Jordan Grumet also known as Doc G, is a physician turned financial expert and author. who brings a unique perspective on wealth, purpose, and legacy. A former hospice doctor, his exposure to the reflections of people at the end of their lives prompted him to pivot into the world of personal finance, where he helps people align their financial decisions with their life purpose. Jordan is the author of the acclaimed book Taking Stock, The Purpose Code, publishes a popular blog on finance and fulfillment, and hosts The Earn & Invest Podcast.
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Dr. Jordan Grumet On Creating Wealth With Purpose
Our quote for this episode is from David Bach. “What determines your wealth is not how much you make but how much you keep of what you make.” My guest, Jordan Grumet, also known as Doc G, is a physician turned financial expert and author who brings a unique perspective on wealth, purpose, and legacy.
A former hospice doctor, his exposure to the reflections of people at the end of their lives prompted him to pivot into the world of personal finance where he helps people align their financial decisions with their life purpose. Jordan is the author of the acclaimed book, Taking Stock, The Purpose Code, publishes a popular blog on finance and fulfillment, and hosts The Earn & Invest Podcast.
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Jordan, thanks for joining me on the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited for the conversation.
How Jordan’s Understanding Of Money And Death Led To A Career Shift
I always like to start at the beginning by maybe asking about childhood. In your case, it’s two different tracks. What was growing up like for you? What was your understanding of maybe money, personal finance, and death that led you down this interesting career shift?
When I was seven years old, my father died suddenly and unexpectedly. He had a brain aneurysm. He was rounding in the hospital because he was a physician and got a severe headache, collapsed, and died. That colored my vision of career, money, and purpose. It changed everything. At seven years old, I very much looked at the world through my own self-centered lens as most seven-year-olds do. I figured, “He died and that had something to do with me. I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t behave well enough. I had done something wrong.” The answer eventually became, “If I could become a doctor like him, I would cosmically solve all these problems. I could walk in his footsteps. I could carry on the good work he was doing.” That’s what I did. I had no interest in money. Money was not interesting to me at all.
Did money get tight or problematic after he passed away or not?
A few things happened, which were lucky. My mother was a stay-at-home mom but she had a deep history of being in scientific fields. She was a teacher at one point and decided she wanted to go to business school. She was about to graduate from business school with a CPA when my father died. She got offered a job at the place she was interning at. She had a job, which was great.
My dad did have some life insurance. This is a strange story. He had one life insurance policy for $200,000 and then he had another life insurance policy from his work. He had started in a new private practice and they were supposed to get him a $1 million policy and they forgot. He died in this $1 million policy that was promised and never showed up. My mom was too emotionally exhausted to sue them or deal with them.
She worked and had very much of a scarcity mindset. My mom thought that she was going to have to sell the house to put us through college and she was going to live her last days in some small apartment somewhere with nothing. That $200,000 from my dad’s life insurance policy went directly into investments. This was in the 1980s. If you remember, bonds were paying 15%. She ended up investing it very wisely. That money paid for all of our college education. It paid for three boys’ college educations. It paid for all of my medical school and my brother’s graduate school and there was still some money left over after.
A lot of times, it takes some work to figure out the dotted line between someone’s formative experiences and their professional interests. Yours is not that complicated.
I was born to at least do what I did. As an adult when I eventually burned out, I realized maybe this was not necessarily the right path for me but it was the path I took nonetheless.
You went down the medical profession. Have you worked with hospice patients?
I started in general internal medicine. I was a doctor who took care of adults in the hospital, the nursing home, the office, and sometimes even in people’s homes but I didn’t do any surgical procedures as a general doctor. As I was building my career and especially as I started getting tired of practicing medicine and realizing that I needed enough money to leave, I started doing what I call medical side hustles. Hospice was one of those.
They were hospices that were looking for doctors. There was a shortage of doctors who knew how to practice hospice medicine. I was already taking care of elderly people, often people at the end of life anyway. I did a side hustle as a medical director for one of these hospices. That eventually became the thing I liked most about medicine.
