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Now, your host, Sam Wakefield.

All right, well, let's hop into it.

This is a session number three with my friend, Jimmy Jays.

Thank you for all of you who've come along on this ride.

I hope that you are getting as much value out of it as I know I am.

In fact, specifically today, I wore my Failure is not an option cap that I got from the NASA Space center when I took my family there this past summer for a, for a fun family day and took my partner Lauren and my kiddos.

And it was a really, really awesome experience and some awesome memories were made.

So I wanted to commemorate that moment and wear that.

And the other side of the reason I wanted to wear this hat for all of you listening is if you've been following along on this journey and you realize that you, you've got there, it's this session so far you've been made aware of opportunities to grow within your family leadership.

And I just want to encourage you that failure is not an option in those moments.

And I've, I'm poster child for having that place of, this is hard.

I don't want to do this.

And so then I would dive back into work things and not work on myself and not work on the family moments.

And I'm here to tell you that that's the glass ball.

If you remember back from episode one, don't drop the glass ball.

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, go back and listen to episode one, start over.

And so failure is not an option because once that sucker shatters, is insanely difficult to put back together.

And it does not go back together the exact same way that it was before it broke because you're missing some pieces now.

You will not find them all.

And it doesn't look the same and never will again.

So failure is not an option.

So I wanted to start this episode with that.

And so today we are going to, we've covered the, from what I understand, we've covered the roots side of things.

Now we're going to be talking about wings and capabilities.

So thanks for joining us for episode number three, Mr. Jimmy James.

My pleasure, man.

Super happy to be back with you and talking about some important stuff.

It is important.

It's, it's those things that, you know, it's the most important.

But, you know, as, as vision focused people, as providers, as all of the things, you know, we're taught by our society.

And I just want to take a quick little side detour here and get your opinion about a couple things.

And I'm sure I have an idea of what it is.

But, you know, society just teaches us and trains us that these things are less important than, you know, the work in the business and all of that.

And we're so conditioned to put our family's priorities second.

And, and it's, it's turning into such a gross atmosphere that the more that I dive into really learning about, you know, business and business growth and all, really meeting so many more people at the highest level, you know, it's, it doesn't matter what someone's income is or the size of their business.

Everyone struggles with these same issues.

And so it could be somebody with, you know, it, it really doesn't matter, the state.

And we're just so conditioned and trained to prioritize that first.

And man, I, I'd love to, it love to have you like weigh in on this because it's been hitting me really heavy since we started the series.

Yeah, well, there's a few things to say on that topic.

I think that again, to go back to the, the first session on, on juggling the balls and the glass ball, there is no balance.

And so there is going to be times where you are out of balance for a bit.

And I think the mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make is that they don't bring their family along that ride.

They don't, they don't explain what's going on.

Right.

So if you're in a season of grinding and you're going to, let's say, be traveling out of town, it's very different to be able to say, I'm going to work versus if your children know what it is that you do, and you're like, hey, we're going to represent the Wakefield family in Boston and here's the values we're going to be teaching people right that's very different.

And, and so then your kids have a sense of, of what's actually going on.

That's one thing.

I would also say that when I was growing up, my dad wasn't around.

And I remember going to an event one time and the speaker that was there was talking about what he was doing to be a good dad while he was at an event.

And it hit a mental wall for me because in my brain, in my head, being a good dad meant being around, period.

And it didn't really cross my mind.

As somebody who didn't have his dad around growing up, there's people that their dad was around being while they were growing up and they probably wish that their father wasn't around, right?

Some trauma or abuse or whatever.

And so it's possible to be home and be a bad dad and it's possible to be away and be a good dad.

And that, like, was a little mind blowing moment to me.

And as I was away at this trip, it was really, really difficult for me to be able to communicate with my kids because there was a.

We're in a different time zone.

The events were really long.

I had very little energy.

When I did, you know, reach out to them, they would be in the middle of something.

And so I'd be trying to like, you know, call or FaceTime when they're in the middle of something.

And so what I did was I just sent a, I sent a video recording and I just said hello every morning.

And one of them was, there's a book that I read my son, he was really young.

And so I just made a video of me kind of reading the book off memory and saying to my wife, here, can you read this to him at bedtime or play this to him at bedtime?

And so one of the things that I would say is be really, really careful around what's called false dichotomies.

And so false dichotomy is when there's two options presented.

And it doesn't have to be two options, right?

So just now, as you're talking about, like, you know, is family first, is business first.

