Transcript
Paul Winkler: Paul Winkler along with Arlene Brown and Anne Sawasky. Okay. This is interesting. So New Year’s resolutions. I like to think about, okay, so what do I want the future to look like? And, and I always think about what do I want the future to become and am? And what do I see myself doing in the future? I’ve always thought that way. I think about what I would like to have life look like, and who do I want to help? And where do I want to make a difference in the world?
New Year’s Resolutions
And so, to me, thinking about the future in this way is just really, really powerful. So they had this article in the Wall Street Journal for New Year’s resolutions, never think you’re too old to become a beginner. Okay. Pandemic turned us all into beginners suddenly. And usual ways of doing things were no longer an option. Governments and businesses scrambled to develop new protocols. And we all struggled to reinvent the activities of everyday life. So we’re on zoom and, you know, you’re dealing with how to rearrange your life. So you can actually do the stuff you used to do and interact with the people they used to interact with in a different way, how to shop in a different way. How do you use technology in a different way? There are a lot of things I’ve talked about here on the show, how businesses have actually gone to using new technology much, much faster than they ever would have without a pandemic. I mean, really productivity.
I think the jumps in productivity in the future are going to be seismic. I think it’s going to be phenomenal for businesses going forward, but anyway, I’ve talked about that in the past, but this is a little different just as noteworthy as how many people in the face of such disruption decided that they wanted to learn new things. Online learning sites like Skillshare, Duolingo, Coursera saw extraordinary growth enrollments and online art and music classes spiked.
It just seems like such a fun thing to do right now. And a lot of people have been doing that kind of thing, enrollments and online art and music classes. Novice bakers flooded the help lines of King Arthur baking. People want to learn how to bake stuff and how to make things, how to cook and how to, you know, make meals from scratch or, and things that they’ve never done before. Even before the Queen’s gambit online chess lessons, flourishing. I mean, it’s just, people are like, okay, well, let’s learn how to play chess. Let’s, let’s get into gardening. My wife did a garden in the backyard. You know, she had it all set up, man, phenomenal, fresh fruits and vegetables and all that stuff.
And so what happens here? Well, we commit to these new things that we’ve never done before, and we’re getting older and it’s sometimes you talk about it. You know, he can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but the reality of it is you can. And what they talk about in this article, which I think is fascinating, is this: the writer says that she had this feeling a few years ago and she’s like taking her daughter to classes and lessons, swimming, and piano. And she started to think to herself. When’s the last time that I took up a class and when’s the last time I learned something new? I’m taking my daughter to learn all of this stuff. And when was the last time I did anything new. And she says, you know, so I decided I wanted to learn about singing and surfing. And, and she says, but being a beginner is hard because it’s really great when you’re good at something. But it’s a struggle when you’re bad at something. And you’re older and you’re like, well, I shouldn’t be good at this. I’m older. I should be able to take up this hobby and be good at it right away. And you don’t realize that that’s not the way it works. You know, when you look at little kids, they spend a lot of their time learning how to crawl.
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The Brain and Learning New Things
It’s not just something instantaneous. All of a sudden they get it. They all of a sudden learn how to walk. It’s not something instantaneous that they just get it learning how to read. I mean, they don’t start off reading, you know, war and peace. The article says a good starting point is to take up juggling. The innocuous little act of throwing balls into the air has been found in a number of neuroscience studies to alter the brain. Really? Yeah. I mean, neuroplasticity, you literally change your brain.
But anyway, juggling changes, not only the gray matter, the brain’s processing centers, but also the white matter, the networked connection and the connections that bind it all together. And then there’s a really interesting book about this.
And what happens is you’re developing these abilities and it makes it so that it is hard to unlearn a skill. And the exam sample that they gave was when you’re learning music lessons. And when let’s say you’re learning how to play piano. And one of the things that they tell you to do is play the piano so slowly that nobody even recognizes the song. And the reason is that you practice not to make mistakes, play a piece so slowly that you can’t make a mistake.
And then little by little speed it up, because what you’re doing is you’re developing those pathways in your brain. Well, and they do that with sports too, the muscle developing the muscle memory, and they did it in soccer. And what they did in soccer is they actually had people play soccer in small enclosed areas where the little movements of the soccer ball made a big difference. And because you were trying to keep the soccer ball in a very small area, you developed abilities that you didn’t in larger areas on a big field. So that’s exactly right. And so by the time you do a skill and you can do it without much thinking, then it becomes automatic.
So you try a new juggling trick. And then the process begins anew. Now, interestingly, the changes in brain density happen in older people, just as much as they do for younger people, which ought to be really encouraging for older people. When you realize that you can change your brain, I don’t care how old you are. There’s a caveat. The older you are, the harder you’re going to have to work. As Dr. Schmidt Wilkes says they do. They should not do less, but more to keep and maintain their abilities. There’s a happy twist. However, the more learning that older adults take on the faster they seem to learn, the more they become like younger adults.
