← Money And Wealth With John Hope Bryant
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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Did you know Tide has been upgraded to provide an even better clean in cold water. Tide is specifically designed to fight any stain you throw at it, even in cold butter. Yep. Chocolate ice cream. Sure thing. Barbecue sauce. Tide's got you covered. You don't need to use warm water. Additionally, Tide pods let you confidently fight tough stains with new coldzyme technology. Just remember, if it's gotta be clean, it's gotta be tied. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-IHeart.
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Welcome to Money and Wealth with John Hope Bryant, a production of the Black Effect podcast network and iHeartRadio foreign. Hey, hey, it's John o' Brien. And this is the Money and Wealth Black Effect Network presented podcast series for 2026 and to kick off the year. By the way, I want to thank everybody that listened to the podcast in 2025. Marty, I'm already talking about 2026. Almost came out of my lips. 2026, 2025, it got us nominated for an NAACP Image Award. I appreciate that. It's really just to be be nominated along with the likes of former first lady Michelle Obama and others is a great compliment in the same category. So I'll take that and everything else is a bonus. But if you want to support the nomination for us, go to the website for the NAACP Image Awards and vote for the podcast. Okay, to kick off this year, I want to do something a little different. No guests today. No headlines, no debate. Instead, I want to answer a question I get more than almost any other question. John, how do you actually run your life? What is it that you do to become successful? And it's not the speeches, it's not the quotes, it's not the highlight reel. It's the systems. It's not the hype. It's the structure, the habits, the routines at home and on the road. I told you, you make money during the day. You build wealth in your sleep. It's compounding. Success is about compounding. And this is a compounding effect also. And I'm going to give you a sneak peek into my world and how I function. You like this? Let me know in the comments on the platform where you see or listen to this podcast. I read those comments. I often comment on many of them. If it's on social media platforms. I listen to you, and I'm willing to do more of this if it's helpful. Success is really misunderstood. Only in the dictionary does the word success come before the word work, because it's alphabetical. Here's what I've learned over time. Success is not about motivation. It's about infrastructure. If your life has no structure, your dreams don't stand a chance. I'll repeat that. If your life has no structure, your dreams don't stand a chance. The late Dr. Dorothy Height, civil rights icon, the only black woman to own a building on Pennsylvania Avenue through the National Council of Negro Women. I believe my friend Oprah Winfrey actually paid off their mortgage, if I'm not mistaken, because she respected Dorothy Heights so much. But she once said to me, john, I like you because you're a dreamer with a shovel in your. A dreamer with a shovel in your hand. So it's about not just having the dream, not just having that dream, but having the structure to execute on that dream. Again, if your life has no structure, your dreams don't stand a chance. So today, I'm pulling the curtain back just a little bit. Not to impress you, but to demystify success, which is I try to do repeatedly on this podcast. Because if my life works, it's not magic, it's designed. Let's get into this. The philosophy, the core philosophy. People romanticize discipline. They think successful. People wake up inspired every morning, energized, focused, locked in. That's not reality. I don't rely on motivation. I rely on systems. People get up, edgy, cranky, irritable, needing their coffee out too late the night before. Not me. Not typically. Clubs don't pay. Hanging out doesn't pay. Hanging out with a bunch of folks, getting drunk and high and whatever it is they're doing, talking about somebody else's business. None of that stuff pays dividends on me. You see me at a club, know that I probably own it, or I have a stake in it, or I'm meeting with somebody who I'm doing business with, who's in the entertainment business. There's some purpose, I'm there. But anyway, people have lots of reasons why they may not get up in the morning feeling motivated. And they said maybe they might just be tired, right? Worn out. And so you can't rely on vibe and energy and, you know, motivation alone. I'll tell you something, and this is why I continue to tell people to become reasonably. The goal should be to become reasonably comfortable in their own skin. If you ask me what my silver bullet is, it's not anything obvious. It's that I am reasonably comfortable in my own skin. That is like number one. So joy comes from the inside. Happiness affects you from the outside. You can be happy and joyful. You can be, well, you can be joyful and happy and joyful and unhappy. But if you are joyful, you'll never be unjoyful. Where you can be happy and not be joyful. And you will. One thing I guarantee you is one day you'll be unhappy. So you just really have to get that core right. And that's your first system, is your inner system. Motivation is emotional and emotions are inconsistent. I've said repeatedly, if you make an emotional decision, it's going to be a bad one. Systems don't care how you feel. They carry you on the days when you're tired, when you're distracted, when you're overwhelmed, or just that life hits you hard. Here's the line that governs everything I do. If something matters, it needs a system. And in my systems, everything has a place. I'll get into this in a minute. So your health needs a system. Your