You can be great at both, right?

And there definitely is a culture of hustle culture that glorifies, you know, working, working, working.

I'll talk more about that in a second.

But just be careful with the false dichotomy.

It is possible to be great at both.

And another false dichotomy sometimes when I'm coaching people is they'll talk about family and business and like, oh, they're Just really at odds.

I just don't have enough time.

How do I do this?

How do that?

And the reality is it's not two things.

It's three things.

It's family and business, and for them, it's football.

And the thing that goes into the calendar first is actually football, not family or business.

And they're making it about family and business and completely ignoring the fact that what actually comes first in their life is football.

So be careful of false dichotomies.

And the last thing that I would say, I think this is I met somebody named Scott Donnell, and his unfair advantage is that he got to work with 7 million families in a company called Apex, helping them, Helping kids do fundraising for school, teaching them about, you know, leadership.

And so instead of selling chocolates and stuff like that, they did fun runs and leadership training.

And so we got to meet 7 million families or help 7 million families.

And he's also had the opportunity to coach with and mentor with, like, some of the top hundred families.

And not all of them are billionaires.

A lot of them are.

But it's.

It's like, that's not the definition.

The definition is that your kids and grandkids blow by you in every way.

And having an opportunity to be able to, like, hear from and learn from some of these same people that I've been introduced to through Scott.

There's a lot of people that I meet, and my unfair advantage that I'm starting to get now as well is I'm meeting people that have already accomplished all the things that I want to accomplish, and they're a little older, they're a little further down the line, and being able to find out, like, what matters to you now, what's important to you now, what do you wish you would have known?

And it's never a money skill.

It's never a wish I would have sold for a bigger multiple.

It's not.

It.

It's all stuff related to family.

It's all stuff related to legacy.

And so when you can see that, right, Because I'm used to chasing down people that I would see them, and they're doing well in business, and I take some of their advice and, you know, go harder, you know, work longer hours.

You're not sacrificing enough.

And, you know, then I go to an event and it's.

It's filled with these people that are the opposite, where they've.

They've achieved a bunch, and there's, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in the room, and there's not A Rolex to be seen in the room because they just don't care.

And it's a really, really interesting perspective to be able to see that and then look back to today and say, man, I don't need to go through that whole process that they went through to be able to get some perspective.

I can get it through that perspective right now by just.

By just seeing them.

And the world definitely perpetuates this hustle culture.

And there is some merit to the fact that if you want stuff that other people don't have, you're not to be willing to do stuff other people won't do.

Absolutely.

But there's also something that says the.

The level of thinking that got you to where you are is not the same level of thinking that's going to get you to where you want to go.

And almost always it is not about working harder.

It is almost always about getting more leverage, getting more clear about what you want and don't want.

There's a book called Essentialism, which is the discipline pursuit of less but better.

And there is another book called Rigging.

Yeah, it's another one called Rigging the game that talks about, instead of bigger or better, it talks about closer.

What is it?

What's the life that I want?

And is this thing going to get me closer to or further away from that?

So I think that's probably the best context I can give on just that idea that the world is pushing on us.

I love it.

Thank you so much for that.

And it's the clarity you mentioned clarity.

And it just reminds me, actually a quote I heard from you years ago is, you know, problem half def, or problem well defined as half solved.

And it's very, very much true in, in this case too, with our family.

So with that being said, I feel like we've kind of half defined this process so far.

So let's.

Let's continue on with defining the.

The other side.

Let's get into the wings and.

And take us from there.

Awesome.

Yeah.

So if you missed the other episodes, we talked about this idea of, of raising children with roots and wings.

We want.

Have courage and to have capability and to do the right thing and to be able to go out there and make a big change in the world.

And at the same time, we want kids that have.

Have roots, that want to be around us.

They don't need us anymore as parents, but they deeply want to be around us, not just as children, but as adults.

And that's really what we're striving for, is to have kids with roots and wings.

And so we're going to talk today about wings on the wing side of things.

It really comes down to courage and to capability.

We're going to talk about capability today.

And really to set up this conversation on capability, it really requires a reframe around what capability means.

And I love what you just said about a problem while the find is half solved, because there's some new problems that just didn't exist before that are impacting our children in a very, very real way.

And whether you have, you know, kids now that are, that are going through this, whether you've got younger kids that are going to be going through this, or whether you are somebody who plans to have children in the future, your kids are going to go through things that we didn't go through as kids, and you as a parent are going to go through things that your parents didn't go through.

