. Now there are things I've done because of monetization and whatnot. But you kind of have to enjoy what you're doing and just enjoy the process. Right. So that means it's going to take a long time. And I can't guarantee the level of success. But I can pretty much guarantee that you're going to move in the right direction over time. if you keep at it, right? Doesn't mean you're going to sell a million books. Doesn't mean you're going to do this or that. But I do believe that people that keep a things for a long time

tend to succeed in them in some way. So you just got to keep at it. One of the biggest differences between the ones who sustain excellence and make it happen over time is that they were willing to get through those first years where you hear that deafening silence or you get no feedback, not even bad feedback or haters, you get nothing. It's even worse. You'd rather somebody, hey, Nick, this is terrible.

And here's why. You'd rather that than just nothing. But I think that's part of it is you have to have kind of a love of the craft, a love of the process. Peyton Manning always talked about he loved taking every rep and practice. And the day he realized he either couldn't do that for health reasons or he didn't like it, then that was a day to stop. I think that's big when it comes to work, whatever the creative pursuit, writing, podcasting, a love of the prep, a love of the research, a love of the reading. It's too hard to keep going if there isn't some insatiable curiosity and love of the process. Like you have a love of the process.

And you've written about this recently that you've got off track at times, but now getting back on track of the love of the process of writing. And most importantly, writing about what you're most interested in and curious about as opposed to trying to have search engine optimization and gain it based on what's popular right now. Yeah, exactly. So like I recently wrote a post on this year in 2023. I was like, you know what? I want to try and get more organic traffic. Every week I have to go out there and put my content and fight for page views. Like, why is this relevant?

Why should you care? So every week I go to go fight for my traffic. traffic. I do have an audience. I have a newsletter. So that's somewhat passive traffic. But like, I have to go out there on Twitter and Instagram and put stuff out there and hope people read it. And so I was like, why don't I put stuff that like people are already searching for? So I did that and it worked well. Like I saw my organic traffic go up 6x. Like that helps with page views, all sorts of stuff. But at the end of the day, I was like, I'm writing stuff that I don't really want to write about, right? I'm writing about topics that I don't necessarily love. I still put in the research. I tried to

write the best blog post I could. So I wasn't like reducing quality at all. But it's just I wasn't writing about stuff that I was truly passionate about. I think it was showing up in my writing. My writing was become more formulaic. I was doing stuff that was more like, it was more like listicles. And it was helpful, but it wasn't necessarily aligned with my core audience. So that's an example where I was clearly going after page views and ad revenue and all that. And I admitted this. And I'm like, hey, guys, I did this. Like it worked. It was actually doing what I want. But then I was like, why am I doing this? And I had to like really, it started to make me not want to write anymore. I wasn't excited to write. I wasn't like, oh my God, this idea I have to get out there.

It's a good idea. That's how I generally feel with most of my blog post. But this year, I kind of got off track a little and I admitted that and my audience was very open. Like, yeah, I could tell you kind of changing. I was like, yeah, it's true. I was doing things differently and I'm not going to do that again. And it's a lesson for people out there because they're like the people that make the most money in some of the stuff. You just have to put out stuff that's just like kind of bland.

It's not necessarily the stuff you want to write about the most. And so there's this trade off between loving what you're doing and also like modernization. And so thinking about that. And I think by choosing the craft and what you really love, I actually think you see more long term benefits than by just going to try and monetize early. That's my actual opinion. And that's why I said for three years I didn't monetize. So now I'm like trying to on the tail end of that where I've actually gone down the wrong path a little bit. So now I'm trying to recorrect and get back together. It's in line too with a post you've written about the fact that great things take time.

And people who play the long game, it feels to me, and I've studied lots of them now because there are a lot of them have been guests on this show that they're delayed gratification to superpower. It's something that they possess. And one of your stories is I'm definitely going to mispronounce this guy's name. Dashrath Manjee, the Dashrath Manji breakthrough. This story is awesome. I want you to tell because I've experiences, and I think a lot of people who I've recorded with have experienced the fact that great things take time. And the difference between those who make it happen and those who don't is that they're willing to put in the time in order to see.

So can you tell this story of the dash rat? Mahmangi breakthrough and also pronounce it properly too. Yeah. So I don't actually know to pronounce it. Oh, you don't either? So yeah, I'll just say it. Everyone calls him the mountain man. I mean, that's what he's called even in India.