finances needs a system. Your thinking needs a system. Your leadership needs a system. Your relationships, I call it relationship capital needs a system. If it lives only in your head, it's fragile, that means also there's noise in your head. That's a lot of stuff to try to keep together, to keep organized. If you're keeping it all in your head or even on little sticky notes all over the place, that's like chaos, right? Just waiting to happen. You've got to get things organized in your life so that you're running it. Your to do's not or your to do list in your head's not running you, you're running it. So let's now get right into the JHB Achievement Formula. Let me give you the framework that quietly runs my life and I'm gonna if you as on the back end of posting this, publishing this episode, if you go to Bryant Journal on my Brian Group Ventures website, you'll see an article about this piece and you'll see a couple formulas I'm going to post there that amplify what I'm talking about here so you can see it visually. And I'll also do some social media posts and I'll put those formulas, a couple of the formulas there. But my primary formula, the JHB Achievement formula, goes like this and it's like a mind map which I'll get Into okay. And it, this is a, it's a circular vision, not a linear vision. Right? Vision, mission, strategy, plan, execution, tactics, to do's to dones. Then I say assessment, reevaluation, readjustment. And then I do a software upgrade at the end of the day based on what happened that day. So I'm gonna repeat that again. This is a success formula. I'm gonna put it in places where you can see it visually, most notably in my Bryant journal. Go there to get a copy of this, print it out, put it on your wall, are adapted to yourself. And how you're going to use this in your own life starts with vision. Where are you going? The Bible says where there is no vision, the people perish. Right? Then mission. Why are you going there? There's a lot of folks going a lot of places, they have no business, right? Just wasting time trying to impress somebody you really don't want to be like just wasting the only real asset you've got, which is your time. Strategy. I love this. How do you intend to win? Right. Strategy speaks to structure. And a lot of businesses fail and ventures fail, not because the product is bad, the product may be excellent, the business actually might be decent, but the structure is all screwed up. And strategy and structure sort of go hand in hand. The plan, what, what's that strategy look like on paper? And the plan is what you're going to execute, which has come next. So this is really important to translate Vision, mission, strategy, plan. Right? If it's not written down, it's not real. Right. What's that strategy look like on paper? Then execution, putting it into motion. PhDs are good, PhD are even better. Right. Then tactics, the specific moves. Right? The specific moves around what you're doing. And I would encourage you as fast as you can, delegate things that you don't have to do yourself. For two decades, people around me criticized me for paying for. I had started a little organization, have a great vision. And this was in South Central la I'm thinking about now. It was the New Leaders Organization, Young Black Professionals, another organization. And I'd hire an executive director part time and I'd pay them money I really didn't have. And they're like, John, why are you paying that money? So I can free myself, right? To do things that person can't do, that only I can do. Right? And I believed in myself. I backed myself enough to believe that I could go get some serious things done. But I needed the freedom to be able to do it. I needed the time, the head space to be able to do it. But I need these other things done. So I wanted to hire team leaders who could help me execute on the pieces, the tactical pieces that really didn't need my attention. Quantitative versus qualitative or qualitative, my part versus quantitative, their part. And now I have, you know, 400 employees that are helping me lift what I tell you again. You make money during the day, you build wealth in your sleep. Compounding, right? You're starting to get it. All these things work together. So the tactics are the specific moves, the to dos, that should be obvious, right? And then the to dones. What did you get done? Right? It doesn't matter if you have a to do list if it keeps moving every day or every week and you never get anything to done. You want to get some things to done so you can move, you can grow up, as my T shirt says. My T shirt today says grow up. That's an operation hope from the operation store. By the way, it's ordered a whole bunch of stuff in the operational store. It's pretty cool. So you want to get things done. So here's where most people stop, right? If they get this far, it's amazing. But then they sort of stop here and they don't realize that there's a couple more steps after done comes assessment. You want to assess, what did you get done? What was the quality of that thing, right? Then you want to readjust. You want a readjustment based on the assessment and be in this being an honest assessment. To make a mistake doesn't make you a mistake, right? To screw up does not make you a screw up. There's nothing wrong with saying I'm suboptimal. Today I didn't, I, I didn't perform as well as I did. I, I, I messed up, I tripped and fall. In fact, you cannot even grow except through legitimate suffering. So success and, and you know, failure to me is just an outcome to experiment. It's a, it's, you know, if, if you, if you try something a thousand times and you fail 999 times, but then you won. Nobody remembers the failures, right? Success has a thousand mothers and failure as a bastard child, just keep pushing. As my friend Tony Rush would say, if you don't stop or you