I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah. Learning a skill. Even if you don’t achieve mastery, the benefits are way beyond the skill itself. In a study of people aged 60 to 90 conducted the center of vital longevity at the university of Texas subjects were split into two groups. One took classes in digital photography and quilting don’t ask me why they were both, but they did both digital photography and quilting. The other simply met and socialized the subjects who took the classes, had larger improvements in a variety of cognitive areas, ranging from episodic memory to processing speed.
So this isn’t the sole reason we do this, though. This is something that I really liked in the articles said, pointing it out. Why are other reasons that we do this? You know, you have a feeling of growth, but it’s, you know, you kind of become somebody new and you become a better conversationalist is the way I like to really, really kind of talk about this because when you’re doing something new, what do you do? You tell people about it, you talk about it. It gives you something to talk about. It gives you, Hey, let me tell you what the, Hey, what, when somebody comes up and says, Hey, Anne, what’s new in your life. You got something to say, Hey, Arlene, what’s going on?
What’s what’s happened in your life. What’s new. You got something to talk about. You know, as the old joke says, you know, how do you know if somebody is a triathlete? You know, if somebody is a triathlete, you know, how do you know if somebody has a triathlete, I look at them and go, wow, you’re ripped. You know, you’re in good shape. You ran up those stairs in record time, or, you know, whatever you would think that that would be the comeback is because they’re able to see it by looking at the person. But now people talk about their new hobbies.
Very, very interesting. So finally let me, because we got to go into a break right here and there’s just a second, but there’s also a feeling of growth and meeting new people that are like-minded. They said here in psychology, it’s called openness to experience. There are big five personality traits that extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism. I’m trying to think of what they are. It’s openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism are the five psychological concepts, but becoming a beginner, you know, it takes openness and you’ve just have to be willing to step out and do stuff like this.
But this was what I thought was really good because those of you know, that know me really well, know that much of the bumper music on the radio show is me playing drums. Right. Cause that’s one of my hobbies and I often don’t tell people about it, but I feel like this paragraph that I’m about to read to you has given me the ability to just go, okay, just go ahead and tell people you do it. Paul, check this out skills don’t necessarily need to be career related to help your career. When we expand ourselves through new activities, we’re able to see more as David Epstein notes in his book range. Why do generalists triumph in a specialized world? Hey, check this out.
Nobel laureates compared with other scientists are at least 22 times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer. So, you know, take up a skill, take up a new one. You never know what it might lead to and the growth it may lead to. Do you ever do goal setting with your clients?
SMART Goals
Do you ever do like SMART goals? Yeah. Is that, is that how you do all right. Yes. So I always have to remind my kids when they make goals, you know, make it specific, make sure it’s specific.
Arlene Brown: I do that and I have an overarching goal. It’s 5% sunflower.
Paul Winkler: Oh, I’ve, I’ve heard you say this before. Remind me of what that is. 5% sunflower.
Arlene Brown: Well, no, it’s a sunflower. The purpose of sunflowers is just to be bright, sunny, positive, and spread the seeds of happiness. And then if I can grow that every year, 5%, if I can do that.
Paul Winkler: Okay. So I got it. So then I was going to say, how’s that measurable? I got it. Now it’s 5%. All right. So you measure so, so yeah. So sometimes you measure things by saying on a scale of one to 10, like I like I’ll do this. I’ll go. Okay. So I break my life into different pieces. I go, okay. So I have a financial career that is going to be one. Education, marriage, friendships, hobbies, spiritual, and also break, break my life into lots of different pieces like that. And I’ll be very specific. Okay. So I’m going to go and rate myself on a scale of 1 to 10. How are my friendships?
Well, everybody hates me. So that’s maybe it’s a 2, You know, how’s my marriage outside. It’s a 10 out of 10. No, it’s 10 out of 10.
So hobbies, you know, if you got a lot of hobbies, then you might be an 8 or a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10. If you don’t have any hobbies, well, give yourself a 2, then you go, okay, so what about financial? You know, I’m, I’m broke, you know, so, you know, give yourself a 2 or I’m flushed. I’m doing really well. Give yourself a 10 and then you go, okay, what about career? Well, I’m retired. So in a, well, don’t put that on your don’t have career in your list of things. So what I’ll do is I do a bar graph, so I’ll do a bar graph. So each one of those things, hobbies will be a bar. And if it’s a 10, it’s maybe 5 inches tall.
And if it’s, let’s say that it’s a hobby is one or spiritual is another one. And then maybe let’s say it’s 2 or something like that. It’s going to be a really low bar. So then each bar is going to be a different height based on how I rate it 1 to 10. Now, if you can picture these bars as you go from left to right, they’re going to be different heights. If you’re living life at 5 miles per hour, this road of life that you have. Cause imagine now these bars make up a road, okay? Moving from left to right. If your life is running at five miles per hour, you can probably go on this road and it’s bumpy, but your car is going to handle it.
But if you’re trying to run life at a hundred miles per hour, your car’s going to fall apart because your life is so out of balance. So what happens is you take the areas that are low 3, 4, you know, the things that are not where you want them to be. And that’s where you’re going to focus your goals for the new year, the things that you want to see improved. So that’s what I do as well. If you don’t have it, if your hobbies area is, this is a 2 out of 10, well, you better take up a hobby because as we’ve just seen, hobbies can really impact all the other areas too. You know, they don’t just impact one area. They affect everything.