And so he's a man that lived in a small village in India. And one of the one of the, I think his wife was getting sick. And one of the hospitals, like the only way to get to the hospital, they had to go around this mountain range. And it took, I don't know, it was like 20 kilometers or something. It's kind of far. However, like the hospital's littered on the other side. So if they could just go through the middle of the mountain, it would be way easier.

It would save them way more time. anything would be like one or maybe two kilometers, right, instead of going around the edge of it. And these villagers had walked around the edge for so long. And it's like kind of dangerous and everything. And as once again, his wife kind of fell and I think got sick or something because of that. And so she had medical treatment is what? He's like, why don't I just carve a path through the mountain? And to you and I, it sounded crazy.

So he started doing it. One day he just went out there and started cutting a hole through the mountain. And people laughed at him and this and that. And it took him, I can't remember how long. I think it took him 20 years to do this, right? Unfortunately, his wife passed right before he finished it. Like literally he was almost done. And she passed away, unfortunately, but he did carve a path through the mountain.

And now that village that he's in can now just walk that one little kilometer or whatever to get to the other side instead of going around the mountain range. So he saved his entire village, like tons of headache, tons of time, all that in the future and not possible them getting even hurt on that going around the mountain range. And he did that by literally just moving a little bit of rock every single day. And he did it for 20 years. And it's so crazy. It's an amazing story. It's not one that's very well known. And it just goes to show like he didn't have much.

He didn't have the construction. He didn't have money to buy like construction gear. You couldn't hire teams of people. But what did he have? He had time. And so everyone has a resource, whether they realize it or not. Like every person should have some sort of resource, right? And so for a lot of people, especially younger people, not a lot of money, you may not have a lot of money, you may not have a lot of money, but usually have a lot of time. So that's the lever. So you got to pull the lever that you have when you have it. So I think for most people, especially younger people, that's time. As you get older, hopefully you've been saving. You start to have some capital there. And then there's other things. You have a net. work. There's other resources you can rely on. And so that's the thing with thinking about great things take time. It's just they really do sometimes. Like you always hear about the overnight success that took 10 years, but that's kind of how it works. It's really going up an exponential curve is kind of crazy because even I've experienced this in very small ways. And trust me, my success compared to the other people you mentioned James Clear Morgan Housel, they've sold millions of books, far more successful than myself. But just seeing it play out is still just kind of amazing to think that I could even sell as many books as I did. And we sold 50,000 by February. And now in six months, we've sold a I remember it was out for almost a year. We were at like roughly $50,000. Then we've sold $50,000 in the next six months after that. So it's like kind of accelerating in some ways. So that's one of those examples where it's like it's hard to predict what's going to happen beforehand. And it just takes a lot of time. And the repetitions, right? Because not only the time, but you're getting better. I would imagine as he carved through the mountain, he got better. Right. He figured some things out. He learned. He made mistakes. And he was just willing to show up and carve. This is the part that the end of keynotes when people ask, they ask for a hack. What's the hack? What's the quick way? Same thing. with investing, I'm sure, or personal finance. What are the three things, Nick, I can do right now that will set me up to be better? And you're like, well, one of the biggest ones is you need time. You listen to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, right? One of the biggest things they say is don't interrupt compounding ever. That's the biggest way. And I think that, but that is such a letdown for people when I share that answer. Well, it's 500 repetitions over eight years. It's all

of the preparation that won into each of those moments. That is just a lot of time and effort. And really, Chase Jarvis said this on this podcast. They're just for, and he's an amazing photographer and artist and everything that he does, build a big, great company. There are no hacks. They just aren't. The hack is doing the work. And I think that is just an unsatisfying answer to a lot of people.

Just think about it. If there was an easy way to do it, it would already be solved. If there was an easy way to get rich, we'd all be rich. There's an easy certain things we have actual solutions to. Oh, I don't want to get smallpox. Okay, we have a smallpox vaccine. That's easy. People get that.

There's a simple solution, people just take the simple solution. Oh, I'm dehydrated. Okay, you need water. You probably need some sort of vitamins or minerals, whatever that is. Like, if there's a simple solution, there's a way to do it, people would just do that. If there isn't, then obviously it's not solved. And so that's why I think same thing with like diet, fitness, finance, all these things are they were easily solved games. We'd all be super fit. We'd all be super rich, but they're not. And that's why we have people sitting there saying, what's the hack and there isn't one? And no one wants to talk about that. But I mean, it's not good marketing. How am I going to market? hey, by the way, guys, it's going to take you 30 years. Who wants to sign up for that? But that's the truth. And it doesn't sell as well as, hey, I have this one simple trick. And so it's once again, it's like this pull between being honest and truthful and like monetization, right? You can't monetize the truth necessarily. Sometimes you can, but a lot of times you can.