don't quit, you can't fail, right? So you've got to constantly be reassessing like a software upgrade on your phone. You know, you get that iPhone, it does not come out perfect, right? I got a 17 Pro now. I love it. But you know, within two weeks of that phone coming out. Here is Apple coming to me with a 17.1 software upgrade. I think we're up to 18.9 now, and the phone's been out for about a year because they keep finding things that they need to fix. They keep assessing and readjusting. That's what I want you to do. Then I want you to give yourself a software upgrade, right? This is what I really want you to focus on is giving yourself a real software upgrade on your life daily. Start with annually, right? Stop doing stupid stuff and start doing smart stuff, right? And then you want to get it down to maybe monthly. Try not to put any pressure, too much pressure on you, right? And then I want you to. I want you to do it weekly. And at some point, I do want you to get it down to daily. I make adjustments now, literally in real time in my life, constant software upgrades. I want to wake up tomorrow better than I was when I went to bed yesterday or last night. And then you're right back on track with vision. A new vision. Vision 1.2. Vision 1.6. Vision 1.9, right? Starting to get it. That loop is everything it means. Failure is feedback, not shame. Adjustment is discipline, not weakness. Growth is expected, not accidental. My life works because it's designed to evolve. That's the infrastructure. There's nothing like my American Express Platinum card. I love that I can earn hotel credits when I travel. I can also earn resi credits, so you know, I'm hitting the restaurants everyone's talking about.
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Plus, with the digital entertainment credit, I'm.
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Even more excited to catch my favorite shows. All in all, I can access over.
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$3,500 in annual value with benefits and eligible purchases across travel, entertainment and more. Learn more@americanexpress.com Explore Platinum Enrollment Requirements monthly.
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And other limits in terms apply.
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Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Let us show you@iheartadvertising.com that's iheartadvertising.com.
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Energy before time. I manage my energy because time without energy is useless. If I'm exhausted, mentally cluttered, or emotionally drained, it doesn't matter how open my calendar is. I Won't perform well. So I protect my sleep at least six hours a night. No matter where I am in the world, no matter what I'm doing, I get six hours a night of sleep. My mental clarity, this is really important. That's why I say you cannot have a lot a bunch of noise going on in your life. You need to get the noise out of your head. You need clarity, Emotional stability. If you have a surviving mindset, if you're in a surviving state of mind, then your life is ready, fire, aim right. And that's not going to work long term. The clutter and the noise in your head is not going to work long term. So that's why I forget which book it was. It was the memo or up from nothing. I speak about this specifically and try to get you to go from a surviving mindset to a thriving mindset to a winning and a building mindset. So. I protect these things not perfectly, but intentionally. There is no perfect. A saint is a sinner. That got up. What I want you to do is the very best you can. Burnout isn't a badge of honor. It's a warning sign that the systems are missing. I want you to work smarter, not just harder. Even though hustle and hard work are not to be underrated, when I didn't have any money in my life, I had to have hustle on hustle, creating more hustle that compounded on itself. That's another podcast for another time. Thinking and capture. Most people don't lack intelligence, they lack capture. I hope you're writing this stuff down. Ideas are fragile people. They don't arrive politely when you're sitting at a desk. They show up while walking, while traveling between meetings, in quiet moments. When you get up to the middle of the night to go to the restroom, right when you're talking to your kids, just there you go, right? So I never trust my memory. Haven't you have this great idea about something? You say, oh, I'll write that down later. If you don't write it down, it's not real. Please remember that. Please write it down. Write that down. If you don't write it down, it's not real. You had some great brilliant thoughts and then later on you went to go write it down and you're like, where did it go? Exactly my point. It went away because it wasn't real. You didn't write it down. It's just fluid, right? So you never trust your memory. You trust your systems. If I have an idea that is worth having, it's Worth saving immediately. So I have voice notes. There's voice note on your phone. It's a voice note app on your phone. Most people don't even know that. I used to use that. I don't use that anymore, but that's where I started. Written notes. I'll tell you the tools that I use in a minute. Written notes for those who don't use technology. You write things down, that's fine. Or maybe if you use an iPad and iPad pen, then do that, right? Digital capture. We all know what that means, right? Your phone, your iPad, whatever digital tool you're using. Judgment comes later. People just get it written down. Editing comes later. Just get it written down. It could be messy as heck. Could have typos, could have spelling errors. It doesn't matter, just you talking to you. Just get it written down. All right? Respect the idea first, right? Entire books, speeches and initiatives have started