Tell me about your vision. Well, I think for me, my vision is that I look to help as many people
as I can to reach what I call Freedom Day. So I typically don't use the term retirement
anymore. I use the term Freedom Day, which basically my definition of Freedom Day is
the first day that you wake up, you have enough income, assets, and freedom to be able or time
to be able to not get up and go to work that day. So you have a work optional lifestyle.
You are focused around doing what you want to do instead of what you have to do. And I look at it
as taking, it's more than just being a passenger in life. It's teaching people to not only find
financial freedom, find the time freedom that they want, but it's also to have a freedom of purpose
in life. Because I think a lot of us just kind of amble around through life and it kind of,
we're passive about it, we're in the passenger seat. And I encourage people to be active,
become the driver of the car and be active and take an active role in their life. Now,
we do that through a bucket list. So one of the first things I teach people is
build a bucket list. And most people wait until they're way older to do that. I want people
as early as possible to have that bucket list because it serves as a reward system along the way.
Wow. There's a lot you shared in there. And there's a lot of avenues I can take this.
But let's go on to the first thing. The page of your Freedom Day Method, it says, and the title of
the book is Overcoming the Retirement Trap. That's a very intriguing title. Why choose
it as the retirement trap? Well, I think there are several things. But the biggest one is,
when people think of retirement, and the reason I stopped using the term retirement, I use it in
a part of my business, but in the part of my business that I focus on helping people that are,
let's call them mid-career. They've gotten started, they're what I call a cubicle warrior,
they get up every day, they go to an office, sit in a cubicle and die just a little bit every day.
What I'm trying to encourage them to do is to think outside of the box, because what we've
been taught and what the industrial mindset was, was, okay, you went to work for a company when you
were 20, you worked until you were 65, and then you retired and you got to go have fun. Well,
not everybody wants that. And I noticed that difference in the way that people think about
retirement. And I noticed that difference in my clients throughout the 2000s period.
Working with older clients, a lot of them had this kind of mindset of, oh God, I didn't save enough,
I had kids, and we had all kinds of financial difficulties at the beginning, so I didn't save
much, so I'm just going to have to work forever. So that was one mindset. The other mindset was a
lot of my younger clients that kind of grew up in what I call the post four-hour workweek world.
That, for me, was the book that made me change my mindset. And I think a lot of younger people
grew up after that time period where it was acceptable to say, you know what, I don't want
to work for, even if I don't work for one company, I don't want to just work for 40, 45 years and then
start to live my life. They became a generation of people that said, you know what, I can do things
online, I can do things remotely, I'm going to go and live in Thailand for a year and work there
and have all these amazing experiences, live in a different country. So what I'm trying to do is
get people that are trapped in what I call the retirement trap. I'm going to have to work for
40 years, my life sucks, it's just not going to get any better. I have to do this and change their
mindset to say, you know what, now you can figure out ways, even if you're working in that cubicle,
you can figure out ways, there's lots of time available to you to go out there and create
other sources of income, to start to invest in things that will generate an income stream for
you. Maybe it's real estate, maybe it's the stock market. But the main thing is starting to get out
of that mindset of, I have to work for a period of time and start to think about, I have to work for
a certain amount of income, generate a certain amount of income that will support my life.
And then when I've done that, the day that that happens, there's enough income coming in
to support my life, not I make $150,000 a year, but I spend 40,000. I really only have to make 40,
or maybe let's say 60, just for a little bit of a wiggle room. That's all I have to make to actually
get to my freedom day. And that freedom day might be, hey, I'm done, I'm out of here, I'm going to
go do those things I want to do, or it may be, I don't like my job, I'm going to do it, but I'm
going to be the best employee ever because I have no financial stress at all. That's definitely a
different way of looking at it from an employee perspective and an entrepreneur perspective and
freedom perspective. I see three sides to this equation, and we can talk about that later. But
let's go to the second thing. Yes. You mentioned the bucket list. Yes. Why do you, why would you
say create a bucket list early in your career instead of for later? Well, because it gives you,
when you create a bucket list, and if you do a bucket list correctly, that bucket list is a list
full of things that you literally have to do before you die. And the ability to pack that into
certain things. The whole story behind the retirement trap is my story. I go through that
whole story of how I got to my freedom day. And really the last part, and it was funny because
it was after everything had kind of come together, I had sold my business to my business partner,
I was in the process of it. I went to a retreat, or it was actually a conference, and I kind of
treated it like a retreat. And I learned about bucket lists because there was a guy there that
spoke on it. He gave me, you know, we got a book, a bucket list book. And that was the aha moment
for me that I went, this is why people don't succeed a lot of times. Because think of it,
the traditional, you know, once again, you get to the retirement trap, the retirement trap is, oh,
well, I have to keep saving, you know, millions of dollars I've got to save. And I'm starting off,
and I've got $20,000. Well, that's not very motivating. It's a long slog to get to that.