And so figuring that out and trying to find those people that are like, okay, yeah, I actually want the truth. Like those are the people that you want in your audience and on your team and kind of following you. And that's kind of what I kind of shoot for. You wrote a post called the constant reminder. And this is about how the right decisions and compounding can lead to huge results. So this is about NASA. And they made decisions 40 plus years ago that had a profound effect on the Voyager missions, much further beyond their initial thoughts.

But it's about the decisions. Can you share that story of NASA in the Voyager program and how it had an impact for such a long time and why this is a constant reminder? Yeah. So with the Voyager programs, they shot off two rockets, one, or two, I guess, space shuttles. One was Voyager one. It's a small, it's not a massive space shuttle. It's a very tiny little, I mean, I don't even know what it looks like exactly, which I knew, but they shot two of these things off. Voyager one went off first and Voyager 2 went off second. But how it worked is like they had to actually slingshot around the planets because they don't have enough fuel to keep pushing

these things forever. And so based on the decision they made early, they shot Voyager 1 off, but then they said, hey, maybe if we use Voyager 2, we can slingshot around these planets. And as a result, it'll go faster. So even though Voyager 1 left Earth before Voyager 2 eventually passed it, and to this day, Voyager 2 is the furthest manmade object from Earth, further than anything we've ever sent anywhere else. And so it's out there, it's sending data back periodically. And I think, I can't remember when. I think it's like 2030, it's going to stop sending information back.

But it just goes to show if you set up the right trajectory early and then just let compounding do its work, like you can allow for that stuff. And compounding in this case and this story is obviously like the trajectories around the planets and using physics and all that, which we're not going to be able to get into. But you get the point of setting the right decision early can be more important. Even if someone starts before you, that's not necessarily mean that they're going to be ahead of you later. It's all about you can think of the difference between like when you start and the slope,

right? And so having a bigger slope can be really important. So whether that means you're making better decisions early, making smarter decisions, that's kind of how I think about it. And so for me, it's a constant reminder that like the day, like, this is what I said in the post is like the day, let's say you're trying to lose weight. The day you lose weight isn't actually when you lost the weight. It's the day you decided to start actually making the decisions just that you're going to move down that path to lose the weight. Once you're like, hey,

I'm cutting out this. I'm going to start exercising and doing it. And if you actually stick to those, so the day you actually say, hey, I'm actually going to stick to this and you know you're going to do it, that's the day you lose the weight. That's the day you make the change. And so people don't realize that, but you kind of bring the future into the present by doing that. And you don't realize it yet, but that's the day it all happened. Like for me, what changed my trajectory, the slope of my career or whatever was deciding, hey, I'm going to write one blog post a week. It seemed like a small decision at the time, but it's monumental when you look back now, right? You're looking back almost seven years now. It's, holy crap, that was an amazing decision. But at the time,

I was like, oh, we'll see what happens if I can do this thing. And that was it. That was the day when everything really started. So that's kind of how I like to think about it. It's like a constant reminder that it's like the little things we do and do day in and day out that really make the difference. Getting to some of the core of what you write about even more, you've written about all these things that again it's funny that what has piqued my curiosity Nick when I read through so many of your posts are these fascinating stories that in itself is a telling sign and another one the title really grabbed me and I'm sure titling there's a whole art to that to get people to click on it and then they click it on they read it is quote saving is for the poor investing is for the rich

and you write about the mathematics of saving and investing over the life cycle so this is more into your niche of personal finance that I think is important for all of us to be thinking about. But when you write that saving is for the poor and investing is for the rich, what does that mean? Let's create an avatar. This is a person who's a mid-level leader within a Fortune 500 company. So they're probably doing pretty well as far as their income. And they're thinking, maybe I'm not fully dialed in on my personal finance. I'm focused on my job and my family and paying the mortgage and the car payments. So can you give like an overview on why saving is for the poor and investing is for the rich. Well, it's funny you bring up that avatar of the mid-level

4-500 executive. That person is kind of in the middle ground. So when I say savings for investing is for the rich, what I really mean is like where you should focus your time and your financial life is going to change over the course of your life. Right. So if you're 23 years old, let's say you're fresh out of college, right? You're just starting to work. How you invest your money is not going to really make that much of an impact. And the example I give is when I was 23, I just started saving, had a thousand bucks in my 401K. Even if you're just, if I got a 10% return, that's $100. At the same time, I was regularly going out with friends in San Francisco, dinner, drinks, Uber

Home, whatever, Uber just come out. All that was happening. I would easily spend $100 in one night. So I did spend my entire year's investment return in a good year, like 10% in one night. So it's like, what was really the dollar? I was talking about the lever I was pulling. When I was 23, the lever was my spending was like how I saved money. Saving is for the poor.