this way. Nation building, business building, empire building have started this way. With the power of a powerful idea that's been written down and then and later on refined and structured. The JHB arch tools inside a system. Once you have a framework, you now need tools, right? But tools only work inside architecture. I think of my tools as an arc. Every piece has a role. Remove one and the structure weakens. So let me tell you about what just happened in the midst of this podcast taping to give you a sense of my tools. I don't use different kinds of manufacturers. If you like PCs, that's great, then use PCs. I use Apple products. They don't glitch, they don't, they don't crash. I used to. I got PTSD from computers crashing on me back in the day. You write be all into, something crashes and it goes away. And I'm sure that doesn't happen anymore. I'm sure this gotten much more efficient and technologically, you know, elegant. But I just like Apple products myself. And I'm not, you know, have no business relationship with Apple. I'm just telling you how what I do and what happened in the middle of this taping is my primary device that I was using for my recording, I didn't have it hooked up to a power unit and I had been messing around for longer than I expected. Well, the power died. That's okay. My iPad, which was my secondary unit, and I have a third, actually four pieces of tech here in front of me. It's all cloud based, right? It's all on a cloud system. It's all real time sync. So in real time, I just switched without you even knowing. I'm letting you know. Without you even knowing. I switched to my iPad Pro, which, and I get, I get. Make sure I get the best tech, the highest level of, of I can afford it now, can afford it back in the day, but maybe you could afford this if you weren't, you know, out at the mall or partying or whatever, right? What do you spend, your money? I'm not, I'm not judging you, I'm just saying. This was where I decided to invest my cash is in technology and systems to run my life. Because I do the work of several people through technology. I get the work done of several people because I leverage the power of technology. Okay, back to this. The JHB arc. So I think of my tools as an arc. Every piece has a role. Remove one and the structure weakens. Right? This is the JHB ARC again. I'm going to put these graphs out so you can capture them and use them yourself. Some tools help me capture ideas. Some tools help me plan. Some help me execute. Some help me help my teams communicate. Some help manage scale and relationships. The names of the tools matter less than their function. Now, that said, let me tell you the tools, some of the tools I use in order to capture ideas, and I cannot underscore this enough to capture an idea about a business, a function, a project, your, Your kid's birthday party, everything from personal to a wedding anniversary to a business concept, to a joint venture idea, to a new patent, a product you want to patent, to a, A trip, a business trip, to client acquisition for your new venture, the house, rehab, whatever it is you want to do. I initially would capture that in what's called a mind map. It's called mind mapping software. Write that down. Mind mapping software. Find the one that works for you. And I use mind map software. Used to, and now I've, I've, I've sort of, I, oddly enough don't even need that anymore because I've gotten most of my ideas pretty refined now. But I used to, I mean, I had 50 or 60 different mind maps going. But capturing your ideas, yes, you can do it in a note card, you can do it, you know, in linear writing, but your brain is, sees a picture again. The Bible says where there's no vision, the people perish. Right? So you capture that vision, that idea. I do it with a mind map. So then I have other tools that help help me with a plan. Well, of course, you know, artificial intelligence and writing tools like Microsoft and. Gee, I'm doing this off the top of my head, Evernote. I used to use Evernote to both capture ideas and write out my plan. But there's, you know, whatever business tool works for you best that's typically a collection of tools is. Is what I use to write my plans. I certainly use artificial intelligence help with my research. It used to be the Internet. Before that it was a dictionary and, you know, going to the library things. So technology really has helped you to be smarter. Then I have to help me execute. I used to use airtable. I used to use a bunch of stuff. I currently my base station, my command center. I have everything my entire life sitting in Trello. All right, so. And I manage my professional life, my personal life, my passions, my priorities, my projects. I like. I manage everything in a technology piece of technology called Trello, which is. Is encrypted, is. It has, you know, multiple levels of security. So to worry about that, people getting into your stuff. It's password protected times2. And it's. And it's visual, but it's also technical. It's project management, essentially. And it's really quite elegant. And I've not found its capacity yet. I've not found its outer limits yet, which is really cool. I definitely push the envelope and I may share a photo screenshot of some of my Trello boards. But if you just search for Trello, you'll get the picture. Go to YouTube and ask to do a tutorial video on what Trello is. It'll make your life so much easier, personal again and professional. I use these tools in all parts of my life. Then I also have a sub tool for Trello that. That's a knowledge tool that is called Obsidian. And Obsidian is for crazy people like me. But I have Obsidian notes which use markdowns. You can research what a markdown is, but I use Obsidian notes to capture knowledge and data. As it comes to me, I just throw it in there. I throw it in there and I throw. I link it.
