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The Four Pillars of A Purpose-Driven Life · The Expert Method

• speaker-0: I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. I've had enough. Enough is enough. I'm better than this. I want to move forward. Poor people think about money. Rich people think about value. And therein lies the difference. The secret sauce of success is not working your life away. speaker-1: What has to happen for somebody to really take this work seriously? speaker-0: Find your purpose, your God given purpose speaker-1: I've spent a lot of time staying really busy with work and other things in life without ever really taking the time to stop and consider where it's all taking me. I treat a full calendar as a sign that I'm making progress, but I can keep filling my days with work and still avoid the bigger questions as I have for years now. First, am I building a life that I actually want, or am I just getting better at repeating the one that I already have? So how do I know when the direction I'm moving in needs to change? And then when I get that clarity, how do I actually make that change happen? To help answer these questions, I'm excited to be joined today by Ted Copeko. Ted is the author of Finding Joy, and his work helps people think more clearly about how they spend their time, what they value, and the direction they want their life to take. In our conversation, we discuss how to recognize when busyness is keeping you stuck and how to start making more intentional choices with your time, attention, and work. If you get value from this conversation, be sure to subscribe and share it with a friend. And now please enjoy my conversation with Ted Copeco. Ted, thank you so much for being here. speaker-0: Ian, it is a pleasure being here and I gotta tell ya, I'm honored to be here. And I was excited that ⁓ I'm excited about being here and the discussion we're gonna have and giving value to to to your audience. speaker-1: Yeah. Well, thank you for being here. ⁓ as I was mentioning before we pressed record, it was the most engaged I've been in a small talk session before we pressed record. So I can only imagine what our conversation here today will lead to. But Ted, you spent decades in business, spanning from architecture, commercial real estate, starting your own firm. And in your experience, you started to notice a pattern for yourself and for the people around you. People are working hard, staying busy, achieving what looks like external success. But internally they still feel stuck or disconnected from purpose. So when you say disconnected from purpose, what do you mean by that? And then why do you think success can still leave people feeling that way? speaker-0: Yeah, I mean, you're right. Boy, what fun those years were. I look back and I go, Wow, that time went by so fast. And yeah, ⁓ to kind of give the audience a little bit of platform of myself and so forth. My name is Ted Kopeko. I wrote the book Finding Joy, Journey of You. The acronym for joy is Journey of You. Right? Finding your purpose, your value, and your freedom. And through the years of work I've I had, my traditional roles in life was I was born a commercial architect. I had a really strong mom, Ian, and she said, You're never gonna work as hard as your father. Right. And she drilled that into me and my she, you're gonna have your own business, doggone it. And ⁓ when I got ⁓ college, ⁓ I went to Cal Poly, San Luis, ⁓ the MIT of the West Coast, I I call it. in in architecture and so it's like, well gosh, I I can't go work for anybody. I'll disappoint mom. So I started my practice right out of college, which is really unorthodox. Yeah, I was young, going you know, I had the world on the string and I was going for it. What I discovered in that journey, that part of it, was I built a fairly successful office. We got up to about twenty, twenty-five architects. We're doing shopping centers, healthcare work, a lot of large end distribution hubs. Like an Amazon type of hub. We did work for General Electric and so forth. But it got to a certain point I didn't want to go in the office anymore. My son was born, and I went, I want to be with him. This is what I'm doing right now is very egotistical and is driven, it's successful, but I'm stuck. I can't go anywhere, even on the weekends, without this tethered being on me at all times. And I sold my practice, went on and ⁓ was looking for something else to do. And what I didn't want was actually, I gotta be honest with you, I didn't want employees. I wanted to be free of going in the office and and find trying to figure out who's going to be sick, who's not going to be sick, who's going to be there, what problems were going to happen besides getting the projects done that we had on on our on our tables. So I became a commercial broker and I had more freedom in that. But one of the things I I always thought about is like, And I was helping a lot of other people with their businesses through commercial brokeraging. Where I buy, sell buildings, get them in, look at their business plans and stuff like that. What I found was we're all in the same pattern. We were all we're taught to do to go to work. No matter if you have an employee or if you're an employee working for at a company, or you're more business minded and you Bought yourself your own job, which was your business. At the end of the day, and this probably hit home. I was at Home Depot one time, and I ran into this lady. She