Episode 39: The Wealthy Anti-preneur: A New Path To Career Success With Dr. Matt Markel

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The Wealthy Anti-preneur: A New Path To Career Success With Dr. Matt Markel

Living Your Dream: Beyond The Cliché

What is up, Money Masters? I have another special guest for you. His name is Dr. Matt Markel. Matt, how are you doing?

Wade, it’s great to be here. I am living the dream.

Living the dream. Whose dream is that?

That’s a good question. It’s my dream, of course. It’s the ability to do what you want with the people who you want to, on the timeframe that you want, and to see them and to see the good in what you’re doing. We talked about the glass being half full or half empty or whatever. To me, it’s looking at the glass and saying, “Whatever level of fullness it is, that’s good, and I’m going to be thankful for that.” It’s a combination of being with people you want, doing what you want to do, and living with an attitude of gratitude. It’s my dream, but when you think about it, some of those tenets are pretty universal. Maybe it’s the dream for everyone.

I love that. What I find most commonly is there’s a cliche in that, “I’m living the dream,” as if it’s a universal dream. Maybe it is wealth, power, fame, fortune, the nicest house, the nicest car, or whatever. Oftentimes, I’d push back on that question when people ask or say that to me. I say, “Whose dream is it?” They got thrown off, but you weren’t thrown off by that, which I loved.

 

 

The dream. It’s powerful to think about what that means for you. As we begin this show, we want you to have that in mind. Whose dream are you living? Have you chosen to live your dream? Have you thought about what that is? Have you given yourself permission as an adult to step back and think about what it is you care about? We’ve been living other people’s dreams. We’re often employed by other people.

Even our customers, if you’re a business owner, might be telling you what they want, and you’re trying to do what they tell you to do in your church life, in your home life, in your communities. You might be acquiescing to other people’s stuff. I’m a dad. Oftentimes, I’m acquiescing or I’m giving up some things that I care about for the betterment of the family, for my spouse, for my kids. I don’t think that’s uncommon or wrong, but I do think it’s important that we take a step back and have a chance to dream, like we did when we were kids. Think big and have something powerful to look forward to in our lives.

As we talk, Matt, I want to make sure that we address some practical things related to that, and recognizing that it’s not just those who are in positions of power in large businesses, owners of corporations, or leaders of organizations are the only ones who can have autonomy and live a life that seems to be the dream. Let’s talk a little bit more about that. How did you come to the understanding, the way you described it, of what it is to live the dream?

As you were saying that way, there are so many things that are going through my head that we could talk about on this. For me personally, it’s been an evolution over years and years of refining what matters to me, refining what I believe are the key important things that I want to have in my life. For example, we talk about success a lot. We want to be successful.

I’ve been wondering how, for the audience, how many people have sat down and defined what success means to them? Living the dream or living your dream and success are very much interrelated. As we think about what matters to us, we could pattern our lives after going after those things that we think are the most important. We can choose to prioritize those. As we all know, the mind works in funny ways with the unconscious mind and so forth. When you start looking for the things that you want to see in it, you start finding those. Some people say that you start attracting those.

That concept of how to live the life that you want and how to be successful, what it comes down to, or some part of work that you have to do, is to define what you want that to be. Otherwise, you’ll continue to spend time living for someone else, or living by what some authority at some point in your life has told you should do, whether it’s your parents, school teachers, or your view of common wisdom, conventionalism in society, or whatever those things are.

We oftentimes even think about things that are not the most inspiring things, but they’re the minutiae of what we have to get done in the day. I guarantee, for everybody in the audience, no one gets out of bed in the morning going, “Today is the day I’m going to pay some bills.” No. It doesn’t get you out of bed in the morning.

It’s my favorite thing.

“I was going to earn some money today so I could pay some bills.”

Rekindling Your Inner Spark: Overcoming Limitations

That’s the exact opposite thing that most people want to do. We are all driven by something bigger. There is something innate within us. It’s the spark. It’s been mostly extinguished by a lot of people, or within a lot of people. Back in 2010, I was feeling that personally. I was feeling pretty drained in terms of what my future was going to look like. I was still quite young. I was in my late twenties, and I was looking for a career path.