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Right?
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Right. I link. You know, I met somebody, they live in Atlanta. I mark that Atlanta's a markdown. So everybody that lives in Atlanta that I know, when I go to Atlanta, it tells me everybody that lives in Atlanta, they own a restaurant. It tells me everybody that I know that owns a restaurant, because I put that as a markdown. They're an architect. Later on, say, what architects do I know who live in Atlanta? It'll tell me all of those. It's really quite fascinating. It's called Obsidian, but it, it's, you know, it's a little out there. You got to be somebody who's a tech obsessed person like me to really want to get in that. So don't, don't spend a lot of time on Obsidian. But you should know that that's what a lot of very successful people use. Tech geniuses, tech bros. Tech leaders, business leaders, CEOs, billionaires, multimillionaires, CEOs of Fortune Popular companies, they use these tools, right? And if you see my Obsidian map, it is. It, it looks like a, it looks like a, it looks like a Cosmo, right? It, it's, it's, it's all, it's all these little dots from all these little contexts and relationships. Because when I grew up I didn't have financial capital, so I had to use relationship capital. And so my relationships were my capital. And so then I had to then value that capital and how to keep up with them and what are they doing. And whenever I got a new piece of information on them, I put it in this database. And then you have some tools you use to communicate, right? And I use Slack to communicate. Slack is like text messaging in a, in a very narrow confine about a specific topic with a specific group of people. It's encrypted, which means security protected. It's password protected. It, you know, your, your text messages are not secure. They're just not. And you also, don't you forget where you, which text stream? Who'd you text? Where's that information that you texted or somebody texted you? Where is it? You forget again, like, like an electronic sticky note. You get lost in all of these text messages. This with Slack, you don't get lost. But Slack is also temporary. So now you have a stream of information that you're communicating with Your, in my case, my, like on my special forces team, my senior team leaders, the 20 people I rely on for most things in my life. But that's even that stream will be pushed out by new information in that stream. So if something's important, I translate something in Slack, I convert that into a Trello card and Trello card into a Trello board. And a Trello board manages a project or part of my life. Everything has a place. Remember I told you that earlier. And then that Trello, those Trello board relates to a project space and that project space relates to, is probably a company or companies in my life or groups of activity. And that group of activity ties into my strategy, my mission, my vision. See what I'm saying? See how this works together? Some tools help me manage scale and relationships And I've talked about that already. The names of the tools again, matter less than their functions. Here's the key lesson. The tools change, the architecture doesn't run a business.
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And not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Call 844-844-iHeart to get started. That's 844-844-iheart.
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I don't chase apps. I design systems. I was on retreat recently in Maui and I spent half my time there, in addition to enjoying myself, upgrading into redesigning my system for 2026 because I've grown so much that I've outgrown the system I had in January of 2025. And so in order, in order to move fast, because you get to When I was struggling, money was more important than time. So I would waste time in order to try to make money. That hustle was real. But please believe me when you, as you become more successful, please hear me when saying this. Your time becomes more valuable than your money. You can waste my money for a minute. You cannot waste my time at all. I'm ruthless about my time. Everything I'm telling you now is a time wasting hack. It is a way to get back your time to create more time. Oh, this is so powerful. But I don't have time to stick to any one topic because I want to get through all this in one podcast. If you like this, let me know. And I'm happy to take any one of these topics and go deeper. Your brain is for thinking, not storage. Please write that down. Your brain is for thinking, not storage. I'll go one step further. Your brain is about thinking about where you want to go. Don't let your brain overtake your life. My brain don't control anything that I do. I'm an intuitive leader. Women's intuition is stronger than anything I know. Men have it too. The ego, the bravado, the lack of comfort with our emotions sometimes keep us from listening to our intuition. But God, that's to me. To me, that's God speaking to you and through you. We're not human beings having a spiritual experience. We're spiritual beings having a human experience. Energy matters. So when I get an intuitive Read. Not an emotional read, not an anger read, not an ego read. When I get an intuitive read about something, when I know what I know about somebody or something, I feel it in my gut, they say. Some would say that, right? And now I know I want to do. I have a vision for something. Right. I've done my research, I've created a plan, I've water tested, I've pressure tested to make sure that the plan is real. By the time an entrepreneur actually moves on something, the risk has mostly been wrung out of it, by the way, through the process, I'm telling you, everybody has their own way of doing it. This is my