And so one example of that is, you know, when my was, was parenting, she's 70 now, danger looked like a person in a van in a dark alley.

And now it's, it's literally your child talking to somebody on a cell phone during third period of school.

And that's the predator, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

It's not the van down by the river anymore.

So there's very, very different things.

And, and so there's these five converging forces that are happening right now.

And I won't go too long in any of these, but just to kind of give an.

The first one is, is, is parents.

There's this force right now that is yanking parents in all kinds of directions.

So the cost of everything is going up.

We need to work longer than ever before.

It used to be that you had a job and that that was it.

You worked from, from 9 to 5.

Now, even if you don't own a business, most employees have, you know, access to their email, access to their phone, and it's just expected that they're working these longer hours.

It used to be that one parent stayed home and one went to work.

And so now a lot of households are, are two income families.

And if they're not, then there's one person, you know, essentially working twice as many hours as they used to and.

Somebody work to be able to accomplish it.

Yeah, right.

Which means that they're away from home more and the person that is home is doing twice the work at home that they used to do because they have less help around the home.

So parents are just stretched more than they have ever been in the past, which makes it difficult for parents to be able to, you know, tackle some of these issues or, or to be around because we're just pulled in so many different directions.

And you know, social media and there's all kinds of things that are, that are happening to parents.

That's the, the first force, the next force that that is, is new is this idea of screens in social media and its impact on kids.

And I mean, I can't even imagine if when I was going to school, everybody had a cell phone and could take a picture of everything and everything went on to social media.

Like that'd be terrifying.

Well, thank God that didn't exist when was in school and especially into College.

Holy cow.

100%.

So, so that part is a little bit new.

It's not super new.

But the part that is very, very new is how screens are impacting kids.

And the reason that it's new is because of the level of access that developers and advertisers have to our kids.

So it used to be that if you were playing a video game, you know, you'd, you'd buy the video game and that was it, you'd play it and then you go buy a new one.

And now a lot of games are free and the way that they make money is by selling you skins and updates and upgrades and new stuff.

So it's a, it's a never ending cycle of them selling.

And, and so in the past if you were a app developer or a video game developer, the way that you got paid was making a game that people liked.

Now the way that you get paid is by finding ways to get kids more and more addicted, to spend more and more time on so that you make more and more money through advertising and more and more money through add ons.

Right?

Absolutely.

And that might be a small difference, but all of a sudden now we've got, we've got kids that they're on an iPad.

And you gotta think about this like if every iPad or if every app has a team of 50 people that are working on that app, 50 developers and their, their job to get your child to stay on for five minutes longer, five minutes longer, five minutes longer.

All the same people that used to work in Vegas to get you to sit at the machine and say five minutes longer, five, they now work in the app space.

So there's, if there's 100 apps, you know, on your iPad, that means there's 5, 000 people whose full time job it is to make sure your child spends five more minutes on a device.

Every single one of the apps on.

The device, binging, dinging, everything they can do.

And then as parents, we're like, man, why is my kid being acting this way?

Why are they completely ignoring me?

Why are they not ants?

It's because it's an entire industry and there's people that understand psychological cues and they're tapping into them, right?

Or my son plays a video game and he.

He gets off.

I'm like, why are you being crazy?

Well, I'll tell you why.

Because he's playing a game where it's simulating him running through the forest, being chased by dinosaurs, and he's like, literally got this fight orf flight response kicking in and all of the hormones and all of.

All that's being pumped into his body, but he's not actually physically moving, right?

Right now.

He has to do something with it at this point.

Got to do something with it.

So we've got this impact of screens.

We've got this social media pressure comparisons, right?

You just see everybody's highlight reels.

You don't see any of the behind the scenes.

You see people, you know, posting pictures of Lamborghinis.

So kids have this crazy idea of what the world is supposed to be like because all they're seeing is everyone's highlight reels, and they're not seeing any of the behind the scenes.

Then you add to that this instant gratification problem that is.

That is new.

And it sounds funny to call it a problem, but everything is more and more and more instantaneous.

I remember when you and I are near the same age and when we were growing up, the.

I remember I'm calling it the microwave generation because all of a sudden microwaves happened and we can get food instantly.

And so that started that trend.

But what a major difference now versus even then, 100.

There's the kid.

There's kids now that don't even want to get their license.

They just want to get a phone because they can Uber and they can get doordashed into their house.

