Episode 195 – Jonathan DeYoe

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Automated Transcription

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Jonathan DeYoe  0:02  

This is something that I’ve done and talked about. It’s about my four hour routine in the morning —read, read everything, read constantly, read every day, read, read, read, read, read. I read economics, I read art history, I read philosophy, I read religious studies, I read commentaries in culture, I read newspapers, I read news articles, I read books, I read, read, read, read, read, read, you want to become a better you, read, reading gives the opportunity to learn things gives you the opportunity to experience things that you won’t have the opportunity to do in any other environment. It lets you develop empathy for other people. It lets you develop creativity. It lets you understand how people communicate with each other that reading is, I think, the most important thing that people can do to improve themselves. And read broadly, read people that disagree with you, read people that are specifically making arguments that you hate. Read, that’s the first thing. And I think that anyone that reads every single day, cannot fail but improve themselves and improve their situation.

 

Richard Matthews  1:19  

Heroes are an inspiring group of people, every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell, the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers, and the firefighters who risked their safety to ensure ours every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what, I can fix that, I can help people, I can make a difference. And they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service. Some go on to change the world, others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the Hero Show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers, their success, and their influence. So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money, and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…

 

Richard Matthews  2:14  

Hello, and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. And I have the pleasure of having Jonathan DeYoe on the line. Jonathan, are you there?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  2:20  

I’m here Richard, how are you?

 

Richard Matthews  2:22  

I’m doing great. I’ve been a little cold up here. I’m halfway up the mountain to Yosemite with my family. So I was a little surprised how cold it was here.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  2:32  

Wow. Warm up, get a blanket. Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  2:34  

Yeah, so where are you calling in from?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  2:38  

I’m in Berkeley, California.

 

Richard Matthews  2:41  

Have you guys started to get any of the warmer weather there yet? Or is it still a California cold?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  2:46  

Um, well, it’s coming. It’s never terribly cold here. I grew up in South Dakota, Montana. That’s a different kind of cold.

 

Richard Matthews  2:51  

That’s why we call it California cold. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  2:52  

California cold. Yeah, well, I’m not fully acclimatized. So this is beautiful for me, 60, 70 is beautiful.

 

Richard Matthews  2:58  

See, now I grew up in Southern California. And my freezing point is about 65 degrees, anything below 65, and like my fingers turn blue.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  3:07  

Wow, that’s too bad.

 

Richard Matthews  3:10  

Awesome. So what I want to do before we get too far in this interview is just do a brief introduction. And then we’ll dive in. So Jonathan is a best selling author of Mindful Money. And you have led the Bay Area wealth management firm focused on financial planning and client education since 2001. Your Lutheran Seminarian. Wow. I don’t know if I said that right. Lutheran Seminarian. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  3:30  

Lutheran seminarian.

 

Richard Matthews  3:31  

Yeah. And Buddhist academic term financial advisor. So what I want to do before we get too far into this is, what is it that you do now? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  3:39  

So it’s an interesting question because it’s shifting a little bit, or I’m adding an element on. So for 25 years I’ve worked with pretty well-off individuals and families on financial planning and investing. And that’s been the core of my business. When lockdown occurred in Berkeley in 2020, we started building financial courses. So throughout my career, the thing that’s really been different or interesting about what we’ve done is instead of relying on our ability to guess what the future is in terms of markets, we’ve said, hey, how about instead of that we do education around basic steps that people can take, things that people control, things that people can actually do to get better outcomes. And so we’ve had clients say, hey, Jonathan, come into my company and talk to my employees, Jonathan, come to talk to my family meeting, I want you to teach people about all this kind of stuff, and it’s great. So I’ve done these things, one off, but in 2020, we build courses. And so I’ve started to do a lot more free education, just to broaden out there and get it to more people. And so I think that education is key, and that is I think, what I spend the most time doing today, I still work with clients. I still have 100 clients that I work with face to face, but I like doing bigger presentations and a lot of public speaking around financial education, financial literacy, that’s how we move the needle.

 

Richard Matthews  4:58  

So with your courses, do they start to shift how your revenue is driven in your company?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  5:04  

Actually, no. And that’s not really the intention. The way we’ve used the course, we’ve had probably 2-3000 people have gone through some of the courses. And we’ve just given them away, like we’ve said, in a couple of instances for entrepreneurship groups, like I’ve hosted an event, and kicked off the course, and then show people how to go through the course themselves. But in many instances, here’s a link, here’s 18 modules at it, and we see people go through it. We haven’t really had a lot because it’s digital, I don’t have to be there. And so I’m just giving people access to it, especially in my community here in Berkeley, and Oakland, and Northern California, I’ve just given away to any group of adults, young adults, any group of at least high school age students, college students, focus a lot on bridging the wealth gap focused a lot on people that are maybe run into some problems financially in sort of rebuilding, how do we get them. So basic education and a basic launch set up so that they can improve their own stories.

 

Richard Matthews  6:08  

So why do you think financial literacy is, you said, to turn our country around and help train the next generation?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  6:21  

Well, I’d love it if we could turn the country around with it. But I’m like one person at a time. And a really good example of this is like 2008, much of which went into the meltdown that became the Great Recession. 2007, 2008, 2009 were just a lack of understanding of how debt functions, it’s a lack of understanding how leverage can turn against us. And I mean, it was a lack of understanding up and down the wealth chain. So a lot of people that probably shouldn’t have been able to buy their first home, were able to buy their first home with a lot more debt. And they used mortgages, and not on them, not necessarily their fault. But mortgages were applied to them that were probably inappropriate and were problematic. And if people had learned how to read the fine print, or understood how debt worked, I think that the problem would have been a lot smaller than it was. The interesting thing about that is pretty much at every level of finance, in that particular scenario, people made bad choices, whether it was the CEO of a company offering products, lending products, or whether it was, the mortgage broker themselves, who saw higher commission with this other thing, or the people valuing real estate, saw that if they did more, and actually boosted the price of the real estate, hey, guess what, I made a little bit more money. Because more mortgage brokers would hire me to value more real estate, or it was the person borrowing for the second home, or the third home or the fourth home or whatever, at 120% loan to value. So people up and down the chain made mistakes. Theoretically, we’ve changed a lot of the rules of that game. So that can’t happen again. But there are some basic incentives.

 

Richard Matthews  8:05  

The incentive for all messed up. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  8:06  

Oh, yeah, totally. But there’s some basic fundamental decision making that if we know what we’re doing, if we understand what we’re embarking on, we won’t make the big mistakes. And that my hope is with education, we can help individuals, for sure, but if we have a lot of individuals with some basic financial education, that I think we help the country, we help out the world.

 

Richard Matthews  8:27  

Yeah, absolutely. So, I want to talk about how you got into this space. We talked on this show about your origin story, every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s the thing that made them into the hero they are today. And I just want to know, were you born a hero? Were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into financial education? Or did you start in a job and eventually move over to become an entrepreneur?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  8:50  

Yeah, I wish I was bit by a radioactive spider that’s my favorite superhero, I love that. I was actually raised in a household with a lot of love and a lot of belief in bettering yourself and having a better future, but very limited resources. So that’s a nice way to say we were poor, but happy. So this backdrop made me put financial security as critical. And in fact, we’re now 40 years later, and I still am afraid of losing it all. I’m afraid that at the drop of a hat something can go wrong. So just because you finally made it doesn’t mean that the fear goes away. It’s really important to understand that psychology remains. The psychology developed as a kid remained. So at nine years old, I was really interested in security and I was really interested in investing and so when other kids were out playing with GI Joe and the Kung Fu battle grip, I was reading Value Line Research and Kiplinger’s and Money Magazine trying to figure out how to invest and make a little bit of money while other kids were going outside and riding their bikes. I was learning about business and running little micro-enterprises and little endeavors to make a little bit of money and I started investing like I said, when I was nine. So by the time I graduate from high school and think about college, I was thinking of finance for sure. Business Finance that’s what I wanted to study. And I went into it. And you know what? So boring after doing it for 10 years. And then to study it, it was just I hated it. So I very quickly shifted to Philosophy and Religious Studies, and had a couple of great professors, Gordon Britton, Jim Allard, Marvin Shaw. And they were like, hey, Jonathan, you love this stuff, you love reading about the stuff, you love writing about it, you should continue studying in grad school. So I went to the graduate theological union, to study at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, that’s where I started. And then I was like, you know what, I’m going to switch to an academic program, I’m not going to be a pastor, I’m going to switch an academic program. And I was very curious about Buddhist studies. And so I started doing comparative religion between Christian and Buddhist studies, and then shifted more and more and more towards Buddhist studies for a few years. At which time my wife said, Jonathan, you studied long enough, it’s my turn to study and she wanted to get her master’s in education. So I said, All right, great. I dropped out and got a job at VMware. And I spent five years at seven firms and learned a ton of lessons. And when I hit all these places, I got to start my own. And in 2001 started my own company.