I mean, I don't say poor. And when I say poor, I don't mean abject poverty. Like that's true with abject poverty. but even I'm talking about relative poorness. Like I was poor 23 relative to my, you know, 65 year old self. All else equal assuming you have a decent life, career, you save, etc. Like young people are poor relative to their older selves, all else equal in expectation. So that's the idea.

And then imagine someone who's 60 years old has a million dollar portfolio, a one year returns, $100,000. Imagine saying $100,000 after tax or something like that. That's a lot of money. So, of course, that can be done. But it's much harder to do that than like just get an investment return. So someone who's 65 or retired has to focus everything on their portfolio because they can't necessarily work and make changes with their spending, right, and their saving behavior. So that's what I think it's this dichotomy of when you're young, you have to focus on saving, when you're old, you're focused on investing.

So in the case of your avatar, the person mid-level executive, Fortune 500 company, they actually have to focus on both. And I can give you a formula to tell you like how much you should be focusing on each, but I can pretty much tell you that anyone who's mid-care has to focus on both. You can't ignore your investing. You can't ignore your savings. they both matter. I'm just saying depending on where you are, that's where you should put more of your focus. So the simple thing to think about is, okay, think about how much money you can expect to save the next year. Whatever that number is, that's an amount. Let's say 10,000 bucks. Okay, that's amount A. 10,000 is how much I can your investments earn you in the next year in expectation, right? I might use something like a 5% return, right?

So if you had a $100,000 portfolio, that's $5,000, right? So our first amount, how much you can save in the next year is 10,000, your second amount, how much your investments can earn you is 5,000, which one's bigger, the 10,000, obviously. What that tells me is you should put slightly more focus on saving money to get the other amount larger, right? Save that money, get invested. Because over time, what you're going to see is as you save money and get invested, that $5,000 investment return should grow, right, over time and expectation, right?

And one day, it will pass. One day it's going to pass the amount of money you can save in a year. In theory, if your income just keeps going up forever, then there's nothing I can tell you. But it's one of those things where like most people, you'll see at some point, probably mid-career, maybe mid-to-late career, you'll see that your investments in a given year will probably earn you more than you can earn yourself. And that's when you know, hey, the switch is gone and I now have to care a lot more about investing. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't care about your portfolio in the interim, but it just means where you're focusing your time and energy probably needs to switch based on that. So for most people in the avatar you brought up, it's you kind of, you have to care about both, if I'm being honest.

So there's not much of a hack there in the middle. At the end, it's investing at the beginning. it's saving, but in the middle, you kind of have to care about both. Let's get practical again for somebody who maybe is becoming aware of you and this type of thinking for the first time. And I realize actually, Nick, as I got older, how lucky I was, my parents did a fantastic job of explaining all of personal finance to us when we were in high school and college and then really right after college.

And my dad had me sit down with a financial advisor, the one that he works with. And it was very like, has like, he teaches to me like, I'm, in third grade and they did a fantastic job and we just made it so this kind of automated system of this percent is going to be immediately put into our account with our advisor and i haven't stopped and that was when i was 22 and so we the only thing that which changed is that we've increased the amount of money that goes and we got married and the same thing we just did the exact same thing so it's almost been automated for me for quite some time but i've talked to friends and others who are very bright people who weren't lucky to have to have

those types of sit downs and so they didn't have they had a 401k and they thought I'm just dumping everything into there and that's good enough or whatever I thought wow that's no that's something that you do but there's a whole another avenue of investing and saving beyond we look at our 401k as just bonus money we're gonna max them out but their bonus money it's not even something I'm thinking about beyond the other stuff is really what we focus on so for that person who is bright is intelligent but didn't have the parents to sit them down and help them out or they haven't had a guy like you or somebody

