Today’s guest Garrett Gunderson is an expert in helping people get their finances in line. He reveals the true dangers of a scarcity mindset and how to unlock lasting financial freedom while doing what you love.
Adam: It’s so funny because here you are, this expert helping people work out their money. But it does pose that really interesting thing that, “what’s the point? Why have the money?” And the whole point is so that you can enjoy life. So you can figure it out instead of worrying about money and so you can worry about other things that are far more important.
Garrett: Yeah. I thought like I’m the financial genius, that’s what I would maybe tell myself under my breath. Yet I was talking to my wife about all these pivot points, one when I was a miser and I had this woman Nancy say, “I wonder what it’s like living in the financial prison you built for your wife?” And I’m like, oh, that was a huge pivotal paradigm-shifting moment for me.
But outside of that, pretty much every paradigm shift I’ve had around the quality of life, enjoyment along the way, and living wealthy, not just having it for one day someday, came from my wife who’s not a big spender, she doesn’t blow money, she’s really responsible. I was the Meiser, I’m more the spender now, but I just love that. She’s been this unsung hero for me and really a powerful stand.
You can never buy back the memories you never have.
Now I’m understanding what legacy is and how we live our legacy from the meetings we had with our kids, to the investment. We have this weekend of going and spending quality time with them at our cabin and asking them about one thing they want to do and making sure that we do that with them. That’s a huge value, and you know what? It is awesome that I have the financial wherewithal to take some time off or the financial wherewithal to buy some of these things that create amazing experiences.
But that’s why it’s important to figure out what value you have and how you can provide that value and monetize it. But don’t get trapped by it where that suffocates you and sucks you in. That’s all that you end up doing at the cost of your health and at the cost of quality of life along the way. My dad taught me when I was young, “you can never buy back the memories you never have.”
Garrett: Do you remember how many people were subscribed to my YouTube channel that day we sat down? Do you remember at all? It was small.
Adam: Yeah, it was like a couple of thousand or something?
Garrett: Couple thousand. That’s what I remember too. So we’re over 30,000 now. We spent less than a thousand dollars on any type of ad strategy whatsoever. It’s all by recommendations, and videos. I’m now releasing five videos a week on it. We’ve had 2 million minutes consumed in the last 28 days, and 8,300 subscribers. Our goal is to hit a hundred thousand subscribers by the end of the year organically then we can launch off to a million.
The reason for the reach is because like I’m enjoying filming the videos number one. Number two, I enjoy engaging and commenting back and forth with the comments on YouTube and anyone that says something negative. It doesn’t bother me. I just realize it’s their own judgments and insecurities, it’s not really about me. Then three, it just helps to build a way to get the right connections and the guy that coaches me, Evan Carmichael, he’s got a couple million subscribers.
I mean he could be on any podcast he wants it seems or on any stage. I’m amazed at the difference we’re making through videos that are free online. If it’s free, will people really watch it? Seven minutes and 30 seconds average view time. I’m like, so thanks for your advice that day is what I really want to say. I just think that it was awesome.
Adam: Aw man, thank you. My absolute pleasure if you’re doing this yet, are you riding the news waves as part of the content creation yet?
Garrett: A little bit. We haven’t done a great job with it. We’ve done it just a couple of times. I know that if we did that we’d have enough editing power and turnaround that I think we could start doing more of it for sure.
Adam: Here’s one silly tip we’re doing right now. It’s more of a Facebook one rather than YouTube, but when somebody likes a video but doesn’t comment, we’ll go through and add them in the comments and be like, “Hey, at whatever your name is that click, what did you like about the video? Or what did you love about the video” based on what the reaction is.
It gets them to start commenting because obviously, they liked it, just not enough to write a comment, but when you tag them and you’re like, I noticed you liked it. It goes crazy.
Garrett: Well, dude, you’re the man. I appreciate all the advice.
Adam: Yeah. My pleasure
Garrett: Who knew that we would schedule this so far out and it happened to be on a day like this and we’re just flowing all over it. But I think it’s important to understand the result of when money’s not your obstacle, but instead, it’s your ally when it’s a byproduct of who you are versus trading time and effort for it. It’s a different world. There are different possibilities that come with that. There’s a different level of fulfillment. There’s a different level of enjoyment. There’s a different level of choice. There’s a different level of freedom.
Unfortunately, people have been sold that financial freedom is having a certain amount of money in a bank account. Well, if you’re in a scarcity mindset and you’re not clear about your purpose, the bottom line is no amount of money we’ll ever do. You’ll always feel inadequate, insecure, and frustrated. I think it’s investing in yourself from a self-discovery. What are you capable of? What do you have? What skill sets? How do you deliver that value to people?
Play a game worth winning. Too many people are playing a game that is very finite and they struggle in it because they’re scrimping and saving and budgeting and cutting back and eliminating and reducing and no one shrinks their way to wealth. So the wrong philosophy with hard work still equals very limited results.
Adam: We’re moving toward the end and I do want to ask you one big question, which is what is a psychological hack you have that might help somebody listening to this?
Garrett: A psychological hack is, if I ever find myself in a situation where I feel stressed, limited, down, selfish, or struggling, I do one of two things. Number one, I call someone like you or someone that I consider a peer or even a mentor that I highly respect and I tell them what’s going on.
Then they ask me a question that I probably couldn’t ask myself because of the negative emotional state that I might be in. Or number two, I simply go add value to one of those people because when they acknowledge and appreciate me, it’s hard to stay stuck in scarcity, frustration, or being down.
So those are the two spikes that I can have. But before I go back to the very first thing that I shared, I call and listen to someone. Number two, I will be radically vulnerable about my situation. Number three, I bring love and compassion to go through the pain with people that I know that’ll be there for me. So I guess you asked for one, I gave you three.
Adam: I love it, I love all of those. You got me resonating with one of them. I have moments where I refuse to make decisions because I’m aware that I have cortisol flowing through my brain, which is the stress hormone. T
here are times, this actually happened earlier today, when I realized that there was a complication with some scheduling. Long story short, I got flustered because something that was supposed to happen wasn’t happening and everything messed up.
However, in the middle of that fluster, somebody asked me a question and I looked at them and I know that my instinct would’ve been to just answer to make them go away, but it wouldn’t have been a real answer. It would’ve been an instinctive answer, not necessarily the best one.
So I’ve trained myself in those moments to look and say, “I’m sorry, the answer that you want, I’m not capable of giving right now. I will get back to you later on when my head’s in a better space to give you an answer that’s worthy of your question.”
That statement is almost hardwired into me to say whenever I’m stressed so that my instinct, instead of giving a bad answer or the wrong answer. “Freaking out” is just my brain can’t cope with this question right now, but you are going to get it. I just need you to give me time to fix my head, to give it to you correctly, and then following one of your psychological hacks, go fix it and then go after them.
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