 

Richard Matthews  11:26  

It’s amazing how similar our stories are too. I was nine years old when my dad gave me a copy of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And I became obsessed with how the business worked. I never really got into investing. But when I was 13, I started my first company which lasted all of about six weeks, which is a fun story, but I convinced my dad to give me a loan for 50 bucks and a ride into the big box store. And bought all those big giant candy bars with 50 bucks and I brought them to school and like the guy on the street corner in New York with his trench coat and his Rolex fake watches, I was selling my candy bars out of my backpack on campus, and sold about $1,500 worth of candy over six weeks. Before I was informed by the powers that be that I was not allowed to sell on campus without a business license. And I was too young to have a business license. So I had to close up shop. I tell people, I was shut down by the government at 13.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  12:22  

Yup, my story is the same as mine was gum, though, I buy a pack of gum for 25 cents, and you could sell a piece of gum for 25 cents. And turns out all these years later, my nephew is doing something similar. So it still lives on as an idea.

 

Richard Matthews  12:36  

Yeah, it makes me happy. And I went to college and studied theology and got a degree in preaching. And then right before I was done, dropped out and started my own business. And been going ever since. So yeah, it’s fun that we have a similar trajectory. I haven’t met someone else who’s like, yeah, I started doing business and then went to college to study the Bible. And then, dropped out and started a business.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  13:01  

Yeah, that’s got to be rare. There are two of us.

 

Richard Matthews  13:04  

Yeah, so over the course of building your career in finance, I want to talk about whether or not you have discovered your superpower, whether that’s a fancy flying suit, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky, or super strength, every hero has their superpower. In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills you were born with, or you developed that really helped you slay your client’s villains and help them come on top of their journeys. And the way I like to frame it is if you look at all your skills, you probably have a common thread that ties all those skills together.  It’s that thing that’s tying everything together behind the scenes, and that is probably where you find your superpower. So with that kind of framing what do you think your superpower is in your business?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  13:53  

Yeah, I was thinking about this. And I think that there’s probably two, I don’t know if it’s,  I just leave tall buildings and see through things. The first thing is I’m incredibly disciplined, my wife would say obsessive, my day has started for the last 25 years with almost the exact same morning routine. And that’s pretty much true in all aspects of my life. The first four hours of my day are meditation, exercise, stretching, reading, and writing. And that’s been true for a long, long time. So the benefit of actually having these excellent routines is that I’m able to be present when things go haywire. I had a coach who used to say, we systematize the ordinary so we can humanize the extraordinary and so in my business it’s unpredictable when the world’s going to go crazy. I don’t know when the next crazy thing is going to happen. So I have to be able to plant myself in the middle of the crazy when it occurs and be ready to combat whatever demons come up for my clients in that space. And then the second thing is, this is really also very important in our business, I’m really, really good at identifying and ignoring the noise. And there is a lot of noise in our industry. So sometimes I’ll be talking to somebody, and I’ll realize that they’re no longer curious about what we’re discussing, they’ve shifted from having a conversation to try to convince me that they’re right, their minds are made up. They’ve decided that they’re right about something. And that’s really, really important that I agree with them. At this point, I put on my blank face, and I nod my head and I just tried to look for a way out of the conversation, because you can’t learn something from somebody that has just, push, push, push, push, push, push, push, and if I want to stay open this new thinking, and I want to constantly find this noise is A-not real, B-not provable. And how do we avoid this stuff? And there’s a lot of it in our industry, so the ability to ignore that and help other people ignore it, I mean, putting in context, the last eight years, we’ve seen two very, very, very contentious elections, one went one way one went the other, both periods of time, there are people that are absolutely terrified on both sides of the aisle, terrify that was and of the world in both cases. And I just think that’s the kind of stuff.

 

Richard Matthews  16:17  

The sun came up after the next day, in both cases.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  16:20  

It did in both cases. And I think that’s pretty universal, but our system works. And I continue to have conversations on the same topic, but it’s mostly noise.

 

Richard Matthews  16:30  

But what’s interesting to me, is one of my good friends and mentors for a long time, used to say, if Armageddon happens tomorrow, the sun will still rise and the flowers will still bloom. And it always struck me as an important thought, especially when we’re dealing with things like the global financial crisis like in 2008. Or I see a lot more of big bubbles growing now that look like at some point, they’re going to pop. And when the worst happens, you have to be able to realize, honestly, whoever the President is, doesn’t make a big deal of a whole lot of difference on what you wake up and do in the morning. And we have a lot of people who are terrified of who’s in the office, or what’s going on. And really, to your point, a lot of that is just noise, because you get to control your own economy for a lot of the world.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  17:25  

And I mean, I think you said it right, you control your own economy. It’s never what the world does to us that really causes the damage or cost, the price, how we react and how we respond and how we think about it. And I have to say with a quick hedge, and there’s some people where the world does happen to them, and it does hurt them, and you can put a positive spin on all you want, and it doesn’t really help them. And I understand that I don’t dismiss that. But the vast majority of us there are college educated and living in the big cities or whatever, we’re pretty incredibly well off. And if we just have a mindset that’s open to, hey, it’s gonna be okay, not, that’s gonna be great. But hey, it’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.

 

Richard Matthews  18:06  

One of the things that really struck me about traveling to the US, was talking about this with my wife and my best friend a couple of weeks ago. We’re 42 states into seeing the whole country over the last five years. And I had in my head before we started traveling, that when you traveled America, you’re gonna get to see all these different things and experience all these different things. And it was going to be this epic adventure, which it has been. And we have gotten to see a lot of different things. And one of the things that have stuck out more than anything else traveling the US is how well off everyone in America is. Like, it doesn’t matter where you go, what city you’re in, there’s always a Walmart within 45 minutes, there are always restaurants, I don’t even know what you want to call it, there’s like this subset of Americana, that is everywhere. And there’s like a baseline level of living that happens all over the country, no matter where we’ve been. And it always makes you proud to be an American, like you go around, you’re like, wow, we’ve done a really damn good job at building what we have here. And so to your point, for the most part, the stuff that’s happening, the things people are convinced are Armageddon, really not that big a deal, you just get out and take control of your own economy.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  19:25  

And very interestingly, you travel the United States, and you get the sense of how well off we are. And to the extent that some middle class or some of the socio-economically challenged folks in the US have suffered in the last 15 years. It’s actually because we’ve been handing the baton to the global markets, and it’s, wow, there are people in South America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, that would dream of the stuff that we have access to in the poor stereos of our country. And so we have to just count our blessings, we will have to say we’re really lucky that we’re born in the United States, that we live, where we live, that we have access to things we have access to count our blessings.

 

Richard Matthews  20:14  

What you do with it.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  20:15  

Yeah. What do you do with it? 