I thought I had found the right topic of career path. I knew personal finance was going to be it. This was in 2005 that I figured that out. I know most of my audience has heard some of that backstory before, but I had this spark within me that said, “Personal finance is your career path.” I was in a personal finance class in early 2005. It showed me that there was a need for people to learn financial literacy.

I started to study people whom I could find. I studied Dave Ramsey, Robert Kiyosaki, T. Harv Eker, Thomas Stanley, and even Suze Orman. I studied anyone I could find who had something to do with personal finance and who had some level of influence. I started to study them and try to find the commonalities, but also the things that were different and practical. I went to business school, and I had all this theory going on in business school.

I was reading books like Rich Dad Poor Dad, and I was like, “There’s practicality and stuff like that.” I was looking for the real practical stuff. Over a series of time in 2010, I was like, “I’m inspired by this topic, but what does it look like to be in a career?” The only thing I could find was salesmanship in investments and insurance. I wanted to be a teacher, trainer, educator, mentor, and coach of some kind.

I was down. I was like, “What am I going to do? I cannot make a living doing this. I don’t know a path.” A friend of mine introduced me to a guy who became a friend. His name was Greg, and he became a great mentor for me. There was a moment when he asked me a powerful question. “What if you let go of the negative things in your life? What if you were willing to share with me something that you’ve never shared with anyone else?” I’m like, “What do you mean?” He was like, “What’s a silly little story in your life that you’ve never told anyone before?” I’m like, “Why does that matter?” He was like, “Just share something.”

I trusted this guy enough to share something that for me was vulnerable. It was a silly little situation in sixth grade. We’re all exiting. It was the end of the year. Everyone seemed to have girlfriends. I wrote this note to this girl I had a crush on since first grade. I had it passed down. Somebody took it down to this girl. She was down at the end of the table. I see her open it up, and then I see all of her girlfriends hysterically laughing.

For the younger members of the audience, we should tell them that this was before texting.

This was far before texting. This was back in, I guess, ‘89, ‘90, or something like that. This was our form of texting. We would pass notes when we were kids. I was devastated emotionally by this. As I shared this with my friend, he’s like, “Let me tell you one.” He proceeds to tell me something similar. I’m like, “Really? You’ve had something like that happen?” It cracked me open and helped me see that there’s work to be done.

There are stories of experiences we’ve had in life that have created limitations in how we do things in life. It was empowering to know that by opening up, I was able to gain a deeper relationship with that person. As a mentor for me, he was older and further along in his career, and he was able to bring me into some training that he was going to the following weekend. It showed me a path to do what I call powerful work, introspective work that helps us figure out those limitations and the roadblocks, and find a way to dream again, and then live into that dream.

Guys, what I’m caring that you get is that there is powerful work you can do to overcome stuff in your life that’s holding you back. You can move forward powerfully, but you have to do it. You have to do the work, and be willing to do the work. Matt, thanks for bringing that topic up. I want you to share a little bit of your background. Who are you professionally? How have you transitioned your thinking from being in a professional environment as a leader in your field to a topic that you call anti-preneurship or being an anti-preneur? Can you give us some background on that?

The Anti-preneur Mindset: A New Path To Wealth

I’ve been a senior leader and C-suite executive with several eight and nine-figure businesses. When I started out, I was in the lowest entry-level engineering position that the company had. I didn’t start in the mail room, but I started at the lowest entry-level engineering position. The company hired me right out of undergrad. I worked hard. I’ve got some key tenets that I try to bring to how I’ve operated in the workplace, and I can share those. I’ve got five key things that I can share with your audience. It might be very beneficial to them.

To paint the pictures, I continue to grow in expertise and leadership capabilities, and then towards over the last decade or so, continue to rise in the level of agency and authority to help bigger and bigger groups do what they need to do. It’s been primarily in the defense sector. I made a big pivot in 2017, and I left the defense sector that I’ve been in since 1990.