You read a lot of articles about people who work with people at the end of their life. What were some of the biggest takeaways you had from the discussion and then ultimately led you to decide to completely change careers?
There are two major inflection points. One has to do with hospice patients and one doesn’t. Back when I was in the midst of my career, I started writing about medicine. Writing was something much more aligned with my purpose I eventually would find more than being a doctor. I was writing a medical blog and got a phone call from this guy named Jim Dahle. He wrote a book called The White Coat Investor. It was all about investing and finances for doctors. He sent me his book to review for my medical blog, and I did. It taught me all about personal finance and I realized I was probably financially independent and didn’t need to work anymore. That sent me down the rabbit hole of learning about personal finances.
Eventually, I had a blog and a podcast. The thing was, on my podcast, I was interviewing entrepreneurs, financial independence people, and authors. I found that we often got stuck on not, “How do you make money? How do you build a business or career?” That was something they were great at answering. What they weren’t so great at answering is a little bit of the why and what comes next.
Strangely enough, I was starting to get the answers to those questions from my hospice patients because I would sit with them at their bedside at the end of life and we’d have all these conversations about their lives. They wouldn’t talk about money. They wouldn’t talk about work. They wouldn’t talk about working on the weekends. What they would talk about was regrets. Specifically, what did they always regret? It was never having the energy, courage, or time to do something. Everyone’s regrets were different depending on who they were but it was the same theme.
I’ve heard this over and over again from people in hospice. It’s all things that they didn’t do and didn’t try. It was the person they didn’t ask out, the job they didn’t take, or the business they didn’t start.
Think about this. How magical is this? In the dying, regrets are all about disappointment because you don’t have time, energy, or agency. If you are not dying, and specifically if you were young, regret is another word for purpose. It’s amazing you can flip that around and say, “If I could foresee that I’m going to regret this on my deathbed, the onus is on me now to start turning that into a version of purpose.”
I’m curious about the finances for a white coat. What is it about the finance stuff that was particular to doctors in that? What was it about that advice?
Strangely enough, it wasn’t particularly for doctors. He talks about high-net-worth individuals or high-income individuals. A lot of the advice would work for anyone, but there were some things that were very doctor-oriented. For instance, one of his big sayings is to live like a resident. If you are a physician during residency, you get paid little, and then you finish residency and start practicing and your pay bumps up 5, 6, or 7 times.
You’re spending those too.
Your spending can. One of his big pieces of advice is, “For 3 or 4 years, keep living like a resident.” The same thing would occur. If you are a business student and you’re getting your MBA, and then all of a sudden, you get a high-paying job, live like you’re a business student. Most of the advice translates over but there are some medical terms specifically. One of the reasons that the book was so important to me is it gave me the vocabulary to understand my finances.
Overcoming Fear And Financial Insecurity In Taking Risks
Let’s talk about why. Why did they not do these things? I’m curious. Was it that they were scared? Was there a financial component of not being able to take a risk? I never asked my high school sweetheart out or whatever. That’s not a financial thing, but I assume a lot of the risks that they couldn’t take were because they didn’t have basic financial security. Is that right?
The reasons why people end up with regrets, there are probably three main reasons. One is societal expectation. Two is ultimately fear. Last is the perceived lack of time or money. Let’s talk about each of them. One is societal expectation. When we are kids, we naturally have a sense of purpose and we have things we love doing. Look at a kid’s room. There are trophies all over the place. There are posters. There are drawings.
As you get older, you become inculcated to this idea that adults work on careers and we do things to make money. Those are often not the same things we did that brought us joy during childhood. We abandon a lot of those earlier versions of purpose and joy. Society is good at telling us what we should be doing. Look at social media or look at marketing. It’s trying to sell us the six-pack abs, the travel to exotic places, and the nice clothes. They’re trying to sell us something. They’re trying to sell that purpose to us so that we’ll buy their product.
Society has also sold a lot of people on, “Do whatever you do to make money. Eventually, at 65, you’ll start enjoying life.” When I first read Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Workweek, I thought it was a very misunderstood book about productivity. I thought that was a philosophical book. I took a lot out of it like, “I might not even be here at 65. That seems like a silly plan.”