 

Richard Matthews  20:16  

What do you do with the stuff that you’ve been given? And the way I call it is the chance of birth or whatever. We were lucky enough to be born here and to grow up here and to be a part of what this American experiment has been. That’s why I have my backdrop for my podcast because I love what we have and the access to grow and expand our businesses and really be in control of our own lives. Which is, it’s a rare thing. It’s not something that you can have everywhere in the world, but you have it here.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  20:48  

It’s also nice to be lucky. I mean, we did win the birth lottery. And I’ve been pretty lucky.

 

Richard Matthews  20:53  

Yeah, it’s still nice to be lucky. We used to hear some of those things, like, there’s this conversation going on nationally about privilege. And I was like, well, one of the biggest privileges we have is we were born here. I mean, we have the opportunity to do things with that. And so what do you do with it? And I’ve built a couple of companies with mine, it’s going pretty well. And one of the reasons why we run this podcast is to find stories of people who are doing the same thing. What are you doing to grow and build your own economy and give your value to the world? Because really, that’s what entrepreneurs do is they find out what their value is, and they learn how to give to other people.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  21:39  

Absolutely, and then their success can become significant for everyone around them.

 

Richard Matthews  21:44  

Yeah, absolutely. So if your superpowers are your discipline the other side of that coin is your fatal flaw. So the backside of any superpower is the kryptonite like Superman has or the bracelets of victory that wonder woman can’t remove without going mad. I want to know if there’s something that’s held you back in the growth of your business, something you struggled with, for me, I had a couple, I struggled with self-care for a long time, which really led itself come out as not having good relationships with my time or boundaries with clients, and worked way too many hours and just about killed myself. And also I struggled with perfectionism for a long time where I was like, I could just tweak it a little bit more to make it a little bit better before I ever brought it to market, which then, of course, you’re never bringing anything to markets, you’re not doing anything. And I think, sharing a little bit about what you have struggled with, and especially how you worked to overcome it can help our audience learn a little bit from your mistakes.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  22:47  

So your first one’s actually a pretty big one, the workaholism. I think I definitely, for years and years, would put in extra hours all the time. And I used to think, so something happened to me six months ago, my brother died. He drowned in the Pacific Ocean, and it’s created a lot of questions for me. And because achievement was so critical for me, I set that as a goal. 50 years ago, 40 years ago, I’m only 50. So 40 years ago, I set achievement as a goal. And I put that pretty much as my number one goal. Every year, I’d go through this process of values, purpose goals. And every year, I’d come up with my six most important values and achievement was always right there on the top. And after losing my brother and understanding the differences between him and myself, I think one of the things I’m coming around to is, I put far too much emphasis on achievement. You can be wealthy and build great things and be unhappy. And the reality is your health, the relationships with people around you, generosity, continuous lifelong learning, and curiosity are the things that actually make life worth living. And so I know tons of people that are very well off and unhappy. And it’s because the focus is the wrong thing. And so you got to make sure in the very beginning and I think this was one of the things my fatal flaw at the outset was because I didn’t have, I’m trying to attribute it to something else, not myself. It’s so easy, it’s so important to us to not be at fault, that the flaw isn’t ours. So I was raised with very little so that I wanted and because I wanted I sent achievement in and having as my goal. And what I learned was I got and I was still not entirely happy. And so I learned that there are other things and my brother was really good at his relationships and really good at some other things that I’m not more focused on than I was. So achievement is probably fourth on the list. It’s been the first for much of my life. And it’s probably not fourth or fifth on my list.

 

Richard Matthews  25:08  

Well, first off, I’m sorry for your loss. That’s really tough. I couldn’t imagine losing my brother, he’s a great human being. And I had a scare with him a number of years ago, when he got in a motorcycle accident and got a phone call when I was 2500 miles away, and he was in critical care. And just about ruined me in an afternoon. I was like, so I haven’t been where you’ve been. But I felt scared. So anyway, I thought of your lost, and I hope you are doing well. But on the other side of that, the idea that achievement is something that we strive for, I remember being there. And I mentioned, my lack of self-care is what I called it. And when I was a younger entrepreneur, I remember thinking to myself, I had a monetary goal in mind, I want to make this much money. I and I thought that every waking moment of my life needed to be pointed towards that goal, or I would never achieve it. And I was just the underpinning of work smarter, not harder. And I was like, what if I just do both, I just work smart all the time. And you find out if you try that too long, you can make yourself sick and throw up in the bushes and that kind of stuff. But the other thing that I learned was a couple of things. I could not get anywhere because I was always tired and not focused. And the other thing is, I was missing out on things that I really actually cared about. Which was my wife and my son at the time. I have four kids now, but it was just one back then. And I read a book that was talking about how creativity thrives with boundaries. And we talked about that and all sorts of things. Talking about photography or videography, your boundary is that frame, or your painting is the canvas. And creativity always thrives with boundaries. So I started looking at how I can put boundaries on my time working on my business, and instead of working eight to 12 hours a day, six, seven days a week? What if I only worked five days a week? And what if I only worked eight hours a day? What if I only work six hours a day? What if I only worked four days a week? And what I found was that the more restrictions I put on my time with my business, the more productive I got, the more money I made. And I learned other things on the way up too that I hit my income goal. And I was like, I actually don’t need that much money, whatever it is because I have other things that interest me more that’s why we travel full time with our kids. And there are things that I enjoy more than whatever the financial goal that I had. And when I shifted the goal from, here’s the money I want my business to make to here’s the value I want in business to give. I surpass those goals. So it’s interesting how it’s all backward from what I thought, I thought I was working smart and hard and I wasn’t doing either. And I thought if I tried hard enough, I could hit an income goal. And you find out that really when you start focusing on putting my values in the right order. And then when I start focusing my business on the value we can give the income came as a result. And the lifestyle came as a result. So it was a paradigm shift for me to learn how to adjust my values to things that made more sense.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  28:34  

Have you read Bob Burg’s, the Go-Giver?

 

Richard Matthews  28:37  

I have not. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  28:38  

That’s a book you’ll enjoy.

 

Richard Matthews  28:40  

Yeah, I’ll have to put it on my audible list, my son and I have an agreement, he gets an audible subscription every year for Christmas. And he gets credit every month. And it’s like, books he wants every other month, but every off month, he has to buy a book to help grow his mind. And so I always give him recommendations like that, we just stick it on his list because we share the Audible account. I listened to the books too.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  29:08  

Great. Yeah, that’s a good idea. You probably want him on as a guest at some point as well. We interviewed him a little while ago. It’s pretty good. He’s a good guest.

 

Richard Matthews  29:15  

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, the fatal flaw with self-care has been something that man, I can’t even describe how much my life has changed to that point. And I remember all those years ago, I was struggling to run one company well enough to actually pay our bills. And now on a third to a quarter the amount of time I run two companies and travel because it really forces you to focus on what’s actually important and what actually is going to move the needle and you’re getting stuff off of your plate that shouldn’t be there.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  29:50  

Totally. And there are so many tools that allow you to outsource this, outsource that, get this done, have someone else manage this, and by using those tools, you can actually cut down your time spent, I’m just learning about those. So I spent way too many hours doing it manually or working with people in the office. And it’s admirable when you can actually cut your time down and it works. No question.

 

Richard Matthews  30:14  

Yeah, it works. And the other thing it does is when you spend all day playing with your kids, you’re like, man, I gotta go sit down and get something at work, you show up alive. When we show up alive to work on creative problems, we get better results. And a lot of that comes from just figuring out what it is that you actually want to do. What do you want to accomplish in your life? What’s important? Put those things in the right space?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  30:39  

Start with what’s important, you can’t go wrong.

