Building Wealth and Leverage - Thomas Waschenfelder On "Building Out Loud" Podcast with Josh Cadorette
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Josh Cadorette for an episode of his podcast, Building Out Loud. We discuss creating a personal definition of wealth, learning from mental models, and building leverage online.
I’ve included a transcript of our conversation below. Please keep in mind that this information is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be interpreted as financial advice. Enjoy!
Podcast Episode Transcript
Josh: Hello, and welcome to Building Out Loud. The podcast where emerging innovators share actionable insights to help you become a better builder. I'm your host, Josh Cadorette. Let's jump in.
Thomas Waschenfelder is the founder of Wealest - a platform that simplifies the ideas of wealth creators. Wealest is designed to take you from zero understanding about how people build wealth to a working knowledge of how you can do it yourself. In our conversation, Thomas and I discussed creating a personal definition of wealth, learning from mental models, and building leverage online.
While Thomas and I discuss wealth creation, it should be noted that the content of this podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to replace or substitute for professional financial advice. I hope that you enjoy the conversation.
Josh: Thomas, thank you so much for building out loud with us today.
Thomas: How are you doing, Josh? Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Josh: So, you've been building Wealest out loud. What inspired you to build Wealest?
Why I Built Wealest: So Others Could Learn With Me
Thomas: So Wealest is a site about the mental models of wealth creation. And this is how it started. I was walking to work. It was 2016. It's morning. It's freezing out. I'm in Toronto. And I have this thought that just kind of hits me.
For the first time in my life, I have money. I have like, not a lot. I have like $20,000 saved up in the bank and I have this realization that I have no idea what to do with this money. I don't know the first thing of what people do with a small chunk of change.
I didn't really know what investing is. I kinda knew, sort of, that you buy bonds and they're laddered bonds that you can buy for your retirement, but that's 30, 40 years away. What am I supposed to do with this $20,000 sitting in my bank account?
So, what do you do when you're walking or you're on the train? I went to my podcast app and I searched for investing podcasts. I land on an investing podcast and it was called Invested by Phil Town and Danielle Town.
And basically in this podcast, Phil talks to his daughter about how to invest their money, how to invest her money. She's a lawyer, had never done anything [investing]. So immediately I connect to her. She doesn't know anything about money. I don't know anything about money. I'm going to listen and I'm going to learn.
So they go into it and they start talking about this guy named Charlie Munger. And Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett's partner. He's the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, which is Warren Buffett's company.
And as soon as I started to learn a little bit about this guy, it was like a warm light was bathing me. I just felt warm dude. And I knew that I was going to dig into this. I knew that I had to know, I had to learn about this guy. I had to try and understand the way his mind works, how he's built what he's built. So I ordered his book.
Basically, he's known for his speeches. He has this book called Poor Charlie's Almanac. So I ordered his book and I start reading his book and I start learning about mental models, which are basically, how do you organize and think about the world and make better decisions.
And I thought, well, if I'm going to learn all about this, it's possible that a lot of people are in the same boat. They know nothing about wealth creation and don't know the first step. Why don't I start a website that takes you from zero to one in your understanding of how wealthy people built their fortunes, what kind of ideas are they leveraging. What concepts do you need to know to try and build?
So that's kind of how Wealest was created. It started with kind of an inspiration from Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet. And that was maybe a year and a half ago. And today it's kind of transitioned to some of the new wealth creators.
Like Naval Ravikant, a big fan of him. And a lot of his ideas about using the new kinds of leverage instead of sort of financial leverage and labor leverage. We can use code, media like you're doing on this podcast to create a unique brand and then scale it to anybody with an internet connection.
So even within my journey, Wealest has kind of changed or at least my ideas have changed about how I'm personally going to approach finding my core sort of wealth creation journey. It was kind of like, I'm going to learn this, I'm going to learn to go from zero to one. Maybe there are other people who want to know too, and that's kind of where the website came from.
Josh: Yeah. It sounds like the ideal user is you pre Poor Charlie's Almanac.
Thomas: 100%. Yeah. I'm writing for me. And when I look back and see where I am now and sort of the concepts that I can leverage and the ideas that I can put into practice in my own life. I've gone from zero to one and that's kind of what the site's about.
Josh: This may sound like a funny question, but to the ideal user, somebody who's not familiar with wealth creation, why build wealth? What can it do to transform someone's life?
