FFLTV: Creating Success, Following Your Passion and Investing for Cash Flow

Today we’re going to talk about what the heck you should invest in. We’ll talk about balancing what you’re passionate about versus what you need to get done, how I manage my time, and we’ll look at a new type of physical products brand.

A few weeks ago, I brought in some of the best investors that I know and put them on stage all at one time. We called it The Investment Panel and we had individuals who ran funds versus people who invested in real estate versus people who had multi-million-dollar stock portfolios versus someone who had just sold their business and was looking to invest in a lot of different things.

They talked about how they mitigated their tax bill and how they diversified for passive income. We put all of them on stage at one time and my only regret from Freedom Fast Lane Live is that we did not allocate more time to that panel.

It was the most fun I probably had during the conference and will definitely be going more in that direction for future conferences. But there was one specific topic that came up a lot and it was about if things hit the fan, should you be invested in gold, silver, Bitcoin, and other hedges. Watch the video above to see footage of the discussion.

Q: Lavenda Tupou asks, “How do you disconnect what you are passionate about “from what you have to get done to escape the rat race?”

A: Now this is an interesting question and there are multiple schools of thought on this. There are people who say, follow your bliss, follow your passion and the money will follow. There are some people who say follow the money and the passion will come. Both work. Both are perfectly viable. What works for you? What drives you? I think the important kind of x factor here is, you’ve got to be passionate about something, right? You could be passionate about quitting your crappy job but something has to be driving you. Let’s talk about it like that.

It’s not what are you passionate about because then that brings in the question about how do I find what I’m meant to do in this world? How do I find what I’m passionate about? And none of that exists, right. It’s just whatever you decide, whatever you create. That’s what your life becomes. There is no outside of yourself passion that you have to find. There is no you that you have to discover. There is no life path that has been preset for you. It’s just what you decide and what you create along the way. What’s driving you is a much better question and that can be your reason why. That can be your passion.

My suggestion for somebody who is still in the rat race, follow the money. Do what you need to do to make the money, let the passion be running away from what it is that you’re trying to avoid and once you have cut that off, you’ve cut the source of your stress and frustration. Then you could say, okay great. What am I going to do with my life and my business now.

The important question, I think, is, what do you do once you have freed yourself from the thing that you resent? If you hate your job and you’ve gotta pay bills and you’re trying to start a business to try and get away from the job, what’s your life going to look like when that’s gone? Most people never answer that question. So what happens is they cut off the job and then they take the resentment, they bring into their business and then they just resent the business. So, what is your life going to look like once that’s gone? Is it going to be in this business? Is it going to be in a different business and you’ll wind that one down? Does it mean that you just automate that one so you can live a nice, cushy lifestyle?

There’s no right or wrong here but answering the question of what fills that gap, what fills that space will allow you to make a healthy pivot from being able to justify I’m going to do this thing that I might not even enjoy right now but I’m going to put all of my attention into it so that I can get rid of the crappy job. That will allow you to do that.

Now some people will argue that this is just easier if you do what you love or what you’re passionate about and if that’s what drives you, if you’ve got a topic that you’re interested in and you want to build a blog and a side hustle about that specifically, you have my blessing to do so. That has driven a lot of my business decisions but only once I was successful. I had to have the stress monkey off my back before I felt free to be able to pursue what it was that I was passionate about.

That’s me. Other people don’t have that but if you’ve got something that’s holding you back, I say it’s a logical and easy thing for you to do to follow the money so that you can quit the thing you hate and then we can answer the question, what am I passionate about or what am I doing with my life? Derek Sivers had a great blog post on this and he basically argued that the happiest people that he knows have a job that they’re committed to, meaning it’s a career or a skill set that isn’t their passion.

It’s not their gift to the world but it’s something that they’re at least invested in enough to where they can constantly be growing in that skill set and then they have an art form or the thing that they’re passionate about that they’re not reliant on for income and what that allows them to do is to balance both worlds. Is to be committed to their work and committed to their art and they’ve got they do for money and the thing that they do for fun or as a gift to the world.

I think the same is true in business. I have cash flow businesses. I have business that pay for my life and then I have my gifts to the world. I make the least amount of money from Freedom Fast Lane. Of all my projects, I make the least from me taking home Freedom Fast Lane. I talk about this stuff because I can’t not. If you took away all of this, I’ll be on the street corner talking about capitalism and free markets.

I can’t not talk about it but for those of you who’ve been following me for several years, you know that I haven’t been doing this show and the podcast with full commitment until I had the cash flow piece built up from my physical products brands, which I love. I’ve become passionate about them because they’re my babies and now that they’re more automated, I can focus more time on the thing that I think is going to really change people’s lives and give me fulfillment. So, I do the same thing. I balance the things I do for money and the things I do for passion. They’re just businesses rather than a job and a business.

Q: Joe Smolenski asks, “How do you manage being involved “in several ventures at once while also “allocating time for sleep and family?”

A: It is very hard to be in multiple things at the same time without having very clear expectations for what you bring to each project or what you bring to each relationship. My life changed in a great way a few years ago when I started Zen Active Sports, which is the yoga company that I built and sold and my business partner on that is Sean. He’s one of my best friends to this day. We spend every Friday night as guy night, which usually revolves around a really good meal and then being asleep by 10:30. That’s what happens when you have a kid.

Sean and I started Zen Active Sports a few years ago and when we were starting that business I remember being in my bedroom on the phone with Sean and I said, Sean, look, I have other commitments. I have other businesses that I run, so the way this is going to work, the only way I can be involved is if I’m the capital partner and your advisor but this is your business. You run the operations. I will walk you through the process. I will bring relationships to the table. I will bring money to the table but those are my only commitments that I can bring. Does that work for you? Yes. Then we outline what the arrangement was going to be.

I have supplement company called BodyVega Nutrition, same exact conversation with my business partner Paul. Paul, I can be an advisor and an investor but that’s all I can bring to this. I can commit a few hours a week to working with you, to bringing in certain relationships, to bringing you suppliers that I know to the table and that’s my commitment to those projects. Whereas with some of my other projects where I’m much more involved, that’s because either we started it years ago and it’s really successful or I have other skill sets I bring to the table. I have other relationships I bring to the table, so I am not fully time committed into every project. I set the rules up front for what the relationship is going to look like. So that is how I manage having multiple projects.

On top of that I just block out certain times for certain projects, so when you hear the podcast I will record two or three podcasts in a day and that will be spread out over a couple of weeks. Or if you look at some of my projects, like my physical products brands, I have certain days of the week that I have blocked out for those projects and my other members, my other team members, know not to bother me on certain issues on those specific days because I’m going to be committed to something else. So scheduling and blocking out that time has worked out really well for me so batching that time if you will.

If I don’t batch time, I’m at my computer trying to figure out, what am I going to do today? What am I going to work on? Whereas if I know Wednesday I’m showing up for this meeting on this project with these team members, that has helped me be fully present in the project that I’m focused on and I surround myself with implementers so that I can be the idea guy. I can bring what I know best to the table for a project and then get out of the way because I work with people who are better than me at the things that I’m not good at doing.

I believe that entrepreneurship and capitalism is the best way to solve all of the world’s problems. It’s why we need more success. We need more wealthy people and we need less government because government gets in the way. Entrepreneurship is the solution. You are the best shot at the change you want to see in the world. That’s why this conversation is so important.

You can help us spread this message by subscribing to the podcast at freedomfastlane.com/itunes. You can also subscribe on YouTube and like our page on Facebook so you see every episode that we release on Freedom Fast Lane TV. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you on the next show.