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The Personal Finance Podcast
How to Invest In Yourself and Earn More (THIS YEAR!)
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In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to talk about how to invest in yourself and earn more this year.
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Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two year contracts, they said, what the are you talking about, you insane Hollywood? So to recap, we're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month New customers on first three month plan only Taxes and fees Extra Speed slower above 40 gigabytes E Details build a routine with Ollie that supports your wellness needs. Like getting your daily vitamins and minerals with Ollie's multigummies or keeping your mood upbeat with all the vitamin D and hello Happy. Give your gut health some support with probiotics and wake up feeling refreshed after taking Ollie sleep. Do wellness on your terms. Find Ollie at a Walmart or Target near you or@ollie.com these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease on this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, how to Invest in Yourself and earn more this Year what's up everybody and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of MasterMoney Co, and today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to talk about how you can invest in yourself and earn more this year. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Master Money newsletter by going to mastermoney.com newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or whatever podcast player you listen to this podcast on. And if you're getting value out of the show, consider leaving a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast player. Now today I'm going to dive into how to invest in yourself and earn more this year and we're going to go through eight different steps you can follow to invest in yourself and earn more. I'm going to talk about how you can stack up your skills with a skill stack. I'm going to talk about your earning floor and how to raise that earning floor. We're going to go through the 1.5rule and the LDT formula and you guys are going to find out what those are. And we're really going to teach you how you can earn more money this year, specifically by developing your skills. Now before the show, I did a quick Google search Just on how to invest in yourself and some things that you could be doing this year to learn how to earn more money. And I was baffled at how terrible the information out there is. I saw things like meditate, I saw things like go out there and journal. And that stuff is great if you want to do some of that stuff for your mental health. But it has nothing to do with increasing your earning potential. And the number one thing that you're going to take away today is you're going to have an actionable, step by step step plan that is going to teach you how to develop your skill set. Your skills are what are going to allow you to earn more money over time. And the ultimate goal is for you to be able to earn more money, meaning that you can take a set amount of money and invest it into learning a specific skill. And that skill will allow you to earn more money right away. So let's say, for example, that you are completely dead broke and you make minimum wage at a current job, or you don't even have a job. And so if you're making minimum wage, the number one thing you want to figure out is how do I make more money? How do I earn more at an hourly rate and develop skills that will allow somebody to take their hard earned dollars and pay me more? So here's one great example. Let's say you want to get out on the open road and you're making minimum wage right now. You didn't finish college and so you're making minimum wage at a certain job that you don't want to be in this job forever, you want to make more money, you want to increase your income so that you can take that income and put it to your financial freedom over time. And so let's say, for example, you decide, hey, I want to be out on the open road, I want to start driving around. And you go get your CDL license, your commercial driver's license. And so you go out and get that cdl. And all of a sudden, once you finish that process over the course of, you know, nine, 12 months, however long it ends up taking you, you are now able to earn around $50,000 per year just by getting that CDL. So you went from earning $12 an hour to 28, 29, $30 an hour just by investing dollars in yourself, by going out and getting that CDL license, you increase your earning power just by doing one thing to invest in yourself. Or let's say, for example, you make a minimum wage and you're like, I don't want to be on the open road. I don't want to be away from my family all the time. And so you go out and get certified as a public. And so you are drawing blood for blood tests and transfusions. That is a recession proof business for sure. And you end up earning $25 an hour instead of minimum wage at 1250 or whatever it is now. And so what you have done is you have increased what I call your earning floor, meaning your earning floor is the least amount of money that you should be making based on your skillset. And what we wanna do is we wanna continuously move up that earning floor. It's like an elevator. Every single year you wanna move that earning floor up one single level. The earning floor is the least amount you should be making based on your skills, your degrees, all of those different things. Now when you first start out, obviously your earning floor is zero. You're going to make minimum wage, that is the bottom that you can make. Or if you're a kid, obviously your earning floor is even less than that. But then what you do is you begin to acquire skills. So first you may be going out there and getting a high school diploma and that is going to increase your earning floor to likely right around the minimum wage level, maybe a little bit more. Then you go out there and you go to college. Well, that's going to increase your earning floor a little bit higher. And really going out and getting a degree is going to either give you very specific skills and or it's just going to show somebody, hey, I can finish something. And so once you go through that, your earning floor will rise. Now maybe along the way you learn some different skills. Like you have a love for YouTube and you develop those YouTube skills on how to grow a show, for example. Well, those are going to be really valuable skills that you can utilize to earn more money. Or maybe you're always on social media and you realize, hey, I know how to develop a social media video or a hook that really gets people hooked on specific videos and make videos go viral. If you have that skill, you are going to make a lot of money in life if you can do that. And so what we call all of these skills that you begin to acquire is I call them your skill stack. Your skill stack is the skills that you possess to earn more money. But it's not just monetary, it's not just the dollar amount, it's things like they can lead to more money, they can lead to more time, they can lead to more professional relationships that are going to help you increase that income. But your skill stack allows you to do all of these different and every single year you should be at least working on one specific thing in your skill stack to grow out your skill stack over time. Now, there are some really obvious ones like going out and getting a college degree. That is an obvious one that you can just add into your skill stack and what most people go out there and do first. But there are other ones that aren't so obvious, like working on delegation or leadership or charisma. All of those things can lead to you making more money over time. Now, there are countless ways to improve your skill stack and most of your time outside of work should be devoted to this development. If you have personal development goals. So say, for example, you have a couple of different personal development goals. Like you want to read more, you want to learn more, and or you want to earn more. Those three should be spending dollars and spending time and spending energy and investing in your personal development so that you can grow that skill stack. Because if you get really good at what I'm going to teach you today, you can make any amount of money in the world. You can truly increase the amount that you make significantly by just learning these eight steps that I'm going to talk through today. And especially if you're dead broke, if you're dead broke and you only have $1,000 to invest, sure, investing in the S&P 500 is great. But what would be even better is if you can learn a high value skill that will allow you to increase your learning floor. And if you can increase that learning floor and raise that up, that will pay you way more than that thousand dollars for the rest of your entire life forever. Again, the example of someone who just does not make much money. They go out and get a certification and now they're making $25 an hour. They just raise their floor forever. You're going to make that amount of money forever. That is an unbelievable investment in yourself by doing something like that. So today I'm going to go through these eight steps. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you an example of how some of these skills can actually develop over time and grow and increase and make you way more money. And then lastly, I'm going to fire off a bunch of different skills that are value skills that you can use just to generate ideas for you if you have no idea where to start. But first, let's go through these eight steps and do some of these exercises. Because I think this is Going to help you guys find and identify what you need to be doing within your specific career path so that you can learn how to make more money. Today, we are going to raise the most important thing in your life, which is your income. Your income will allow you to retire so much faster. It will give you financial freedom so much sooner. It'll make your life so much easier if you raise your income. Income is the most important thing in the wealth equation. And I am so excited to have you here. Let's get into it. Number one is we are going to start off by setting a very clear goal. We want to be crystal clear of exactly what we want in the next 12 months. Now it is incredibly important to be realistic here. This is not something we're going to have some pie in the sky number where we're going to earn $2 million in the next 12 months. What we want to do is make sure that we understand how to get crystal clear. So one is why? Why are we doing this? We need to understand our reason for wanting more dollars. Maybe it's because you just don't make enough to make ends meet. You listen to the last episode which was talking about how to get you out of the paycheck to paycheck cycle and you're saying to yourself, I'm in this paycheck to paycheck cycle. I need to get out of it. I want financial freedom, I want career advancement, I want to start a business. All of these different things are fantastic reasons to decide to begin to investing in yourself. But you need to set that clear goal because having a clear goal will actually show you which path to take. Now what we need to find this specific target. Meaning that we need to say to ourselves, hey, I want to make $20,000 more this year. Here is how I'm going to do this. Now this target again needs to be very realistic. You can stretch your goal out, you can make it difficult to achieve, but it cannot be out in space where you're never going to be able to attain that goal. You need to make sure that you are 100% sure that there is a possibility that this could happen. And then how you need to decide on a pathway. So how are you going to do this? Are you going to do it within your career? Are you going to learn negotiation and then start negotia your salary? Are you going to start a side hustle or a side business and start to earn more money there? Or are you going to learn different skills so you can start an agency and help people out on the side, there are a bunch of different things that you can talk through here, but you need to decide which skills that you want to work on. Maybe it's more than one, but you need to have those mapped out and aligned so that you can focus your time and energy. Because what a lot of people will do is they'll say, hey, oh, here's a book on marketing. Oh, here is a book on social media management. Oh, here is a book on leadership. And they take all of these different books, read one or two books, and. And that's all they read. They forget all the information, they never apply that information. We're going to talk more about that here today. But you need to make sure that you have this mapped out just in your head and setting that clear goal, because that goal is very important. To be your North Star, you need a North Star in place and decide on those specific skills. Now, if you feel like you're getting really comfortable with those skills and you've done it within six months, then more power to you. You need to do this over and over throughout the year so that you can achieve the goals that you actually set out to do. Now, number two is we are going to assess your current skills and then we're going to look for gaps. Now, assessing your current skills is going to be something we're going to have to get real with ourselves here. So take out your phone, take out a sheet of paper, if you're driving, you know, wait till you get home and kind of go through this process. But we need to make sure that we are getting real here. And I want you to assess where you currently stand. So on the first page or on the first section of your notes, whatever you're looking at right now, I want you to write out your current skill stack and I want you to be super honest with yourself here. If you are really good at leading meetings, but nobody has ever told you that you were really good at leading meetings, are you really good at leading meetings? We need to make sure that this is not something that we have in our brain that we think that we are really good at. I've met so many different people and I ask, hey, what is your best skill that you have? And they tell me their best skill and I know them really well, and that is not a skill that they possess whatsoever. They'll say something like, oh, I'm a really hard worker, I'm a really good communicator, I'm a really good networker. And then all of a sudden you kind of look at what they are actually in life and it has none of those skills involved. So you got to make sure that you're really self aware. Self awareness is key in this situation. So I want you to write out your current skill stack. Now you may be really good at something and you think you're not good at it. So the flip side could be there as well. If people are telling you over and over again that you were an amazing communicator and you think you're a terrible communicator because you have imposter syndrome, then you also need to make sure that you are thinking through, hey, if people are telling me over and over again that I'm a good communicator, I probably am a decent communicator and I should write that at least on my skill stack as something that I'm good at. Now you can always, always get better and always refine that stuff. But if you have current skills and you know you're lacking in other areas, then let's make sure we have that as one piece of our skill stack and then from there we can go and add things later on. Now why is this so valuable to write this on the first page? Because you know where you stand. And let me tell you something, people who know where they stand when it comes to their skills and then they work really hard to develop the areas that they are not very good at are people who become very, very successful very quickly. Let me give you a great example. When I first started out in the corporate world, I actually went through this exercise. I developed this basically from me just learning how to do this over time. So this entire system is me testing and iterating how do I get better at stuff. And I spent my entire twenties honing and developing my skills. It was the best dollars I have ever spent in my entire life was investing in myself. But I realized pretty quickly at my first job, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, I was a financial