The idea is to take your finances and use them to build a framework in which you can live a much more purposeful life. A lot of us have done what I think was the second problem. We are afraid to look inside and think about what’s deeply important to us because by recognizing that, we’re saying, “Life is finite. If we don’t work on it now, we may never.” Instead, we use money or career as a mirage to avoid doing the hard work. That was the second thing I talked about. The first was societal. The second was the fear of failure and the fear of dealing with the fact that life is finite.
The third thing is then the lack of perceived money and time. People put things off. They’re like, “I don’t have enough money. I have to work on my career to make lots of money,” or, “I don’t have enough time.” The time one is pretty easy to dispel. The Bureau of Labor has done the US time survey for decades and found that your average American has 5 to 6 hours of free time a day and that even poor people tend to have slightly more time than wealthy people.
For anyone I know who’s worked with a good leadership coach, one of the things they do, and I’m sure you’ve done this, is the calendar audit. It’s pretty telling. You go to someone and say, “Do you know you spent fifteen hours this month looking at people’s food on Facebook? Is that a valuable part of your life?” I get that people are busy. I know how much time I waste if I want to get into it.
Money is just one of many tools. It allows us to do the things we want. But we also have other tools like our youth, energy, communities, skills, passions, and families.
People are as inaccurate with money. In this argument, “I don’t have enough money,” we forget that money is one of many tools. It’s a very powerful tool to do the things we want to do but we also have our youth, our energy, our communities, our skills, our passions, and our families. We have all these other tools. If you’re lacking in money, it becomes a question of whether you can utilize and leverage some of those other tools to start doing things that are important to you.
How To Navigate The Stress Of Finding Purpose
Rewinding for a sec, what is your definition of purpose? People get stressed out by thinking about having to figure out their purpose.
Let me give you a general definition and then some details. The purpose is pretty much the why of what we do what we do but people confuse it with meaning and happiness. I often say that happiness is meaning and purpose. Meaning has to do with our past. It’s the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and it’s very cognitive whereas purpose is about our present and future and is action-oriented. It’s the things we do now and in the future to fill us up.
It’s interesting. You said fill us up. I had a person on the show a few months ago, Dr. Shefali, who’s a world-renowned parenting expert. She’s already debunked the quote, “You’re only as happy as your youngest kid.” She’s like, “My kid’s never happy. I’m not going to make myself miserable.” If you ask everyone, they’re like, “I want my kids to be happy.” You can’t be happy all the time. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on. The goal should be fulfillment. On net, it’s something fulfilling. It doesn’t mean I don’t have bad times or unhappy times because you can’t be happy all the time. The expectation that you can is what’s ironically creating a lot of depression.
That’s true. This idea that our kids are our happiness or fulfillment too is a little bit off-center. This idea that our kids are our purpose, I don’t think that’s necessarily healthy.
It’s very self-centered.
Not only that, but you want to model for your kids a behavior in which they grew up to live these big fulfilling lives themselves. If you’re modeling that they are the most important thing in your life, those kids are going to grow up and think their kids have to be the most important thing in their life. What if they don’t get married or have kids?
This is the thing. Fulfillment looks different for everyone. Following the path, going to a good school, getting a job, and becoming a surgeon, to everyone else, it looks great but they’re miserable. They want to be in a cabin writing books in the woods. It’s not fulfilling to them. It’s other people’s definition of success. I like the Abe Lincoln quote, “Whatever you are, be a good one.” I always joke with my kids. I’m like, “You can find someone and they’re the grasshopper expert in the world. They’re being invited to grasshopper conventions and writing books about grasshoppers. They’re the go-to person on grasshoppers and they’re pretty happy.” Be good at whatever it is.
We’ve got confused with the words. When you get rid of all these big complicated words out of the way, it comes out to what is winning the game. In my opinion, here’s what winning the game is. From the day we’re born to the day we die, we have a set amount of time. We have no idea how much that is because we don’t know how long we’re going to live. Time passes no matter what you do. People say you can buy time, sell time, or trade time. That’s crap. Time passes and there’s nothing you can do about it.