 

Richard Matthews  30:43  

So I want to switch that and talk about your common enemy. And this is in the context of your clients. Every superhero has an arch-nemesis, it’s the thing that they fight against in their world, it takes a lot of forms. But we will put this in the context of your clients. And it’s a mindset, or it’s a flaw that every time you get on the phone with someone or whatever, however you deliver your value, it’s a mindset or flaw that you have to fight to overcome. So you can actually get that person the result that they came to you for. And what do you think that arch-nemesis is in the financial education space?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  31:19  

Have you watched David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College Speech from 2005 —This is water. 

 

Richard Matthews  31:27  

I have not.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  31:28  

Well, you gotta put that on your list. Anyway, he tells a story about these two fish swimming in the water. And the older, wiser fish comes swimming towards them and says, hey, boys, how’s the water? They all swim off in their own directions. And after a while, one of the little fish turns out to the other little fish and says, what the hell is water? So the idea is, there are the truths that we’re always swimming in that we just don’t recognize. And so, but what I think is really important about that, and this is the common enemy, I think we’re all swimming in this soup of financial success. And if you go to social media, it’s everywhere. No one talks about the difficulty. While some people talk about the difficulty on social media, most people talk about the new car, the trips, the kids going to the private school, they talk about all the positive things. When social media first kicked off Facebook, I believe it was everyone who took pictures of the great meals they had and put them up on Facebook. Look at this great meal, look how much fun I’m having, look at how great my license is. So there’s a nugget in the financial world that says, and this is the soup, and we’re always we’re all swimming in the same false common knowledge. And that is investment selection and market timing are the things that determine great investors.

 

Richard Matthews  32:47  

You can’t time markets, you can’t see the future.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  32:48  

You can’t. And there’s a warning label on investments, past performance is no guarantee of future results. And it’s funny because that warning label I think has gone cross purposes. I think that the warning label makes people more interested in performance, I don’t think it has served the purpose it’s supposed to serve. The reality is mathematically it’s been proven that if you have somebody a manager or an index, or a sector or something that’s done really well in one period of time, the next period of time, it’s equally likely it does well versus it does poorly. I mean, the research shows that if you look at managers for a three year period, and look at them and say you take the top 25% of all managers and a three year period, and you look at the next three year period, they are equally distributed between the top quartile the second quartile, the third quartile, and the fourth quartile. And they’ve done this research over and over and over and over and they use quartiles, they use deciles. What we’ve learned is past performance, and has nothing whatsoever to do with your results. 

 

Richard Matthews  32:55  

No bearings.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  33:55  

No bearing at all. So when we think about investment selection and market timing, which is when somebody calls me up and says, hey, Jonathan, I’m thinking about hiring an advisor, tell me about your performance. Everyone asks that question, everyone wonders, and I can go down on this whole conversation about hey, I could show you some performance and it wouldn’t mean anything. And they still want to know about the performance. They still want to know, how am I going to do based on how I would have done and it doesn’t work. So battling that, this idea that timing and selection matters. That’s the big thing we have the battle more than anything else, where education and planning can make a difference. People aren’t as interested in education and planning. They really want someone who can pick the best stock and pick it right now in market time. And you can’t get anywhere.

 

Richard Matthews  34:50  

So I have an idea of how I would answer this question, but I want to know from you. If market timing and selection are not what matters, what does? 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  34:59  

It’s time in, not timing. So we with three fundamental practices. And they are the same three have operated with for 25 years, they are plan appropriate, asset allocation, meaning you divide your assets up between equities, fixed income, and cash and equities could be, equity in real estate, it could be your private business, it could be owning stocks, small shares of companies around the world, bonds could be your lending on real estate, it could be you’re buying bonds, it could be you’re buying CDs, you’re buying something that’s fixed income, and cash is what it sounds like cash. So, the equity that pays the biggest chunk has the most volatility, bonds keep up with inflation doesn’t do a lot else. And now it’s a question of whether I can do that or not. And then cash doesn’t even keep up with inflation, but it never goes up or down in value, right? So if you want returns, you want more of this stuff over here, the equity piece. And so the first thing, plan appropriate asset allocation, gotta have your liquidity and things that aren’t volatile, you want to have things that are volatile, because that’s where you get your return, plan appropriately allocation. The second thing, diversification, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. And some people say, hey, the Dow 30 is diversified, I disagree. Some people say The s&p 500 is diversified, I disagree. I think you want to look at something like the All Country World Index. I think you want to be global, I think you want to be in big companies and small companies, I think you want to be all over the planet, I think you want to be in every sector in every industry. And that way, the thing that you’re investing in, isn’t companies, it’s in global consumption, you’re investing in people who want to improve their lives, who want new shoes, new pants, want to start businesses, want to put solar panels on their house, want to invest in water projects in Africa, people who want to do things and improve things for themselves, their families, or communities, the world. That’s what you’re investing if you invest in all of it in a diversified way. And then the third thing is because no matter what you do, something in your portfolio is going to do better than something else in your portfolio. So on a very regular basis, maybe it’s once a year, maybe it’s at a 20% dislocation. You rebalance, and you don’t overthink it. You don’t say you know what? I don’t like emerging markets right now, I’m going to stick to the United States. And you don’t say, You know what, I don’t like little companies right now, I’m going to just buy big companies and you don’t say, I’m not going to lend to banks right now. Because I don’t trust banks, I’m only going to lend to car dealerships like it, you just own it all. And then by owning it all, you are less likely to make mistakes, you’re less likely to be pulled astray by your own biases by your own emotional content. You own it all and you rebalance. When the thing that’s doing really well, you sell a little bit of that thing and buy the thing that’s not doing as well today, because it all reverts to the mean anyway, those are the three basic cores.

 

Richard Matthews  38:01  

So you’re taking profits off of the stuff that’s doing well and reinvesting it into stuff that’s out of discount right now? 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  38:10  

Yep.

 

Richard Matthews  38:10  

Yeah. That’s crazy. So the way I was gonna answer the question is what’s important is something that I had a mentor told me as a young business person, like really young, I was like, 13, or 14, and it’s always stuck with me. And he said that Money loves speed, but wealth loves time.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  38:28  

Yep. Well said. 

 

Richard Matthews  38:31  

And it’s always stuck with me because. It wasn’t until a number of years ago that I was talking to a friend of mine who invests in commercial real estate. And he was talking about when he buys and sells projects. And he’s like, he’s got this project and it’s cash flowing like crazy, like $20,000 a month kind of cash flow. And he’s like, I’m selling it. And I was like, why would you give up $20,000 cash flow right now? And he was like because they’re going to give me four and a half million dollars for the project when they buy it. I don’t know what it was, I just pulled those numbers out of my butt. And then he explained to me, the same concept of the Money loves speed, wealth loves time, he’s like if I take that $4 million today, how long does it take me to make $4 million from the $20,000 a month cash flow? It’s x number of years. And he was like, I can take that capital right now and put it into other projects right now. And now instead of $20,000 cash flow, I’m creating $100,000 in cash flow. And it was the first time it really clicked with what I had learned all those years before what it means by Money loves speed, but wealth loves time. And he’s like because what you do is you continue to build those cash flow positions. But when you can you take the profits and you move them fast into other things. So anyway, that’s a concept I’ve learned on what actually is important is how do you spend time in the market? That’s the time wealth loves time and then how do you move stuff when it makes sense to you.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  40:01  

I think that the world of real estate is a much more active world. I realized people say real estate’s passive, and it can be a passive investment, but I’ve invested in real estate my whole life, and I’ve never been able to be passive. I’ve always gotten phone calls. But most of the people I work with, don’t have the $4 million, where most people are trying to educate now, clients all have that, and they do have real estate and stocks and bonds a little bit, but people are just starting out, it’s like, how do you make it to the money that takes smaller fewer cycles? How do you do it so you can actually earn more, you can improve yourself, you can get the raise, you can create better outcomes on the income on your p&l, personal p&l, the balance sheet will follow, I mean, the balance sheet will come. But right now just start earning more, saving more, setting it aside until you get that opportunity for a piece of real estate or you can invest in shares of companies or you can invest in your own business that you’ve been thinking about. And it’s great when you have $4 million you can put to work and buy the four buildings and expand that income that way. That’s awesome, good on you, and good on your friend that’s fantastic. But I really want to know how do we bring people up that aren’t experiencing that opportunity? How do we give them the opportunity? Well, it starts much smaller. And that’s what education and that some planning comes in.