analyst and I realized I'm not as good at Excel as everybody else in this entire department. And every single person who continues to get promoted is very good at Excel. And so I spent an entire year developing my Excel skills and that allowed me to create specific financial reports that nobody else could create. But I spent a ton of time developing the skill of learning how to utilize Excel because it allowed me to make more money in my day job and my career path at that point in time. And so because of this, I still use that skill right now day in and day out. Now I'M on Google sheets more so than Excel, but it's a skill that I love to utilize. And so for a lot of people out there, you may know some of these skills or some of these skills you may see around there that you possess that they could be lifelong things that you could add to your skill set. So the first page I want you to get, write out exactly what you think your current skills are and be really honest here. Because people who know what their skills are, they're going to become very, very successful because they're going to work on everything else, all of their weak points. I want you to think of an athlete, for example, and think of an NBA player. If an NBA player is a slasher and they're really good at driving into the paint and scoring in contact and they're really good at kind of taking it to the hole. But at the same time, their shooting game is extremely weak. They have no three point shot, they can't shoot free throws. Then what do you think they know that they should be working on? They should be working on their free throws and they should be working on their shooting. They should be putting up a thousand three pointers all summer long in the off season. And so athletes do this really well. They look at their weak points and they work on that weak point as much as they possibly can. They also try to double down on their strong points. So if they do have a really strong point, they will spend time doubling down. And this is how I want you to think about this as well. We want to make sure that we are working on our weak points with a lot of our time, but we are also spending some time on our strengths to ensure that those get better over time so we can beat out every single person out there who also has those same strengths. So on the second page I want you to write in what gaps you may have on your skill stack. And I want you to get really honest here. So to get you really honest, I've come up with a list of five questions that I want you to ask yourself. Number one is what skills are required to reach the next income level in my career or income goals? So one thing I did when I started out with my first job is I looked at people above me and I said to myself, what skills do all these people possess that I do not have? And I mentioned before, Excel was one of them. Another one was being able to communicate effectively. A third one was corporate politics. I was awful at corporate politics because I think it's a waste of time. But guess what? If you do not have that skill set, you most likely will not be promoted in the corporate world. You gotta learn how to play the game and the game is corporate politics. And so are there certifications that people have above you that could help you earn more? Are there experiences they have that could help you earn more? Are there tools that they understand how to utilize that could help you earn more? All of these things are going to be something I want you to take a good hard look at every single person above you. All of your managers, all of your managers. Managers get a couple of levels above. What do they do well that you do not do well and try to identify those gaps. Number two is what challenges do I regularly face that I do not feel equipped to handle? So are there challenges that come up that you may not really feel equipped to be able to take care of? You lack confidence in that area, you lack knowledge in that area. A lot of us are going to have this in our own situation. Is there specific things that you just do not know a ton about? Let's improve those. Let's make those some of our strengths and let's work on some of those. Number three, what skills are currently in demand in my industry or one that I want to transition into? So research industry in demand skills for whatever industry you're in. Are there emerging tools, are there emerging technologies or methods that could increase value and future proof your career? Let's look at a big one right now at the time recording this, AI is one of the biggest things that is growing over time. We did an episode a month after chat, GPT came out and talked about how big AI was going to be. Now AI is way bigger. Years later, after that initial conversation that we had on this podcast, it's going to make a major impact on your finances for sure. And so every single industry right now most likely has AI driven technologies that you can learn more about and understand how to utilize. If you want to make more money in 2025, be the master of some of that AI technology, specifically when it comes to your career, and you could be someone who earns way, way more over the course of your career. So what skills, what things are developing if you want to transition into another career? What would that be? What are some skills that you could acquire? Do you want to become a manager? Well, look into project management, look into leadership classes, look at all these different things that you could transition into. Number four, the fourth question I want you to ask yourself is what feedback or missed opportunities have revealed areas of improvement? So when you go into your boss's office every single year. What feedback or missed opportunities have revealed areas for improvement. Look at what they're saying to you or what have other people said to you where you can improve. And I want you to reflect on constructive criticism that you've received and or opportunities you couldn't pursue due to a certain lack of skills. And I want you to think about that and think through how you can fill in those gaps. And number five, what's one skill I could develop this year that would significantly improve my income or opportunities? You're going to prioritize skills from the highest return on investment and focus on those that align with your goals and have the potential to unlock new income streams. So we're going to unlock new income streams for you today as we go through this. But I want you to think through these five questions. They are very important for you to answer. And so really reflect on these as you start to think through some of the gaps within your skill stack. Everybody has gaps in their skill stack. You will never have a complete skill stack that you want, which is the amazing thing about life, because we can always progress, we are always learning. And if you have a growth mindset, which I hope every single person listening is developing just by listening to this podcast, if you have a growth mindset, you can get better every single day, every single week, every single month, every single year, we are here to get 1% better every single day. If you get 1% better every single day, you will change your life forever. And just by identifying what you're good at and what you're not good at is going to help you get 1% better every single day. I am so excited for you guys to go through this exercise because it'll change some lives here. And if you actually do this and go through these five questions, I promise you, you'll see something amazing happen. Now, once you go through this exercise, I want you to do a third thing. I want you to write a list of your dream skill stack. So you're gonna look at your skill stack, you're gonna look at some of your deficiencies, and then I want you to write a list of what your dream skill stack is. What does that look like? Maybe you're like, I wanna be a really good marketer. I wanna be an amazing communicator. I wanna be amazing at sales. I wanna be amazing when it comes to different technologies and how to utilize different tools. I wanna be an extremely detailed person. I wanna be charismatic. I wanna be the connection between people and how they me Forever. If I do that, I want to