them out, how do they get started? What should they do? How should they think about their money growing and being invested and compounding and all of it goes into it? That's a huge question. I think the thing to do is you have to spend some time reading about it, whether it's watching YouTube videos, listening to podcasts, reading books, like there's a lot of material out there. And you have to understand like a few core concepts, understand expected return. What does that mean? What type of investments have generally have higher returns than others? What are the risks associated with that? Because we can talk about return all day, like, oh, of course, everyone wants the highest return, but there's usually

cost to that. And the cost is the volatility and possible even worse than that. I mean, with certain things like an individual stock, the volatility is much higher and you can actually go to zero. So like the return start to go all over the place. The risk is all over the place as you get into more individual names as you're trying to move away from diversification. I generally say, hey, diversify like the whole time. Say diversified income producing assets, things like that. And my book talks about that. There's a lot of books that talk about that. So I think for someone that's just starting out, like you just need to spend time like reading and understanding this stuff. And I'm not saying you need to be an expert at it.

Just like you have to understand. Okay, what do you mean? Like how much risk or how much return like exact? Like should I be owning real estate? Should I be owning, you know, stocks? And there are tradeoffs associated with all these things. And not just in terms of expected return in terms of money, but also on your time. Like owning a rental property can be great.

But there are costs that are not necessarily related to money. It could be like, oh, time costs. I have to go over there and visit it. Or oh, I have to go replace this thing or just like the management, the hassle. right. So there's a lot of other things that aren't just dollars and cents that you have to consider when you're investing as well. Unfortunately, there's no one correct path. I know people that have gotten rich in real estate, no people have gotten rich with stocks, starting their own businesses. There's a lot of ways to do this. Anyone who tells you there's only one path is full of it or there's like the right path is full of it. There's a lot of ways to do this. It's just about finding what is going to work with you and your temperament, your personality, right? Some people love having real estate. Others would hate it. Like I'm one of those people that does not want to have to manage tenants and deal. I don't like human conflict. I'm not going to do that.

that. Some people love that. So it's more about finding the right portfolio and the right investment choices for your personality and your situation. I think that's what's most important. So that takes time, it's not going to be perfect right away, but you're going to have to kind of spend time and do that. And there's no way around it. I wish I could be like there's a hack, just do this and this, buy this fund, buy that. If I tell you that, that might work for a while. But as soon as there's volatility, as soon as we go through a March 2020 situation, you may feel differently. And so you might sell or do something that's not necessarily good for you long term. So that's one of those things where I think you need to really understand yourself.

So what do you do for you? As you approach it, how do you manage your money? How do you think about it? What's your overall philosophy? What do you actually do with your money? Yeah. So my investment portfolio, 70% is invested in equities of some sort. I think it's split pretty much of the 70%, so 35, 35 into U.S.

versus international. And that's pretty close to like market cap weightings, which is like roughly U.S. stock markets half the world. So I try and do that. And then I 10% in real estate. investment trust. So I don't want to manage the real estate. So that's done through, you can buy that on a out of the brokerage account. There's tickers out there. And then the last 20% is mixed into different things. I have obviously treasury bills right

now. I'm trying to buy a house. So there's a lot of money in treasury bills. Just getting that to down payment. And then there's probably like a 10% which is in everything else. That includes any sort of private investments and any ownership I have in my firm. So I have some art. I have some Bitcoin like all those little things. They could be income producing, but they're not necessarily like Bitcoin's not income producing or is not income producing. My firm technically is income producing, but it's illiquid. So I count it as like a non-income producing asset, even though it does produce income. So I think there's just different ways of doing it.

So yeah, so I'd say 80 or 90% of my assets are income producing, 10% are not income producing. And so that's kind of the split I like. People can do different things. I don't think there's a right way to do it. I'm mostly equity heavy, though, at this point. And so I find that's useful and I do have tilts to international because my firm does as well, right? So I'm trying to match my firm's allocation as much as possible, TELSTA small cap, tells the value, things like that. So value stocks. But yeah, it's pretty

straightforward. And I don't think about it too much. When I rebalance, I don't go and sell stuff. I usually just keep buying into the underweight thing. So I'm kind of always trying to, I talk about this in the book called an accumulation rebalance. So instead of saying, hey, I'm going to sell my bonds to buy my stocks, which there are extreme moments where that will make sense like March 2020. I sold bonds, bought stocks, right? But generally, I'm always just buying the underweight thing. Oh, US stocks are doing well. What does that mean? I'm probably buying more international stocks to bring the level back in order. So that's kind of how I'm thinking about it over time. What about fees? This is a big part of the remit conversation. He's like, why in the