 

Richard Matthews  41:28  

Yeah. And one of the things that I’ve always struggled with in financial education is helping people understand how important investing in your own skill sets is. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  41:39  

Oh, god, yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  41:41  

Because people are like, I don’t have the money to invest in this or that other thing, I’m like, invest in your skillset, wherever that is. Because if you invest in your skills, then you can bring your value to bear on something else, you’ll get compensated for that. That’s how you get the money in the first place to invest in other things is by, another friend of mine says you skill up.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  42:02  

Yep. And every time there’s a dislocation in markets, the world goes crazy, like, pandemic hit, what did you do? Did you double down on Netflix? Or did you double down on Khan Academy, and if you double down on Khan Academy, you’ll improve your math skills, your coding skills, or, I’m sure you can find plumbing skills, like whatever the thing is, Khan Academy has videos to help you improve on it. So to the extent you can do that, yeah, you come back to the market, and you’re worth more. And when you’re worth more, you save more when you save more, you’ve got more to invest. That’s the basic beginning treadmill.

 

Richard Matthews  42:34  

Yeah. This has always struck me as one of my favorites, it is contentious nowadays, people are like, how do you get a raise? And I’m like, if you want to get a raise, you don’t just ask your boss for a raise, you show them how you can bring more value to their company. Which is, politically that’s not a happy thing to say nowadays.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  42:54  

And you don’t even have to say that right now. I mean now, I think that’s always true. But we have a very unique world. Where people are basically writing their own tickets,  you don’t want to ask your boss, go find a job someplace else. I mean, in my industry, in my office, we have three open positions. We’ve been trying to fill these positions for a year. We can’t find people and they’re not like low-paying positions. It’s like there’s an opportunity now. So get out there, don’t ask your boss, ask somebody else will find a different job, skill out and move.

 

Richard Matthews  43:30  

Yeah, we’ve been having a terrible time trying to get positions filled. And offering good money doesn’t matter, people don’t show up. It’s really interesting. Never seen anything like it. But I’ve been in the market that long.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  43:46  

Keep moving forward. Do a little bit yourself, find people when you can. Actually, poach them from other places. One of the greatest hires I ever had was with somebody that we hired out of another company, just great service, a great experience, and unrelated industry, like great service, great experience. wonderful person, great attitude. Hey, have you ever thought about working in a financial planning office? No, well, you should.

 

Richard Matthews  44:10  

That’s how we got our customer service person that way, she’s wonderful. So the flip side of your common enemy, of course, would be your driving force. So if your common enemy is what you fight against, your driving force is what you fight for. So just like Spider Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham, Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. I want to know what your mission is. What is it you guys fight for at your company?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  44:36  

Yeah, so if the enemy is an investment, selection, market timing, the opposite side of that is we are goal-focused and planning-driven. It means the decisions we make are the ones we make upfront, not the ones that make ongoing the trade-offs, we make in a planning process, not whether we’re buying Tesla or Bitcoin or Ford like that is a meaningless decision that we know doesn’t work. So the decisions we make as investors are actually, what do we want to accomplish? What is our time frame for accomplishing those things? What do we have to do between here and there to make sure they get accomplished? And so to do that, we focus on individual goals, and we focus on planning. And so to get to those education and planning of the things that lead to the better outcomes for normal people, I’m sure that there are hedge fund managers that would disagree with me, I’m sure that they’re active managers that disagree with me, but we’re talking about normal people in a normal environment, the more you can focus on, this is what I want to have accomplished, I want to retire at this stage, I want to send my kids to this school, I want to have this kind of vacation, I want to drive this kind of car, I want to do this kind of good work in my community, the more you can get really concrete about those things. And then think about and design the path, the plan to get from here to there, and just do the things that you know will get you there. You don’t have to think about the other stuff. The other stuff is that noise we talked about earlier, and you need to ignore the noise.

 

Richard Matthews  46:03  

So it’s a couple of things I want to comment on. So one of them is just how well that works. Because I’ve done it myself. If we go back 12 years ago, my son was just born. And my wife and I sat down and we built essentially a vision board, and we had it up on our wall and had little pictures cut out of all the things we wanted to do with our life, we actually designed the life we wanted to have. And fast forward 10 years, and we’ve hit every single goal on that board without failing all of them and had to build a new vision board because we hit everything. Which is which Crazy, because we’re like,  we planned it and then we did those things, we started with the end in mind and got what we wanted to get. And all the way down to the type of knives we use in our kitchen. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  46:52  

It’s so specific. 

 

Richard Matthews  46:53  

It was, we had specific things and we were so broke, the kind of broke like we fed our son and we had peanut butter and crackers for ourselves. And it’s amazing what you can do if you focus for 10 years.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  47:09  

Yeah, that’s really important, though, you can’t design the plan, and then start flying the plan and four months from now, it’s not working out, throw in the towel. You have to recognize that this is a slow process, you’ve got a long time ahead of you to take the small steps today and reward the little things don’t just shoot for the big things. We talk about values, purpose, goals. So by the time I get through my values, my purpose, and get to the setting of my goals, my goals are where I want to be in 10 years. But if I’d be there in 10 years, where do I need to be in five years? If I want to be there in five years, where do I need to be in three years? And then one year, and then six months? And then one month, and what am I doing this week? So I can make sure to let this happen, I line those things up. And if you can see the incremental things you do today, and how they’re additive to the long-term, 10-year goals. I think that’s huge. And I think that’s where most people, they can’t continue for 10 years, because they have oh, I want to do this 10 years from now, but they haven’t built the things they can reward today. If they do the $10 in the 401k. Or they do the two videos on Khan Academy or whatever the thing is that they can get a little bit better today. They reward that and they’ll want to do more of this. You can oh, I got a little bit further, I got closer to my goal, I did my one step towards my goal. If you just said 10 years, it’s kind of far away. You need something to live your self of.

 

Richard Matthews  48:35  

One of the reasons why we had the vision board the way we did, and it was specific all the way down to we want to buy those knives because when we could afford the knives, we bought them, we have five years. And they’re the little things. And I had someone tell me a number of years ago that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing for the next 10 years of your life. And it’s interesting to think that way because it allows you to focus long term, but also realize that you’ve got time. And I remember when I was young, and I was putting in those 10-12 hour days, the thought was I didn’t have enough time. I need to be successful tomorrow. And then you try to get a whole bunch of things done. And none of them are done well. And we were like, I’m gonna do this for 10 years. And you realize that I don’t have to do everything today. I just need to do one thing, and I need to do it well. And one of the things that I do now is focus on something I call micro completions. And micro completions are like, I don’t need to accomplish 100 things today. I don’t need to accomplish six things. I don’t accomplish five, just one thing that I can take from start to finish in my business, and that’s it. Whether that’s helping a client on board or writing the first paragraph in an article that we’re doing for a marketing piece doesn’t matter. It’s just one thing that I can do from start to finish. And if you complete one thing every day, for 10 years, you can go from a nobody to world-class, which is not just a guess, it’s something I’ve done, in my community, in my group of people that I’m in. I’m one of the best in the world. And that happens because I’m beginning to get a little bit better every day.

 

Richard Matthews  49:13  

Yep, no doubt about it. Think about that, it was called kaizen. Kaizen is an incremental improvement.