The one thing you have a slight bit of control over is what activities you are doing as time passes. Here’s winning the game. Winning the game is getting rid of as many things you loathe and putting in as many purposeful, deeply fulfilling things as possible into those time slots, however many you have. From the day we’re born until the day we die, a productive person is constantly modifying. They are using their tools like their finances, their community, their passions, their joys, their time, their energy, and their youth. They’re using all those tools to continuously get rid of things they loathe and continuously fill that time with things that give them pleasure and joy.
This gets into my book The Purpose Code. We’re talking about what I call little P purpose. This is stuff you love the process of doing regardless of the end goal. It’s not big. It’s not audacious. It’s not being a billionaire. It’s not becoming president. It’s what brings you to a state of flow. What do you do that fills you so much up that you lose track of time? We want as much of that in our life.
It’s interesting. One that comes up a lot is gardening. They’re out there for hours and doing it. It’s enjoyable. This is why I wrote in a Friday Forward that we need to get back to more physical tasks. Sometimes, fixing the signpost or painting the door, you then come home and you’re like, “I did that.” There’s some fulfillment in that.
The Harvard Developmental Health study in the 1920s covered thousands of people. They interviewed people every two years. They eventually did MRIs, EEGs, and blood tests. After 80 years of study, they found that the closest approximation to happiness had nothing to do with money or with a career. It had to do with interpersonal connections.
Purpose is a conduit or a vector to a community. It does not fill us up on its own. It helps us create community and connections.
This gets back to what you’re talking about. First of all, you’re building the sign for someone, whether that’s you or other people. People stop by and they help you. You collaborate. When you do the things that fill you up, you tend to attract people to you. That’s the beginning of community, which also is probably strongly related to happiness. The purpose is a conduit or a vector to community. I don’t think purpose on its own fills us up. It helps us create community and connections. That goes back to the Harvard study of what happiness looks like.
There’s an interesting intersection. These things are inextricably intertwined between physical health, financial health, and living a purpose-driven life. I have a lot of friends who are getting very serious as they approach 50 around physical, both cardio and strength and understanding, “The baseline is going to get worse from here. I need to keep it as high as I can.”
One thing I have noticed is you start getting hurt a lot more as you get older. Whatever it is, your elbow, leg, or whatever, becomes the only thing you can focus on when something’s not working. It gets in the way of all these other things. You can see why it’s so important because you never noticed your right elbow until you realize that it’s sore and everything you do needs your right elbow.
It’s a virtuous cycle. Studies show that pursuing a sense of purpose in life causes increased longevity, health, and happiness. Increased longevity, health, and happiness give you more energy and make you more likely to get up, use that body, and be active and physical. One leads to the other and they’re intimately connected.
Dilemma Of Excessive Borrowing Vs. Saving
I’ll jump around a little bit. One of the things that popped into my head earlier when you talked about how people don’t need a lot of money necessarily for the things they want or they have more than they think is it’s ironic that somehow we can find a way to make payments on everything that we’ve already bought but we can’t find a way to save until we do that. What is enough? How do people decide? Also, things happen. The lack of a rainy day fund could take you out and then you can’t recover. What are some of the baseline financial things that you see that people are not getting right beyond the obvious of living beyond your means?
Finances are very knowable. There are some basic rules that we all know are out there but a lot of people don’t follow. It’s simple stuff like having an emergency fund of 3 to 6 months in case something bad happens and having it available.
How many people have that?
It’s much lower than you think. It’s 25% of people.
I was going to say not very much.
Comparatively. Save 20% of your income. A lot of people in my community who have financial independence will save even a lot more. Put money away for a rainy day. Invest that money so that money is working for you. Use simple things like index funds. Do not spend frivolously. Be a value list. Spend on things that matter to you and not waste money on things that don’t matter to you.
A big one, which we never talk about and which is what I talk about in my books, is putting your money to work towards purpose, identity, and connections. Your finances are supposed to be a tool that helps you live a better life, not that you’re supposed to spend all your life making a lot of money and then have no idea what to do with it.