And you can't save your way there. You're going to have to find ways to get yourself there in
other ways. So the bucket list for me, I realized, wow, we need to shift that, you know, for me,
it was on the backside of all this stuff. We needed to shift that way to the front end of what
we call the freedom day method. Because what it does is it not only says, okay, this is a whole
bunch of things that we're going to do after we reach freedom day. It's here's a whole series of
things that we want to do even before we get there. And sometimes it's relatively inexpensive. And
I'll give you the best example I can. When I wrote my first bucket list, if it's a plane, train,
automobile or boat, I'm in. I love everything that has a motor and is not an electric car.
And when I was sitting there and I was putting my bucket list together, I came up and started
categorizing things and realized that I had 12 experiences that involve planes, trains, automobiles,
boats. Okay, so I was like, man, this is awesome. There's 12 of these. And so in 2023, that was my
first year of freedom after I sold my business, I said, you know what, every month I want to do
one of these experiences for 12 months. And so I did this whole thing where, you know, one of one
or one of them was that I wanted to drive a Lamborghini, never wanted to own a Lamborghini,
but I wanted to drive one. So I drove one at the F1 track here in Austin. And I went and flew on a
World War II bomber that I wanted to do forever. I went and rode on an amazing train that there's
only one of them that exists in the world and got to ride up this thing. And so it was a whole series
of those types of experiences, combining these with trips that we made, you know, my wife and I made
to England where I got to drive on an F1 track in England and drove the James Bond car, you know,
all those types of things. But what I came up with the reality was every one of those experiences
every one of those experiences cost right about 500 bucks. And so when I decided when I started
off the year, I said, well, I'm not going to save up $7,500 or take $7,500. If I'm going to do this,
I'm going to live my I'm going to live what I say in the books and all the things I talked about on
my podcast. So I said, you know what, 500 bucks, what can I do to generate $500? And I just happened
to own a rental property at the time that I was getting ready to sell. And I turned around and I
heard something on a podcast talking about working with traveling nurses. And so we ended up converting
this property we had into a midterm rental, where we work exclusively with traveling nurses. And if
you know anything, if anybody knows anything about traveling nurses, they get paid a ton of money,
they get paid a stipend to travel and they you know, basically, they get a tax free stipend for
their, you know, their home or hotel or wherever they're staying, along with food and everything
else. And they work on 13 week contracts. So basically, we have four turns per year.
Nurses are the nicest human beings on the planet. They never complained. The only thing they complain
about is if it's not safe, and it's loud, because they tend not to work normal hours. So we did that
that started to generate, you know, it went from maybe $100 extra cash flow per month to about
$700 cash flow per month extra because we could ask more because it was a furnished property.
And it generated the 500 bucks a month that I needed to go do all the things that I wanted to
do. So that's just one of the steps of where you can use a bucket list today and do the things on
your bucket list, but also retrain your brain to start to think about not how can I afford this,
but what can I do to afford this? Wow. To me, Jeff, it is very clear, the way you're talking
about the mindset, but to some of the audience listening, there might not be as clear because
they are in that mindset of the one track mind. It's hard for you to see where you can't see.
You can't see your own blind spots because that's your own blind spot. And I encourage people to
think about this mindset instead of looking at how can I, instead of looking at, hey, I can't do
this, you should be looking at what can I do to do certain things. And insert, yep, insert whatever.
If you want to retire at 60, what can I do to retire at 60? If you want to make $10,000 extra
a month, what can I do to make $10,000 a month extra or $2,000, whatever is your starting point?