 

Richard Matthews  50:19  

Incremental improvement or The Richest Man in Babylon talks about that as well. The other thing that struck me about what you said was about doing the right things on a regular basis, the planning and goals and it reminded me of The Last Samurai. Have you ever seen that with Tom Cruise?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  50:38  

Oh, I love it, trying to get my son to watch it with me right now. He’s like, no, he’s 17, he’s too cool for it.

 

Richard Matthews  50:44  

It’s too cool for it, it’s such a great movie. But my favorite line from that movie is when he’s fighting, and he’s getting his rear end handed to him by the other swordsman. And the guy on the sideline says too many minds. And it’s because when you actually have to show up and perform, you want the distance between the stimulus and the response to be minuscule, and that comes in the financial space, just like anything else. If you want to perform on the basketball field, or with the samurai sword, or become world-class in your space, it’s the practice ahead of time. And when you’re talking about your decisions for your financial space, just to ground it for people, if you’re doing day trading or something like that. And you’re like, hey, I’m just going to try and time the markets, it’s not going to work. But if you go, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put in $10 when it goes up, 2%, I’m going to sell it, you’ve planned that it’s not an emotional decision. It’s a thing that you’re just going to do. And when you do that over and over and over again.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  51:38  

I recommend against that, though. That’s a bad example.

 

Richard Matthews  51:45  

I don’t know anything about day trading. But the idea is that you’re making decisions based on something you’ve pre-planned, not on the emotions of the moment. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  51:53  

Exactly.

 

Richard Matthews  51:55  

As I said, I don’t know anything about investing. I don’t do that. I’m still in the phase of my life where I’m working on building my companies that will eventually have the cash flow to drive into other investments. We’ll get there eventually. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  52:05  

You’ll get there.

 

Richard Matthews  52:09  

But yeah, it comes down to that idea that you’re building your practice and your goals now. So when you’re on the court making the decisions, you’re not making them at the moment, you’re making them based on what you’ve already pre-planned.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  52:20  

Just like muscle memory at that point.

 

Richard Matthews  52:24  

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that wraps up our driving force. I want to talk about some practical things, shift gears a little bit and talk about your hero’s tool belt. And just like every superhero has their tool belt full of gadgets, like their laser eyes or web slingers, or their big magical hammer, they can spin around and fly across the world with, I want to talk about the top one or two tools that you couldn’t live without in your business. It could be anything from your notepad to your calendar, to your marketing tools, something you use for product delivery, anything you think is essential to getting your job done on a daily basis.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  52:58  

Yeah, so first off, I want to say that except for one, your examples almost all come from Marvel, I think we need a little bit more DC Universe. I mean, there are a couple of things right, the first thing. 

 

Richard Matthews  53:12  

You like Marvel better than DC? 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  53:14  

Of course, they do. But Batman and Superman are DC. 

 

Richard Matthews  53:21  

That’s true. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  53:22  

Anyway, neither here nor there. So the first thing is something that I’ve done, talked about my four-hour routine in the morning-read, read everything, read constantly, read every day, read, read, read. I read economics, art history, philosophy, I read religious studies, I read the commentary in culture, I read newspapers, I read news articles, I read books, I read, read, read. If you want to become a better you-read, reading gives you the opportunity to learn things, gives you the opportunity to experience things that you won’t have the opportunity to do in any other environment. It lets you develop empathy for other people. It lets you develop creativity. It lets you understand how people communicate with each other. Reading is, I think, the most important thing that people can do to improve themselves. And read broadly, read people that disagree with you, read people that are specifically making arguments that you hate. Read, that’s the first thing. And I think that anyone that reads every single day, cannot fail, but improve themselves and improve their situation. Second thing is, the tool that I use for that is I use a newsreader. Right now, I’m blanking on the name of the newsreader. But I mean, I highly recommend just an app on your phone or an app on an iPad that will do two things allow you to highlight something that you like, and categorize it as something that you like. But also allow you to highlight something that you disagree with, and lighter categorize it as something you disagree with. So that it will pull into that folder, these things that are difficult for you to defend against. The people that are making the good arguments that you don’t want to hear. And so you’re reading both sides. And if you have a newsreader, you can actually separate the two-out, this newsreader, stuff that I generally agree with, I generally like, because that’s natural, you’re going to go there anyway. This newsreader I’m specifically setting up to bring to me arguments that I don’t like that I disagree with, that I think are stupid, that come from the other side of the aisle, whatever. Because if you can’t make those arguments, you’re always going to be filled with vengeance and dislike and hate and it’s not going to be beneficial for you. You’ve got to be able to argue both sides, and you’ve got to be able to defend your own position, always. So the only way to do that is by actually understanding what they’re saying. So as a newsreader I think it’s critical. I just discovered this other one and I want to share it. Have you heard of Notion? 

 

Richard Matthews  56:13  

I have heard of Notion. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  56:14  

I love Notion.

 

Richard Matthews  56:16  

 It’s like your own personal database.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  56:18  

It’s so incredible. And somebody introduced me to the PARA method, it’s a universal method for organizing digital information. It’s produced by Forte Labs, PARA. It’s such an incredible way. So Notion gives you the database. Now, PARA gives you a way to organize it, it gives you a structure that you can use in any way and it’s those two together, I’m just implementing it myself. And I’ve used so many different tools for project management and so many different tools for digital content arrangement. And I’m so excited to use the two things together, I think it’s gonna change my life.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  56:19  

Yeah, you are the second person I’ve heard that from in the last couple of weeks. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  57:08  

PARA or both? 

 

Richard Matthews  57:10  

Specifically Notion with a UI on top of it. So he had a different one. But it’s a similar kind of thing where it’s like an operating system for your life. You can use Notions database as the back end for.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  57:20  

Yep, simplify, simplify, simplify. So awesome. Notions is powerful. I love that. I love it.

 

Richard Matthews  57:25  

Love it. Yeah, it’s interesting, too, because, by itself, Notion is intimidating, because it’s just like an open-ended database. And it’s not until you start looking at them, I don’t know what to call them other than the operating system you put on top of the thing, like the PARA that you’re talking about, I can’t remember the other one that my friend mentioned. But he was like, I couldn’t figure out Notion by itself until I got this thing to go on top of it. And I was like, I have the same experience where like, I got into Notion I was like, I don’t know what to do with this, because it’s literally just a blank canvas database. This means you can do whatever the f you want with it, which is cool.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  58:01  

Right, I mean, I used to email myself with every little note, I just emailed to myself, and then I would put in my email structure. I mean, that’s truly old school and not a very good way to do it. But now I’m so excited to actually have something that is more active, more accessible, more useful, searchable. You can use a Notion page and link to it and share the content with people. There are just so many possibilities that are there. I’m sure that there are other apps that I just didn’t know about that were equally helpful. Notions is what I’m gonna go with for sure.

 

Richard Matthews  58:33  

Yeah, that’s awesome. And I wanted to comment a little bit on the reading everywhere, including the other side of the aisle, and tell you a brief story that fits right into that, that I thought was fun. So we both went to seminary. And one of the things that we did in seminary was we did religious studies, which was essentially setting all the other world religions and not just a little bit either, like, in-depth reading their scripture, reading everything there was about them, their common arguments they bring up and everything. I did that every semester for four years and with all the major world religions. And so generally speaking, I know more about your religion than the average practitioner. And that’s just because I studied it for as long as we did, and as in-depth as we did. And I remember my favorite experience with that I had the local Mormon boys who come and knock on your door. And me and my best friend, we’re sharing a house at the time and we both just got married. We were like splitting the house. They had the top and we had the bottom. And so they came to the door and we’re like yeah, we’d talk and we invited them in, come in and talk to us. And because they wanted to convert us to Mormonism and sat around the table with them and we’re like, totally cool. We will absolutely discuss anything you want to discuss. We’ve got two rules. Rule number one is that the whole purpose of this is just to search for the truth. And if we find the truth, wherever the truth is, we’ll just align our lives with that. Do you guys agree with that? And they’re like, yeah, absolutely, because why not. And they came over every week for six weeks. And our wives made them food and we had dinner for six weeks. And in the seventh week, the local Bishop came over and informed us that our house was put on a black mark, and we would no longer be getting visited by the Mormons because they had to send our Mormon boys back to their reeducation camps. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:00:38  

Nice.