What does that look like? Give me a tangible example of how someone could do that.
I’ll give you an example of how I got it wrong and how I could have done it better. When I was in medical school, the first thing I did in my first week of medical school was volunteer at the inpatient hospice at Northwestern University and I loved it. What happened? I eventually went through medical school and realized hospice doctors don’t make a lot.
People are not sitting there bowing at the altar of the hospice doctor, the surgeon, or even the general internist who is making these amazing diagnoses and doing these crazy things. I convinced myself that although I loved hospice work, I needed to do something else. I eventually did something else and made a lot of money and burnt out because it wasn’t fulfilling me. Eventually, my career in medicine ended in my 40s.
If I had taken purpose, identity, and connections and I had thought about more who I was and what’s of value to me, even taking into account my history of losing my father at a young age, I would’ve probably said, “Hospice probably fills me up more. Even if I don’t make as much money, I’ll probably enjoy the work more and have a much longer career. It might take me longer to get to financial independence but that won’t matter because the point of money is to do the things that fill you up.”
It’s also about enjoying the journey. A lot of people are willing to suffer the journey for the destination. The destination’s never as good as you think it’s going to be.
That’s the problem. This is why I talk a lot about the difference between Purpose and purpose. Purpose is very goal-oriented. If you are not enjoying the process, you’ll find that you are not enjoying 95% of the climb there. When you get there, it’s only fun for hours, days, or maybe even months.
The most successful and driven people I know will all tell you they got to the top and the view wasn’t what they thought they would be. All they did was start going up the next one.
Let me tell you something. All you need to do is look at Elon Musk to realize that our sense of enough is disjointed. Elon Musk has more money than anyone else. He created some of the greatest, life-changing things than anyone else and he looks completely miserable. Here’s the thing. Enough has nothing to do with money. Enough has to do with meaning, which is the stories you tell yourself about yourself. Most people who struggle with enough haven’t gotten over their generational and lived trauma of childhood. That’s where enough comes in.
Particularly if money was short as a kid. I’ve seen people go either way with that. Typically, they become lavish overspenders or they have the money and they count every penny.
Here’s the thing, both of those people haven’t figured out enough. The lavish spenders think if they spend more, it’s going to deal with that trauma. The frugal savers think, “If I save more, it’s going to make up for that trauma.” Both of them are suffering from the same problem but they’re reacting differently. What they need to do is go back, tell themselves better stories about their childhood, and get over some of that trauma or they’re going to pass it on to their kids. That’s exactly what generational trauma is.
There’s always an opportunity. I remember a story years ago when I was out in Park City for the summer. I would go out in the morning on the deck at the hotel. I was talking to this guy. He’s a doctor and he spends a lot of his time a year in Park City, He was working remotely. I said to him, “How do you work remotely as a doctor? That’s a new one for me.”
I don’t know what it was, whether it was radiology or something else, but he had decided that he loved Park City. He lived somewhere else. It wasn’t foreign. He had family and all this stuff. He designed a job where he’s the guy in whatever this field was that got the thing, helped you find another person, looked at a second opinion, set it on, and coordinated it for you. He had built a job around the life that he wanted to live. Did he make a little bit less money? Probably. That story always stuck with me. If you ask some people, there are no jobs as a doctor that let you do that. There’s state licensing. This guy went and figured it out because that was what was important to him.
It behooves us. We have to get back to winning the game. Winning the game is filling up as much time as you can with things you love and as little time as you can with things you loathe. This guy realized, “I better change something so I can be in Park City, so I can be in a place I love, and so I can spend more time doing things that feel purposeful to me.” That’s what it is. Hopefully, if we’re healthy throughout our lives, we’re constantly figuring out the calculus of how those numbers work.