was ⁓ her name was Ellen, and Ellen is probably a good maybe 70 years of age, and she was in the electrical section. And I, being with my background, I was looking for a particular part, and I was asking Ellen where it was. All of a sudden, I get in a discussion with Ellen, and she is a whiz at. Electrical components. I said, Elle, wait, wait, wait. There's got to be more to this story. What's what's going on? What this doesn't make sense. Right? You're at Home Depot, you're in the electrical such, you have all this knowledge. I mean, and I told her, you know, God, I'm a commercial architect, I I understand what you're talking about, but it doesn't doesn't fit for me. She says, Well, I had my own electrical firm. And unfortunately we went bankrupt. And she had more of the story, but she basically lost everything. So through those experiences, I looked at, you know, I started looking at life going, man, every one of us were almost we're sheep in a line. We're all doing the same thing. And it starts off by our mindset. When we were young, what we were taught, what was put into our cerebral hard drive. After the doctor slapped us on the butt, right, was the first negative thing in our life. And then we were taught in school what to do, when to go, when to sit down, when to get up, when to go have recess. And that repeated over and over and over for at least 18 years. Well, what do you think happened? What do you think was ingrained in our minds after we left college or trade school? Go work. Go work hard. Now, nothing against work. What I'm trying to say to everybody is you have a greater purpose in your life. You have you have ⁓ more greatness in you to get out, to give to the world. And our job really is to find that purpose in our life that we have. What is that thing that you can do really well that you can perfect and give out to the world? Because the secret sauce of success. Is not working your life away, not being tethered to an office or being strung into a cubicle somewhere. The secret of success is to find your purpose, your God-given purpose that you were here on earth for. God gave us us all the dots. We just need to connect them to increase the value of our time to become valuable in a process. Will lead you to ultimately to freedom. Every successful person I know has that formula. You see, they don't worry about money. They worry about value. We were taught to worry about money in our school years. We weren't taught value. Does that seem to make sense even? speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. And I think Yeah, go ahead. speaker-0: So from I'm sorry, so from that, ⁓ a few years back, I I started putting these dots together and I started writing. I actually was blogging on Facebook and I came across the word joy, and I'm a big acronym person. I love acronyms. In fact, you know what the acronym for job is? Just overwrote. And isn't that the truth about our lives? We're we're struggling every month to get to the next month. So what joy does is the opposite of that. It's joy is the journey of you. And your joy is through that journey. It's finding that purpose that all of us have. We have all individual purposes. ⁓ I don't know if you know Les Brown or not. ⁓ Les Brown is a I love him. He's like one of my he's like one of my mentors ⁓ in life. He has a famous statement and that is you only work hard enough so they don't fire you and they they only pay you enough so you don't quit. Right. And isn't that the storyline of most of our lives? Ninety percent, ninety five percent of the people out there. That's the existence that we have. We may have a barbecue on the weekend or a beer on a Sunday afternoon, but then we're back into that rat race every single day. And the sad part about this is most people wake up in their sixties or sixty five or seventies going, Where did it go? And generally speaking, what hits us speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Is disease. That's what slaps us in the face when we look back and go, Is that is this it? Is that all there is? Thank God when you're younger, you can say to yourself, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. I'm not going to be doing, I don't want to do this every single day again. Enough is enough. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. But the first thing that I'd love to explore with you is this. No, I love it. I love it. But ⁓ the first thing that I'd love to explore with you is this idea where, you know, we're taught from a very young age, we're kind of indoctrinated into this system. Right. And there's a whole separate deep dive rabbit hole conversation that we could go down on like where did that come from and why is the system designed this way? But Just taking it for what it is and not trying to have a conversation about how we're gonna reshape the world and the and the global system of education and whatnot. But right, we're taught from a very young age to put a ton of value on money. Right. Money is this incentive, this thing that we're gonna strive for that's gonna create this freedom for us, this idea of money, money, money, money. Money is so important. Right. But if money is the incentive, the thing that if we optimize everything for money and making money. That is the thing that turns us into sheep, right, and will lead us astray and disconnect us from our purpose. What is that incentive in your opinion, or the thing that we should be optimizing for that will bring us closer to our