I was very well known in the industry. On the government side and the industry side, I was pretty well known and pretty influential. I left all that to join the self-driving car industry for a couple of reasons. One, I thought it was fantastic. It’s a great way to say, “You have many lives.” A quick piece of data, we lose about 43,000 lives on the road every year in the United States of America. That is about the same as the lives we lose every year to breast cancer.

With breast cancer, which is a horrible disease that takes people far too young, we’re doing a lot about it. I wear one of Susan G. Komen’s shirts now. We do all these things for breast cancer awareness and support. If somebody gets killed in a car accident, it’s like, “Yeah, they got killed in a car accident.”

The self-driving industry was big on helping to take a big bite out of that. That’s what I like about them. They have the same passion as defense for something where I could tell people what I was working on. The other thing about that is it forced me to get out of my comfort zone, to push myself. One of the things in a circle I run with is we use the phrase, “If you’re not experiencing imposter syndrome every eighteen months, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.”

If you’re not experiencing imposter syndrome every 18 months, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.

I needed that. I was comfortable with being well-known. I got out of my comfort zone. I joined a company where I knew two people in the company. It’s Waymo, the Google software car company. I ended up taking over all of the working radar that the company had. That’s everything from getting it into production to research and development, new product innovation, and manufacturing. I did that. Waymo did it for a few other companies. I then became the CEO of a radar company.

Now I’m with a company called Epirus, which is a defense technology startup that’s working to help bring new novel technologies to the warfighter to help keep them safe from things like drones, which we’re all more afraid of every day when we see what bad things those can do. That’s like the arc of a professional career. I guess one thing to highlight here is that it sounds to people probably like, “You had this plan all worked out along the way.” A hundred percent, not.

Every time people say, “You can make a ten-year plan.” I was like, “I didn’t know it’s allowed to be ten years. I don’t know if to be ten years.” I cannot make a ten-year plan. They go, “Then make a five-year plan.” I would make five-year plans, but I will quickly find out that I never hit any of them. I never made a single five-year plan. What I had planned didn’t work out the way I thought, but it always worked out better than I could have imagined.

I think that comes a lot from using these five principles I talked about. Number one, always make the most out of every day. You’ve seen people who are not putting it in. They’re phoning it in sometimes. I knew you see others who are working hard and giving their all. They make the most out of it. They get more done in a day than other people do in a week.

Always make the most out of every day.

Always be learning. If I didn’t have the mindset of, “Can I learn this? Can I pick up this new skill? Can I understand what makes it go on with these people, this project, this organization, or whatever?” If I didn’t have that curiosity, then I probably would not be as successful as I am. There’s a great book on curiosity by Brian Grazer. He’s a very famous film writer and producer. He worked with Ron Howard on several things.

I got to meet Brian in LA, and he’s a super great guy. He’s got a book on curiosity. This is a good read. Keep your hope for big opportunities. When a big opportunity comes, be willing to take the risk on it, like what I did with Wayne Long, or being able to go back to school a little bit later in life and get my PhD. Numbers 4 and 5 are important in how we deal with others. Number four on my list is to always exceed expectations. Number five is never to pass up an opportunity to be kind or lift someone else.

That’s the playbook that I’ve been using throughout my life. I didn’t always have it as crystallized as that, but I’ve been using that playbook. I think it helped me be successful, not only in my professional career, but as I’ve looked more and more around my peers and the people like the generation behind me. Some of the myths and mistruths that we’ve been accepting as part of society that it called me to want to do more. That’s where I came up with the concept of being an anti-preneur. I’m not against entrepreneurs at all. I’m thinking anti-preneurism, like anti-matter or anti-hero. It’s a different take on being a hero.

What Does “Anti” Really Mean?

You might even take the word anti and think about before. Doesn’t the word anti sometimes mean before something?

