Ep 27. Ideas that Enrich & Make Rich - Dirty Chai with Chio

In this podcast episode, the host discusses life lessons from different books that have made her life better. The first lesson is from "Lean In" by Sheryl Sandberg, which taught her to accept the reality of life and navigate it as best as possible. The second lesson is from "Outliers" by Adam Grant, which demystifies success and shows that successful people are ordinary individuals who take brave actions. The third lesson is from "Daring Greatly" by Brene Brown, which empowered her to seek her authenticity and not be chained by seeking others' approval. Lastly, "Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell explains that extraordinary events are born from ordinary actions and everyone has a special role to play. The host identifies as a maven, someone who collects and shares information. Overall, these books have brought growth and freedom to her life. Hello, hi, welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Jive podcast with me, your host, The podcast where we focus on holistic, professional, and personal success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes, all your failures, and everything in between, you. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation, and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Today is my favorite kind of installment. Today I'm talking to you about the life lessons from different books that have made my life richer, that have made my life better, that have made the horizons of my mind broader. And as soon as I started looking at the different books, I do this thing where I stand in front of my bookshelf and I just run my eyes over the different books. And as my eyes landed on each of my favorites, the lesson from that book immediately popped into my mind each time. And I felt so excited at the prospect of recording the episode. In fact, my first thought was, oh my God, this is going to have to be a series. I was so excited. But let's jump right in. The first one, obviously, is Lean In. Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg. Lean In changed my life in that I learned that there is no special skill to make life easier. If you're a working woman, there is no special skill or special dispensation to make life a little bit easier. You need to lean in to the way things are and that's in your life, the reality of the things in your life, and then adjust them as best as you can to deal with the reality of life. So the reality is you need to parent. The reality is you need to show up for work. The reality is you need money. The reality is there are gender and political dynamics in play all the time. The trick is to not frustrate yourself with wishing those things disappeared into the ether. There is a time that they will, I hope. We continue to work towards an equitable society. But we're not there yet. And there is a powerful unlocking of the mind that comes when you work out or accept that you are not there yet. We haven't reached that point yet. And before we get there, we still have to live in the world that we're in now. And we still have to navigate in the world that we're in now. And you have to figure out ways and means to do that. What does that mean? Does that mean empowering your spouse a lot more? Does that mean getting more help? Does that mean speaking up when you need something? Does that mean taking a seat at the table? What does that look like? Even if it causes you discomfort, lean into the reality of the situation and lean into navigating it as best as possible. Of course, you can feel free to change the world on the side. Feel free to change the world as a side hustle. But while life is happening, you need to be present and to be leaning into the opportunities that are being presented to you right now. That freed me. It freed me from feeling unnecessary angst. It freed me from feeling like every moment must be a fight. It freed me from so many things. And it also just allowed me to grow. It allowed me to look at the women who have managed to grow in these circumstances and to talk to them and to hear their stories. And I said many, many times that stories are the gateway to growth, success, and shared humanity. Because once you hear that there's a woman who also went through something, who also had a child with special needs, who also was working full time, who also was striving to be a great leader in corporate, who also was trying to be a good spouse, and that they made it. And you sit down with them and you ask them, how did you do it? What was difficult for you? When they share that story with you and you understand it from a place of reality and respect, you learn so much and you grow so much and you realize that you do not have to reinvent the wheel. You simply need to learn from the experiences of others. It is amazing. And as you grow, you're able to do it for other people. They're able to lean into. There is no alchemy. There is just stories and people and life. The second favorite lesson is from the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell or Adam Grant? Adam Grant. It's by Adam Grant. This situation where I confuse Adam Grant and Malcolm Gladwell has been happening from the inception of the newsletter, but actually long before, but from the inception of the newsletter and the podcast, it's been more apparent because I do it every time I reference one of their books. I apologize to both of them. They're both incredible authors and I love their body of work. And I've read so much of it that it is all interlinked in my mind. But Outliers is one of my favorite books because it demystifies success, which is what I want this podcast to be for most people. It demystifies success. What Adam