So that is typically what I’ll do is I, and I look at that and go, okay, so there are going to be specific goals. They’re going to be measurable. It’s gotta be attainable. It can’t be, it can’t be something that you can’t do, you know, so that you, that you can pull off and it’s gotta be realistic. Smart, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and T is time sensitive. So you set a time on when you are going to accomplish this thing by now, it may be that you’re going to do it by the end of the year. If it’s something that’s that big, it’s going to take you all year, then I always recommend that you break it up into pieces, you know?
So take part of it and say, well, you know, I want to have $20,000 set aside in an emergency fund, you know, or let’s use a nice, nice number, like, you know, $12,000, let’s say $12,000 set aside in an emergency fund and you got zero right now. So you go, okay, so what can I do? I put a thousand aside, per month and you’ve taken into little pieces. So you break it up. And each month you have a goal of a thousand each month. So that’s typically what I like to do is break up those goals. Do you do it any differently and or do you typically think in terms of that, or do you have goals that you said or things that you want to achieve for the year and how do you typically do break them up like that?
No, you don’t break them up like that. I’ll just have a goal that I work for. And I think that’s fine because you know, they’ll say that when you say something, not only do you work on the goal, but it works on you. Right. You know? Cause I think about things all the time and I have them in front of me, like when I decided that I wanted to go get a master’s degree. It’s it’s, it’s in front of me, I think about it all the time. Yeah. It’s always good to have a target. Yeah. So, that to me is important to think in terms of that now. So, you know, setting these types of things, that’s what I typically will spend a lot of time doing is just getting real specific and then don’t choose too many because it becomes overwhelming.
I saw this article and I thought this was really, really interesting. Something to think about. And it is one of my goals. I’m going to tell you right off the top, it is something that I am thinking about right now. And I saw an article about it and I’m gonna share it with you. It’s something that you may want to do, not just for yourself, but also also for a future generation. So I’m just going to tease you with that. Be right back after this, you’re listening to The Investor Coaching Show, Paul Winkler, along with Arlene Brown and Anne Sawaski talking about the world of money and investing, okay.
A New Year’s Resolution for Your Heirs
So a New Year’s resolution, not just for yourself, but for heirs, what to do when you inherit your parents’ stuff and you don’t want, it was the title of the article, but it made me think about what we do to prevent this problem from happening. And, you know, I thought a lot about this because it says that one of the most daunting tasks an adult child will eventually have to face is the handling of their parents’ estate and all the contents accumulated over a lifetime. No one wants to think about the future. When our parents will become ill or pass away. Sometimes these life events can take years to surface and sometimes they happen overnight.
What you need is a game plan in advance. And I think a lot about my parents, what they did, my dad used to travel all around the world and he was in the military and he had some really cool stuff. I mean, just got stuff from all around the world. And I will never forget the day that a dumpster showed up in our front yard. And he went through the house and just got rid of just a boatload of stuff. And, you know, he kept the things that were really, really old, but there were a lot of things he was looking at going, you know what? This means something to me, it’s not gonna mean anything to anybody else.
And he started just ditching things. Now my mom, she had a lot of crystal. And what happened is she bought, she got every Christmas. She had an unbelievable collection of crystal, right? And my mother didn’t get rid of this stuff. She didn’t go and just ditch this stuff. That’s that’s not what she did. She said, my mom was the queen of fun.
And what she did was phenomenal. She said, you two girls and you, Paul, what you’re going to do is when I’m gone, I want you to draw straws. And whoever gets the first, second, third, and what you’re going to do is you pick from the crystal, what pieces you want, the pieces that you want, whoever draws first and wins. The draw gets the pick first. And then the second one goes in. Third, one goes, and you just keep going in order one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. And we went through and she said, I want you guys to have fun when I’m gone. I want you to have fun doing this because she was all about fun. And that’s exactly what I and my sisters did.
And what happens with kids. So often as their catapult in this world in handling an estate under address of crisis. And it’s so much better if you plan it ahead of time, but go through your stuff, look at the things that you got in your house as a new year’s resolution. The stuff that when I look at clothes that I haven’t worn all year, I haven’t worn for two years. Or if I look at things that I have, and I’m thinking when my sons actually enjoy this, probably not. They’re going to have to get rid of it one day. Why put them through it?
Anne Sawasky: Yeah. That’s a great, great thing because some people really aren’t very good at purging. Yeah. And you can really have a huge task.
Arlene Brown: Marie Kondo thing that they say is, you know, just keep the things that spark joy. If it doesn’t spark joy, throw it away. Right.
Paul Winkler: Exactly.
Arlene Brown: That’s actually what most people have learned in the year 2020, because they had time to go through their stuff.
Paul Winkler: Oh yeah. Yeah, exactly. Investor Coaching Show. Paulwinkler.com is the website. Paulwinkler.com. Hey guys, have a great week. You can go to our website. That’s where you get the podcast and download those types of things in the videos. And in all of the things that we have there, all the handy-dandy is on the website. Have a great week.
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