Transcript
Brad (0:00)
Hello and welcome to Choose a Fight. Today in the show we have a fun one. I have my good friend Ginger back to do a little roundup episode. We're going to talk about the benefits of travel, about connection, my significant trip to Asia that I took and I went on the Five Freedom retreat. We're going to have a voice message from our good friend and colleagues Lynne Mettler and Sean Mulaney. We're going to talk a little bit. A couple of public service announcements that I think are going to be really beneficial and some of Ginger's nonfiction books and that'll be a little, a little teaser for the future. So I think you're really going to enjoy this. And with that, welcome to Choose a Fight. Ginger, it is so good to see you.
Ginger (0:47)
Brad. It's good to see you too. I'm so excited to talk to you today. Should we go ahead and jump right in?
Brad (0:53)
Let's do it.
Ginger (0:54)
Okay, everybody. We are recording this one day after Brad sent the newsletter in which he stated that his trip to Bali changed his life. So instead of starting with, you know, how are the flights and was it worth all the points? We want to start with this question, right? Like, how was your life different, Brad?
Brad (1:12)
Okay, this might, might be. Hey, Brad, don't be so hyperbolic next time in the newsletter. I am somewhat prone to hyperbole, I think, but no, that said, it was an extraordinary trip. It really was. I think it was transformative in a lot of ways. So let's start first with I guess the concept of like a mini retirement or a red X month. I think that's ultimately where this started off and I think this is going to be. I really proved to be enduring in the terms of my day to day existence. I think. Ginger, I've talked a lot recently about how maybe I've felt a little bit of burnout. I've felt a little overwhelmed and frustrated and. And frankly, that is all on me. I think that that's one of the interesting things about life is like you live in your head 24 hours a day and everything is. You're the star of your own movie, right? Like everything essentially revolves around you because you are the one who is living with you 24 hours a day. And I think I have not taken steps back recently amidst maybe this bit of burnout to just realize how incredibly fortunate I am in so many ways, not least of which is this. Choose a fai, this amazing thing that, that I helped create and has existed now for eight plus years. And it's easy in the Day to day to get lost in oh man, I'm getting so many emails I have to respond to these things. And just the little day to day stresses as opposed to taking a step back and saying, oh my goodness, I've created something that has been downloaded 70/ million times, has literally changed hundreds of thousands of people's lives and has impacted the world in a way that I could have never fathomed in 2016 when we started this. And I think it's easy to lose sight of things like that and in your life, whoever's listening right now, like your life. It's easy for us to get bogged down in details and the day to day instead of taking a step back and take a global picture of look at how amazing my life is. And I talked about the book the Gap in the Gain that I read recently and I think this helped reframe things for me in terms of I've just been looking at that negative gap between where I am and essentially perfection, which is utterly ridiculous because nobody can ever get to perfection. Instead of looking at the gain from oh my goodness, I started this podcast with Jonathan almost eight years ago to the day from nothing. And it's turned into something truly extraordinary. I mean there's, there's a real strong argument to be made that this is one of the most positively beneficial podcast in the history of podcasts. I mean I don't think that's a stretch and believe me, I'm very self deprecating. I don't like saying nice things about myself. But I think that that is just kind of fact at this point and, and I think just to see the benefit of it has been amazing. So Ginger, that's a very long way of saying I've made my life easier. The run up to this big trip that I took, so I took a 23, 24 day trip and what that required was doing some hard things upfront to make life easier for this trip and beyond. And I definitely want to talk about this in depth in this episode because we actually have some fun things coming at choose of high in 2025 that I think is all part and parcel of this where we're going to have a lot more interaction with some of our friends and world class experts and all the listeners, all the community members can ask questions and we're going to play voicemails responses from these experts on the, on the podcast. You're going to actually see the beginning of it today in this episode. And this is just but a taste of things to come and I'm just super excited about it. But Ginger, what the upshot of that is for me is I don't feel like I have to answer everything. And I also don't feel like I just have to zip off a response just to get an email out of my inbox anymore. Now we can get a real answer. We can create an article on the website thanks to Jonathan and what he's been doing behind the scenes. We can turn them into segments for this podcast and like it's the best, all beneficial, like, positive feedback loop I could imagine. And it lowers my stress. Right? Like Jonathan's been able to help automate a bunch of the things that I have to update for credit cards and different interest rates and things like that on the website. And that's just something off my todoist. And not only is it off my to do list now, Ginger, but it's off my todoist forever. You know, that's the beautiful thing about, about automating. So all the things that I did leading up to this red X month and ultimately mini retirement are just helping me. And frankly, that perspective made a massive difference. The gap in the game. So there's that. That's kind of like the basis of how I started. But the trip itself was extraordinary. It was further proof to me that connection is everything. And I think one of the interesting things about travel is you realize how wonderful the world is, how amazingly small it can be in the best possible way. Even when you're in extremely different places from where you live or maybe where you grew up, you just realize there's a common humanity. You realize how most people, 98, 99 + percent of people are just trying to live their best lives or trying to have fun or trying to be happy or trying to just do good things. And, and you just get a perspective that I think living in your own little myopic bubble in regular life, no matter how good your regular life is, just doesn't afford you. So I had just these incredible connections and, and obviously I'm fortunate that I have this podcast, but I think, I think honestly I always thought of myself and, and this is such a bad, imprecise term, but introvert, I think that's the, the term that I always used to.