 

Richard Matthews  1:00:39  

Which cracked me up. And the reason that happened is that we knew all of their arguments better than they did. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:00:45  

Wow. Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  1:00:46  

Because we studied it. We studied everything that they knew. And they didn’t actually know what they thought they knew. When you actually study the other side, even the things you don’t agree with, and you can argue their points better than they can, it is significantly easier to sit down around the table and have a discussion about what the actual truth is.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:01:09  

I mean, I think the challenge is you also have to be authentic yourself. Like be open to whatever they do bring out, but if you’ve already studied, you know what they’re gonna do. Absolutely.

 

Richard Matthews  1:01:19  

Yeah, and into that point, you have to have that honesty where you’re willing to be like, hey, if I’m wrong here, and you can show that to me, I am absolutely willing to change my life based on that truth, wherever that is. And that’s the whole point of being authentic. Is that you line yourself up with what you know to be true. So anyway, I thought that was an interesting story to line up with that.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:01:42  

Yes, perfect. Good example.

 

Richard Matthews  1:01:45  

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Richard Matthews  1:03:16  

So a couple more questions for you. We talk a little bit about your own personal heroes. Every hero has their mentors. Frodo has Gandalf and Luke has Obi Wan Kenobi. And even Spider Man has his Uncle Ben, or Robert Kiyosaki has his Rich Dad. And I want to know, who were some of your heroes? Were they real-life mentors, speakers, authors, maybe peers who are a couple of years ahead of you, and how important were they to what you have accomplished so far in your life?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:03:40  

Yeah, I mean, my history is littered with people that have had a positive effect. I guess my first mentor my first year, I was probably my dad, I think that you probably hear that often. Whenever you ask that question. Or one of my parents, right. My dad is definitely my first hero. And then after that, college professors. I mentioned Marvin Shaw earlier, he was the one who was my primary Religious Studies teacher in undergrad. And so he was one that really suggested, hey, you have a skill in reading and writing and digesting some of the stuff and making good arguments. And so I think you’d like to study this further. So he was the one that sort of got me to apply to these graduate schools, which was really important for my life, on my becoming who I wanted to be a better person, all that kind of stuff. While I was there, I met Steven Goodman, who died a couple of years ago. He was instrumental in developing my meditation practice. And he wasn’t a meditation teacher so much as he was so well versed in pop culture and Buddhist philosophy and man, he could tell you a story that came from just anywhere, he read everything, an incredible human being. But I was having a hard time meditating, I couldn’t sit for more than 10 seconds, I’d get up and go do something else. I just couldn’t do it, my mind was racing. And he just sort of said, hey, you’ll waver until you stop wavering. And that gave me permission to not beat myself up for not being able to sit still for very long and sooner or later, I was going two minutes and three minutes and five minutes and 10 minutes, I could sit for 20 minutes. And that’s Steven Goodman that was that was him. And then when I first entered in the industry, the first speaker I saw in the financial services world was Nick Murray, any sort of young advisor out there, and I meet a lot of them these days that have never heard of Nick Murray and never read Nick Murray. And it just blows me away. His philosophies and teachings were critical to developing my practice, to how I serve clients, to how I build trust to the kinds of things I say, Nick Murray was incredible, he’s kind of out there a little bit. But in terms of how to manage a business and how to be a financial advisor, he was incredible. About seven, eight years ago, I started wanting to write more and speak more and get out there. And I started reading Steven Pressfield. Steven Pressfield wrote a book called The War of Art. And he talks about this thing called resistance that’s always in our way, the thing that makes it so you can’t write the book, the thing that makes it so you can’t start the business, the thing that’s in your way that you almost can’t identify, that’s keeping you from becoming your best self from doing the thing you want to do. And he writes, and he’s a very well-known author, just novels, he writes great novels, and I highly recommend those. But he has probably half a dozen books on breaking through resistance and the War of Art is I think the best one Turning Pro is probably the second best one. And I’ll sing his praises all day long. He’s just a fantastic teacher on dealing with resistance, which, if you do anything important at all, you will run into resistance. And he’s trying to show you how to work with resistance and work around resistance. Incredible. So there’s a short list, I could probably name 10 of them.

 

Richard Matthews  1:07:21  

People who have had an impact. It’s a fascinating question. And the answers are all over the board when I asked that, and what always strikes me is, generally speaking, probably, 99 times out of 100 for people that we’ve asked that question to the people who are mentioned as heroes, like your personal heroes, your mentors, wouldn’t know that they are a mentor to you. Like, if you ask them, they’re not going to be like, oh, yeah, of course, I mentored I had a big impact on his life. They wouldn’t know. And what always strikes me about that is the reason I started this show was a mentor of mine said to me, when I was very young, he said, hey, someday when you grow up, your kids are going to have a hero. If you’re not worthy, it’s not going to be you. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:08:06  

Oh, wow. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:08:10  

And I was like, Oh, I was like, 17 at the time. Kids were a long way off in my future. But for whatever reason, that stuck with me for a long time. And the reason it stuck is because you realize that everyone has their heroes, their mentors, people they look up to. And if you’re not the kind of person who’s worthy of it, you’re not going to be the one they choose.

 

Richard Matthews  1:08:35  

Be worthy. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:08:36  

And so for me, it was always a reminder to be worthy of someone choosing me as their hero, even if it’s only my four kids.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:08:46  

It’s an incredible lesson. That’s an incredible lesson to get when you’re 17. That’s awesome.

 

Richard Matthews  1:08:49  

Yeah, and so the reason I asked that question is that I’m curious to see how often that’s true. And so far it’s been very true that people regularly look up to people who had an impact on your life who probably don’t know that you chose them to look up to.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:09:08  

Yeah, I think the first time I was asked that question, not that question, but the question similar to that, who’s your important mentor, I was probably in college, and I referenced my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Ecker. And I remember that very next summer, I bumped into Mr. Ecker. And I said, hey, I want to let you know about this and this. He didn’t remember who I was, talking about crashing.

 

Richard Matthews  1:09:32  

My 10th grade English teacher was that way. He actually did remember me though, because he had a big impact on my life and some other things that happened. And I actually went back to his class 20 years later, and he invited me to speak to his class. And so I got up and talked to them because I can attribute a couple of things that he taught me specifically that have helped me grow really large organizations. One of them was the idea to fail forward, like, failure is just the stepping stone of success. And the first time I ever learned that really well was from him. And it was something very specific he taught me. And I remember going back to his class and just talking to his students about that. I was like, this guy here and the stuff that he’s taught me has directly led to several $100,000 in revenue in my company. So it was like, pay attention.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:10:28  

Yeah, listen up. Yep. 10th grade.

 

Richard Matthews  1:10:31  

10th grade English class and he changed my life. So sometimes you get the opportunity to go back and actually tell someone, but for the most part, they don’t know.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:10:39  

Yeah, I actually had a coach for years, and I didn’t mention him, which is sort of amazing. His name is Greg, he has this big coaching program, and they put on this annual conference called Excel and asked me to speak in Excel. And he was actually in the audience. And I was like, 50 people, 60 people in the audience, and for the first time ever, I got to publicly say, thanks. I’ve been working with him for 10 years, at the beginning, there was all this, do this, do this, do this, do this. But in the end, it was more like, hey, I got this issue, can you help me out? He was just awesome, beginning to end. And I got to say thank you and it was huge. And we shared a big hug at the end of the presentation. It is just the ability that takes the chance, go say thank you to these people I say, you get a lot out of it.

