Are You Ready to Succeed? – Episode 443

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[00:02] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Kim, we’re talking about a book today. This one’s gonna be fun. Yes. Yes. This is a treat that you sent to me, Are You Ready to Succeed? And the author is Srikumar, if I’m pronouncing it right, Rao, R-A-O. And it is interesting, you know, with books, anybody can write a book of any title, including the title of another book. So you do want to be careful. It’s interesting, Spencer, when you shared this book with me, I was of course interested because it was you, I will admit, because I am very careful about what I read. And a fairly deep book in the what I would call personal development space had been shared with me just recently. And so I thought, okay, I’ll do one kind of December, if you will. And then I’ll

[00:51] wait on this one and not hit it until the new year, just wanting to give the one that I had read some, well, the one that I had read was good, didn’t get a lot of new ideas specifically. And that’s usually what I’m looking for. Love to have the confirmation of aspects of my life that I’m already working on, but usually looking for a little tweak or a new thing. And so I decided to go ahead and read this one too. And it did help that Todd was very involved in a programming project for a couple of weekends in a row, gave me a little extra reading time. And it’s cold here. Anyway, just a couple of things that I would like to share, but you tell me about your perspective with it first and how you found

[01:28] out about it. Absolutely. This book was actually referred to me by my friend who I admire. It’s great. That’s how it works. Here’s the strange thing. And then I’ll get into the book. Most authors are writing a book and saying things where they want others to evangelize it. And they want to grow that audience of their true fans. The author of this book says you only want to share this with the people that you feel are ready for it. And it’s wow. Okay, cool. So here are the pieces that really hit me well with this book. One is that our world isn’t real. Now I’m not talking Matrix isn’t real for any of you fans out there. I’m talking that we only see the world through our perspective and our reality. And when we do that, it’s really easy for us to forget that it is just

[02:29] our reality, not the reality. But the beauty of that is that once you finally realize it, you can play different movies and you can change your reality so fast. So incredibly fast. I’ll have some stories to that. And this book is not easy to read. I didn’t think so at least because there are exercises in there. And if you actually do the work with the exercises, that’s why it’s not easy. Well, it is super fun when somebody so well researched and so well supported and really with very good writing style so that it’s very ingestible comes up with some pretty high level perspectives that I think would really cause a lot of people to pause. And what’s interesting is this man is a professor at Stanford and

[03:28] he and his class that is essentially the book have their own alumni association. Like people are so profoundly affected by his class and the book and the information in it that they continue to stick together, which is I think a really important lesson because you do need people around you that are supporting this kind of thinking, or it can appear a little woo-woo and a little hard to continue to implement. Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of the woo, why do you feel that this is a bit woo versus sitting in the lines of your normal think and grow rich or book that would be? Well, interesting that you bring up think and grow rich because I think some people would say that one has some woo-woo and in addition, but really because in today’s world, we are conscious of mindset

[04:22] and because in today’s world, we work on mindset and perspective and that kind of thing. I think our society is actually ready for the woo-woo, if you will, and it isn’t woo-woo. That’s the, I think, most important thing is it’s studied, proven, statistically backed up strategies that can get you result, but it can appear as woo-woo. Yeah, and I think that, as you mentioned, people are waking up to that and the challenges is a lot of people, they just want to be told, but they want the easy answer and this stuff takes work. So what were some of the key takeaways for you? I’m going to actually go backwards because I think it’s really important. So on page 180, he talks about the title of the chapter,

[05:06] it’s chapter nine, is you create your world from what is inside of you and I think a lot of people would have to just pause right there. I have heard that before, I’ve studied that before, so I dove right in. The second sentence is the chapter will introduce to you a general purpose mental model, which I think is super, super helpful because we do base our lives on models even if we’re not conscious of them and this is a mental model that you can adapt and you can adopt it and yet he says the catch is that you can’t adopt a mental model because you recognize intellectually that it is better than the one you are using. It doesn’t work that way. You begin to start trusting a new model only when you see it operate and produce

[06:03] favorable results in your life and so Spencer, you and I have shared the tiny habits book. I think this is what you want to do is tackle tiny habits, little tiny baby steps, little changes in your thought that can then get you changes in your life that can then get you to trust. Absolutely. Do you feel that it’s human nature for us to want to have big grandiose events or is it, I mean because you’re talking with families all the time or is it that the more successful well put together families are looking at it maybe retrospectively and saying, oh, okay, I guess it was these little baby steps. How does that work typically? Well, I think what you said is exactly how it works. When you’re new in the