purpose? speaker-0: Yeah, let me end point. You know, and you're right in the beginning of this, what you said. We could we could spend hours on this discussion. That's the reason why Finding Joy Journey of You went to a number one international bestseller, because it hit a a really raw nerve in each one of us. Busy is a word that comes to mind. We've trained ourselves to be busy every single day. Not being focused on what our true purpose is, but busy to a point that. We just live each day trying to catch up. Busy will never move you forward. You know, it'll only keep you on the fence of life. Yeah, ironic, isn't it? speaker-1: Yeah. So just this idea, right, that like from a young age, we're taught to incentivize and like strive for money and finances and money, money, money, right? That's the thing that we should optimize for, and that's the incentive that we're chasing. And it's clearly explained by you and many other people that a strive and a chase for money is gonna lead to a very sad life, right? Like money is the root of all evil, or like money is not the key to happiness. I don't know. I'm missing a lot of those famous quotes. Right. So money isn't the thing that we should incentivize and strive for because that is what's going to turn us into sheep and and disconnect us from our true purpose, our divine spark. So then in your opinion, in the work that you've done and the thinking that you've done on this subject, what have you found that should replace money as the thing that we incentivize that is our incentive and the thing that we strive for that will bring us closer to our purpose? speaker-0: Yes. Yeah. Well again it goes back to value and the book goes into this the journey of value. Money is just the unit. It's just a unit, the element of time. Poor people think about money. Rich people think about value. And therein lies the difference between what we were taught when we were young, think about money, be coin operated. You you put so much of of of a service in you want so much money back for that, one for one. What we should be looking at is how do we raise the value of our time to become valuable? Yeah. Through that, and and this ⁓ this is true with everything I do, ⁓ in my core businesses and so forth. The more value you can give out to people, the more it'll come back to you. It's I know it sounds like magic, but it's not. It's weird how this happens, but literally every successful person I know think about value as the key to success and not money. Money is money is literally just the ruler, I guess, of success that we all can translate to. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah, I mean money inherently is nothing, right? It's just an exchange of value, right? It helps you to buy time, buy goods, buy services. I completely agree with you on that. And that idea of, you know, the more you give, the more you'll get is something that Bob Berg, ⁓ the author of The Go Giver, came and shared on the podcast. And that completely changed my life. That idea of, you know, approaching every interaction that you have with a person, not focused on what you can get from this other person, but thinking about how can you give, how can you provide value to this other individual. And then I completely agree with you that thinking instead of in dollar signs, right? In money, but instead of thinking about value is definitely a more, a better way to think in the game of making more money. But I think just going back to this idea, because this finding my purpose, why right? Yeah. Why I'm uniquely here or what what like what is my unique reason for being here? Like is something that I've thought about for a lot. Granted, I haven't taken as much intentional time to find it that's probably required in order to find that answer. But, you know, in my like Paul Graham, founder of Why Combinator, had a series of essays that he wrote in the late 90s, early 2000s, and one of them was titled How to Do What You Love. Are you familiar with that essay? No worries. ⁓ it's a great essay. I highly recommend it. It's one that I, you know, have read multiple times. There's a founder's podcast episode about it. I shared it with my sister. I was really excited about it. speaker-0: I can't say I am. speaker-1: And he had one idea in there that really struck me and has stuck with me that in the journey of trying to find your purpose, right? Why are you here? Right. It's what everybody's looking for. And he made this point that out of the billions of people that have existed over the last hundred years, right, maybe a few hundred thousand people maybe have really truly found their calling, their unique purpose, their reason for being here. And every single one of those people are the happiest people on the planet, right? It's something that we should all want, something that we should all strive for. And the one bit of advice that he gave on it, it's like, you know, it's a unique journey for everybody, but just follow your curiosity. Follow your interests. Find find the things that engage you, that light you up that you're excited about doing. So maybe that's almost like what should take place of the filter that you use to make decisions on what you're going to do in your life, instead of using what's going to make me the most money, instead maybe using a filter of what am I most interested, excited about, curious, engaged with doing, right? Maybe that's like the the new filter that we should use. Is that something that you found in the work that you've done? speaker-0: In line of what you're saying, the two most important dates in our lives, you may know this one, the day you were born and the day you find out why you're here. Right? Everything else is taking your human time and spending it. And so what we lay out in in Finding Joy Journey of You is there's a an alignment framework of Finding that journey in your life. And there's four pillars. One is mindset. And we go in really deep the every chapter in the book is a journey chapter, a journey of some facet of your life. So the very, very first chapter is the journey of mindset. What were we taught? How were we calibrated? What was down put in our cerebral hard drives? Almost like an app on a phone. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: And that stays with us for a very, very long period of time. So, and Carol DeWick, professor over at ⁓ Sanford University, has done a lot of study and research on mindset. And she said, you know, you're either going to be a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. And I we really dissected that in the book. And I said, okay, well, there's really a bandwidth of mindset. You know, none of us are really fixed, and none of us are really growth. I actually believe there's only one time when we were extremely growth-driven, and that's when we were born. We didn't have anything to compare it to. We weren't nothing was downloaded. We were open to everything, right? So in that bandwidth, most of us are center or left closer to a fixed mindset, where we stay in our comfort cave. We don't venture out. We don't say, you know, how do I take my life and Yeah, challenge myself to go forward, challenge myself to know that there's more greatness in myself. You know, what makes an Elon Musk an Elon Musk, which has a almost a hundred percent growth mindset? When he started PayPal, he didn't look at it like going, ⁓ I I don't I there's no way I can do that. No, he looked for solutions on how to do that. He looks at failure like not regressive. But progressively speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. It's an intentional part. ⁓ speaker-0: We were taught in high school what we were taught in school. We had a we had a a a grading system, right? Failure was bad. I'm sure maybe in in grade school you you didn't do well on a test, right? How terrible did you feel? Right? Or that or the one kid that got the yay. You know, screw up the whole class curve. But you felt terrible because you got an F Well, that thought pattern was drilled into us, saying that failure was a bad thing. So what we do is we're creating more fixed mindset people through the system that we built. And finding Joy Journey goes into that to a point to say, okay, well, how do we change it? How do we go from a fixed mindset more to a growth-driven mindset? Do are we reactive to life? Are we Life led or in another case, job led, J O B led, just over broke led? Or are we joy led? Are you putting your life first to move it forward? Right? The next thing is identity. That's one of the other pillars. So you have mindset. Now you have identity. What's your branding? The book goes well into branding. Who are you? Who do you believe you are? Are you are you doubtful? Or are you confident? Are you moving forward in your life, right? So identity. Who do you look like? How do you want the world to picture you? Really important. Most of us don't even think about that. Right? We don't realize that we're all boxes of cereal on the shelf. Right. You have to look at yourself. like a product line when you go greet life. Are you Kellogg's? Are you name branded? Right? Do people like you? Or you got this generic brand over here somewhere? I always say that. We're all flavors of ice cream. We're just different flavors of ice cream, right? We're all ice cream, but we're just different flavors. Time. We go into a lot in this on the book. Time. How do you spend your time? We have a time bank every single day that we go to. We go to the ATM time bank. Automatic time machine. And we withdraw so much time every single day. Well, what's interesting about this is we spend that time. So the question in the book has how are you spending your time? Yes, you may have to have a job as you're going through this metamorphosis, this transition, which is fine. But don't go home and then turn on some mindless TV program or download a bunch of junk on your cerebral hard drive. It doesn't work. Get away from dark media. Get away from toxicity. If you're in relationships, get away from those type of relationships. It's not furthering your life, it's not furthering your purpose. So time is extremely important. We go into a lot of deep on because it all comes down to this last pillar, and that's direction. Where are you heading to? Where do you want your life to be in 20 years? And I I love this little game, transport yourself 20 years from today. Where are you? Right? If you got everything you're thinking about, that's where you're at. Transport yourself 20 years from today. Now look back on your life 20 years back. What would you change today to get to that destination? And that's what finding joy journey of you is about. It's giving us a respite in our busy life to say, is this the direction I want to go in? It's a scary question for a lot of people. And does does it take work? Yes. It takes it takes work. Is it worth it? God, you're you bet it is. speaker-1: The most important work you'll do in your