I think that’s ANTE versus ANTI. I’m sure that somebody a lot better at Latin than I is probably going to call in and say like, “By the way, you guys.” I think it’s ANTE versus ANTI, but that concept got me excited to help with all this. I’m not going to name names, but I’ve met some colleagues of mine who are brilliant. They are some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Some people say, “Matt, you’re smart.” I was like, “No, these guys are on a different plane. They are super, rockstar brilliant.”

I also know that their financial situation is not great. They haven’t planned for what they’re going to do. I have a story of one of them being laid off from a company. He’s like, “I’ve got to find something to do because I cannot not work.” Some people will say that it’s because that’s how they feel validated. This is like being from a money standpoint. We’ve got to do a better job of educating people on the two careers that you need to have.

You need to have a career that you love and enjoy. For me, being an engineer at heart, that’s being an executive. There’s the planning for your financial future. I think those are two sides of a coin. When I’m talking about it, I sometimes take a coin and show people its two sides. It’s a simple visual to help remember it. If you’re void on one of the sides, it’s going to be trouble for you.

If you’re void on the career side, you’re always thinking about money. You’re going to lack in validation, and you’re going to lack in what is your real contribution to society, which we all want to focus on. If you’re thinking on the financial independence side, then it’s going to be a tough situation for you, especially as you get older. You start thinking about perhaps changing your work habits, or wanting to retire, or whatever is in your plan. If you haven’t done a good job of planning for your financial situation, then it will be trouble for you.

True Wealth: Financial Literacy On Any Income

As you bring that up, I was revising the introduction to the book I’m writing, which I’m very likely going to call True Wealth, and getting beyond the financial wealth and all these other areas that we’ve been talking about. My core premise is that anyone can live wealthily on any income, but we have to do what you described. We have to be financially literate. We have to be willing to take some actions that are good, healthy actions around anything.

If you’re going to be good in your career, there are certain things you have to do to be good in your career. You cannot skip things. Otherwise, it doesn’t work out. You get fired. In our financial lives, I often think we’re too lazy. We think somebody else is going to handle it for us, or that somebody else should handle it for us. In the end, we just get by. Even though there are many out there making healthy incomes, they still spend it all. They don’t have an opportunity when they get laid off, or if there’s a good opportunity to go to the next thing, they don’t have the resources to even bridge the gap of 2 to 3 months without income. Have you seen stuff like that too?

Yeah. That’s in The Anti-Preneur Book I’ve got coming out later. It comes out at the end of June or early July. I’m still working through some of the details on how this can be available. If you go to Anti-Preneur.com and sign up there. There’s a field for a name, email, and maybe phone number. Put those in there, then I’ll send updates on when it’s going to be available, how to probably get the book, and stuff like that.

There are so many myths and mistruths that we’ve been pulled over the years. We’ve been conditioned to think that there are good business people and bad business people. Bad business people are focused on top-line numbers, like revenue, “I need more revenue.” Good business people are focused on the bottom line numbers. What are the assets I’m creating? Look at the balance sheet. The balance sheet at the end focuses on the assets. What are the assets that this business has?

Good business people focus on the bottom line number.

It’s like with people, too. We get so focused on salary. They’re like, “I’m going to make $100,000 next year. I’m going to make $150,000,” or whatever the numbers are for you. You start thinking, “If I don’t get a raise and get $210,000, then I’m going to quit.” Really? When should you be thinking about wealth and assets like a good business net?

Good business people think about wealth and assets. Bad business people think only about top-line revenue. It’s sharing those types of insights. When you think about it, and this is something you could maybe consider for your book, there’s a foundation that we can bring to understand a new way of thinking about how to deal with our lives and our finances. Number one, basic financial literacy is teachable.

They could be taught in high schools. We all agree about that. Number two is exactly what you were saying. You will resonate with this. You can become wealthy in your career without having to quit and start your own business. We all know several famous examples of that, like football player Tom Brady. He made so much more on the field. People think all these stars made more money from all those endorsements. He made a lot more on the field, which is his W-2 job, than he made off the field during his NFL career.