And it could be as small as $100 a day or $100 a month. It could be $100 an extra month and in
passive income, Jeff, gives you a starting point and you can just duplicate it 10 more times
and get $2,000. I do these big projects every year. So people that follow me on social media
and watch my website and stuff like that, they'll see me do these big projects. And it's something
what most people would consider astronomical. This year's project was I wanted to publish 24
books this year and not just 24 piles of garbage, but 24 really good books for two purposes. One,
I wanted to build up my asset pool of passive income from publishing. And so I established my
publishing company or kind of tweaked my publishing company over to publishing books and I spent money
and time to learn how can I write as fast as I possibly can really well. And I just literally,
I was so happy because right before I got on with you, I just finished the type setting and
everything for my sixth book for the year. So, and I know that there's another 14 right behind that,
right behind that, that are in various stages of being complete at this point. And it can be done.
It's not hard. I mean, for me, I have a little bit more time than your average person because
I sold my business, so this is my job, but it is something that it can be done. And for me,
it's building this nice little pile of passive income on Amazon. It's pieces of the pie that
I'll be using to market my services in the retirement space. So there's all these kind
of little keystones that I'll use these books for, especially the early ones, to be able to
build my other businesses as a result of it.
Well, thank you for sharing that, Jeff. I have one more question for you before I wrap up today's segment.
I want to make it a good one.
There are no dumb questions, just dumb answers, so be prepared.
You're good. And you can take time to answer this. I can't find the question. Where is the question?
Yeah, right here. Jeff, to you, what defines a great leader?
Well, I think for me, a great leader is someone who is a servant of the people that work for him.
So one, you have to model good behavior. So if you expect your people to work hard,
you better work harder than they do. There's too many leaders that get to the point where it's like,
oh, okay, well, now I have a team of people. I can just sit back. No, you still need to be out in
front, always. You lead from the front. I spent five years of my life in the military,
leading teams, and you always lead from the front. But the most important thing, and I learned this
as a sergeant, I saw this from lieutenants, colonels, and generals, the troops eat first.
So whatever we have to do to take care of your team first before you take care of yourself. And
I think being a leader is, once again, modeling the right behaviors. So what do I do as a leader?
Well, I absorb information. First off, I read multiple books a day. I read a couple books a day.
I once again developed the skill where I could read a book insanely fast and grasp all the concepts
because I gather that information and then I disseminate it out. Right now, I don't really
have a team that I lead, but I look at it as the people that are on my social media,
the people that read my books, all that. My job is to get all this information, gather it together,
pull out the good parts of that, and then really focus it towards who they are. And it's always
about not selling them a product, but it's about helping them achieve the goals that they want to
achieve. Well, thank you for sharing that, Jeff. I can agree with that. A leader needs to be a
servant. And too many people don't realize that having teams and having even processes and
procedures in place doesn't replace you as a leadership candidate to be leading from the front.
It comes later in the day when the downfall happens, when they don't see you performing well.
They say, okay, why would I do that? You're not doing it. How would I do it? And then you start
a vicious cycle that you don't want to be part of, and then it's hard to recover from it because you
can't change who you are that fast. You cannot, not without a motive. Well, I mean, people don't
leave companies. They leave bad employers. Exactly. People don't quit because, oh, you know,
there's this great opportunity out there. They wouldn't have even known about the great
opportunity had you not failed them at some point along the way. Yep. Hey, that is so true. That is
so true. I have not thought about that before. Not even from the perspective. They do not leave
bad companies. I look at it from my own view. I mean, I was probably the most loyal employee
that ever existed. And there was a point, you know, where one of the companies that I worked for was
a very large financial firm. I figured I would be there for 30 years. I mean, I love the company.
I love the vision and the mission of the company. And somewhere around 2003 to 2005, you know,
there was a lot of stuff that changed within the company and the culture changed massively. And,
you know, I kind of came to work with the attitude, you know, they actually rent me. They don't own me
at this point, you know, and once you get that mindset, you're not coming back. And that kind
of ruined my mindset going forward. I'm, you know, I am genetically unemployable now. So I have to
work for myself. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned into Vision Pros
Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. This
is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite
people to participate in the show. And thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an
excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.