life, right? Because it is the design, the creation of your life. Right. And what kind of life do you want to create design for yourself? Is it a is it a a life on autopilot where you just kind of take the subconscious things that are poured into you and you just don't think about it, or you don't ever actually really plan or or design it in a way that you would ever want, or you just kind of run on autopilot. And I think one of those critical things that needs to happen in order for somebody to even think about starting this process that we're talking about here today is unfortunately a lot of times, you know, you talked about it a lot, most people maybe wait until their 50s, 60s, 70s, right later in life to really ever think about this stuff. Or if it does happen, it's just like on the back or like on the coming right after something bad happens, right? So is there a way that people can take this kind of thing seriously? before that happens, like before something bad happens or before it's too late, like what is required? Like what has to happen for somebody to really take this work seriously to do the work that's required to to make this happen? speaker-0: One of the words we use in the book is called life straighted. Life straighted. You're so frustrated at your direction, you become life straighted in life. Unfortunately some of us get so buried because we're busy we don't we don't recognize it. But those few who go through the trash can and pick up the memo that some of us got And say to yourself, I am just sick and tired. I just cannot do this anymore. There's more to life than what I'm leading right now. The standard way of living is you go to school, go get a job, get two dogs, maybe you have a kid or two. ⁓ you have a partner, you're maybe you get to go to Disneyland once in a while. You you rack up bills on your your credit card, there's over seventeen trillion in debt on credit card debt. That's what keeps us in the grind. There comes a point in time, I think it's interesting. I think after in your thirties somewhere, where you've worked enough from maybe late teens through the tw through your twenties to say to yourself, you know, guy, I I I don't I'm not progressing. I'm I'm struggling, pain just You know, the gas bill, PGE. And there's gotta be more. But then what happens to people? I see this over and over and when I talk you know, finding joy is giving me the ability to talk to so many people. And what what happens is they they know that they're stuck, they want to get out of the rut, but they don't know what to do. They don't know what the next step is. How do I get from here to there? And unfortunately in some in part of our society, we think you just gotta go buy that lottery ticket. Right? It doesn't it doesn't happen that way. I want to tell everybody in the audience, right? You know, we we see, ⁓ he just got lucky. Or that person, well, they, you know, they they they had stuff, they were given some stuff from from their family or whatever. It doesn't matter. It still takes work. It still takes your brain power to get from here to there. So don't worry about how do I what where do I get to? Get to the first step. And that first step is I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. I've had enough. Enough is enough. I'm better than this. I want to move forward. So what I talk about in the book is self education. You don't have to go back to college. You don't have to unless that's what you want to do, but at the end of the day, reading books is the cheapest way to get educated. You know how many books Elon Musk reads in a month? About ten to twelve. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: It's amazing, but if you look at the growth mindset, that growth mindset is reading books. And in Finding Joy Journey, they have a whole list of books to start off. This is your first chance to rescue yourself from a life of work. So the very first thing is pick up, get a book, start reading, create some mentorship in your life. Beyond your friendships. Beyond your friendships. There are some great people out there who that have mentored me, right? That will change your life. speaker-1: So And your mentors don't have to be your mentors don't have to be like people that you talk to. Right? Like I read I love reading biographies, right? You can just be mentored by the world's greatest people just by reading their story and just be mentored by speaker-0: Exactly. And that's why in that's why in the book, Finding Joy, Journey of You, we have a lot of stories like that of people. People have come from struggle and they find freedom. Right? And the book is not political. All right, so understand that. But we're all different walks of life. But you know, we're all human beings. We're all people. We're all in the boat of life. We're all on playground earth. What I have learned is this we all have hope and aspirations. We don't want to be tethered our life away, and then we're sitting on our deathbed going, I wish I could have done this. I don't think one doctor's ever heard a person say, I wish I could have worked one more day in my life. Right? That just that just doesn't happen. But it does take work to get there. And finding joy gives you that pathway to get there. speaker-1: Yeah. Just something that I'm feeling compelled to share. ⁓ you talked about that idea of people on their deathbed. There's a great story ⁓ that has stuck with me for a long time. This was like one of my first experiences with like