be able to speak on podcasts. I want to be really, really good at all of these different things. Imagine some of the people that you admire most in life. What are some of the characteristics and traits that they have? Why do you admire them so much? They probably have a really great skill stack that they have been working on for a very long time. Or sometimes skills just come naturally to people. Other people have to work on it. If you say to yourself, well, that person has it naturally, I'll never be able to do that. You need to change your mindset. You need to have a growth mindset because you can do it just as well as they do. But it's going to take you a little more work. You're gonna have to grease that wheel a little bit more. But I promise you, you can do the same things they can, but you have to work at it. You have to put the time in and the energy in, and it has to be extremely intentional. And how do you get intention? By understanding what you're good at and understanding what you're not good at and then working on the things that you are not, not good at. That's why we go through this exercise and why this is so incredibly important. So I want you to write out that dream skill stack. What would that look like? How would you behave if you had that dream skill stack? A lot of people, your behavior is a vote for the future person that you want to be. And if your behavior is not the same as someone who would have that dream skill stack that you want to have, then you need to change your behavior. So ask yourself, how would someone who had this entire skill stack, how would they behave? What would they be doing day in and day out? How would they be reacting to certain situations? This, my friends, is going to be a big difference maker for you if you can actually get in there and start to do that. And then lastly is what would your schedule look like if you had that skill stack? Would you be slammed all day long? Would it allow you to earn more money so you had more time? Or what would you do if you wanted to earn that skill stack? And how would you develop those skills over time? Time. This is what we really want to be thinking through is create that dream schedule. You've heard us talk about some of your dream schedules and in master your money goals, we talk about dream schedules and how to develop that dream schedule. And this is something that we're going to do. Again, here is what would your dream skill stack look like and how would your day go if you had those skills? So that's step two is you're going to go through those three exercises, figure out what you're good at, figure out what you're not good at, and then what your dream skill stack is. Number three is now we're going to be choosing your skills and we are going to choose high impact skills at first. So if you are someone who doesn't make a lot of money, we want to make sure that we are choosing high impact skills on your list of gaps. And so what you want to do is I want you to take all of the things that you know you need to work on and I want you to list them from most impactful to least impactful. We are going to create ourselves a hit list here. And when it comes to this hit list, I want you to think through, hey, which one of these would immediately help me earn more money? Which one of these skills would immediately help me increase my income significantly? So let's do an exercise here. Let's say, for example, you're working a corporate job. And in that corporate job, you know, there are two or three different skills that would help you earn more pretty much immediately. It would increase your likelihood of getting a promotion over the course the next 18 months. And so you start to work on some of those skills immediately. But really your dream is to have a Facebook ads agency. Now, the reason why I'm talking about Facebook ad agencies is, you know, for some of our businesses, we work with some of these companies and they make a lot of money. So let's say, for example, you want to start a Facebook ad agency. You love the idea of running Facebook ads and studying it and you like the intricacy of details and you like just going through the process of psychology and doing all these different things. You love advertising and so you want to start this agency. But right now, you know, immediately to earn more money, you have to go out and you have to learn these three skills. Well, what I would do is I would work on those three skills and make sure you develop those over time. If you think those are going to really make a true impact in the short one, then on the side, you want to start learning Facebook ads. Well, in your freeze time or your spare time. That's outside of that personal development where you know you're guaranteed to earn more, you can start to work on that skill. If you really enjoy it and you really love it, then that is something you can absolutely do. But you got to make sure that you are prioritizing the things that matter the most first. Then go into the stuff that may possibly earn you a max, massive amount of money, but you can also do it in your free time if you really love it. And so you want to prioritize skills that align with your career and your entrepreneurial goals. If you're an entrepreneur, then making sure you prioritize skills that are going to help you in that. Entrepreneurs. There are three big things that you can really focus on. One is leadership. Understanding how to lead your teams is very, very important. I personally am working on this currently because my teams are growing more and more and more and I need to increase my leadership skills. I've never had this many employees that are on my teams. And so we need to make sure that we increase our leadership skill, becoming more clear by understanding how to communicate effectively, by understanding how to make sure that people on our teams understand what our specific goals are within the company, our big rocks, and how we move those big rocks. So all of this stuff is something that we talk through a lot and it is something I personally am working on. So make sure it aligns with your career and your entrepreneurial goals. But leadership is a big one for people who are entrepreneurs. Sales is another big one for people who are entrepreneurial. Understanding how to sell properly and how to market properly and all those different things. And so making sure it just fits those goals and prioritize other skills that are in high demand or offer a strong return on investment. So let's say, for example, you're still in college. There's a lot of college students who listen to this podcast. And so you're still in college and you're trying to figure out what skills should I learn? What are some skills out there that you could learn that could actually help you start a side business that could turn into a full time business when you graduate? Facebook ads, great example. Learning how to grow a YouTube channel, great example. Learning how to start a social media marketing company, Great example. I mean, I just met somebody the other day who has a social media marketing company. She's 19 years old, makes $7.7 million a year. It is amazing what your skills can earn you if you learn how to do this properly. So I want you to focus on one of those two things. Align with your career and entrepreneurial goals or are in high demand and offer a strong return on investment. Now, for the time being, if you're getting started with this, I want you to focus on one skill at a time and get really, really good at that skill. If it's learning how to improve your writing skills. I want you to start to write every single day and work on improving those skills with all of your personal development time. And I want you to make sure that when you choose that high impact skill, it is the highest impact skill out there. Maybe it's public speaking, maybe it's digital marketing, maybe it's data analysis, maybe it's leadership or technical skill skills. It doesn't matter what it is. Focus and hone in on that one thing. So choose your one high impact skill. Okay, everybody here listening right now. Think about what it is. Look at your list, put them in order from highest impact to lowest impact and tell me what the highest impact skill is. For example, if you're watching on YouTube and or you're listening on Spotify, Spotify allows comments. Now I want you to write in the comments, tell me what that high impact skill is for you. Tell me exactly what that is. Because I want you to put that out in public right now, declare it out to the public and let us know what that high impact skill is. This is also going to help people generate ideas too, which is a really, really cool thing. Now the next section is we are going to learn how to create a learning plan. Now this is something that we've done entire episodes on, so I'm going to try to not go too long on this, but we are going to dive into how to create a learning plan and this we have a very specific way on how to do this. So we're going to do it right after this break. Real estate. 