And so everything is instant gratification, right?

So we've got this instant gratification culture, and we stopped and we started giving people participation trophies for everything.

So there's no failure.

And you're used to being able to get something immediately with no struggle, right?

And that is what society is creating.

Well, it's funny, we've been having this conversation a lot lately about, in fact, my partner.

We've been talking about how weak and just our kids are.

That's why we took them camping to One of the, what I mentioned, just kind of offhanded to all of the kids.

It's like one of our goals this weekend is maybe all of you develop a little bit thicker skin and do some hard things and toughen up a little bit.

Fall and scrape your knees.

And we don't have an instant solution to the pain going away.

You'll get past it.

It's fine.

You're not, you're not destroyed.

You're just at a moment 100 man.

There's a whole conversation.

Make sure we don't get off track because this is, this is a whole conversation about courage and being anti fragile.

And we'll talk about that on, we'll do a whole episode on it.

Sneak peek everybody.

But exactly what you're talking about is, is so true.

And we have this generation that is coming up fragile, not from their own fault, but because of the environment.

And then what we do as parents, we don't want to see our kids go through hard stuff.

And so we try to solve it.

And if you think about this like a video game where maybe you have a character and you're, you know, grinding and every time you do something, you, you know, get some XP and you level up.

What's happening is that parents are jumping in when kids are younger and younger and younger and we're solving all the problems for them and we take all the XP so they don't get any of it.

They don't get to level up.

And we think that we're helping them.

And then they turn 21, 25, 30, and now they start facing real problems and they don't have any of the XP that they should have got when they were younger because we stole it all from them.

That hits hard.

So we'll do a whole other call about that.

But, but these forces, these five forces, right?

Number one, parents working more, not around, we're stretched more than, than ever before.

Then we've got screens and social and, and kids that are just on devices.

They've got social media in front of them all the time.

They've got this number three, this instant gratification that, you know, that's, that's happening, that's going on.

Number four is call whatever you want.

I call it like being woke.

But it's like there's this idea that we're, we're pulling parents away like that, that it's outsourcing parenting, that like the state should be the one that teaches your kids stuff and school should be the one that teaches them stuff.

And, and it's like removing family from the equation.

Right, Right.

And so now we've got parents that are already working harder, more out of the picture.

And now we've got like society pouring onto that.

Like it's not, it's not the parents job.

Right.

And if you, if your parent says something that, that offends you or makes you mad, or if you're, or if your parents do something to make you go through hard stuff, that there's some other safe place and safe space because someone's going to step in and stop it from happening.

And so again, now it's like even if you, even if you're trying to, to let your kids go through some hard things and some challenges, the world is just making it really easy right now for them to be able to avoid any of that.

And again, just creating fragile kids, that's force number four.

And force number five is crazy.

So force number five is it's really information and the rate that it doubles.

And I'm going to talk about it through the lens of AI, but this is, this is, this is crazy.

So in the early 20th century, the amount of time it took for information to double was a hundred years.

So every hundred years information would double.

Late 20th century, it dropped to 25 years.

So all of a sudden information doubles every 25 years.

And information doubling means the information that we know as human species.

It also comes down a lot to how we're able to store information.

So if you can only store, if you have to take any information you know, and write it on a cave wall, there's only so much information you can store.

As soon as there's a printing press and books and libraries, you can store a lot more information.

Right.

Internet hits bam.

Now all of a sudden it is 13 months is how long it takes for information to double.

So what are the implications of that?

Well, back in, you know, 2000, when information was doubling every, every 13 months, what that looks like is if you go and you go to university and you go through a six year program and information is doubling every 13 months, by year three of your six years, some of the stuff you learned in year one is already obsolete.

Right?

Right.

So we have this problem.

One is information overload.

Right.

One is information becoming obsolete.

And on top of that, some of these jobs that somebody's going to get in six years, if information is doubling every 13 months, that job might not even be available anymore.

Right.

So now we've got, and we're just now starting to see the ramifications of it.

So there's somebody, you know in 2010 and they were starting to go to school and they did a 60 year degree and they come out of that, you know, $150,000 in debt and they can't get a job.

And the solution is that they say, I need more schooling.

Right.

So they take more student loans because they can't get a job.

And if they're in school, they at least get student loans and they rack up some more debt.

To learn jobs that are about to information that's about to go obsolete again.

So this is really, really, really important when it comes to this idea of capability because the skills that you need to learn and isn't so much about learning one skill or one trade.