Why You Should Build Wealth: Freedom Of Your Time
Thomas: Yeah, I think that's an easy answer for me. It took me a little while to get to this answer, but it's freedom. It's just freedom of your time.
Naval (Ravikant) has a great line where you don't have to get up and wear a tie like a collar around your neck and go to work a job that you don't love to do. That's not to say all of us do that. Some of us have amazing jobs that we really love.
But ultimately it's about: can I build freedom of my time? The most important things in my life are getting up and having a cup of coffee with my wife and going and walking the dog. And I want the freedom to be able to do that whenever I want to do that.
And it obviously takes a tremendous amount of work and luck to get there. And in some ways, those are the same thing. But yeah, just to be financially free is freedom of your time. That's pretty much what we're all after.
And if you work a job that you love, you may already be financially free. There are some people who are doing exactly what they're meant to do. And if you're happy and if you're just waking up excited to conquer the day, then you're already there. But for others, it does mean trying to get away from what you're doing, so you can do something else.
Josh: Yeah. I think the foundation of financial wealth gives way to so many different other types of wealth. I know one being popularized right now by Jack Butcher and Visualize Value as mental wealth. And you had mentioned with Naval discussing and you discussing with your own personal life, the ability to control your schedule. That doesn't maybe look like a number in a bank account, but, and maybe it's not as measurable, but it's just as impactful. And certainly it's a form of wealth.
Are there any other forms of wealth that come to your mind more than just financial, more than just controlling your schedule, more than just mental wealth? Which in my opinion, would be learning opportunities and mental models. Any others that come to mind that we should be thinking about?
Other Kinds Of Wealth: Health And Personal Relationships
Thomas: Yeah, I would say fitness, certainly. The freedom to move your body in the way that you want to move your body. Life is just a lot easier when you can go for a hike and it's not too difficult for you to handle. So that's a big part of what I consider wealth is the freedom to do with my body what I want to do with physical exercise.
And then the other one, I think is certainly your personal relationships. Your friends, your family. I married an absolute rockstar, so I wake up and I just feel lucky and I think that contributes greatly to my mental health and to every aspect of just wanting to get up and attack the day and build something.
Josh: That's awesome. Yeah, I enjoy hearing you discuss these other components of wealth because they relate to our health and that's the point I was going towards.
But also when we think about monetary success, it quickly becomes tricky because we all want to achieve a certain amount of monetary success, but money's not everything. So it's this weird balancing act of, I need to be somewhere between: I don't care about money and money is everything. And there's like some line, which is like, I believe money is important, but not everything.
And I'm curious, what is your tips for any listeners out there in, in striking that balance in their mindset?
Process Matters More Than The Outcome
Thomas: I think you have to know what you want. A lot of people talk about writing down their perfect day. Write on a piece of paper. And if you can achieve that perfect day, you're there, you've arrived at where it is you're going.
So I think you have to get extremely specific about either what that day looks like or what your goal is. Whether it's a number, whether it's specific job or role that you want to do, or, if you're trying to change professions. But there's a dichotomy there because, of course, we all have goals, but we still need to be present in the process and be content with our lives in the journey.
Because I've had a few things where what I would call goals have just been handed to me kind of out of the blue or I found a bit of a workaround. And once I get it and I haven't worked for it, it's almost meaningless. It almost does not mean anything.
So you have to know what you want. You have to go after it, but you have to understand that once you get there, your goals have likely changed. And it's not going to bring you any sort of lasting peace or lasting happiness. It's going to be a moment of "Yeah, I did this... What's next?" Maybe it lasts 20 minutes, maybe it lasts three minutes, I don't know.
But you have to enjoy the process. To answer your question, know exactly what you want, put it on paper, tell your friends about it. Cause that'll help you commit to it if you use social proof. Tell everybody and then enjoy the process.
Josh: Sounds like everybody has a responsibility to build out their own personal definition of wealth.
Thomas: Totally. If you don't know what it is, you'll never know if you've gotten there or not. You don't know what process to put in place to get there. So, you definitely need to figure out exactly where it is you're going. Whether it's a number or whether it's a lifestyle or whether it's just what your day looks like - figure it out and then work towards it.
Josh: I think my fear is that in American culture and you're based out of Canada, maybe I should say North American culture - we don't personally define what wealth means to us. And we do take steps. And I'm thinking about middle-class professionals who have retirement options. And I say that knowing full well, not everybody has these wealth creation tools at their disposal.