 

Richard Matthews  1:11:25  

Absolutely. I agree. So, the last question for you, your guiding principles. One of the things that make heroes heroic is that they live their life by a code. For instance, Batman, to go out of the Marvel space, he never kills his enemies, he only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the show, I want to talk about the top one, maybe two principles, you live your life or in your business by maybe something you wish you’d known when you started out on your own hero’s journey.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:11:50  

So it’s interesting because I’m in the business of giving people advice. And advice, people don’t seek advice when they know the way they seek advice when they don’t know the way. And they seek advice when they’re running into a struggle. So in that way, I’m kind of a coach’s advice. So the most important thing and every business book talks about it, this isn’t rocket science. The only basis for an advisor client relationship is complete mutual trust. My only value to my client is if they can hear me when I’m telling them something that’s uncomfortable for them. And they can follow through and take action. So the only thing that I have, the only way that I can make a difference in their lives, really make a difference in their lives, is to make a difference at that moment when it really matters. When they’re not comfortable, they’re angry, they’re upset, they’re scared. And if I can have a relationship based on total trust, and I can say, Hey, listen, I don’t know how this turns out. But I think that we have a plan in place. And I think if you do this, and this and this, and this, just like we said in a plan, it’s going to turn out okay. And if we’ve built that relationship up, and they trust that advice, they will be able to continue forward, then they’ll be able to take that advice and be able to take the steps necessary. This means it’s critical, it’s so important that in every circumstance if you want to give anyone advice, you want to be trusted for that advice, you have to always tell the complete unvarnished truth and let the chips fall where they may, sometimes you’ll tell the truth, and someone will choose not to be a client anymore. Sometimes you’ll tell the truth and bad things will happen. But you have to tell the truth. And you have to let the bad things happen, let the chips fall where they may, or no one will ever listen to your advice, you have to be trustworthy. So this leads to the second part which is the best business is the one that people will talk about, and refer to. And the only way that works, the only way you get that, the only way that ever happens is if you are referable. The only way you can be trusted is if you are trustworthy. The only way you receive referrals, which is a fantastic thing for a business, is if you’re referrable. And I think you said this earlier, you have to be worthy. You want to be somebody’s hero someday? You have to be worthy of being a hero, you have to be trustworthy, you’ve got to be favorable, you got to be worthy. So this goes deeper than just developing yourself. Develop yourself, be a better person, if you become a better person. If you’re honest all the time. You tell the unvarnished truth, you’ll let the chips fall where they may. It’s gonna suck sometimes, but in the fullness of time, you are going to be more successful than any other way.

 

Richard Matthews  1:14:52  

Yeah, I think this comes down particularly for a lot of young entrepreneurs who have not yet put in the time to build up their skills. And I find this happens a lot, where people are like, I want to get into this space and do this thing. But I don’t have the book of business to back me up yet. So how do I approach a new client and get them to say yes to me, take a chance on me and how often I’ve had to be the coach on the other side, telling them like, be honest about where you are, there are people who are willing to take that chance. And one of my favorite stories growing up as an entrepreneur is I had a client who came to me and was like, I want to get this particular problem solved. And he’s like, everyone I’ve talked to says it can’t be done. And I looked at him. And I was like, that’s because it’s never been done before. And nobody knows how to do that. And I was like, I have some ideas on ways that we could potentially approach that. And maybe come up with a solution I was like, but I can’t put my time into that unless you pay me for it. And I was like, we may not come up with anything, we might come up completely blank, nothing will work. It’ll all be terrible. And I was like, but if you’re willing to bet on it, we can approach something, see if we can copy something together. And he paid me for three months to work on this problem. And we did actually come up with a solution for it and invented some new tech to make that happen. It was really cool. But the point for me was learning how to use honesty and the truth as a way to close clients, even when you don’t have the book of business to back you up. And then in the future, I was able to close a whole bunch more clients who needed the solution to the same problem. Because now I have something but if I had lied to him upfront, and we couldn’t come up with anything, and I told him I could or that I had things, I would have ruined my reputation and my business.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:16:54  

Yeah, no doubt.

 

Richard Matthews  1:16:57  

It’s definitely an important thing to learn as you’re growing. I actually think that’s probably a really great place to wrap up our interview, I do have one final thing that I do on all my interviews, I call it the hero’s challenge. It’s a simple little thing, hopefully, to help me get access to stories I might not otherwise find my own because not everyone’s out doing the podcast rounds like you and I might be doing. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine, and why do you think they should come to share their story on our show? First person that comes to mind for you.

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:17:26  

It’s somebody I recently interviewed and he’s been a friend of mine for 27 years. His name is Gary. And he’s not, he doesn’t do a lot of interviews. He’s not seeking any kind of exposure or anything like that. But what he has done is he’s built a business. And his idea of enough is different than most people’s idea of enough. And he’s built a business that gives him time. And we talked about this earlier how we both have overworked and worked too many hours, working too hard, thinking we were working both hard and smart, doing neither. And he worked incredibly smart. And he built something that he can actually leave for six months, and not have to worry about it, which in my book is incredibly impressive. It’s not going to make them wealthy. But he got what he wanted. He said this is what I want. I want time. How do I make it so I have time? He built a thing that gives him time, which is impressive.

 

Richard Matthews  1:18:28  

Yeah, absolutely. That’s what I’ve been focusing most of my business on is how do I get a time first? And how do I get the money second to grow and do some other things. I would love to see if we can interview Gary and see what he’s doing and hear his story. They don’t always say yes. But anyway, we’ll send an invitation out afterward and maybe look at a cool story. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:18:51  

Sounds good. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:18:52  

So in comic books, there is always a crowd of people who are cheering and clapping for acts of heroism at the end. So as we close, I want to know where people can find you if they want your help in the future, where they can light up the bat signal so to speak, and say, hey, Jonathan, I’d really love to get your help with my financial planning. And I think second to that is who are the most important people to actually reach out to?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:19:13  

Yeah, so the best place to reach out to the place everyone starts is the website, Mindful.Money. And probably, if somebody is looking at a company exit or something, selling a piece of real estate, or a parent who’s passed recently, I’m going through this with my sister in law, after my brother died, finances are a mess. And figuring that stuff out, it’s really hard. And I’ve kind of figured out how that works. So that’s one subset of people. People that have established net worth and want some support from a one on one financial advisor. They can reach out to us through that website, Mindful.Money there. Also on the website, you can just go to the Education tab and you can take a digital course, digital courses are there. There’s a free one and I hope we can put it in the show notes. That’s values, purpose, and goals. I’ll just submit that you guys can share that with your audience. And the thing I do every single year. It’s something I’ve done for 20 years. It’s an incredible tool, I just turned it into a course for people to do it themselves. So you go to Mindful.Money, all my social media stuff is there, you can connect with me on social media, if that’s your preference or you can just send us a note through the website.

 

Richard Matthews  1:20:26  

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on today. Jonathan, I really appreciated the opportunity to hear your story and learn what you’re doing, and get to hear some of your past experiences. So again, I appreciate that. And I love what you’re doing. Last thing here, do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience before I hit that stop record button here at the end?

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:20:43  

I do, just try to go to those words. I want to say thanks, Richard, for having me on. Because I’m a huge fan of Marvel and DC and this is a very interesting take on this. It was a lot of fun, I appreciate it. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:20:55  

Yeah, absolutely. 

 

Jonathan DeYoe  1:20:56  

So final words. It’s kind of a tagline a little bit. I use it as often as I can. So I think it’s the three things we can do to get us in a better place and it’s simple, stop predicting, start planning and stay mindful.

 

Richard Matthews  1:21:09  

Absolutely life, great place and it. Thank you very much.