Back when information, you know, doubled every hundred years or every 25 years, it was normal that you got a job and you worked it for 40, 50 years and then you got taken care of.

That was it.

That world doesn't exist anymore.

Yeah, right.

And now if you think about these converging forces now you think about, you have a child that's used to instant gratification.

They're using everybody's, you know, highlight reels and not the behind the scenes work.

Right.

They're, you know, used to screens and instant gratifications and all, all of this.

And they've been given a participation trophy whether they, you know, how based on how hard you work, not based on the results that you create.

And now you take that person and you put them into a marketplace where the market doesn't care about time and effort, it just cares about results.

Yeah.

And that's a big problem.

Yeah.

So that was a while ago with AI now, how often, how long do you think it takes for information to double?

Instead of 13 months now it is.

What I honestly, I would guess probably within hours.

Knowing a lot of what I do about AI at this point, 12 hours.

Every 12 hours, information doubles.

Not surprised.

So how on earth can you, can you go to a school for six years when information is doubling every 12 hours and expect that at the end, the way that we've learned in the past, it we can't keep learning that way.

Right, right.

The skills that you need now is you need the skill set of how do I learn, how do I be adaptable?

Right.

When the, when the job that I go to get is, doesn't even exist anymore, then what?

Right?

People think AI is going to take jobs and they think it's going to take jobs.

Like it's going to be, it's going to be like truck drivers.

Yeah, that's coming.

But you know what else it's taking?

Like, surgeries will be done by machines, teachers.

Like, you'll have your own AI.

There's, there's, and there's so much good.

I don't want to say this is all doom and gloom.

There's so much good that's, that's coming from it.

What the warning is, though, is that if you keep learning the way of the past and we keep raising kids the way that we did in the, in the past, the school system is literally still raising kids up to teach them how to live in the 80s.

That's like where the school system, that's the speed that it is, is going at.

It hasn't even adapted to the like, information doubles every 13 months.

Right.

It hadn't even hit dot com yet.

Hasn't even a dot com yet because it's just, it's so big and so bureaucratic and takes so long.

And that's why a lot of parents are doing homeschooling now, because they got to find ways to be able to teach this, this to kids.

So that's kind of where we are at in the world.

And if, if, you know, you fast forward 20 years from now and you think about what's life going to be like for my kids if they, you know, come up fragile and they're used to getting everything, you know, and they come up entitled and they come up expecting that, you know, the government's going to take care of them or a job's going to take care of them.

It, it's not that everyone's going to become entrepreneurs.

It's that entrepreneurship is going to change and that jobs are going to change to where it's a lot more gig economy and not like everybody drives for Uber, but more like you can be able to just get paid very well for being able to do one specific skill set.

And so that's what we need to be able to, to prepare kids for.

So we'll talk about that in, in a second.

But anything you want to add to that?

No, it's, it's so apparent the way that we're discussing it, you know, and bringing AI into the conversation.

I've always been that advocate for, you know, when things change in our society, not to fight against it or push it off, because if you, if you don't embrace change, you better get used to extinction because it's truly what happens.

And do I feel I have friends that, you know, immediately the second AI hit their, their jobs were Slashed because now one machine can do the job of 30 people.

But at the same time it depends on their mindset.

And we have to embrace this idea that see being aware of it and then looking ahead and that adaption and change be like, okay, how can I, right?

One of the things I train all the time, as you know, and which there's a good chance I probably learned it from you as well, is changing the mindset from every single time something comes up that we can't.

I can't.

Is changing the question to how can I or how can we?

And that is I think, a really important overlay in this conversation to as we see these changes happening faster and faster and faster and entire industries, the jobs no longer exist that were the highest paying ones six months ago and now they're completely gone.

We've got to remember, how can I and, and everybody remember, you're not a tree.

You can move, you can change, you can learn new skills.

And so this is really important to kind of keep us grounded in that reality in this conversation.

100.

So what you're talking about right there, that is what kids need to learn.

More important than any other skill that they can learn is skills like what you just said, how can I?

And I didn't learn that in the school system, right?

It was a Robert Kiyosaki book and he said, if you say I can't, your mind turns off and it stops working on it.

As soon as you say how can I, your subconscious mind goes to work on it and starts answering the question for you.

And the, the problem is that it used to be okay to only have that type of thinking if you were an entrepreneur and you were going to face a lot of change and you wanted opportunity more than you wanted security.