But the discussions that I hear mostly around wealth creation are around products like a 401k, Roth IRA. These things that are far off in the future, people are allocating 10 to 15% of their income there.
And these are great things, but they're doing so very passively and not intentionally and not having a number. And my fear is that when you do try and build wealth passively, and you don't create your own personal definition, then that monetary aspect becomes the dominating factor in wealth creation. And not the things that you talked about, which is freedom of schedule, freedom of personal relationships, those things that I find to be more important.
And it feels like, correct me if I'm wrong, Wealest is starting to push back against that culture and educate and allow people to build their own definitions of wealth.
Don’t Wait Until 65 To Try And Enjoy Your Life
Thomas: Yeah. I don't think I've ever framed it like that, but I generally agree with you. If you're waiting until you're 65 to try and enjoy your day-to-day life free of a conventional full-time job, many of us don't want to do that. We don't want to wait until we're 65.
There has to be a way, there HAS to be a way to build a day-to-day life that you enjoy, that you're excited to wake up for that doesn't involve kind of delaying that freedom until 65.
And that's why you really do have to figure out what that is, so that you can start moving towards it now and not just work day after day after day contributing. Look, for some people it works.
And I think the internet and some of the ideas that Naval has around scaling your personality and even Jack Butcher, to some extent, scaling your personality, scaling your skills on the internet has changed the capacity for somebody to make a living doing something that they enjoy more than a full-time job.
I always thought that I was going to be in a conventional salaried job for my entire life. Cause that's what my parents did. I don't know anybody who's gone off and built something on their own. I just haven't been exposed to it.
And I think that's the power of Twitter and social media apps where you can see people doing things that you don't even know about, you don't even know what's possible and you can talk to them and you can ask questions and say, how does this work? How did you do this? And then they'll teach it to you. They'll show you at least what they did.
I think that's the difference between how things have worked previously saving for retirement, and working a job you may not love for years and years and years, and what we have at our disposal right now with the internet and the billions of users on it.
Josh: It leads perfectly into my next question, because you were indirectly referencing the idea of the compound effect and how Naval and Jack Butcher are saying, build your leverage by compounding your skills, your talents, which are marketable and accessible to anybody in the world through a digital environment.
You recently had written an article about compound interest, and you referenced a tweet. And within that tweet, you had an equation and you said one plus one equals three+ in reference to ideas. Could you break that equation down for, for listeners?
Idea Compounding: Building a Base For Better Ideas
Thomas: One of the things that has significantly improved my life in the last year and a half or change has been writing an article every week for Wealest. That's the schedule I gave myself when I started. So I've written an article for 78 weeks or something in a row.
And what happens when you write about ideas is that you start building a base of solid models that you can then add new ideas on top of that base. And you're just not adding a new idea, but you're reflecting that new idea through your base. And it becomes more than just one additional idea.
I'll give an example. There's an example of an asymmetric opportunity, which is just the idea that if you want to create wealth, one way to do it is to look for opportunities where the upside is much greater than the downside. So the downside is capped in some way and you aren't going to blow up, but there's a lot of room up top. It's uncapped - an asymmetric opportunity.
You add to that an idea of a Black Swan - a massively rare event. Bitcoin, for example, that's a Black Swan event.
What you get when you add those two ideas together, is you get a third idea, which is a positive Black Swan event: a massively asymmetric rare event that, if you are in the midst of and can see and take advantage of, can change your life.
So you kinda need the base. You need to know what an asymmetric opportunity is. You need to know a little bit about Black Swans and how it's really, this is an idea from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, about how it's extremely rare events that define history.
It's not our everyday life that we just go about and "dah, dah, dah, dah," it's these pricks (pierces) that define history. And if you can be in a prick where it's positive for you in that asymmetric opportunity, and it's a rare event, and you've positioned yourself, you could get paid out.
So that's the way ideas compound on to each other, at least the way I see them compound onto each other. And the way I'm trying to build a mental framework for myself. So that's what idea compounding is to me.
Josh: Using you as an example, are you currently creating your own asymmetric opportunity or have you identified one and you are then leaning into trends that are already happening? So in other words, are you creating the opportunity yourself or did you recognize an opportunity and are you leaning into it?