Business leaders like Tim Cook and Mary Barra from Apple and General Motors are employees. They become wealthy working for someone else in their career that they love. Those are famous people, but there are so many more. You and I probably know someone who we were like, “He’s not famous. No one knows who he is,” but he has become wealthy in his career.

The third piece is that wealth creation is teachable. That’s one of the things that we can help people also. It’s one thing to convince them to get to the point of like, “Yes, I want it.” The next thing is like, “How do we teach wealth creation to people?” By using the skills of investors and entrepreneurs, like smart strategic use of credit and real estate, private equity, strategic joint ventures, arbitrage, tax optimization, asset protection, and those sorts of things, we can teach that. Those are teachable skills. That’s the foundation.

Unlocking Wealth Creation: Teach Yourself Financial Freedom

I believe all of that. When we talked a few weeks ago and we were just getting to know each other, we stumbled into this topic, probably because of my background. You’re like, “This dude made this introduction to us. Let’s see if we can find some common ground.” We did. There are so many things about what you described that are exactly what I’ve been up to in my career. I believe anyone can become financially literate and develop a high financial IQ, and it doesn’t have to be complex.

I also believe and have seen that he can be wealthy on any income. One of my mentors wrote this little book, Financial Freedom: Finding What Works For You. It’s a small read, but the premise in there is what we’re saying. He also shared this interesting little story of a woman that he had been advising, coaching, and guiding in her financial life. She had retired or passed away.

She came to him one day and she said something to the effect of, “What do I do with all this money?” He’s like, “What do you mean by all this money? You’re living on Social Security.” She’s like, “Yeah, I’ve got an extra thousand dollars a month. I don’t know what to do with it.” “Wait, what? You’re living in such a way that you have extra money to play with, like do something with it?” “I do. I just don’t have a lot of needs in my life at this stage. I don’t have places I need to go, nice cars I need to drive. I’m fine. I’m comfortable with the life that I’m living, and I have some extra money. What should I do with it?”

He shared that story because it illustrates very clearly the fact that what matters is how well you manage the money that you have. It’s not the dollar amount coming in. The top-line revenue thing you mentioned a few minutes ago is not the right thing to focus on. How you manage it matters in a huge way.

Here’s another little story. One of my favorite little reads by a guy named Marvin Ashton. If you’re watching this episode, you’ll see a little picture on the screen. It’s an old one from the ‘70s. This guy lived during a time of hyperinflation. He was a leader in the church I belonged to at the time. He was noticing that a lot of people were scared about inflation, and were not managing the resources they had very well.

He was in an interview with a young couple who were about to get married. It was the impetus for the booklet that he ended up writing. It was this little interview where he asked this couple all these questions about how they were going to deal with life. One of the questions shocked him. He asked him, “Who’s going to manage the financial affairs of the family?” They look at each other. “I guess he is,” or “I guess she is.”

They hadn’t had the conversation about who was going to manage the finances for the most part. He shared some statistics back then that I think are still very similar now. Somewhere between 75% and 89% of divorces that occur were associated with money problems. It’s a matter of financial IQ and having some systems for managing money in an effective way, and having an open dialogue.

As we were talking about earlier in the episode, the vision for our future, if we have an individual vision and then if you happen to be married, if you have a shared vision with your life partner and you guys agree to that, then the decisions around money are guided by something powerful, a dream, a vision for your future that you can live into.

It’s just a matter of learning some new skills. You use some pretty big terms that not everyone is familiar with, like private equity and whatever else. There were a lot of things that I’m familiar with, but a lot of people are not, but they’ve learned. I think the first thing we need to learn is the fact that there are things called assets and liabilities. Assets are things that we own, like the desk that I’m sitting at, the house that I’m sitting in, and the cars that I drive. Those are things I own. Bank accounts are things that you own.

If you have investments and brokerage accounts, those are things that you own. If you have a 401(k) or IRA, those are things that you own, but you’re now in a partnership with the IRS that then determines certain drawbacks and benefits. Mostly, you’re invested in the stock market if you’re in any of those things. What most people are familiar with is stocks, or having ownership in a publicly available stock.