Now what's changed is that the security that used to be there with jobs isn't there anymore.

And so we need to be able to teach not just entrepreneurs.

We need to be able to teach all kids this idea of value creation.

We need to be able to teach all kids this idea of this how can I attitude.

And to be able to ask questions like that because when they don't have those skills and they're being trained for one thing, and then they get pushed into a world with so much uncertainty, so much change, what it's leading to is mental health crisis.

That's what's happening right now in kids right now.

It used to be that the thing that was the biggest threat to your child was them getting in a car wreck.

And that's why we spent so much time with kids.

It was such a big thing to get your license.

It is now suicide.

Gee is talking about hit home man.

That's one of the.

I can.

I'm post not necessarily poster child for that, but I can.

That hits home so much for and this is re for everybody listening and be real transparent real fast.

April this year was a hell of a month for me because my 11 year old came to actually 10 at the time came to us and said I don't want to exist anymore.

And thank God that we are on the other side of that and doing better than ever.

But you know, live through it and it doesn't matter who you are.

It, it can come around if we.

Don'T pay attention one hundred and and, and everything else stops right just in an instant.

And, and this, this isn't a, an unusual story.

It's.

It's 18% now of children in the United States between 2 and 8 have a mental health crisis or behavioral disorder.

So that's where almost, almost one in five.

It's like 17.4% I think.

So this is, this is what is.

This is what's happening.

Right?

And we're out there as, as entrepreneurs reading about hustle culture in the next car and the next watch and the next and, and trying to compete.

And meanwhile our kids are going through silent battles and they're dealing with stuff that we've.

We can't even comprehend it dude.

Because it's a different world than what we, than what we grew up in.

And so such an important conversation around.

We need to make sure that we're teaching our kids a couple of different things.

And, and it's, it's not.

We're going to talk today about capability.

Capability is not the solution to all five of the things that we just talked about.

Roots and wings together is, you know, it's, it's.

Instead of doing a whole bunch of things on screens, how, how do we get off of screens?

How do we have time together as a family with no screens and with real connection?

That's the solution.

It is this instant gratification culture of expecting that, you know, you just get everything given to you or you see other people, you know, posting pictures of Lambos and this, that half the time it's not even real.

It's something they rented but your kid doesn't know that.

They haven't gone through anything hard.

So let.

Giving them opportunities to go through challenges, to be able to build courage.

Are you being more of a caretaker to your child or More of a coach to your child.

A coach will let people go through hard things because it they, they know as a coach that that's what prepares them for the big games and the big moments that matter the most.

And when we're a caretaker instead of a coach to our children for an extended period of time, then they're not prepared.

Right.

They missed the hard things in practice and now the first time they get to do hard things is when it's in the game time when it matters a lot.

Right.

So.

So let's talk a little bit about, about capable.

Capable.

One of the those top hundred families that I learned from, they talked about the four freedoms and this came from, from Dan Sullivan is who this person's referencing.

The four freedoms are time, money, relationships and purpose.

So you got freedom of time, you got freedom of money, you've got freedom of relationships, meaning that you have the freedom to not have a relationship with people that you don't want to.

And that sounds silly, but I mean if you're reliant on a job, there's relationships that you have to have that you might not want to have, but you have to have them because you need them for your income and freedom of purpose.

So one of the things that, that this family wrote down is by age 21, all our kids will be in the top 1% of society.

And here's the part that I like in terms of knowing how to create value and build wealth, right?

See there's a lot of people that I talk to, especially first generation, second generation money.

Most, most wealth is gone by generation three.

Most, most of the time there's an entrepreneur that builds it.

The next generation, you know, spend some of it, keep some of it.

Third generation, it's all gone because they're disconnected from what it took to be able to build it.

And what I see in a lot of, of these wealthy families that are doing it for the, is their focus on how do I pass down the money, right?

And they'll be like, I'm gonna, here's a tip for everybody out there.

Go ahead and buy a four plex for your child when they turn one.

And then by the time that they're 18, they've got passive income for life.

Or hey, if you use this type of life insurance, you can make your kid a millionaire by it's all about make your kid a millionaire, right?

Which means passing the money.

One of my favorite quests, this is super quick.

It's the one from Jim Rohn that like I've referenced so many Times and it hits me so hard.

He always used to say, work to become a millionaire, not for the million dollars, but for the person that you have to become to earn that million dollars.

And, man, it just hits so, so much home right now.