Publishing Content Online Is An Asymmetric Bet
Thomas: I would say if you're publishing content online, you are recognizing and leaning into an opportunity because most people don't appreciate the opportunity right now that there is to build a personal brand online that will pay you, will compound and pay you out at some point in the future.
Certainly from a content creation, from a Wealest.com standpoint, that's definitely something that I've made an effort doing. I've listened and seen where things are headed, and listened to some really smart people and where they think things are headed and kind of joined in on the opportunity to try and scale my ideas and other people's ideas and my writing and you know, my Twitter or whatever it is, purposefully to try and take advantage of the opportunity I think there is.
Josh: I certainly think that right now online, there is still so much asymmetric opportunity, even within content. People think it's oversaturated. And I disagree. I think certain types of content are oversaturated. I do not think personal brand content is oversaturated.
And I'd be curious after I've offered my thoughts. I'd be curious to get your opinion on it because we no longer follow companies online. We follow people, and this sounds cliche, but each of us brings a unique story.
And so if you build a personal brand, if it's authentic and it's truly who you are, it is unlike anyone else's personal brand, therefore you can lean into that rare, that rarity that you had described as such a key variable in your mental model.
What are your thoughts? Do you still think there is an asymmetric opportunity online? I would hope so. That's seems to be where Wealest is strictly based.
Thomas: Yeah, I think it's still early to get into the game if you want to.
But here's the thing: not everybody wants to. Not everybody wants to build online, not everybody is interested in building online.
So for those who are, it may feel like you're up against the whole world, but dude, only 10% of people on Twitter actually contribute to Twitter. So even if you have a Twitter account, chances are you aren't posting anything. It's social media and the internet generally that makes us feel like everybody is creating content everywhere, but that's only because we're following the people who are doing it. And that's what we see.
So I don't think it's too late. And I think the opportunity to build, like you said, a personal brand and leverage to help people in whatever way you can, whether it's a product or service or whatever - it's huge. It's HUGE. Anybody who's listening to this is probably either thinking about it or already doing it.
Josh: I see it from the mental wealth perspective. I no longer am within the walls of an institution to continue my education. And it's now on me to continue my education and what better way to do so then do it out loud and engage with people and ensure two-way communication.
Because when I started, when I started writing essays and this might just be because I didn't have a large audience, and because people weren't replying to the essays, but it felt like one way communication. Now, writing, I still strongly encourage, but what really got me interested in podcasts was that two-way communication and building relationships.
And so from a financial standpoint, it doesn't cost in absurd amount of money to produce a podcast and host a website, but it takes a little bit of money and it takes a considerable amount of time, particularly when you're getting started. There's a little bit of a learning curve, but it's the mental wealth aspect that is so key for me because it's a continuation of my education.
The Internet Is The Greatest Teacher In The World
Thomas: Yeah. If you're interested in learning about the world, the internet will give you everything you could ever need. It'll give you the people, it'll give you all the people who have ever been around. It'll give you all the people that you can connect with today. I think that's a fantastic way to frame it.
I've learned more from Charlie Munger at 97 - I was lucky enough to see him for his annual meeting for The Daily Journal, a company that he still runs at 97 or 98 now. But I've learned more from him that is relevant to my life, relevant about decision-making, about how to think about the world, how to navigate the world from him than I ever did in my post-secondary education.
So, the internet is the greatest tool to learn really anything you want to learn and connect with anybody you want to connect with.
You have to want it though. Like you said, there are sacrifices that it takes to build out loud, to consistently put your work out there, to go after building an audience or getting your product out. You just have to want it, and it has to be the way that you approach your career. And not everybody wants it. And that's okay.
But I'm with you, it's made my life - realizing that the internet is both a good friend and a platform to try and build the things you want to build and the lifestyle that you want to build has had a massive impact on my life, man. I just wake up just to see what I can do, you know?
Josh: In my life, when I think about my definition of wealth, a part of that definition is really the core foundation of, and this is something I journaled about four or five years ago, my mission is to provide opportunities for others. To provide opportunities for those that don't currently have it, or wouldn't have it, if they weren't allocated resources that I've been blessed to have had from the get-go, to have built upon throughout my life.
So, for people who do not have wealth creation tools readily accessible, how do we empower them to gain access to them?
You Must Teach Yourself Financial Education
Thomas: And I think the other part of that. Look, I'm not a financial advisor. I'm not anything like that. And we should all get financial guidance from professionals that can help us with our money. But just from a financial education point of view, we need to teach this far better than we have.