world are you paying 1% AUM assets under management fee to your advisor? You should pay him a flat fee, an hourly rate, whatever you want to do. What do you think about the whole fee structures when working with the financial advisor? So there's been a ton of research done on this. And clients generally do, I mean, of course, no one wants to pay fees. Everyone wants everything for free. So let's get out there. I'm not saying. I'm not saying people love paying fees. That's not I'm saying. I'm saying the type of fee that clients like to pay are the ones that are just like out of sight, out of mind. That's what AUM fees do. If every time you have to pick up the phone to call your advisor, oh crap, they're going to charge me an hourly thing. It does change the relationship in a way.

And also like in terms of a business setting, it's much harder. Like hourly firms just cannot survive. So it's one of these things where it's like you need to have a relationship where yes, the business is profiting from the client, but like at the same time, the business has to add the value, right? Like that 1% fee is like what you're paying for is the planning, the value, the piece of mind, right? And so for some people that like, oh, I would never pay that. Yeah, you're not the right audience. You're a do it yourself or probably or you're someone, what we call like a validator, which means like you like you like to do it yourself, but you want like a second opinion. If you want a second opinion, you don't want to pay an AUM fee. You probably just want to pay a one off flat

fee. Someone to look at your plan. You pay them, what, 500,000 bucks, whatever it is. They look at yourself and say, hey, that's good. And if you want to check in, we can pay another 500 in the future. That's fine as well. Like there, there are those services out there. But for a lot of people, they just don't want to deal with it. Hey, I don't understand this stuff. I don't want to sit and read 10 books and understand risk and volatility and all this crap. I want them to take care of it. I want them to come up with a plan that really helps me to reach my goals. And so that's where the fee comes in. I'm not saying anything bad about Rame. I just think he's looking at it from a do yourself versus view. And from his view, that makes sense. Like, why would you pay for this when you

can do it yourself and learn it yourself? And he's an expert in it. Why would you pay fees if you're an expert in it. From his perspective, it makes no sense. But for certain people, like, it makes a ton of sense. And that's why this industry exists. So, yeah, of course, you want to keep your fees as low as possible. But if you're someone who's, hey, I don't want to spend all the time and diligence and do all that, then that's what the fee is for, right? That's why we do it. Yeah, I've come full circle because the peace of mind is probably the part that's very important. Like having somebody you trust, you believe in, you can email, text them at any time. And they'll say, hey, I have a tax question here. and my accountant and the financial guys, we get together, and I don't know what I'm doing.

I have no idea. That's what they do every day. This is what I do every day. It has nothing to do with that. So that's the part to me that makes it worth it is I want the peace of mind to know that I'm, essentially, that's how I'm taking care of my family. I want to make sure it's done well. And I'm looking at net gains at the end of each quarter and at the end of each year.

And if I'm happy with those gains, this is my dad told me, why he's perfectly fine paying the AUM fee, is I'm looking at where we are net. and the fact that we communicate constantly all the time. And he's very helpful in putting us in good positions. And now he's retired. And they still talk all the time because he's living off of that money. That's the peace of mind element, I think, is which makes a lot of sense. And what industry, like if they asked me to come do something, speak or whatever,

by the way, we don't want to pay your fee. I'm like, what? I mean, it's part of the deal. If you're going to do work and do whatever you can to help somebody, there's a cost associated with that. And usually the good ones, yeah, they're worth what you pay them. You'd hope. And if they're not, like you said, you just leave.

Yeah, exactly. So I think it's pretty straightforward for people. And it's also changes over time. I don't know a lot of people that have done do it yourself most of their life. And at some point, they're just like, why am I still doing this? I don't want to get tired of it. And I think that is what eventually leads people to advisors at some point. It's not even that.

Could you do it? Yes, but do you want to deal with all the hassle? Do you have to call people up? It's just for some people I don't want to deal with it anymore. And that's the solution they come to, especially if they've done really well. they have more money than they need. They're like, I'm not even spending money. Like I have really, I like hiking.

