Transcript
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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.