Grant did in that book is he went out and he studied the stories of some of the most successful businesses in the world and some of the most successful people and some of the most iconic people, the people that we've come to identify as extraordinary or outliers. And what he tells you is that they are people just like you and me. I think I said this in the podcast last week. There's a quote out there and it reads, he was one of you, but he became Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was afraid when he made the decision to free the slaves. Martin Luther King Jr. was afraid when he gave the speech. Michelle Obama was afraid when she went to the interview with her baby. All this is to say that there is no special source that is made specifically for people who do extraordinary things. They are ordinary people who brave getting into the arena. That is who they are and that is who you can also be. Isn't that an empowering thought? That takes me straight into daring greatly. Brene Brown's work was instrumental in me changing my life three or four years ago, in me realizing I had trapped myself in a world where I tried to please everyone, in a world where I tried to work towards perfection, in a world where I labored for the wrong things. Brene empowered me to free myself from the shackles. You would have to be a recovering people pleaser to understand the burden of wanting to please other people and how it can chain you to the most horrible of situations purely because you want that crumb, that muscle of well done, I'm pleased with you. But Brene Brown's daring greatly taught me to dare in the opposite direction and that's what daring looked like for me. It taught me to dare to step away from seeking that kind of unhealthy approval to seeking my authenticity, to seeking who I was because I don't know that I remembered who I was, to seeking what was true to me and building myself back up from a deeply rooted place. And from that book I carried away Theodore Roosevelt's The Man in the Arena. It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. And I realized, having read this and having read the book Daring Greatly, that the worst thing that could happen to me is to neither know victory nor defeat, is to just chug along and hope that I don't cause a stir. It's okay to upset people. It's okay to break a few eggs. It's okay to get some steel in your spine. It's okay to say no in the right places. It really is okay to dare to be yourself, to be authentic, to step out as the truest version of yourself, but the truest and best version of yourself that you can manage. Try it. Try it. It freed me in a way that words can never wrap themselves around. Tipping Point was also a big part of my journey. Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Tipping Point actually informed the name of my newsletter, The Maven Mail. In Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explains that the extraordinary world events, it's fascinating, and I think this is why Adam Grant and Malcolm Gladwell confuse themselves in my mind. See how I'm blaming them? Outliers is about how ordinary people do extraordinary things. Therefore, you, an ordinary person, can do extraordinary things. Tipping Point is about how extraordinary events happen. It's about how extraordinary events are born from ordinary actions. It is the one step, two steps, three steps that are taken. It's the one burst forward and the other that Kipchoge takes that makes the race that breaks the record. It's the step that you take one at a time in your office that ultimately builds your career. It's the step that you take one at a time in your garage that ultimately builds your business. That's the tipping point. And in the tipping point, he goes further to say that all these things are built from little things, but everyone has a special strength and a part to play. So he speaks of people who are mavens, people who are connectors, and people who are, let me try and remember, and people who are salesmen, I remember now. So mavens are people who collect information for the pleasure of it. People who are knowledgeable about things because they like to collect data and collect information. And over time, they become trusted because they are known for verifying, checking, reading, consuming, and sharing. People who can get an idea and pass it on to the next person. That's what a maven is. And that's the character I identify the most with, hence the maven male. Salespeople are people who can convince others by selling an idea. These are people who you find can get people on board. A salesperson doesn't necessarily need to work in sales. It can be an HR director who knows how to bring people on side with a difficult idea. It can be someone who knows how to manage trade unions. It can be somebody who knows how to manage difficult shareholders. It can be somebody who knows how to go to a family gathering and neutralize a situation. Get everyone to buy into the idea of, we're here for a special occasion. Let's focus on being here for that. That's what a salesperson is. And of course, a salesperson is also somebody who actually sells things. Who sells the idea of buying a thing to a person. Then there are connectors. People who, with their many links, distribute and collect information and connections. So they would put the mavens in touch with the salesperson and they would put the mavens in touch with the salespeople in touch with this and in touch with that. That's what connectors are. And this was my favorite takeaway from the book. Because based on your understanding of the category that you fall in, you are able to lean into your strengths in the right situation. Once you know that your superpower is information collecting