I assume the American system is very similar, but I grew up in Canada and like I said, at 26, I had no idea what to do with my money. I had no idea. I didn't know what compounding was. I didn't know you have to own equity to build real wealth.
A lot of these kind of what you would think if you know anything, are super basic concepts, I had no idea at 26. So that's part of it - just getting people educated and building that into the system from the ground up. That would probably be helpful. It won't solve every problem, but it would be helpful.
But I just started this site because I was learning and if other people want to learn with me, amazing. But, ultimately like every article I write, I learn something myself with everything I write. So that's where the site comes from - this is as much for me as it is for other people. I'm just happy people are getting value from it.
Josh: You mentioned that you are writing about this and you're educating yourself about it, but your full-time job, you're a writer and producer. This is particularly interesting for me.
So going away from the wealth portion and towards the idea that you are allocating time outside of your job and your job doesn't fully align with what you're doing. And that is totally okay, if not encouraged, because this is something that this is an area you wanted to grow in, and you may not have had the opportunity in your day-to-day job to grow in it.
And I know that you enjoy your day-to-day work as a writer and a producer, but what advice would you give to someone seeking to start a personal project, a bit separate from their full-time responsibilities, like you have?
Publish Content Around Whatever You Are Learning In Your Spare Time
Thomas: I would say if you're learning about something that's outside of what you do on a day-to-day basis, and you're really interested in it, and you're learning about it in your free time, then create content around the thing that you're learning about. Because that is probably the best way to kind of internalize the ideas.
It also opens you up. Again, another asymmetric opportunity with content online, it opens you up to potentially pivoting (if the right person sees the right thing at the right time) into that field. It gives you options, at least at some point, if you're in the right place at the right time.
Go after it. There's no rules about what you can and cannot be interested in. And if you are interested in something in your free time create content and you will never know what happens.
There was a time where I was like, okay, I'm going to get into finance. Dude, I didn't even know you could go to business school really as an undergrad. Can you believe that? I didn't know. So I went to film school and I loved film school.
But with the internet, I think we all become content creators in some way. Whether it's essays or podcasts or whatever, that's where you eventually end up if you're gonna try and move in that direction.
Create content about the things you're learning about, and it just gives you options and you'll meet people. You'll meet other people in the field that will open up relationships that you didn't have before. It's just a massive asymmetric opportunity.
Whereas if you're just sitting in your room, reading a book - that's fantastic and I do it all the time - but you're missing out on some of the potential upside to putting your ideas out there. And there is downside. But if you're not living your perfect life already, there's not a lot of downside.
Josh: It goes back to maybe not a personal definition of wealth, but a personal definition of what success looks like online. And it's not everyone's goal online, nor should it be, to become an influencer. And to have an immense follower count, X number of likes, Y engagement, Z impressions targeting those numbers.
I know that it can be profitable for some, but recognizing there's value in putting my ideas out there, not from the profitability standpoint, like we talked about, but from the aspect, just like you said, of making a connection that you wouldn't have otherwise, just reaching out to that expert in your industry.
Cold email may have worked, may have not, probably lower success rate, but by building something that analyzes what that expert in the industry has done, or somehow captures the attention of an expert in an industry, then can open the door to a further conversation. To picking their brain, to them, promoting what you built.
And there is so much value in that and I'm not sure if we fully capture it because it takes intention in setting your definition of success online and it takes discipline. Certainly I don't always have that discipline online.
Patience: It Takes Time To Find Success
Thomas: Yeah, yeah. And I think it takes patience too. The digital world is just constant dopamine hit after dopamine hit, after notification, after retweet, after message, after email... and all those feel really good for us - for our brains.
But it takes time for these things to play out. It takes time to build a relationship with somebody online. It takes time to get trust between two people to be in position to take that relationship to the next level. Most people just don't have patience.
It's patience that is incredibly hard to have and the more patience you can have - and that's why I talk a lot about and write about the process because you need to enjoy the process. If you're just sitting and waiting for the outcome, it's going to be very painful and you're not going to wait long enough. Naval says, you know, you have to stop waiting or else you will get tired of waiting and you will do something else.
You just have to enjoy the process. Keep going. And just know that at some point something will happen that will be good for you, that you wouldn't have had otherwise had you not done all that work and kept up that discipline and just kept going.