inspirational, motivational stuff. I think I watched this video for the first time when I was like twelve years old. But a part of this video was this story of a hundred people on their deathbed were asked the question, What's your biggest regret in life? And A hundred out of a hundred, not a single one of them was something that they did. A hundred out of a hundred people, it was something that they didn't do. So one of those biggest things that you didn't do, I would imagine, is being like a big regret, would be ⁓ taking the time to think about what you want, right? What do you want out of life? Is what is your current situation something that you're happy with? Like you can get a pretty good beat on, okay, if I keep doing the same thing that I'm doing now, where is this gonna lead me? And if you're not happy with what that end outcome looks like, what that picture looks like if you keep playing out the current path that you're on, it's on you to to change it, right? Like is anybody gonna come change it for you? I don't think so. So it starts with that idea, like you I love how you laid it out in your book, right? Mindset, identity, time and ⁓ direction. Right. It starts with that mindset and that understanding of extreme ownership, right? Like there's nobody coming to change this for me. Every outcome in my life is my responsibility. It's my fault. Right. So if you want to make a change, it's on you. You're the one that has to do so. And then the second order effect, right? Your second pillar, which I think is also brilliant. Okay, it starts that idea, that mindset. And then okay, you identify, okay, I need to change. I'm gonna make this shift. It's on me. Then it comes down to the only way to make a change is make a change in how you're spending your time. Right. So how are you spending your time? Are you gonna come home after your job? You're gonna watch TV? Which is fine, right? There's nothing against watching TV, but like you have to carve out if you want to make a change, you have to make a change in how you're spending your time because your time's the only thing that you have. Your time is your action, and your action is the only thing that's gonna make a change in the direction that you're going. But yeah, again, a lot of amazing stuff that you shared shared there. I think you kind of hinted at the idea of There's probably a lot of people listening at this who understand what we're talking about. They hear a calling for what we're talking about, but they just like don't know what they should do, where they should start. And you talked about the idea of like, okay, making a shift in your in your growth mindset, you know, reading a book. Is that where you recommend? Like for somebody who's listening who wants to make this shift, who wants to make this change, where do you think they should start? Like where how do you start on this path? speaker-0: Well yeah. Think about friendships. This is something that we all can to really take a look at. And ⁓ Jim Rome said that you are the sum of the five people you associate with. And show me your friends and I'll show you your future. Now this may be the hardest thing in the world, but if your friends are not serving you. Then you need to find some new friends. You know, if the level of toxicity is there, you'll never get out of where you're at with hanging with the same friends you have. That may sound hard or cruel or whatever. You don't have to completely excommunicate them. But at the if they're very toxic to you, yes, do. But at the end of the day, those friends are not moving you forward. If those friends are right next door to your comfort cave, And they got their own comfort cave? Well, where do you think you're gonna be? You're gonna stay in the cave. You need to have people withdraw yourself out from that, those limiting beliefs you have. The very first thing is to really assess who your friendships are. Because that's where you're spending a good part of your time. Are there's are they serving you? Are they building you up? Are they Are they doing something that you go, wow, I really admire that. I really respect that, right? Also I say to people, don't be the smartest person in the room. Get around other people that are far smarter than you are. It's okay. You'll gravitate upwards. It works every single time. speaker-1: I think both those ideas, whether it's, you know, the content you're consuming or the people that you're around, is just like that's going to feed, you know, the mindset. Obviously mindset's a very big buzzword, but like who you're around, what you see in the people that you're around, right? The habits that they have. Are they are they people that are working out and, you know, taking care of themselves and are happy and are kind of working hard or like, you know, are the people that are living a life that they have chosen for themselves? Or are they people who are just kind of on autopilot, can't wait till five PM, come home, you know, just bet on sports, watch TV, you know, drink on the weekends, you know, do this stuff. If that's what you're seeing, like that's what you're gonna do. Right. That's just the example, like we're, you know, we naturally mirror the things that we see, right? It's just like a part of our psychology and who we are as human beings. Like we're naturally just going to want to like kind of blend in and be like the people that we spend the time with. And The same thing goes for just reading books. Like what is the content