What People Get Right And Wrong In Shaping Their Legacy
You talk a lot about legacy, which is something we’ve talked a lot about on this show. How do you define legacy? Where do people get it right and get it wrong? There is a quote someone said once. I don’t know if it was a story but I’ve come to appreciate legacy. It has almost become way too trite. It’s like this product that people are doing or selling. He said, “We don’t get to determine our legacy. We live our life how we’re going to do it and other people determine our legacy.” I like that viewpoint. I’m curious about what’s yours. Do you also think of this productization where people are like, “I need to work on my legacy,” and they’re going around doing horrible things all the time?
Here’s what I think. I agree and don’t agree with you.
That’s my favorite part.
We have a huge contribution to our own legacy. When I’m talking about legacy, what I’m saying is how you affect people not just now but in the future. We have a huge impact on that by the things we do and don’t do but much differently than people think. I’m a big fan of acting locally and thinking globally. Instead of worrying about what I call a big audacious purpose, which is becoming president, curing cancer, and all these things that people are like, “That’s impact,” do the things that fill you up that you enjoy. That’s going to create a huge impact and legacy.
I’ll give you a perfect example. This is a story from my own life. My maternal grandfather, I never met him. He died in the 1960s. I was born in the 1970s. My maternal grandfather loved math. It was what I would call his little P purpose, the thing that lit him up. Since he loved math, he would sit my mom on his lap, have spreadsheets, because this was the 1950s, and would show her what went in each box. He loved it. Since he loved it, my mom took notice and she did what kids do. She tried on that identity for herself, the identity of her beloved parent to see if it fit her. She loved math, so she became a CPA.
When I was a kid, I had the same influence on me. I liked math too. I saw my mom loving it. I had a learning disability. I couldn’t read and everyone else could. I would’ve lost complete hope except I was at the top of the class for math. I knew if I could do math, I would be okay in reading. I eventually became a doctor, a highly mathematical field. One day, I was seeing a patient in the hospital and noticed a mathematical connection between two of his lab results. He was on death’s doorstep. We made a very rare diagnosis, which was treatable. He never came back to the hospital again. He was a pastor in a local church and took care of runaway kids.
If you think about this, my grandfather who died in the 1960s, his actions, love, and purpose are still having an impact many years later. Do we have to go for impact and legacy? No. I suggest you do the things that are deeply meaningful to you. You’ll create communities instead of generational trauma where we hand down all the bad things we do and we give that to our kids.
Be the best you are most excited, most engaged, and most involved intentionally. You will impact the people around you for generations, and it will matter.
I believe in something called generational growth. Be the best you. Be the most excited, most engaged, involved, and intentional you and you’ll impact the people around you for generations. It will matter. It’s not as sexy and as exciting as having someone remember your name 300 years from now but the impact is still there and clear.
It’s the local stuff too. It’s interesting. If you’ve ever been to someone who died and went to the funeral, everyone seems to pour in and there are thousands of people. The person is like, “He only met me once and he said this thing to me,” or, “He made me feel this way.” It’s not the, “He did this,” or, “She did this. People come in and tell these very simple, relatable stories.
When do you give your best advice? When are you there most for people? It isn’t when you’re trying to cure cancer. It’s when you’re being your intentional self who’s passing on whatever little bit of knowledge you got through doing things you love. It’s important to hold onto that.
Role Of Leadership In Shaping Purpose And Legacy
Leadership also plays a role in helping to shape both purpose and legacy. How has your experience as both a doctor and a financial advisor shaped your views on leadership? They’re very different use cases. What advice would you also have for leaders trying to balance their personal and professional lives?
You will be the best leader when you are doing things that feel ultimately purposeful and exciting to you.
I would say the same thing would go for parenting too. How do we teach people? How do we lead people? One of the ways is to didactically teach them. We sit them down, get the whiteboard out, and show them how it’s done. The other way is by modeling. We end up doing things the way we think people should do them and show them through our actions what it looks like. Last but not least, it’s through experiential learning. You give them a task, one that they could fail at but not ruin everything, and allow them to go out there and do it. Leadership is based on all those things. You will be the best leader when you are doing things that feel ultimately purposeful and exciting to you.
It’s because that’s aligned. It’s hard to be asked to go out and be good at something that you hate and don’t want to do with people that you don’t want to do it with.