Josh: You mentioned the red notification button, which triggers the dopamine in our brain. It's fascinating that these tools, our attention is so valuable for these tools and they want to keep us on the platform.
And it is a balance to not get trapped on the platform, to not give in just strictly to the dopamine receptors, but to maximize the pros of the platform and say, I'm going to use this to capture people's attention in the way I want. I
'm not going to use this just to get - and the example I'm about to give I fully guilty of falling into this - of going into the trending section of Twitter and seeing what controversy has struck the world today. Or going into YouTube, which I don't create content on, but certainly YouTube's algorithm has me just pinned. And it shows me highlights of Philly's games from when I was a child.
And of course I want to watch those things, but is it worth watching Chase Utley hit home run after home run in the 2008 / 2009 playoff runs. Like, those are fun things, I should do that on my own time, but not when I'm trying to sit down and write an essay and get trapped in these platforms.
Endless Distractions Steal Your Time
Thomas: Yeah, it's hard, man. We're up against the smartest people in the world in a battle for our minds, basically. For our attention. For the direction that we move in. And anybody who says that they win that game every day is lying. It's incredibly addictive.
You have to be very careful about protecting your mental space and protecting your mind and protecting yourself from the content that you are consuming. Because you become what you consume. It's the quality of your ideas come from the quality of the content that you're putting into your brain. So, the more you can internalize that, I think the easier it is step away from some of the bubblegum stuff.
But yeah, man, it's hard. The smartest people in the world trying to get us scrolling every day, all day long. And if you're going to accomplish anything, you have to find ways to battle that and find ways to kick it more often than not.
Josh: Do you have any strategies to refine your inputs so that your outputs are more impactful?
Refine Your Inputs: You Are What Your Expose Yourself To
Thomas: Yeah. If I'm going to read a book, it's going to be recommended by two or three or four people that I really respect. If I'm going to follow somebody on Twitter, I'm going to keep my eye on them for the kind of content that they're creating.
Mostly my filter is: “is it positive?” Is this person generally looking at life as an optimist, as a rational optimist? I don't like a lot of negativity cause that stuff can destroy you if you let it in.
But I'm also looking for realists. I want people who are thinking about the world with not necessarily with those rosy goggles on, but saying, this is the world as it is. How can we make it better? How do we think this will work?
So those are my filters: positivity, rational optimism. And if I can learn from somebody how to better navigate the world, how to make better decisions and then test that on my own and see if it works - and if it works, then boom, that's somebody that I can go back to again and again.
Josh: It seems like I've identified two variables - and tell me if I'm wrong - to your success. One has been consistency. You have a writing schedule and a posting schedule. You have written one article per week, I think going on 70 plus weeks thus far. So over a year, which is incredibly impressive.
But another one is, which is key to building out loud or building in public is the transparency with which you are building - transparency and consistency. Are those the two variables that you would attribute to your success thus far?
Success Is Consistency, Transparency, And Authenticity
Thomas: Yeah, 100%. I think that [consistency] is the single most important thing in getting anybody to read any of my articles. Because at the beginning, I was writing into a vacuum. I was tweeting into a vacuum. I had a few metrics - one page view here, one page view there - nobody's reading this.
But, I kept going, I kept going. There's a newsletter of 500 plus now. Thousands of page views a month. If you had told me that, "Hey, you can get in a year and some change," I would have been like, there's no way, there's no way that could happen. Yeah, consistency, absolutely.
Transparency is an important part because I think you have to be authentic online. You should be authentic period, but especially online because it's easier to hide online behind an avatar or behind a personality that you're creating or whatever.
But transparency and authenticity are important if you're going to build a brand for yourself that's going to last a long time and you're going to help people in an authentic way.
And then I think the third piece is just courage to publish. Courage to publish before you think you're ready to publish.
Because I'm not rich. I'm not an authority on wealth creation, but I have a capacity to collect ideas, shoot through my point of view, write them on the page and potentially provide value for somebody else. And nobody gave me that permission. It took a really long time even to give myself that permission. It took years and years to get to that place.
I think consistency and then transparency and then permission to publish and see what happens. Because the power of the internet is that no matter what you're interested in, no matter what really niche subject you're into, there is somebody else who's interested in the same thing you are - no matter how strange or niche you think it is.