way of doing it. And so by the time you execute on it, you know, you just want to move efficiently and quickly, right? Well, I'm moving so fast now on things that I have built. I'm trying to institutionalize everything now. And things are coming at me hot and heavy. I don't have time to be sitting around and messing around with time and messing around with analysis or screw. So I spend time on my retreat. I'll call it a vacation. I retreat. It's intentional retreat to go away so I can think, so I can slow the world down, reimagine everything, go through this process of reimagination, reassessment very slowly. Go from my left side of my brain, analytical, to the right side of my brain, creative and intuitive and contextual. I come up with an upgraded software for my operating system. I take time to develop it so that when I get back into the game, I'm relaxed and I'm just executing. Boom, boom, bang, bang. I'm just moving, grooving. Yes. No, that, that. Go. Don't do that. No. Right. It's very clean, it's very elegant. It gives me more time for my family, more time for my passions. That's how I'm able to do so much. Your brain is for thinking, not for storage. Once tasks leave your head and enter a system, your mind relaxes and a relaxed mind thinks better. So my. My intuition is from decision making. Actually, my brain is a GPS device to tell me how to get to where my intuition has told me I'm going. Now that is a drop the mic and a podcast all by itself. But I don't want to get distracted from giving you the tools of my success, execution and delegation. If you do everything yourself, you're not in control. You're trapped. I organize execution around one question. What only I can do and what should never be done by me again. I'm Telling you, this is, this is so good. I organize myself around this question, what only I can do, what's those things or that thing that only I can do and what should never be done by me ever again. Anything repeatable gets documented. Anything scalable gets delegated. This isn't about ego, it's about sustainability. It's about building. It's about building something that outlives you and can grow underneath you. Communication and boundaries Communication overload is where leaders burn out. Email, texts, direct messages. DMS they call them. I don't do DMs. I tell people, don't DM me, you'll be eat your heart broken. I don't, I just don't bother again. I walk through life. I walk through life consciously oblivious of most things around me because most things just don't matter. At least not to me. I decide what matters and I focus on those things and I decided direct messages don't matter. They matter to most of the people listening to this podcast. I just don't do them. I don't manage by text message. I don't project management by email. Right. These are just efficiency tools to get from. I decide the way I'm going to communicate and then it's a stream of communication in this portal with the folks that I have already pre decided that I want to communicate with in that way. Now if somebody else picks up my, my direct messages, I just don't myself. But, but I'm in the comments. By the way, if you, you already know any social media platform and you see a response from me, that's me. So just leaders get burned out. Emails, text messages, DM, Slack, WhatsApp, which is another form of communication. WhatsApp and all kind of other apps. Accessibility without boundaries is chaos. I structure communication so what matter, what matters to me rises, noise falls away. Not to be distant, but to stay effective. Boundaries aren't arrogance their survival. Home mode versus Travel mode. My life runs in two modes. Home mode and travel mode. Trying to live the same way in both places is a mistake. There are things that cross over and they're consistent, but the the flow is different. Home mode allows depth. Trouble mode demands simplicity so that you can flow what stays constant. Sleep, discipline, idea capture, end of day reflection and a little fun. I do have fun every day. I binge watch on YouTube or whatever. They read a book if I'm here at the house. Here's a difference between home mode and travel mode. I have a racing simulator at the house. I have a full competitive auto racing license and get in the racing simulator and I just. Absolutely. That just renews me. I'll go in the. I'll go and watch a movie. I can do that on the road. I just got a. Anyway, never mind. Can you all in my world. But anyway, I. I have passions and I find a way to take some of those passions with me. I have portable versions of my life that go with me when I travel for trips in more than one day. And there are certain things I can only do at home. Flexibility within structure is the real discipline. Flexibility within structure is the real discipline. Daily habits that matter. I don't have a perfect morning routine. Leaders who say that, I mean God bless them, they mostly have engineers brains. But my life is dynamic and I give myself the flexibility for it. I think that actually all money is freedom. So I've got enough money to have the freedom to do as I like it with how I'm allocating my time. But I do have a morning orientation. Okay. I ask what matters today? What would make today successful? What do I need to avoid sometimes? Who do I need to avoid at night? Actually, by the way, I can avoid somebody right in front of me. Just to be clear, I don't have to physically avoid somebody because that takes too much energy. I literally can. I mean somebody. Unless I decide you're visible, you're invisible, right? We'll put it this way. Most people are visible until they make themselves invisible by tearing their rear end and acting a fool. So again, I walk through life consciously oblivious and most things around me because it just doesn't matter. And I