[06:50] game, it doesn’t really matter the age. You think that it’s just one thing and it’s never just one thing. It’s always a series of baby steps and course corrections and two steps forward to one step back, et cetera. And yes, the wealthier and we don’t just mean monetarily wealthier. We mean spiritually and intellectually wealthier families realize and teach their children adult or otherwise the baby steps are the way to go. The baby steps are what’s going to get you the result. Ooh, good. You said you had another takeaway from this. It’s funny because I was pretty sure this was in what I was going to bring up and it just dovetails perfectly. Here’s what I underlined gently, very gently try to make more events happen.

[07:37] Now this is a perfect suggestion to support the tiny habits, right? This is in the chapter. You can change the universe and it is talking about miracles and he says when you go shopping, expect to find the item that you want. When you go bowling, expect that a particular ball will be a strike and he just has examples after examples, some of them incredibly mundane, right? At least 40 or 50 times a day, he says you want to be expecting the results that you want to get and he’s got the proof that it works. It does work. So I’ve got a funny story for you. When I first read this book, which was early this past summer, I had read that and expecting the tiny miracles, very small. So I’m with my friend. We’re in

[08:34] Seattle and he’s a great guy. He might not always be the most positive all the time, but he’s not necessarily negative. Call it stoic in some cases. We’re in a busy Costco parking lot and we pull in and I say this and I kid you not, I go, oh, we’re gonna have a parking spot right at the very front on the right. He goes, whatever. He goes, I never get parking spots. It just doesn’t work that way. We pull up parking spot in the very front to the right where I called it. He looked at me, he goes, how did you know that? He said, it just happens like this. And every thing that we did, like on the trip, I would just think abundantly and I’d have these miracles. And by the end of the trip, he’s, man, how do you do this?

[09:19] And it started to wear off. I loved it. So it does happen. There was a few for me in the book that I’ll share that I feel were really helpful. In fact, I’ve highlighted so many pieces in this book and I’m trying to use them as a piece that will help me become a better dad, a better husband, a better manager to the team members that I have. And so as I find this, it’s actually very towards the very beginning of the book. This is enlightened leadership is service, not selfishness. The leader grows more and lasts longer by placing the wellbeing of all above the wellbeing of self alone. The paradox is that by being selfless, the leader enhances self. And it made me think about me as a leader and my role of reducing complexity and my role of reducing stress, of really finding out what

[10:17] are the challenges and problems. And it’s not necessarily my job to fix those problems, but I can look at it and I can help the team and I can provide as much value as possible, and the companies that I own, that’s what my intention is. And sometimes I’m doing well and sometimes I’m thinking too much about myself and I don’t. It is so instructive to really adopt that servant attitude in all areas. We went to Todd’s parents last night. They wanted help decorating the Christmas tree. I did not want to decorate the Christmas tree. And I was like, too bad, Kim, get in there and do it. So we did. And it was fun. Isn’t that great? And then you will get your time on the things that you want to do. But it’s strange that when we start to do the things

[11:07] that maybe we don’t want to do, that’s actually when we’ll make some of the best memories. You grew up on a dairy farm. You had your sister Tammy with you. Can you think of any stories of things that you didn’t want to do then, but you look back now and are grateful for? How about getting up at 430 every dang day to milk the cows? Gosh, the habit and the discipline and the work ethic that that taught just so naturally I will forever be grateful for. Don’t tell my dad. Yeah. And you’re an early riser from that too. So what a blessing as well. Wonderful. Well, we’ll include a link to the show notes of this book right here. It may be for some people. It may not, but it is one that’s helpful. I’ve bought multiple copies of it to give away. I find it to be one of those books

[11:57] that for the right person, when they need it, it will come. And the phrase, when the student is ready, the teacher appears and this teacher may be the same teacher. You just may be ready at a different time. And for all of you listeners that are on the podcast, we’re grateful that we’re able to share this and to learn from Kim today. And thank you for sharing these lessons with us, Kim. Enjoyed it. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit us at partnersforprosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.