Usually, it is some sort of tranche, slice and dice, mutual fund, which with unclear investment objectives, and minimum tolerances for pulling versus rolling cash.

Nobody reads the prospectus.

No one knows what it is.

No one knows exactly what they’re invested in. It can create confusion, guys. If you’re confused about money, you’re not alone. Let’s just put it that way. It doesn’t have to be that hard. It doesn’t have to be that complex. Some basic literacy things, like what a mutual fund is. Ask Google, Gemini, Anthropic, or whatever AIs you are familiar with. Do something and have it teach it to you as a third grader. Ask it about things like that, and then go, “What can I do to simplify my portfolio? What can I do to enhance my financial awareness? What are some things besides those that can be invested in?”

The field outside of the stock market is called Alternative Investments. You might start to study what are our alternative investments? What are some of the common things, like multifamily real estate or investing in drilling wells for oil and gas? We still use that so commonly. Maybe it’s the newer technologies like the radar systems and self-driving cars. Is there a way to invest in that? You might be able to be a small investor in a large pot of money.

Your few tens of thousands or a couple of hundred thousand dollars go into this pot. It’s a pot of a hundred million that might then go to place an investment in something like Waymo. I don’t know if they’re publicly traded or not, but use that as an example. If they are not public yet, then you might be able to gain some ownership in that company as a tiny participant.

Now you have an asset that can grow dramatically in value without having to be the startup person. Statistically, if you do the research on this, half of businesses fail within five years. I’m pulling this as a reminder from your back cover, by the way. I was rereading that. I’m like, “Those are perfect. We’ve got to show this.” I think you said 18% chance of success.

Get this. All the people out there are thinking, “I’m going to start a business. I’m going to be a millionaire or a multimillionaire.” Remember some of the statistics. If it’s your first time starting a business, your success rate is 18%. It’s your second time starting a business, but the first one wasn’t successful, and you’ve learned everything now. Now you know the mistakes. You’re not going to listen to that again. You’ve got it figured out. On the second one, your success rate goes from 18% all the way up to 20%.

If you guys were not watching this, you missed it. That little pause was his hand going up to above his head, and then coming right back down, right next to his other hand. That was good. All the way up to 20%. What’s after that?

They’re not good odds. It’s been a lot of successful businesses before. It’s only like one in three or so. They’re not great numbers. Some people are called back, and by all means, go for it. If that’s your calling, that’s how you feel validated, and that’s what you think your purpose is; by all means, go into that. Here’s the deal. I think that’s wrong for probably 19 out of 20 people, maybe more like 49 out of 50. That’s why it’s so important to me that people think that you don’t have to quit your career to become wealthy. You can do what you love, and what also gives you the risk posture and risk exposure that you’re comfortable with. You can do that and still become wealthy.

Your Greatest Asset: Maximizing Your Earning Potential

I’ve learned in my research, and I’ve got software that helps show this visually, what we call your maximum potential. It helps us visualize. If you’ve got even a steady income, the average income, $85,000 a year, is like a person’s median income in the United States. Household income is closer to $120,000 to $150,000.

If you’ve got $85,000 a year and you’ve got a career ahead of you and you’ve got 3% average increases, cost of living increases over your life, it’s going to be somewhere around $4 million that you are responsible for managing because it’s exponentially increasing. By the end of your 40-year working life or whatever it is, you’re not making $85,000, you’re making several hundred thousand. It’s the nature of a compounding income over time.

That’s what you described. You start at the bottom of the totem pole in an organization. If you find a place that you love to work, you can work up the ladder into different positions and different responsibilities and thereby different income levels. What we’ve learned, and Warren Buffett validates this, is that our ability to earn an income is our greatest asset.

If we can sell that ability and our skillset to an employer who has stable income in this form of a salary even, or maybe there are some bonuses you can get as well, and you’re able to learn on an ongoing basis as you described, you’re the type of person who’s one of my favorite mentors, Jim Rohn, he said, “You need to work harder on yourself than you do on your job.” If we’re constantly learning, if we’re constantly trying to acquire new skills and add value beyond what we’re being paid for, it’s inevitable that we will have greater responsibilities and greater opportunities.