just don't let. I don't let other people irritate me. To argue with a fool proves there are two over mess, not in it. At night I reverse my mode. So again I ask what matters today? What would make today successful? What do I need to avoid at night? I reverse it. What did I learn? What worked, you know, what, what successes, what wins that I have today, what needs adjusting and then of course planning for tomorrow. That's how you stay aligned over decades, not days. And I use my tools and I have a command center trello board by the way, that it, where everything flows up to me in this command center. And in that command center, there's no TO dos, there's no, there's no, there's no directives. This is, this is a visualization of my life at the vision level. Then below that I have a CEO dashboard. That's where my teams and I interact. And yes, there's some, you know, ex. There's execution stuff in there, but that's them executing mostly, not me. And then below that is our, you know, like, operating companies and operating projects, and there's mostly other folks, again, delegation doing that stuff, not me. But I am certainly all in it, all over them about whether they're hitting their deadlines and whether it's speaking to the vision. You starting to get it, by the way, everything started with me when this whole thing started. I have 400 employees right now, but when this thing started, this was just me. It was just me, and I was homeless, and I had nothing. So don't. Don't think this is like some trust fund guy giving you a vision with a lot of resources. I started with absolutely nothing. Anybody knows my story. I had extremely humble beginnings. I'm telling you that the. The. The apps, the tools, the computers. I mean, I used to have a computer that literally was like. It was like £50. I carried around with me a compact computer. I used to have a Radio Shack computer. I used to have a mobile phone. It was like a brick. Literally a brick. It cost 45 cents a minute, you know, so now we have the iPhone and the iPad. The tools are elegant, right? But, I mean, I've always been a bit of a geek. I've always been a techie. The tools have changed, but I haven't, right? And this strategy I'm telling you about has paid off. And all the folks who wanted me to go party with them now want to work for me. All right, the meta lesson. This isn't about productivity. It's about freedom. Freedom from clutter, mental clutter, constant reactivity, emotional overload, being stressed the heck out, which leads to depression, I think. Also, by the way, systems don't cage you. They free you. And here's the most important thing. These systems are learnable. You don't need my life. You need your version of structure. You may not like the tools that I use. I don't care. Find the ones you do like. That's why I didn't tell you which mind mapping software. Just find the one that speaks to you that you like visually. But mind mapping software is a big get. That's a big hack. A cheat sheet from this podcast. Everything should have a place to document your vision. Think about a Pinterest board that's, like, seriously interactive with you, like a dream board that is operational, and then you're getting close to what mind mapping is. Literally mapping your mind. I want you to start small. Capture one idea. Don't. Don't overwhelm yourself. Remove one friction point from your life, protect one block of energy. Over time it compounds, it builds on itself. So that's how I actually run my life. And yes, I have a workout routine. I didn't mention that but I, when I get up in the morning, I meditate, I reflect. If I'm in a hotel, I do a 10 minute, 15 minute workout. Push ups, 20 push ups, 20 sit ups, squats, stretches, stretches come first. If I have a little bit of time, I go down to the gym and get on the peloton machine and, and cycle. I have a red light machine at the house so when I finish working out, I'll get on the red light machine. If you never heard of red light therapy, look into that. My, my wife Shaytra is a wellness expert. I'm. Well, she's health and she's taught me so much. One of the things that's been a game changer is red light therapy. And I have a full, we have a full body red light machine. I spend 10 minutes front and back three times a week and I don't have pain in my body anywhere and I move all the time and I have a red light machine. I travel with, I have tools, I travel with and maybe if you want me to, I'll do a, I'll do a special video on of me on the road because that is a, that is a science all by itself and I do not, I do not wait till I get home for my life. I take my life elegantly with me wherever I go. So if you see me on the road, know that I'm flowing and I'm going and I'm living and I've got a routine system and a structure to make that work. So yes, I work out at home in the gym, red light I, my racing simulator is a version of working out. Also I incorporate that because you motorsports is like the, one of the top five most strenuous sports in the world. You use every muscle in your body and you cannot multitask. You've got to focus. So I have a racing simulator across street from, from the, from the gym here at the house. And again, yeah, these are, you know, options that I have now. But remember, keep in mind, I started where you were, where you are right now, no matter where you are in your trajectory. I've been there, right? But with enough discipline and enough structure, enough consistency and you just outrun your problems, you outrun failure, you outrun, you outrun, you know, folks who are lazy, you know, you're just putting the work in There's a book called Outliers 10,000. It basically says if you put 10,000 hours into anything, you'll be the equivalent of an of an NBA player in your field. You will be the best of the best. Just 10,000 