and maybe to a lesser extent you're a salesperson or maybe to a lesser extent you're a connector, you know what to lean into when. When a philosopher way back when said knowledge is power, what they meant was knowing and understanding yourself, knowing and understanding things, empowers you to act in the best possible way in the right situation. That is how I understand it. So that's tipping point. Then one of the biggest hits this year was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. And the book itself is a counterintuitive approach, yes. But there's one story in there that I took and ran with. And that story was the one about Lieutenant Hiro Onoda. Lieutenant Hiro Onoda was sent off into the islands to fight Americans just at the end of World War II. I told the story much earlier in the year on this podcast. And he was told to fight to the death. Interesting thing though, the war ended while he was in that forest with his little troop of soldiers. The war ended. And no matter how many messages were sent to him to tell him that the war ended, he refused to believe it. He continued to fight in that jungle by himself. He continued to kill people. He continued to fight for the Japanese Imperial Army and to seek to die honorably. And no matter how many messages he was sent, they sent people to search for him, he would hide from them. They dropped leaflets with messages from family. He thought it's a trick from the Americans. They sent Imperial soldiers. They couldn't find him. They sent message after message. They sent person after person to try and find him and to get him and his troop of soldiers out. And they couldn't get them out. And most of them eventually died. And he was left in there alone. Until a young, naive, gung-ho fellow thought, hmm, I spent my life searching for things. Let me go search for him. And he went to search for him. And his big plan, his big plan was he would walk through the jungle and he would shout Lieutenant Hiro Onoda's name until he came out. That was his big plan. The guy who went to find Lieutenant Onoda was Norio Suzuki. He was a Japanese man who traveled around the world looking for curiosities. So things like, in his words and in that order, Lieutenant Onoda, a panda and the abominable snowman. You see, he was just a naive adventurer. So he shouts Lieutenant Onoda's name for four days and he finds him. After decades, he finds the man and he brings him home. Lieutenant Onoda comes home to find that the Japan he's been defending has moved on, has changed, women now wear trousers, the country has evolved into this new version. The country that he has been fighting for is long gone. The people that he is fighting for have long since moved on from him. The world and the war that he was fighting has ended and has moved on. And he has given his entire life in this deep forest chasing an instruction that had long since expired in value, giving his life to it and refusing to acknowledge message after message telling him that the time for it has passed. That story shook me to my core. Pay attention. Pay attention to the wars you're fighting in. Pay attention to the battles you're engaged in. Pay attention to the ideologies you're subscribed to. Pay attention to the people that you're pushing against or for and ask yourself, do you still need to be there? Is that war still worth fighting? Is that war even still going on? Do the people you're fighting for care? Do you care? And then figure out if you still want to be there. Reassess, reconsider repeatedly. Otherwise you will give your life to a war that is long done and no one will appreciate the effort that you have given and the life that you have given to a cause that matters to no one but you. Then there is Untamed, my true love in books, written by Glennon Doyle. Untamed is a womanifesto of thoughts, a call to freedom, a call to unlearning and it speaks really to people like me, perfectionists, people who are recovering perfectionists, people who grew up overachievers, only understanding their values as coming from the things that they achieve. And it teaches you to let go and to figure out how to get value from within, how to get value from real things, from things that give you real joy. And it's a series of chapters that are each standalone as well. And one of my favorite ones is the Touch Tree. And what she speaks of in the Touch Tree is a hiking concept. Or if you're going into the forest, you will encounter sometimes, you must find rather, a tree that is very unique, very deeply rooted, one that's not likely to disappear or be swept away or anything like that. A very unique, easily identifiable tree that becomes your Touch Tree. So that's where you explore from. This is how you make sure you do not get lost. You start from your Touch Tree you branch out from there, you come back, you reconnect with your Touch Tree and then you branch out in a different direction while you explore. It's how you make sure that you can always find your way back. That you can always find your way back from your journeys. And the trick in the book is understanding. You might hear my kids screaming in the background, sorry. The trick or the... Oh, let me go find out what's going on. Apparently, they want to come in here with me and record. But we've negotiated a truce. And so I was telling you about the Touch Tree from Glennon Doyle's Untamed. A Touch Tree, she says, is a recognizable, strong, large tree that becomes a home base to stop you from getting lost. You can adventure out into the woods as long as you return to your Touch Tree again and again. And that perpetual returning is what keeps you from getting too far gone. So she then goes on to say something that I found so deeply powerful. She