Calculate the Cost of Your Ideal Lifestyle With Kylon Gienger (167)
02/08/18 • 42 min
Do you know how much money you really need to make to live your ideal lifestyle?
Klyon Gienger and I have an extensive conversation about calculating the cost of your ideal lifestyle.
Kylon is the host of the popular Successful Dropout podcast, where he’s interviewed people who dropped out of college or the traditional employment system like myself.
He manages several businesses including a hot yoga studio, real estate investing and an online affiliate marketing community called AffiliateFix.
We had such a fun conversations and we covered a lot of different topics including:
- Rethinking the American Dream.
- Calculating the cost of your ideal lifestyle.
- Moving from a permission mindset to a freedom mindset.
- What he learned from trying so many different career paths.
- He explains the concept of self-credentialing.
Life Skills That Matter In This Episode
- Align your habits with your goals.
- Self-awareness.
- Self-directed learning.
How Kylon Works and Thinks
- Wake up time: Lately around 5:00am, but typically between 5:00-7:00am.
- Core work activities + habits: 1) Using to-do lists to keep all the businesses organized. 2) Communicating with his wife and his other business partners. 3) Doing a mental check at the end of the day to keep himself on top of each of his businesses.
- Ideal work environment: In his home office, a lodge in the mountains without cell service with a cup of coffee or tea and hardcore music playing.
- Favorite productivity tool: Trello
- 90-day goal: Launch his new community platform and get to 10,000 members for Successful Dropout.
Inspirational Quotes
“My goals are all, they’re all set with the primary focus being, like, how do I want to spend my time and who do I want to spend my time with and the money, I believe, sort of comes as a result of that.”
“You stick to doing what you love and building what you love, as long as it’s working, you know, I think it’ll pay off.”
“I’ve never wanted to do something just because I’m supposed to do it.”
Coaching Advice
Kylon recommended these actions to start breaking out of your comfort zone to try new and different things:
1) Don’t get hung up on finding the one right thing, pick one and just get started.
2) Switch, pivot, or quit if the first thing you do doesn’t work or you need to do other things as well.
3) Action begets more action, so don’t wait for the inspiration to strike to get started.
Resources + Bonus Materials
Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech
Do you know how much money you really need to make to live your ideal lifestyle?
Klyon Gienger and I have an extensive conversation about calculating the cost of your ideal lifestyle.
Kylon is the host of the popular Successful Dropout podcast, where he’s interviewed people who dropped out of college or the traditional employment system like myself.
He manages several businesses including a hot yoga studio, real estate investing and an online affiliate marketing community called AffiliateFix.
We had such a fun conversations and we covered a lot of different topics including:
- Rethinking the American Dream.
- Calculating the cost of your ideal lifestyle.
- Moving from a permission mindset to a freedom mindset.
- What he learned from trying so many different career paths.
- He explains the concept of self-credentialing.
Life Skills That Matter In This Episode
- Align your habits with your goals.
- Self-awareness.
- Self-directed learning.
How Kylon Works and Thinks
- Wake up time: Lately around 5:00am, but typically between 5:00-7:00am.
- Core work activities + habits: 1) Using to-do lists to keep all the businesses organized. 2) Communicating with his wife and his other business partners. 3) Doing a mental check at the end of the day to keep himself on top of each of his businesses.
- Ideal work environment: In his home office, a lodge in the mountains without cell service with a cup of coffee or tea and hardcore music playing.
- Favorite productivity tool: Trello
- 90-day goal: Launch his new community platform and get to 10,000 members for Successful Dropout.
Inspirational Quotes
“My goals are all, they’re all set with the primary focus being, like, how do I want to spend my time and who do I want to spend my time with and the money, I believe, sort of comes as a result of that.”
“You stick to doing what you love and building what you love, as long as it’s working, you know, I think it’ll pay off.”
“I’ve never wanted to do something just because I’m supposed to do it.”
Coaching Advice
Kylon recommended these actions to start breaking out of your comfort zone to try new and different things:
1) Don’t get hung up on finding the one right thing, pick one and just get started.
2) Switch, pivot, or quit if the first thing you do doesn’t work or you need to do other things as well.
3) Action begets more action, so don’t wait for the inspiration to strike to get started.
Resources + Bonus Materials
Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech
Previous Episode
Lesson: Practice Being Curious (166)
Several LSTM members asked if I would start teaching more lessons on the podcast and I thought it was a great idea!