hours makes you an outlier. And I agree with that. So that's how I actually run my life. Not perfectly, not rigidly, but intentionally in. If this episode helped you think differently about success, then do one thing today for yourself. Not for me, for yourself. Build one system that supports the life you want. Because success isn't mysterious, people. It's designed. I use Evernote, I use Trello, I use Slack, I use Obsidian, I use Plot Notes, which is artificial intelligence. I use Chat GPT 50 times a day. I'm co chair of the AI Ethics Council with Sam Altman who is the CEO of ChatGPT. I use other AI platforms to just to have different disciplines and operator will be launching Hope AI soon. We launched it, we announced that we're launching it soon. So that'll be a tool that you can help you in addition to financial literacy. So make sure you go to operational for both in the future. Van Jones is my new co chair on that. So yeah, these are some of the my core tools and mind mapping mindmeister is one of my, my, my mapping software. But I used a couple there. Yeah, these are my core tools. Notice that. Notice I didn't mention financial tools or spreadsheets or anything like that. Like, you know, that's tactical and I used to live in spreadsheets. I, you know, I lived in numbers or Excel back when I had to. But I again I moved from working increasingly working in the business to working on the business, which is where you want to graduate to. But you can't get to one without doing the other. Because the only place that success comes before the word work is in the dictionary because it's alphabetical. Everything every other kind of success or every kind of work is. It's just hard. You got to do it and there's no shortcuts. If it's a free lunch, it's probably stale. So build one system that supports the life you want. Because success is mysterious. Right? It's designed. I want you to tell me, give me some feedback of how you felt about this. This is John o' Brien, the Money and wealth podcast. And I want you to go to Operation Hope and ask them for a scholarship, a program scholarship for financial coaching and counseling. I want you to tell your friends about this podcast. I want you to take this episode and Use it as a talk point amongst your, your, your group of friends and let me know what they think about it. What if you get 20%? If you can use 20% of what I said, it can be a game changer for your life. And yes, you should not spend every dollar that you make. You should take 10 cents as a habit. This is part of systems. 10 cents of every, whatever you make and put in a savings account or put in a 401k that's matched by your employer, or put it in a stock account or invest it in something. But don't, you know, don't just live to pay your bills. If you're making, if you make a dollar, put 10 cents aside. You're not going to miss the 10 cents. If you make $1,000, put $100 aside. You probably waste that without even knowing it. And if you can't put $100 aside, try putting $25 aside or $50 aside and just ramp it up, increase it little by little over time. Right? So there's a system for everything, and you want everything to fit in your life. In my life this year, everything has a place. By the way, why do, why do wealthy people have big houses? They call them mansions, right? We have a big house on 40 acres. It's not for profiling, it's not for flossing. It's for systems. As your life gets bigger, as your vision gets bigger, as your success gets bigger, as your travels get broader, as you move from traveling down the street to across the county to cross the state, across the country to other countries, then doing that all the time, you collect things, you collect people, you collect friends, you collect experiences. And you will. Your life expands to meet the level of exposure you have in your life. And you will find that you need places for things that you never thought you had needed a place for at all. It just wasn't even a thought before. I have a gift closet. For God's sakes. Who would need a gift closet? I mean, I never thought I wanted a closet, but now a regular part of my life is both giving gifts to business associates and friends and colleagues and family. And I receive gifts. And there's an intake section where every package has to be recorded. There's security issues. There's all kinds of stuff that happens when your life expands that you're just not thinking about. I have a technology closet. I never thought I'd have one of those. I mean, if everything from. It's this, from the simple things to the big things. But, but when you're moving efficiently. If you're wasting time trying to find something, you're an unorganized mind. Waste time. And you, you've gotta not abuse yourself by wasting your own time. So I'm gonna introduce these, these visuals in the social media platform so you can download them from there or my Bryant Journal, and I'll see you on the road to success. I may even see you on the roads. I run into a lot of people literally on the road who listen to the podcast. Thanks for making it one of the top 25 podcasts for entrepreneurship on Apple last year in America and top 100 for business last year in America and top 250 for on every continent in the world for business and entrepreneurship. Let's go change the world and go. Of course, register that NAACP Image Award Vote. If you support Peace and light, irregardless, I support you. I'm not mad at you. If you vote for Michelle Obama, by the way, I sort of would vote against myself for her sometimes. All right. Peace and Life, Money and Wealth with John o' Brien is a production of the Black Effect Podcast Network. For more podcasts from the Black Effect Podcast network, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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