says, I spent much of my life lost in the woods of pain, relationships, religion, career, service, success, failure. Looking back on those times, I can trace my lostness back to a decision to make something outside myself my Touch Tree. An identity, a set of beliefs, an institution, aspirational ideals, a job, another person, a list of rules, approval, an old version of myself. Now when I feel lost, I remember that I am not the woods. I am my own tree. So I return to myself and I re-inhabit myself. As I do, I feel my chin rise and my body straighten. I reach deep deeply into the rich soil beneath me made up of every girl and woman I have ever been, every face I've loved, every love I've lost, every place I've been, every person I've had, every book I've read, song I've sung, everything, everything, crumbling and mixing, decomposing underneath, nothing wasted, my entire past there, holding me up and feeding me now, all of this too low for anyone else to see, just there for me to draw from, then up and up, all the way to my branches, my imagination too high for anyone else to see, only part of me entirely visible to the world, pulpy and soft inside, just tough enough on the outside to protect and hold me, exposed and safe. I am as ancient as the earth I'm planted in and as new as my tiniest bloom. I am my own touch tree, strong, singular, alive, still growing. I have everything I need beneath me, above me, inside me. I am never going to lose me. Oh my goodness, makes me emotional 100% of the times. And every time I feel embattled or lost or at sea, I come back to this book and I read the touch tree story and I remember, I remember that I am home, no matter where I am, no matter what sea life brings, because life is not fair. Nobody promised that life would be fair. Not God, not hustle culture. No one promised that life would be fair. What you have been promised is that you have everything you need from within you and that because of that you will find everything that you need that is outside of you. The last one for today is a book is The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. The Psychology of Money is one of my, it very quickly became my favorite financial financial advice book because it didn't speak to what you should do to get rich, as in how to's. It spoke to how your mind works and why it is you make the financial decisions that you make. What is it that has affected you as you've grown up that has led to your understanding of money and your behavior towards money? What is it, so for example, if you're a big fan of Mercedes, what is it about a Mercedes Benz that made it synonymous with success in your mind and why do you pursue it? Understanding that will help you understand your money decisions and perhaps steer your money decisions in the best possible way. He told many stories and he gives a lot of advice for today's purpose. I'm going to speak to only two. One of the things he says is when people say, and I said this in the newsletter yesterday, a lot of people will say that they want to be a millionaire but what they mean is they want to spend a million rand or a million dollars. Those are two very different things. Those are two very different goals. Wrap the right words around what it is you're trying to achieve. Are you trying to build wealth or are you trying to build wealth? Then the second one was the story that we all know by now of Ronald Reed. Ronald Reed was a janitor who when he died had eight million in investments and he left them to his stepchildren. He left that money to his stepchildren and to a couple of charities. The point or the shock was he had never had a windfall inheritance or anything like that. He simply lived and he saved every penny and he put it in the stock market and the returns from the compound interest over time were what manifested as eight million dollars. Really. Two things to take away from that story is you don't need any special skills to become super wealthy but also that you get one life and you need to figure out what success looks like to you. Perhaps to Ronald Reed success looked like tying his coat and giving all this money somewhere else. But I found for me success looks like the freedom to buy books when I want to buy them. It looks like a basic car that does what I need it to do and that's reliable. It looks like a home that I feel safe in that has the odd little indulgent amenities but nothing too much. It looks like freedom of choice. It looks like options that come from having a buffer and that's what success looks like to me. It looks like leaving my children with enough money to find their own dreams and to live their best life even if I'm not here. That is what success looks like to me but what is very very important is for you to figure out what success looks like to you so that you know where your enough is otherwise you will always be blown in the winds of what society suggests. What society suggests success is for you. What society suggests that enough is for you if at all. And if you really pay attention to what's going on in the world right now there is no enough. There is always seeking more and more and more and more. There is a lot of power in knowing at what point enough is for you. What success looks like for you and where those two things meet and then working to achieve that for yourself. These are some of my favorite lessons from books in the last year or two and I have no choice but to do a sequel to this hopefully without my son screaming in the background because he wants to join me in the room which I successfully negotiated by the way. He's now waiting for me to come outside so I'm going to do just that. Thank you. Be safe. Be wise. And rest. May you be blessed abundantly. you