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Now phase one is going to be for anybody, especially if you have no money, is going to be for anybody. Starting off is you're going to start with books. Now, books are a huge factor. When it came to me learning my skill set in my 20s, I did not have a lot. I leaned on books and I attribute about 70% of my early skill stack to utilizing books. But you have to do it in the right way. Now the amazing thing about books is that you can access the mind of someone who spent decades learning a specific skill and you can get it all in one single book. It is one of the best investments you can make for 10, 15, 20. Now some of them are getting like 25 bucks. But it is the one of the most amazing things that you can do is read books. Now, some of you may be saying to yourself, well, I'm going to listen to audiobooks and that is great. You can listen to audiobooks. I continue to do that as well, but I don't get as much out of it as physically reading on my Kindle and or on a physical book. Now you can acquire all that person's knowledge in less than a week in Seven days if you do this right. And so that is where, if you're really serious about developing skills, you need to be reading more and you need to be constantly reading, even if you're doing some of these other things and you're like, I hate reading. Get good at reading. Learn to love reading because it is going to help you tremendously over time. Warren Buffett is famous for reading 500 pages a day. Do you think he got to that? Net worth being the best investor of all time by far. It's not even close by not reading 500 pages a day. He literally reads 500 pages a day and spends the majority of his time reading because he knows it's the highest impact activity that he can do. So he spends the majority of his time reading. He also learned to enjoy it. And books compound knowledge over time. The more you read, the more you can compound knowledge over time. Now, if you're learning a technical skill, like learning how to utilize Excel and or learning how to use a specific software, reading books is not going to be the number one thing that you should be doing. You should be learning by doing. But for most people out there, if you want to learn how to network or sales skills, or if you want to learn how to start to make impact within your organization, you got to be reading more. And really, you've heard me talk about this a ton is try to read a book per week. If you can't try to read one book every two weeks. We've talked about that system before. But the way that I do it is I take a book every week, I look at how many pages there are, I divide it by seven, and that's how many pages I read every single day. That's all it is. If you know you're gonna only read six days a week or five days a week, you divide it by five or six. And so this is going to compound over time. Now, if you have no money, you go to the library and you can access a massive amount of books. Say, for example, you want to develop your sales skills, go to the business section, look for the sales books, and go through some of those sales books and start to read them. Now, you may be asking yourself, if you're not broke and you want to start buying books. I do not think twice about buying books. I will buy any books. Even if I think it'll help me with one small minuscule thing, I will buy it. Because those dollars are the most valuable dollars that you can spend. I literally have no budget for books. I will buy an Infinite amount of books if I could. Now I can only read about one per week. And so for me, that does help restrain me from buying too many books. But again, I don't think you can overspend on books books. And that's something I think most people need to understand. Non fiction books. If we're talking about fiction books, that's a whole different story. That's consumption. No, we want to make sure that we are buying books and implementing things that we learn in that books. Now, when it comes to developing skills in books, I want you to learn something called the 1, 5 rule. And the 1. 5 rule is something that I developed early on in my personal development to understand how much I need to be reading to develop a skill. And so here's how it works. It's very simple. You choose one skill and you read the five best books about that specific skill. Skill. Okay? So you choose one skill, read the five best books. What I would do is say, for example, you want to learn more about negotiation. Okay, if you want to learn more about negotiation, I would start to read the Internet and go to chat gbt. I would type in, hey, what are the five to ten best books on negotiation? Then I would go to the Internet and try to validate that. I'd go to Reddit and try to validate some of that and try to get this list down the line. So this is something I did when I wanted to get better at negotiation. I said to myself, what are the five best books on negotiation? If you're looking, looking to improve your negotiation skills, I'll give them to you right now. Number one is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Chris Voss was a FBI hostage negotiator. Probably my favorite one on the entire list. Really, really good book. Gives you actual tactical things that you can utilize day in and day out when you're negotiating. Getting to yes, is my second one. That is a fantastic one. I actually found out about that book originally, I think by Alex Hormozi, and it is one that he recommends highly for negotiation. I think it is a really, really good book. Influence by Robert Cialdini is the favorite book of Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffett's business partner. That's how I found out about that one. The Art of Negotiation by Michael Wheeler is a really good one. And then Bargaining for Advantage is another great one by Richard Schell. Those are five books that I went through and all of a sudden tried to implement. So you have to implement it when you read and you don't implement Anything you're just consuming for entertainment, you have to be implementing those things. Have you ever seen those personal development people who seem to be reading all the time, but they don't actually have any skills? Those are the folks who do not implement, they just read. And so it's going to help them a little bit, it's going to inspire ideas, probably help them in day to day if they remember some of this stuff. But if you don't implement it, you will never actually remember what you just read. So very, very important to make sure that you are practicing implementation when you start to read. Now, if you read the five best books on one singular skill set and one singular subject, you will know more than 95% of people out there on that specific skill set. And so that is the first step is to follow that 1:5 rule. If you don't have a lot of money now, for some of you, you may want to fast track this process. I'm the person who now I'm very impatient and I want to fast track processes. And so there are things that you can do that we'll talk about here in a second. Number two is another free way is YouTube, blogs, podcasts, you can go through and listen to some of those and those are going to be completely free. It is going to help you in very specific areas. So if you want to get good in negotiation, listen to all the podcasts with Chris Voss on there. That is going to help you kind of think through some of the subjects that he's