A lot of the best founders out there don’t start as great leaders. They start as people who are deeply and insanely passionate about an idea. The leadership stuff comes afterward. People follow founders not because they’re good leaders. They follow them because, like a moth to the flame, you see them deeply connected to something that’s important to them. We all want to be a part of that. Especially if we feel some of the same things are important, it attracts us.
Overcoming Stagnation: Advice For Life Transitions
I love the notion that everyone wants progress and no one likes change. Many of our audience are probably going through major life transitions, whether it’s career, personal, or navigating new stages of life. I’ve got a lot of friends moving into the empty nester stage, which is a lot of difference. What advice do you have for those who feel stuck?
Good seems to be the enemy of great. I’ve seen people have a hard time giving up fine or good even though they know there’s something better. When they get fired, it falls apart, or they lose the job, then they jump off the track. Oftentimes, people have a hard time moving off the status quo even though it’s not doing anything for them.
I like to remind people, “You are who you are and nothing that happens today or tomorrow is going to change that. Whether you get fired or whether you succeed or fail, you’ve always been that person.” The idea is to be intentional and to act with your values. The idea is regardless of what you’re going through, be intentionally you. Act out your values and assume that if you act with an intention, ultimately, things will go in the right direction.
For the people feeling lost, it’s time to go back to the basics of, “Who am I? What am I about? What feels purposeful to me? What kind of intentions can I act with that further that intention and purpose?” We have no control over the people who are going to fire us, the people who are going to accept what we have to give, or the people who are going to turn it down. That’s all outside of us. All we can do is be the most authentic and unique self we can be. That’s how you start, especially if you’re feeling stuck. You got to go back to the basics of, “Who am I? What’s important to me? How do I act out that intention and purpose?”
How do you ensure that you align your financial goals with those values? What steps do you recommend people take to make that alignment? If you looked at the situation, you’d say, “I’m not leaving because I’m hitting this new goal and I’m paid well, but what am I doing with the money that I’m being paid?” It seems like they’ve gotten disconnected from their values, which are freedom and flexibility, for example. The job has none of that but it pays well.
No decision is wrong as long as you are intentional about it.
We don’t spend enough time thinking about purpose, identity, and connections first. We have to be very clear on what that means to us, and then we bring our finances in and decide what the trade-offs are. No decision is wrong as long as you’re intentional about it. It is reasonable to say, “I want to be a writer. I love writing. I’m at this place and time right now where I probably can’t make money at it but I make good money being a doctor.”
It is reasonable to say, “I’m going to work my butt off as a doctor for five years, put off this purpose, identity, and connections, and maybe do a few things for fun that keep me involved in it, but not much, for five years until I get to a set certain net worth, and then step away.” I don’t love that tactic but it’s reasonable. The other way is to say, “I can go ahead, put my retirement goals on hold, work 75% of the time, and make less money but then use that 25% to start working on being an author today.”
If you’re writing and you enjoy it or you’re traveling, then you don’t need that hard retirement. Let’s go back to the first one. I want to double-click on it. I agree that a lot of people making purposeful decisions have done the hard work, the painful thing, or the sacrifice. That’s lost a little bit on elements of Gen Z who want to live the best life from day one, which I appreciate but also, it has trade-offs, particularly if you’re coming from certain things.
The problem with the, “I’ll do this for 5 years,” particularly in things like law or professional services is unless you somehow put some money on the line that gets blown up or you hit the 5-year goal, it seems like it’s hard for people. They’re like, “3 more years,” and then they turn around and it has been 20. I know that wasn’t your preferred path, but how often can people set that goal, it being enough, and then they walk away?
This is where I talk about memento mori, this idea to bring the knowledge of death with you while you walk everyday life. We want to win the game. Winning the game doesn’t allow you to waste extra years doing things you don’t need to monetarily. Does that mean everyone will do it? No, but that’s the point of our intentions. That’s the point of putting purpose first. We have to be clear if we’re going to front-load the sacrifice, what that means, and when we’ve hit the goals that allow us to pursue purpose.