So imagine robbing your kids of becoming the person that they would become.

Yeah.

Wow.

Because you want to win the game and you want to have a T shirt that says, my son's a millionaire, My daughter's a millionaire.

Right.

What first generation wealthy people do is that what people that have, have built generational wealth, where every generation blows by the previous one is they focus less on what they're giving to their kids and more on what they're leaving in their kids.

Right.

What are you teaching them?

Right?

To become where whatever it is that they, that they need.

And so it's building this capability up.

So I love that thing.

So what I love about this quote is by age 21, all of our kids will be in the top 1% of society.

Like, oh, here we go again.

And then he says of knowing how to create value and build wealth.

Man, what a goal that is.

Because that can't be taken.

If your children have that, it doesn't matter what happens to the money.

Yeah, that can't be taken from you.

I went through an exercise once in a, in a goal setting exercise, and he talked about, instead of setting goals to own a car or have a thing, he said, set the goal of, I want to experience what it's like to be the kind of person who owns a Ferrari.

If you buy a Ferrari, if you don't have a Ferrari and you're not successful, and then you buy a Ferrari and you are successful, and then you sell it or lose it or trade it or something, then you're back to not successful again.

If your view is, I want to experience what it's like to be somebody who owns a Ferrari, then you don't have one.

Then you have one and you do it, and then it doesn't matter what happens from there, you could lose it, you could trade it.

You could.

You've still got to be the type of person that knows what it's like to own a Ferrari.

So that's kind of the.

The idea is training, training this in and really kind of coming up with what.

How do we, how do we train our kids to be capable?

A number of ways.

One of them is how do we train kids to be capable as far as being able to know how to create and build wealth?

One of them is what we call the seven Money skills.

So knowing how to earn, knowing how to save, how to spend, how to share, how to invest, how to protect, and how to borrow.

Do your kids know the difference between borrowing in a way that just erodes wealth versus borrowing in a way that actually builds wealth?

There's such a thing as good debt versus bad debt.

Understanding earning, right, that.

That earning is a res.

Is based on results, not based on time and effort.

If your children know that and they understand that now you've set them up where they can start to go and find ways to solve problems.

If you're used to getting paid just based on how hard you work and how many hours you put in, then becoming more efficient means you get paid less.

Right?

Right.

It's right.

And you see it where people with a hardcore employee mindset are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down.

Don't do that job.

What are you trying to do?

Trying to get this job done in two days.

Like, let's make it last five days so we can all get some overtime over here.

That's the opposite of value creation.

And if you take that mentality into the new world that we're going into, you're going to be in a lot of trouble.

So learning how to create value, learning how to be capable, learning how to know some of these different money skills, understanding what is my unique way of adding value to the world.

Right.

That more and more and more what is possible now is for you to be able to do just the parts that you're good at, just the parts that are in your unique genius.

There's a quote that says, do what you do best and write a check for the rest.

I love that thing that you're, that you're great at, and then just get good at outsourcing all the rest of it.

And that wasn't possible 50 years ago.

Not at all.

So that is, that's, that's a little bit on, On.

On capability.

Love to talk a little bit about just this idea of, you know, kids understanding money.

We, we treat them like they don't, but they, they understand it from really early age.

So before we jump into that, anything you want to say or, or add.

You know, that I could add so much, I won't because I want to keep us, you know, keep us more on, on track on the timeline.

But this, this is just such a.

My mind, of course, because being an entrepreneur and thinking the way I do, I'm constantly relating my mind, relates it back to how does this affect a team, how does this affect business and all of that and it's.

Every bit of this is the same thing, every single piece of it.

It's like all of the, when we solve the problems for our employees or for our team, they, they will never be able to solve it again or in the future.

You know, then when you roll AI into it, so many things that are going on right now is, you know, for example, to be real granular within an industry in service technicians for H Vac or whatever.

Instead of a service manager sitting in the office answering calls all day for a team of five people, and that's their full time job, to just duplicate yourself into an AI model.

And now you can be a service manager for a team of however many, 10, 20, 100, a thousand, it doesn't matter.

And all of these things just absolutely keep like reinforcing both sides of the spectrum.

And the point of, when we do this for business, why don't we do this for our families?

You know, if it works in leadership over here, don't be two different people.

Don't be two different people in your professional life versus your family life.

Be the same person that carries the same leadership and skills and, and, and qualities into your family and lead them the same way that you would your team.