That's my favorite activity. It's okay, like you're not going to spend these millions you have. Do you want someone to help you take care of this and manage it for your children, et cetera? And so that's where advisors can add a lot of value. Given your role and the combination of what you do as a CEO as well as the fact that you've published online since 2017, so you've attracted a lot of high performers, you've attracted a lot of leaders who have sustained excellence over time into your world, you've probably have really good vantage point of what these people are doing. So Nick, I'm curious. When you think

about the people you've met who have sustained excellence over time, what have you found to be some of the commonalities that exist within those people? They just do the same stuff over and over there's the stonecutters credo. I watched the stone cutter just hitting and hammering at the rock over and over a hundred times in a row and not seeing a single crack, but at the 101st hit, the stone breaks in half. I know that it wasn't the hundred and first hit. that did it, but all the stuff that came before. And so it's like that idea of just constantly going after the same thing and doing the same stuff and it's boring and you do it over and over again. You hear about Kobe Bryant was doing two a day practices while everyone else is doing one a day.

You hear about Tiger Woods playing golf for 10 hours a day. I've never done anything for besides writing. I've never done anything for like straight up 10 hours in a day. I've never, I can't imagine doing something like that for 10 straight hours, right? And doing it day in and day out for years, right? It just takes it a sustained amount of effort to really become one the best in the world. And I'm not saying you need to become the best in the world. I'm not trying to be the best right in the world. I don't think, I think it's very outlandish. And I'm not one of those people that's wired that way I do taking breaks and enjoying my life and everything. And so there are tradeoffs to do all this stuff. But yeah, for a lot people, it's just do the thing over and over

again. You start to find, wow, how did that person get so good at this? Oh, yeah, they just did that single thing for 30 years. And by year 30, like, who's going to know how to do that better than them? I'm not saying you need to be the best, but if you're not in the top 5% probably maybe top 1% after 20 years, you're probably doing something wrong. So that's how I look at it. I love it, man. Just keep hammering. The book, in fact, is called Just Keep Buying, Proven ways to Save Money and Build Your

Wealth. Also, I think it's worth it to both buy that book as well as go to of dollars and data.com. That's where I first learned of Nick and love the way that you have weave stories and bring it all together. I just feel like a much wiser person after I read one of your posts and definitely after I read, just keep buying. That's why I want to have this conversation. So, man, Nick, I really appreciate it and I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress. This is a lot of fun, man. Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate you having me on. And if any of your audience, any of your fans want, have any questions about anything, feel free to DM me on Twitter, Instagram. I respond to

every single DM. And obviously, unless it's insane or something, I respond to every DM. So I promise you, I'll respond to you. So just feel free to reach out anytime. Thank you. Love it, man. Thanks again, Nick. It is the end of the podcast club. If you're a member of the end of the podcast club, send me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com.

Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Nick Majuli. Here's a few takeaways from my notes. Great things take time. Focusing on the long term is more important now than ever. story of the mountain man dashrath mangi the dashrath mangi breakthrough probably pronouncing that wrong but the mountain man he carved a path through a mountain made things much safer uh had the inspiration of his wife it took him 20 years but he spent every day carving a little bit each day and it just reminds me we talked nick brought up the the the stone cutter credo it's it's not the hundred and

first blow. It's all that came before it. With whatever it is we're trying to do, if we keep hammering, we keep at it, we do a little bit each day at compounds, and over time we can do something incredible, like carving a path through a mountain. Then when Nick committed to writing one blog per week in 2017, changes life. He learned from some of those who were ahead of him about how storytelling is what captures a reader's attention. And the way to develop good stories is to read a lot from a wide variety of sources. This is something all of us can do. All of us should be doing as leaders is trying to impact our teams by becoming a fantastic communicator, both as a writer and as a speaker. That's a big part of our jobs. And then one decision can change everything.

When NASA, they decided that Voyager 2 would be designed to slingshot around planets, it's helped to become the farthest man-made object from Earth. And it's still producing information for us. This is what makes consistent actions and the power of compounding so amazing. When you think about creating a new habit in your life, imagine all of the future benefits that could come from you making that choice. It's hard to sometimes even figure that out, but that's the importance of making a decision and sticking to it consistently. That was a through point from this entire conversation that kept coming up over and over that I found is how Nick has built an amazing career for himself and how we all can do it for ourselves.

There are no hacks. It's not easy. It takes making good decisions and then staying consistent day after day after day. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Nick McGulie. I think it will help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and you tell all your friends and you go to Ryanhawk.

dot net and once you're there, which will launch you into Apple Podcasts, you write a thoughtful review and you rate the show five stars, hopefully. And by doing that, you are continuing to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you too. Can't wait.