My father died at 40. Luckily enough, my father felt very deeply in his heart that he was going to die young. He told my mom that when he married her. My father spent a lot of time doing things he loved. In fact, he passed up making money. He could have gone and worked in a private practice ten years earlier but decided to work at the VA hospital because he liked the work more.
He traveled extensively. He loved photography. He had his own darkroom in the basement. You don’t want to be that person who dies at 40 and never gives yourself the chance to do things you want to do. I have no problem with front-loading, but you’ve got to be intentional about it. You’ve got to keep on coming back to purpose comes first.
Make sure front-loading doesn’t turn into mid-loading.
Do you know what happens? What happens is when it gets time to start doing things that are purposeful and exciting, people freak out. It’s scary. It is incredibly scary to step off into, “I’m going to embark on things that are deeply important to me, and yet I could fail.” It’s so much easier to go back to work, make a little more money, and tell yourself that the extra cushion is going to save you, make things better, and allow you to buy extra things. We have to have the courage to realize that we’re given a limited amount of time in this life, and if you hiss it away, it’s gone.
What you said there was so parallel to a guest I’ve had twice, Phillip McKernan, who is a clarity coach. He has coached people all around the world. He said that people travel thousands of miles and spend thousands of dollars to go see him for the clarity that they don’t want. When he starts discussing this stuff with people and they start getting frustrated, he says, “It’s always because they’re getting close to their gift.” I asked him about that. He’s like, “You can’t fail at the thing you’ve always wanted to do.”
Here’s the thing. Let me tell you a story. I have it in my first book Taking Stock. There’s this guy in the name of Ernesto. It’s a fake name. Details have been changed so that I don’t divulge things to the person. His name was Ernesto and he had a dream of climbing Mount Everest. In his twenties, he took a year off to train and climb Mount Everest. Everyone thought he was crazy. He was in the middle of his corporate career. He was moving up. He was being fast-tracked and he put that all aside to do this.
In his twenties, he went there. They got to base camp. They climbed about halfway. The weather changed and it became impassable. He had to come back down. By then, his time was over. He went back to work. I met him in his forties when he was dying of leukemia. All he wanted to do was talk about climbing Mount Everest. It wasn’t bitter and unhappy. He wanted to tell everyone what it felt like and how invigorating it was. He didn’t care that he didn’t succeed. The fact is he had the courage to do the difficult thing that was deeply important to him. On his deathbed, he knew that that would not be a regret.
It’s not whether you succeed or fail. It’s whether you have the courage to try. I love the Man in the Arena Speech for that. You want to be in the arena bloodied and barely lifting your head up. That’s living. It’s not standing up the victor. It’s when you’re in the midst of it and it’s hard, deep, and important. That’s a gift. I hope for all of the people that I take care of in hospice that when they’re on their deathbeds, they can remember that valiant fight and know they fought it.
Learning From Mistakes: The Value Of Personal And Professional Growth
That’s still one of the greatest speeches of all time. This is the last question for you that I always like to ask. This is multivariant. It can be personal, professional, single, or repeated. What’s a mistake that you’ve made that you’ve learned the most from?
My biggest mistake was that I kept not listening and putting off the things that were utterly important to me. I knew I always wanted to be a writer. I knew I wanted to be a public speaker. It turned into things like podcasting and blogging but I kept putting them off. I kept on telling myself, “That’s not what you do. Be a doctor. That’s something you do.” I feel thankful that my life trajectory eventually forced me to do this. God forbid, I didn’t die like my father did when he was 40. I got to this place where I gave myself permission because I could look at my finances and say, “I’m safe.” That was the thing that gave me the permission. I wish I’d given myself permission way before then.
Where can people learn about you and your work?
The easiest way is to go to JordanGrumet.com. There, you can find links to both of my books as well as all the places I create content. The place I do it mostly is EarnAndInvest.com but they can go to JordanGrumet.com.
Thanks for joining us. I’m fascinated by your personal story and how you’ve turned your own experience into a purpose that will impact others.
Thank you so much for having me.
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