Not always solely in one company, but perhaps you shift companies back and forth to the right opportunities, but they will be there, and you don’t have to be the entrepreneur. You can be what you might call an intrapreneur inside an organization, coming up with ideas that add value to an organization. I do love your term anti as in “alternative to.” You don’t have to be the starting founder. You can work within an organization and be very successful.

Warren Buffett, I came across a quote from him where he said something to the effect of, “I’ll take any college graduate and I’ll give him $100,000 today in exchange for 10% of their future earnings from this day forward.” What that means is he has seen the math on people’s trajectories in their careers. They will increase in value, and that 10% of $100,000 today is only $10,000, but 10% of $1 million at the end of a career is $100,000.

You might be making $1 million at the end of your career as a salaried person. You get up to a CEO position. Maybe you’re still only making a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but still, you’ve increased over your life. Guys, I believe in you. From what Matt is talking about, he believes in you as well.

He’s the quintessential type of person who has worked as an employee and found great joy in it, great satisfaction in developing a specific and unique skill set, and adding value to an organization. If that’s you, recognize that it’s okay. You don’t have to become an entrepreneur outside of your organization. It’s okay to find a path within someone else’s company that you love, but do so in a way that you’re not shackled to it. What would you have to say about that?

There are two things. Number one, it’s more than it’s okay. It’s great. It’s great if you work in a company. Here’s the deal. There is a group I call Professionals, Practitioners, and Experts, PPEs. Nearly everything we experience comes from PPEs. The clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the laptop I’m viewing you on were all made by some engineer, sold by some salesperson, and with some marketing person.

I use a lot of Apple products, but everything that I buy from Apple is created by the Professionals, Practitioners, and Experts who work there. It’s not by Steve Jobs. It’s by the PPEs. Levi’s is one of the jeans that I wear. Levi’s has been around for 100 years. Levi’s and Strauss had been dead for years and years. Jeff Bezos isn’t with Amazon anymore. What we experience comes from the Professionals, Practitioners, and Experts.

Look around whatever room you’re in. If you see anything that’s made by a man, most likely, it’s made by a PPE and delivered by a PPE and sold to you by a PPE, and you put your money in a bank that’s run by a PPE. It’s more than just okay. It’s great. There’s the second thing that you said that is so true. I talk about this a little bit in one of the videos I put out on my Facebook channel. Don’t confuse your job and your career.

Your career is what you have, the skills you bring to help people solve problems. For me, it’s engineering solutions and leading teams to do great, remarkable things in the process of doing that. That’s your career. Your job is what you’re currently working on or doing. Many people define themselves as “I’m the senior director of XYZ for Boeing Corporation. I’m the VP of something for Kroger, the grocery store.”

They tie their validation to the particular job that they have. That’s not the way to do it. Be validated by your career because that way, if that job goes away, your value doesn’t decrease. The skills that you bring are still there. Whether you’re doing that for Kroger, Albertsons, Publix, or whatever, no matter who you’re doing it for, your career is something that no one can take away from you. Your job has an aspect of vulnerability, either on your side, the economic side, or what else.

Marketable skills are what you’re getting at. I’ve got a daughter who is 19 and a son who is 18. If you’re younger on that end and you’re getting into your career path, it’s about finding ways to learn marketable skills, things that can be yours to keep, that you can transfer to different organizations to be paid for adding value to their organizations based on those skills you’ve developed. Some of it’s highly technical if you’re an engineer. Some of it is more administrative, and you’re skilled at leading people, or maybe you’re skilled or learn the skill of some trade. I love that, as people, we can have our own paths, no matter what it is.

I believe we are all, in a sense, business owners, but it’s the business of ourselves. If you can see yourself, if maybe you’re not going to be the entrepreneur who’s out there doing the tech company, maybe you’re the entrepreneur or the anti-preneur who’s going to be the business of me. Would I buy stock in me? If I look at who I am as a person, am I developing my skills? Am I becoming better every day?