that you're consuming pouring into your your computer, right? I forget what you called it, you your c cerebral hard drive. Yeah, your cerebral hard drive, right? So both those two things kind of are serving the same purpose of just kind of transforming who you are as a person, which that transformation is going to be what's required and also is what's going to set you up and enable you to go and achieve whatever it is that you decide you want to achieve. But you have to change who you are as a person. Because like what got you here isn't going to get you there, right? You're going to need to make a change in who you are. And the two easiest ways to do that is to change what you consume and to change the people that you're around. Cause that's what makes you who you are. speaker-0: book like Finding Joy Journey Review, it's a great and I don't like to put it in this classification, but it's a really great climber for your journey forward. And I say go out there and get a bunch of you know, read one book after another. If you just read twelve pages a day, is that gonna kill you? But when you t tot up those twelve pages a day, that winds up to like almost twelve, thirteen, fifteen books a year. Where would you be if you just took that one that one habit in a year from now? Where would most people be? I'll tell you right now, their friendships would definitely change. Because their friendships aren't thinking the same way as what they're downloading their to their to their brains. But and I've read most of ⁓ the books out there, the John Maxwell's and the Tony Robbins and the Grant Cardones and so forth. Great Great books. And I mean promote ⁓ in finding joy. But sometimes you can you can say, okay, gosh, I'm I'm just gonna jump in the pool right now in the deep end and get a John Maxwell book. John Maxwell books are very ⁓ sometimes are very, very deep. And they're extremely good. But they have a lot of things to do in them that I think as us as human beings who were trained, it's hard for us to go do that. Because those those are not our habits. Finding Joy Journey of You gives us simple steps to take to start changing that mindset so that you can get into higher level reading. It's a four hundred page book, so it's not it's not a walk in the park. speaker-1: It's Mm-hmm. I think that idea, you know, I was 19 or 20 years old when like the whole self-help bug kind of caught me. ⁓ and I just dove in and just started reading as many books as I could. But there's something to be said about, yeah, okay, sure, you can just keep consuming the books, keep reading the books and like getting all this great information and great quotes that can kind of stick with you and, you know, you'll get a lot of motivation just from reading a book. But Something that I've started doing in the last few years is like rereading books, like going back through and just rereading the same books over and over and over again. And I find like I get more value from that. Cause like at the end of the day, a lot of, especially in like kind of the self help personal development genre, a lot of the books say more or less the same thing. ⁓ so you just kind of kind of find like a few books that you've that really resonate with you. Like Finding Joy, go obviously we'll have the link in the description. Go get one go get that book. Like it sounds like it's very story driven. I think the framework makes a lot of sense. Like make finding joy be one of those books for you. But like for me, this book right here is one that I read last year. Early this year is when I finished it for the first time. I'm going back through it for the third time, but a return to love by Marion Williamson is one of those books for me. And it's just like It feels like every single time I go through this, like a something new kind of hits me and the but the the ideas just sink more deeply in. But then to kind of get to the punchline of what I was saying too, it's just like reading a book will only get you so far. Like obviously just the consumption of that information will change you. But at some point you need to put the the rubber needs to meet the road and you need to start taking action. Right. Like you need to do the things that the books tell you to do, which is, you know, something that I struggled with my whole life. Right. Like I said, I've never had a hard time consuming books, reading, highlighting, bending page corners, taking notes, all that good stuff. But when it came time to actually do the work that the books told me to do, I would struggle. So That's actually led me to working out what I'm working on now, which is trying to help make books more effective for both the reader and the author. But anyways, just wanted to make that point that you know, rereading and doing the work. speaker-0: Yeah, you're exactly right. And that's why we have a workbook. The Finding Joy Journey of Youth. So if you go on to the the book's website, ⁓ it's got a beautiful website at ⁓ www.findingjoy.us. because it is a journey. We we take it together. ⁓ we have a great website. We're building a community of joy-driven people, joy-led people. ⁓ and on there you can get your free workbook. It is a serious workbook. It's about eighty pages. And it goes it's compliments the book itself, but it's it takes some work to get through it. If you get through it, ⁓ you can show us that you've gone through the book, the workbook and got it all done and so forth. We will send you a finding joy diploma. Love