talking about and get the bird's eye view, a higher level view of what he is talking about. Books will dig deeper on some of these topics because if we had a podcast episode that is the same thing as a book, for example, this podcast would be five hours long. And so we want to make sure that we are talking through some of that information. Three is affordable learning. So I classify affordable learning as things like online courses, meaning that you can spend a lot less than a college class would cost you to buy a course, go out there and learn a specific skill. Now, the value of courses, this is what the true value of courses is, is someone is taking all of their content and they are condensing it into one location so that you don't have to go out and find every single piece of content. And so really it's going to save you a lot of time and it'll eventually save you money and energy because it'll help you earn more. If you're choosing the right courses because you have it condensed into one Location. Now, this is very, very valuable. Time is money. And you're going to learn that very quickly as you start to do some of this stuff. Because all sudden, when you start to make more money based on these skills, you're going to want to do this really, really fast. And so learning how to implement some of this stuff is going to be really important. What I would do is go out there and find teaching styles that you like. So if you go out there and you find content creators or people who teach this stuff that you really like, go and find them out there. So say you want to learn Excel, or there's that girl who is calls herself Ms. Excel out there. There's another one, I think, that Morning Brew owns. There's a bunch of different folks who teach Excel, okay? And so you find the teaching style that you like, take some of their free stuff, go look at their social content, go look at their podcast or their YouTube channel or whatever else and find teaching styles that you like that you are actually learning from that you think could have a high value, high dollar impact on your bottom line. And go take those courses. Maybe you want to take both courses or a couple of them. If you take, you know, three, four, five courses on a specific subject, you'll probably know more than 98, 99% of people out there. So this is something that I think could be very, very valuable. If you do it right now, the person who is teaching you, make sure they have actually done the thing that they are trying to teach you. They have been in the trenches doing this. If you're learning business leadership from some guy who has never owned a business, then you've got yourself a problem. You got to make sure they've been in the trenches and done this stuff and have the actual experience. Because people can teach stuff all day long, but if you've never actually done the thing, it's going to be really, really hard to make an impact. For example, example, for years I was learning how to run the numbers on a rental property before I actually bought my rental property. And when I went through that process and I spent way too much time, way too much analysis paralysis on this. But that's another subject. But when I went through this process, I quickly realized that, oh, there's a lot of monkey wrenches when you actually start running the numbers on rental properties. And you have to actually go through the experience to make sure that you know all the nuances that are going on. Those the type of people you need to be learning from, people who actually have done the thing. And they have done the thing for decades that is really, really important. So that's affordable learning. Those are two big criteria. Now if you can't afford someone's 200, 300, 400, $500 course, whatever they cost nowadays, another thing that you could do is go to Udemy or Coursera or LinkedIn Learning. Those are three great places to take lower priced courses, but you can still learn a ton from those. And so what I would do is if you are on the lower level budget, then I would get the five books, the five best books in that area. I'd be reading those books and at the same time I'd be taking courses on Udemy or Coursera or LinkedIn learning. Those are three great resources. Sometimes the courses are great, sometimes they're not as good. But it depends on, you know, who you get. So just kind of look at the reviews on each course. All those websites usually have reviews and you can go through that process there and then actually take and finish the course. Only 13% of people who do online courses actually take and finish the course. So make sure you are going through that process and actually finish the course. All right? The last thing you can do on your learning plan is you can go through coaching and mentorship. Now, coaching and mentorship means that someone is taking their time and energy and they are trading that time and energy for dollars that you pay them so that they can teach you a specific thing. So, for example, we have coached a few people here. I don't do it a lot and I don't talk about it really that much. But I have coached people here on just kind of figuring out how to DIY their retirement plan or I've coached people through specific situations with their money and how to get out of certain situations. We've done that here. It's me trading one hour of my time and energy so they can learn how to do something very, very quickly. And so that is something you can also do. Let's say, for example, continue to use the Facebook ads thing. Let's say you really want to learn how to do Facebook ads. Well, Facebook ads is a long learning process, typically to learn how to do each different style of Facebook ads. So let's say, for example, you took a couple of courses and you're working through the process and you get stuck on some areas. Well, you can hire somebody for a coaching program or one hour of their time where you can start to spend time with this person. They can help you solve these problems. You can ask them questions and they can Accelerate your path to learning. This is something I think that can be incredibly valuable. It is also something that people do not have the right mindset, so they're not willing to spend money on this. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. You could go to a college class and you could be paying for all these different college classes that really don't do anything for you. They help you get your degree, which is all you really want. But you could be taking a calculus class, and all of a sudden you're going to school for journals. And so because of this, this is a major problem in the way the education system is currently set up. And one thing that you can do is flip your mindset when it comes to learning some of this stuff. You all of a sudden get a coach or a mentor. You pay them a thousand dollars for a couple hours of their time, and then all of a sudden you learn how to run Facebook ads pretty quickly. Or you pay them $2,000 for one session, depending on how good they are. This is how much some of these people can cost. Some cost 10, 20, $30,000. Depends on who they are. Don't pay too much. There's a fine line in between here. Do not pay 30,000 doll time. You probably are not going to get that back. Let's say 99% of the time, you're not going to get that back. But this is something I think a lot of people do not understand, is that if you pay for someone's time, energy, and their expertise and their experience, and they give you some information that you can utilize to truly accelerate your income, it is worth every single penny because you're paying probably less than a college course would cost to learn a specific thing. And so I think for a lot of people, they don't even scoff at a college degree. And how much some of those classes, some classes cost three grand grand when you're getting a college degree, depending on where you go. But they scoff at someone if they want $300 for an hour of their time. Now, I have done this countless times. I have gotten coaching and I have gotten mentorship from people. Some of it has been fantastic. Some of it has been okay, to be honest. But all of those situations, I have learned something that I've been able to utilize, and I've kept it with me