Each week I’m going to release a brief lesson (about 5 minutes or so) on a skill that will help you along your self-employment journey.
Lots of people reach out to me who want to work for themselves, but have no idea what they want to do. They don’t know what they are passionate about. They don’t have a sense of purpose.
I tell them to practice being curious. Not only can anyone do it, you are doing it all the time and don’t even know it!
4-Step How-To Practice Being Curious
1) Recognize curiosity.
Do you know how to recognize when you are being curious?
Any time your brain asks a question, that's curiosity in action! Your brain has a natural craving for information. It’s constantly looking for answers and has a desire to always know more.
Here are some more signs you are feeling curious:
- When you can't get your mind off of something, whether good or bad. The monkey chatter in your head is so loud, you can't think about anything else.
- When can’t stop talking about something with others about a subject that really interests you.
- Sometimes you might even feel physical sensations like a warmth in your chest as your heart rate picks up when you react to seeing, hearing, smelling, touching or taste something. You might even feel a bit flush.
- Curiosity expresses itself as excitement too. When an experience makes you feel like a kid again or something captures your attention, that’s being curious!
2) Capture your curiosity.
You've heard me recommend this before, but keep a daily journal and write down your most recurring thoughts, questions and interests.
Writing down your curiosities, helps you bring deeper awareness to them.
Keep a note on your phone or use a paper journal. Use whatever method is convenient for you to create a habit for capturing your ideas and curiosities.
3) Analyze your curiosities.
As you capture your thoughts and ideas, look for patterns.
What are your writing about most frequently?
What excites you?
What annoys you?
What interests you the most?
What causes you want to ask more questions or to know more?
4) Be honest with yourself.
Challenge all your assumptions. Challenge your beliefs. Never stop asking, “Why?”
Why do you think you are thinking about a particular experience, subject or event over and over again?
Don’t judge your curiosities. They aren’t right or wrong. Explore them.
Spark Your Curiosity Habit
To spark your curiosity habit, try answering these 5 questions.
1) How do you spend your free time?
2) What were your favorite childhood activities?
3) What gets you so excited you can’t stop talking about it?
4) What problem or problems do you want to solve, whether big or small?
5) What would your family, friends and colleagues say is your passion?
Resources + Bonus Materials
Thanks for listening! Enjoy this episode?
The post Practice Being Curious (166) appeared first on Life Skills That Matter.
Next Episode
Focus on a Niche to Start Your Business With Dave Novelli (168)
You know what is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face when starting your business? Committing to a niche of customers who are most interested in your product or service. You need to focus on a niche!
Dave Novelli shares why niching down your business clarifies your mission and makes every decision you have to make easier.
He’s is the founder of Ultraviolet Analytics, a data science consultancy that helps small and medium-sized businesses find ways to use their data to grow their business.
There are a ton of great lessons in our conversation including:
- What big data is all about and how it can help you grow your business.
- Criteria he uses to find clients that excite him.
- How a 3-month backpacking trip helped him break free from his cubicle as a software engineer.
- Questions he asked himself when he decided to work for himself.
- How to manage imposter syndrome.
Life Skills That Matter In This Episode
- Self-awareness.
- Self-directed learning.
- Building community.
How Dave Works and Thinks
- Wake up time: Tries for between 5:30-6:30am.
- Core work activities + habits: 1) Programming. 2) Communicating with current clients. 3) Networking to expand new opportunities.
- Superpower: Being stubborn and not giving in to challenges.
- Definition of success: Not having to go get a job and persisting through the challenges.
- 90-day goal: Complete market research and create a barebones MVP for a new product.
Inspirational Quotes
“I help small businesses and startups figure what to do with the data they have and how to collect new data so that they can do really interesting things.”
“Make your users happy by giving them what they want and not wasting their time with stuff that they don’t want and everybody wins.”
“Before that, I had traveled on another backpacking trip for three months and before that about eight years of being a cubicle dwelling software engineer.”
“Traveling, itself, builds a confidence in your independence.”
“I started with, what do I want to do for people? What skillset do I have? What type of clients do I think would be, in general, best for me to be working with, that I would enjoy the most? And then from that, I just put together a web page.”
“Everything is so much easier when you shrink your focus as much as you can.”
Coaching Advice
If you’re feeling stuck and the path forward doesn’t seem to be clear, Dave made this recommendation:
Re-examine and add detail to your higher level life goals and then work down from there to get clarity on actions to take.
Resources + Bonus Materials
Connect With Dave
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