it. Of life. Yeah, so some fun stuff. I mean, we we you know, just like you, Ian and myself. And I really applaud you for your efforts. I've listened to your podcasts and so forth. What great value you give to people. So besides reading books, audience, you're you're in the right place, you're in the right room. You know, listen to podcasts like Ian's ⁓ podcasts and so forth. That downloads great information. And I really applaud you for your effort. Because what you're doing is what finding joy is about. It's expanding your basis to give value to others. And I really, really appreciate being here today. But again, everybody go out and go to findingjoy.us, get your free workbook, and ⁓ you finish that, we'll get you a diploma and join our community. speaker-1: ⁓ Very cool. Yeah. So we'll have the link to that in the description of this episode. And just one final thing before we get to the final question. I think a lot of the questions that I asked you today was, you know, could have just been answered by, you know, go to the book, just the workbook, right? Like so you have taken what is a question we all ask of why are we here? What is my purpose? How can I live a life more aligned with my purpose? And it is a very murky kind of hard road to walk without a lot of clear direction. But it sounds like the work that you've done here with your book, Finding Joy, and the companion workbook helps provide some structure to this process. Right. And I think it is again the most important question that anybody can find the answer to. The happiest people in that I've ever met in my life are the people that love what they do and are truly living in alignment with their purpose. And everything else in life just comes naturally to that, right? It's easier to when you're fully engaged and aligned like with what you're doing, it's easy to work hard. It's easy to make a lot of money. It's easy to just be a you're just gonna be a happier person in every th every arena of your life. And if that's something that you're looking for, you've done the work of creating structure to that process, which has historically been a very difficult and murky and hard process to to follow. So I love that. I'm excited to check it out. Ted, thank you again so much for the time. My final question for you is a recurring question that I ask every guest. Ted, if you had a giant billboard that everyone in the world could see for ten seconds, what would it say and why? speaker-0: It would say value. Because everything that we do is centered around value, our time, our identity, our mindset. And it may sound nebulous to some extent, but it's a really deep word, especially in the context of this conversation. Most of us don't respect the value we have. ⁓ I don't wanna digress on this, but you look at our lives and you look at where we're at in the cosmos and the book actually starts off this way. You are so unique. In the whole universe, there's only one of you. That's it. There's only one of you. And it's it's in it's vast when you start thinking about it. And the book kind of explains it in a really interesting way. And I look at that and go, why wouldn't you want to create more value for for yourself when you realize how unique you are? speaker-1: Uh-huh. speaker-0: It's it's incredible. When you start thinking about that in the terms of where we're at in the universe and who we are, you as a human being, and you're the only one that's of you. I I'll leave you with this, and that's what Les Brown would say is we all have greatness inside us. It's our purpose to find that greatness, to give it to others. speaker-1: Mm. that. We all have greatness inside us and it's our purpose to find that and give it to others. That's amazing. That's powerful. We'll we'll put a second billboard behind that, that first one. That says that's great. I love it. Ted, thank you so much for the time. speaker-0: Cat, it's been a pleasure. I I will follow you for sure. I love your podcast and I love what you're doing. So thank speaker-1: Would love to have you back on Absolutely. Thank you for listening. The main thing I'm taking away from my conversation with Ted might sound obvious, but it's a deeper realization that my life is only going to change when how I spend my time changes. I can tell myself that I want a different life or a better business, but that does not mean anything if the days that I live still look exactly the same. Or my calendar is going to dictate and reinforce whatever direction I'm already moving in. speaker-0: Bet. You take care. speaker-1: Unless I'm intentional about carving out time to make those changes or I'm intentional about changing how it's set up. Right? The books I read, the people I spend time with and the work I give my attention to all shape what comes next. I haven't solved this idea perfectly, but I can see that the clearest place for me to look for change in my life is how I'm spending my time right now. If you want to get connected with Ted, you can find his book, Finding Joy, his website, and his free companion workbook linked in the description of this episode. And if you're an author, course creator, coach, or consultant, and you want to make it easier for your clients to get results, download the free program execution system toolkit in the description. It shows you how to install what I call execution infrastructure so clients actually follow through and get results. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you in the next one.