for life. Once you have that skill, you keep it with you for life. So just make sure you do your vetting and understand exactly what you're doing first. If you're going to go this route, this is the person who has more money than time and they want to spend that time wisely and use their energy wisely. So this is something you can definitely do, but you just got to make sure that it is someone who is going to give you that value back. So really, really important stuff. Now don't overpay for this stuff. You can go way overboard on this. I've seen people go way overboard. I saw somebody like recently say they spent $100,000 for two sessions with Grant Cardone or something like that. I think that's nuts. So there's certain things that you can do that make a lot of sense and there are certain things that don't make sense. Make sure it is a reasonable price. If not, find somebody else who can do it at a decent price price that's not above $20,000. Okay, so that's the next thing that you need to think through. Do not go overboard. So that's number four, how to create a learning plan. Those are the four different things that you can do. I do a mix of all of these things typically. And so usually I've bought tons and tons of courses. I've done different coaching memberships and I buy books. I read them every single week. I just keep that consistent. YouTube podcast blogs were huge for me. Also just kind of consistently listening to those. It's the first two books, podcast blogs, all that kind of stuff. That's consistency. Meaning that you continuously are always doing that, but you're focusing on one skill at a time, but you're always kind of doing that stuff. It's part of your daily life, day in and day out. Then affordable learning when you're really laser focused in on going through some specific skill, then you're going to start buying courses, things like that. And then when you get stuck in areas or you really want to get there fast and coaching and mentorship can be your next step. So that's how I would think about those. Now let's jump to number five, which is now apply and practice. Now the apply and practice is fairly, fairly simple. And I've developed what I call the LDT formula, which is how I kind of make this work. And so when you learn something, you need to apply it right away. Meaning that you're going to be doing all of this learning and spending all of this money on books, or you're spending money on courses, or you're spending on mentorship. You need to start applying this information. If you don't apply this information, you are going to forget the information super fast. So if you spend a thousand dollars on a coach, for example, and all of a sudden you don't really do that stuff until later on. You're just kind of taking some notes and trying to remember what they said, but you're not applying this stuff, then really it's going to start to fade away and you're going to start to forget the information. You need to make sure that you are immediately doing stuff after. So if a coach teaches you how to analyze a rental property, for example, you spend $300 so they can teach you how to analyze a rental property. You need to start analyzing rental properties, three to five of them, every single day for the next hundred, 200, 300 days, however long it takes you for you to master that system. And it's really important that you do this so that you actually keep that skill within your skill stack. You can lose skills in your skill stack, and all of a sud, you're starting from ground zero again, or you have to start, you know, 50% of the way there, and you have to do all that work all over again. So you want to make sure that you are honing some of these skills and ensuring that they work. So that's where the LDT formula is implemented. L stands for learn. And that means that you learn how to do the thing from someone who knows more than you. So book, podcast, doesn't matter what it is, you learn how to do what you're doing right now. You're learning how to do my exact system on how to actually make more money by developing your skill stack. And so I want you to be doing what you're learning right now. You need to implement that, this in order to be able to move forward with some of this stuff. So L stands for learn, D stands for do. So you are going to do the thing and keep doing it until you master it. Before you make any tweaks or iterations, you're going to keep doing that thing the way that they taught you. Okay, that's D and then T stands for tweak. So after you have mastered and tried a bunch of different times now you can start to tweak. What most people do is they start to tweak way too early. Early. They haven't actually given it time for the process to work. And so a lot of times they'll start to tweak way too early. I would not do that. You got to avoid tweaking way too early. We all want to tweak and tinker, and we all want to change specific things just do what they tell you first and do it for a longer period of time. Okay. And so that's how LDT works. Learn, do tweak. You can repeat that process over and over again for every single skill that you are working on. We don't need to go deeper into that. It's a very simple process. It's a lot harder to implement for most people, but it's a very simple process. Link, dt, learn, do tweak. All right, Number six is to monetize your skills. So now that we have some of these new skills and you've developed some of these new skills, we need to start to monetize them. So if you're in your job, one is to ask for a promotion or raise based on your new contribution. So if you've never heard our episode talking about how to ask for a raise, make sure you check that out. We'll try to link it up in the show notes for you, but it's a step by step guide. We also have one. If you go to MasterMoney Co resources, I tell you exactly how to do this. And it's a skill set. It is not something you just go into your boss's office and ask for a raise. There's a very specific way to do that. And because of your new skills, you can use those skills in the negotiation. So it's a really, really cool process. Secondly is you can also start to apply for higher paying roles with your newly upgraded skills. And so that's how you kind of do it in your job, or you start to practice those skills first, make sure they're actually working, and then you go and apply for some of those new roles. Secondly though, is if you want to learn new skills for freelancing or a side hustle, you use your skills at a service. So if you are learning design and you want to be a designer for someone, or you're learning consulting or you're learning writing, then all of those are fantastic ways to offer your skills as a service. On the side. Secondly is you can also use platforms like Upwork or Fiverr to find clients or even LinkedIn to find clients. We have a lot of contractors that we hire in my businesses from upwork. We have an entire customer service team that's from upwork in one of my businesses. And so that's gonna be something, I think that you can also find, find some great work there. I've seen people make over a million dollars over the course of their lifetime on upwork, so it's really, really cool to see what people can do there. Then you can also utilize your skills if you're starting a business or if you want to use it in your business. So you use your skills to solve problems or create value or digital products or physical goods. There's all kinds of stuff that you can do there if you're going to start a business with your new skills. But make sure that you're starting to monetize them. You want to see a dollar value come back and you want to track that I want you to track. You know, hey, this skill brought me back X amount of dollars and you're going to try to estimate it. Sometimes if it's a social skill, like you know, charisma, or learning how to talk to people, or understanding how to public speak, it's not always clear as day what that actually would be. But we got to think through that as you start a business. Next is to stay consistent. Consistency is the key when you're developing your skills. You got to stick to it and you got to continuously doing this over time. And then lastly is track and adjust. So track how your progress is