Am I adding more value than what I’m taking from society and from my employer? Am I lifting people up out of difficult situations and always doing something good in the world? Would I buy stock in me? Am I showing up as this type of person? If I’m going to buy stock in Tesla or Amazon or whatever, we see them as valuable because they do all these cool things.

If you look at yourself in the mirror, are you the type of person that you would want to invest in stock? If not, I invite you to become that type of person, to start to work harder on yourself than you are on the job that you’re doing today. As you do so, you’ll have a greater sense of self-confidence. You’ll have a greater sense of self-worth, and that will show up in how you deliver value in your organization.

You may find that you are selected out, because you’re no longer the peon working for somebody who’s oppressing you, but you’re choosing to be in a position of power in your life, which then you can go find a job in a different organization with those marketable skills you have that’s highly valued by another organization. As the money flows in from that, likely a higher income than you’re receiving before, if you manage it well, you’ll be able to acquire hundreds of thousands and ultimately millions by managing it properly.

Let me finish that story about the maximum potential. It’s about how much percentage of that income we keep, because as that exponential growth happens, most of us spend the same amount. We call that lifestyle creep. As our income increases, our expenses increase to the same level. If we can keep our lifestyle relatively similar to what it is today, but we have increases over the years, if we have a system for capturing that, that’s what makes all the difference.

It’s not a rate of return on an investment. It’s the fact that you’re keeping a good chunk, ideally 15% to 20%, but if you’re not there, 5% is great, go to 6%, go to 10%, go to 15%. That will automatically happen if you’re keeping your lifestyle relatively similar while your income increases over time. Matt, I appreciate your time. I want to give you a chance to share any last principle or practical takeaway that you want to leave the audience with.

Cultivating Your Best Life: Essential Principles For Success

We’ve covered so many great topics here. This is almost like a master course in getting your life set on the right vector. At the end of the day, it’s your life. The things that we’re talking about here, the teachings that we’re bringing are ways that can help you get out of some of the conventional wisdom traps that so many people fall in. Lifestyle is one of them, and even the incessant marketing for more and more stuff to buy that you probably don’t need, but somehow you conflate with what success is because you haven’t defined what success is to you.

You think that the new phone is being successful. As soon as I get this new TV, as soon as I get this new car, second car, house, or a bigger house, or whatever. Instead of buying into all that, define success for yourself. Several people can help you get the right tools to be able to optimize your financial situation so that it aligns with your definition of what success is. I piggyback on all the things you talked about. This is a great master class in not only how to be an anti-preneur, but also how to take control of your life and enjoy it the most.

Guys, go follow Dr. Matt Markel, Anti-Preneur.com. What are your socials?

I’m on Facebook at Facebook.com/DrMattMarkel. That’s the best way to get there. I’m also on LinkedIn. I’m the only Matt Markel that looks like me on LinkedIn. If you find me on LinkedIn, you can see lots of cool things. A little bit more on the techie side there, but on Facebook, there’s a lot of content that I put out there to start giving something back. You can go back and look at the previous videos and previous discussions that we’ve had on there. Follow that. There’ll be lots of good stuff there.

Make sure you sign up at Anti-Preneur.com, so you can find all the insights on the book. I give away a lot of stuff for free because I want people to learn from it. If you follow that, you might get a lot of free other resources as well. It’s going to be great. Ultimately, I’ll call it the community of people who see the world like this. Folks like Wade and folks like me who’ve been helping get you on the path to share what we’ve learned and learn from you as well.

Matt, I see some collaboration between us. I’m glad to have you on. I appreciate your expertise and your insights related to being an anti-preneur, knowing that it’s perfectly okay and even great to work within an organization to create a life that you love. Guys, we’ll see you in the next episode. Take care.

 

Episode Resources

• Anti-Preneur
• Dr. Matt Markel on Facebook
• Epirus