Josh: If you wait until you're "ready," ready will never come. There's going to be some level of uncomfortableness to hit publish. And it takes courage. Like you said, who are people in your life that have filled you with courage to set forth? Or do you have an experience that gave you the courage to say, I don't know if this will be sustainable, but I'm going to set forth and I'm going to hit publish.
Surround Yourself With People More Courageous Than You
Thomas: So my wife's an actor and she is the bravest person I know. She's been instrumental in getting me to a place where I can publish frequently, not be so fearful and anxious around making a mistake or writing something that somebody won't like.
I think having a support system that can help you get there, if you don't have the personality that just does it. Because some people do - some people, they're fearless and they just do it. Or at least they seem fearless. Maybe internally they're not, but they just do it. But that wasn't me. I needed kind of consistent nudges, consistent pushes. And also just watching somebody else do it in my personal life.
And then the other piece is watching other people do it online. And watching them for a while, seeing how they're approaching it and how they're thinking about it. And then ultimately you just come to a crossroads. You come to either: my life is going to stay the way it is on this track or I'm going to try and change it.
And for me, it was simply, I'm going to try and build something. I've never done anything like this before in this way; writing consistently under my own name. And I just hit that crossroads and the answer was obvious at that point. It helps if you have a network of people pushing you along,
Josh: I hope people are inspired to look to who's in their network currently as that inspiration and build upon their network and recognize that it can be done online. Which is weird to say. I would not have believed that six months ago, but because of quarantine, I became more engaged on Twitter and these tools that are at our disposal, it is possible to find sources of inspiration.
Now moving into the close of the podcast, the "Two Minute Build." Rapid fire line of questioning to provide the listener with quick, hit actual insights to close out the podcast. Thomas, are you ready for me to put two minutes on the clock?
Thomas: I'm ready, man. Let's do it.
Josh: What is the book or books you've given most as a gift and why?
My Most Gifted Books
Thomas: The Education of a Value Investor, by Guy Spier was one that I got from him that I gift a lot. It's a fantastic book, one of the first ones I read on value investing. And then Poor Charlie's Almanac. It's expensive, FYI. It's like $80 U.S. so be ready for that. But it's a fantastic book and it changed my life. So those two.
Josh: What advice would you give to a smart driven college student about to enter the real world? And what advice should they ignore?
Be Weary of Advice That’s Good For The Person Giving It
Thomas: I'll borrow from Warren Buffet on this one. Your life will be far easier if you can live by an inner scorecard. If you can find a way not to care what anybody thinks, but hold yourself to an internal value system that you live up to, you will be far happier and your life will be far easier.
And then in terms of avoiding advice, I would avoid the advice of anybody whose advice is good for them. So keep an eye on incentive. Ask why are they giving me this advice? What are they getting from this advice? Sometimes it's fine and you should still take the advice. And other times you should think twice.
Josh: What purchase of a hundred dollars or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months?
My Best Purchase Under $100: The Waking Up App
Thomas: Sam Harris's Waking Up app, which is a meditation app. I'm meditating now regularly because of that app. It's fantastic. Then, Grammarly is probably the other one that has helped, which is the writing software. So, all software basically.
Josh: Last but not least, very fitting for today's topics about content creation and wealth creation. What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments that you have ever made? It could be an investment of money, time, energy, all the topics that we were talking about today.
The Best Investment You Can Make Is An Investment In Yourself
Thomas: So, I'm incredibly fortunate. My parents paid for me to go for a short while to acting school. I wanted to be an actor for a really short period of time. But that allowed me to get aligned with how I am physically. With how I am emotionally. It just kind of created a platform for me to analyze how I feel. My posture, my body, my voice, how I sound to other people - this type of stuff. I did that at like 18. So while it wasn't my own, I'm grateful for my parents for putting me through a year of that, which really has had a lasting impact.
Josh: Awesome. Thomas, if listeners want to find you online, how can they get in touch with you and how can they follow along?
Thomas: I'm @TWaschenfelder on Twitter. And then Wealest.com is where you can find my writing.
Josh: Thomas, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thomas: Josh. I really appreciate it, man. It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Josh: Thanks so much for taking the time to listen. You can find the show notes of this episode at joshcadorette.com/podcast. I also send biweekly insights on building better. You can sign up for the Build Better Newsletter at JoshCadorette.com/newsletter.
Want to continue the conversation? You can find me on Twitter @joshcadorette. Until next time.
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