going going when you start to earn more money, reinvest some of those profits back into learning more skills so that you can continue to cycle and grow your income over time. This is going to be a really important thing that you can do. And in areas that you are crushing it, double down, double down on areas that you are crushing it. It's going to be something that can make a huge impact on your bottom line. We're doing this to make money. We're not doing this just to learn the skills for fun, kicks and giggles. We're doing this to earn more dollars so that we can buy our financial free freedom even faster. So mindset shifts that I want you to think about before I dive into a couple of different things is focus on providing value to others. That's number one. Adopt a growth mindset to embrace challenges and then celebrate your progress, not just the results. I want you to remember those three things as you go through this process. Now let me give you an example really quick of how one skill can grow over time. Let's take that negotiation skill really quick and think about this for a second. Let's say you start to learn negotiation, you learn the basics of persuasion, anchoring techniques, how to counter offer people those types of things. And you start to earn slightly more by negotiating your salary. And you start to increase your income based on that. But then you continue to learn about negotiation. You're like, I want to keep doing this and you start to learn how to negotiate in sales. In sales you can earn a lot more money. And so you start to learn about commissions and increasing your commissions because you go into a sales role, because you get so good at negotiations that it also helps you with your sales process. But then all of a sudden you realize, hey, I want to continue learning more. And so what you do is you start to manage high stakes negotiations for folks in partnerships or contracts or leaderships. And so when you start to do that, you can identify leverage points and create win win scenarios and use emotional intelligence to read and influence other people. And this can help you negotiate six figure contracts or seven figure contracts and increase your earning floor significantly. If you learn how to negotiate at that level, maybe you start to go through the expert level and you can start to learn even more about negotiation. You've gone through a bunch of negotiations now, and so now you have some of this experience. And so over time, people start to hire you as a consultant for advanced negotiations with unions or suppliers or regulatory bodies. And then maybe you start to really master it. And big multimillion dollar or billion dollar companies hire you to help train them in negotiations or help you with their acquisitions and mergers, or they do high stake partnerships. You can see how this one skill is developing over time and maybe you become the best negotiator in the world. And all of a sudden when you do that, you're now training government employees how to negotiate and you're doing high stakes negotiations for the government. There's so many different cool things that you can do here that are going to help you earn more dollars over time. And that is what I want most people to understand is that your earning power, your earning potential goes way, way up when you start to do some of this stuff. So it's very, very powerful how you can shape some of this. Now there's a master list of skills that I can go through really quickly here that'll kind of help you just think through maybe some areas that you want to focus on. So if you want to improve your communication, public speaking, negotiation, persuasion, copywriting, sales skills, listening skills, which is actually a big one, conflict resolution, interpersonal skills, leadership, communication, all can be part of just that alone. There's technical and digital skills like coding or data analysis, or web development, or cloud computing, cybersecurity, blockchain technology, all of those can be part of technical and digital skills. Those who understand the Internet are going to rule the world at some point in time. So just understand if you can do some of this Stuff really, really important to have technical and digital skills, financial skills and business acumen meaning financial modeling or budgeting or tax planning or business evaluation or accounting or investing in portfolio management or risk management, revenue growth strategies, E commerce. All of this stuff is financial business. AC for sales, things like digital marketing or SEO optimization or social media or understanding, pay per click advertising or funnel building, which is a big one. Market research, branding, affiliate marketing, event marketing, all of this stuff is part of sales and marketing. There's a bunch of different areas there as well. I'm just throwing ideas out there for you guys to kind of spark some ideas. Personal development, teaching people time management or productivity optimization or emotional intelligence or networking or delegation or mindset coaching or stress management or goal setting and tracking. All of these can be part of personal development. There's leadership and management like team building and delegation, project management, decision making, strategic planning, crisis management. Tons of stuff. Maybe you need a certification to make more. There's a certified financial planner, there's a certified Public accountant, a cpa, there's project management professional or a pmp. There's even a Google Analytics certification. There's a lean Six Sigma. There's so many different things that you can do do in certifications. You know, if you're a nurse, maybe you advanced to a nurse practitioner or those types of things. Maybe if you're a blue collar worker you get some different certifications that allow you to earn more based on having that certification. There's even things like soft skills so adaptability or critical thinking if you're not good at that, or problem solving or collaboration or creativity. There's industry specific skills like for healthcare patient education or telemedicine technologies or for the trades advanced certification or OSHA certifications or heavy machinery operations for entrepreneurs. There's tons of different things out there. You're gonna know what you're probably weak at on your list. But there's things like crowdfunding or branding or venture capital pitching, business plan development, all that good stuff. And then there's also tools and platforms like I talked about Excel, but there's things like office suite collaboration tools like Slack or Trello or Sauna. If you get really good at that stuff, you can help people with that. Google Ads, Facebook ads, automation tools, AI tools, all that kind of stuff. And then there's emerging skills that you really want to think through is AI technologies or things like Metaverse, content creation or things, things like cryptocurrency or virtual augmented reality. All that kind of stuff is coming down the line that you can also work on. If you're really good at that stuff, you can make a lot of money. So this is all just to throw out to give you a bunch of different ideas. And what I really want you to understand is if you follow this system, you can make a ton of money this year and I'm really excited for each and every single one of you to start to implement some of this. Let me know down in the comments if you are listening on Spotify or you're watching on YouTube, let me know in the comments. What are you going to work on this year? Really, really excited for that. Want to see what you are doing? We're going to give you a huge list of some things that you should be doing in 2025 to help grow your wealth and your net worth in the next episode. So make sure you stay tuned. Really excited. Subscribe to this Podcast Share with a family member or friend if you got value out of this episode I pray that you got value out of this episode because we are working really hard on these to try to give you as much value as possible. I want this podcast to give you the most value on the Internet. So we are really, really excited for that and if you guys have any other questions, please let us know and we will see you on the next episode.