So that's really what's coming up for me right now in this conversation.

I love that man.

And one, one of the, one of the, the biggest differences or what you're talking about is the difference between I learning and T learning.

I learning is for anybody listening hasn't heard this phrase before.

I learning means that you are learning in a straight path, meaning that you're in H Vac and you're a technician and you talk to a bunch of other technicians about how to be better as a technician.

T learning is when you're taking information from multiple different places and you're talking to solar people about what are some of the things that they do to be able to get leads.

And you're applying that to what you do.

You're, you know, talking to somebody, a completely different industry and you're applying those same learnings.

T learning is also what you just described, which is taking the things that work in business and applying them to your family, taking things that apply to your family and applying them in business.

And it's crazy how we just, we miss it.

It's like things that you already know how to do.

I remember talking to somebody and doing some coaching with them and, and they were like, oh, I just, I'm just not disciplined.

Just, I just can't find the discipline to, to just do this every day and to go do business calls every single day.

And I was like, bro, do you want to go look in the mirror for a second?

Because you're freaking jacked.

Explain to me how you got that body without having any discipline, right?

It's not possible.

So you do have discipline.

You just haven't applied it to this area of your life yet.

And the thing that, that I see the most is people that are in business, what they do is they have SOPs, they have systems for their business, and that's how it happens repeatedly.

And then at home they have intentions and no systems.

And then when things fall off, they don't know.

They can't figure out why, right?

Imagine if we went into your business and we took all the SOPs and all of the systems and we ripped them all up and we just replaced them with intentions.

How long would it be before things were falling apart?

Well, I can tell you because I've lived that.

And it's about a 90 day cycle.

About a 90 day cycle.

So why do we think that we can make any meaningful impact in our family that's going to last more than 90 days unless we turn it into a system in an sop, right?

And just becomes this is how we do it in our family.

And just make it as simple as that, right?

This is how we do in our family.

How do you do the, the front end loaded thing?

And we talked about this on a previous call, but on we do something called a family, a family party.

And the last thing that we do in the family party, we go out, we do something fun together, we have a little bit of focused reflection time.

And then the last thing that we do is we spin a wheel that has a bunch of activities in it that we've already pre thought of and that decides what we're going to do at our next party.

And we put it into the calendar and it's systematic.

It doesn't require thinking, it doesn't require, what do you want to do?

What do you want to do?

I don't know.

What do you want to do?

Oh, shoot, that place is closed.

We can plan it in advance and it's one time work that once it's done.

Now you have an sop and now this happens because it's easier to do it than it is to not do it.

Right.

It's beautiful because that, that's such a great expression too.

It's like I've heard for so many years, if we actually did the things we already know to do then we would be so much further in life.

And it's as when you really step into not just entrepreneurship but sales or anything that's not just that.

At the old school 1980s way of doing business.

Clock in, clock out, cubicle when because we have so much freedom, these things are easy to do and they are easy not to do.

So I love how you're describing how to stack the deck to make them easier to do than not to do.

100 and fully agree.

It's more important to be reminded than to be taught.

We just apply all the stuff that we already knew.

Man, we'd be in such a, such a great spot.

So.

So let's talk a little bit about what to do to be able to like actionably teach this stuff to kids.

And I think a good starting point is even realizing what's possible.

So there's this, this story of this young man.

His name is David.

He's 22 years old and he's been coaching with, with Scott for 10 years now.

And so he's 22.

He reads a book every single week.

He's been promoted six times already to now becoming the CTO of a billion dollar company.

His income is 500,000 plus including bonuses.

He's launched a non profit to mentor like thousands of kids.

Bought a house.

He's got strong faith, strong family connection.

Found the girl of his dreams at 22.

Geez.

It's decades ahead of most people.

You can't compare that to the person who's like well we're gonna buy you a fourplex when you turn 18.

Jeez.

At 22 I was finishing my fourth year of junior college and still living at home playing guitar in the metal band and not having a clue what I wanted to do in life.

100 so, so one of the top questions I get is where were you 10 years ago?

Right.

Meaning that my kids are now 25 and they're not even close to where David is at or it's too late for me.

It's not too late.

The, the definition is of legacy is that your kids and grandkids blow by you.

So there's still time.

And I'm not sharing any of this about, you know, David to say that's where long ways away from where I was at 2022.

And this comes from, you know, a family that's been teaching concepts for generations.

But what we can do is we can say what are some of the sops that that family has?

What are some of the systems and rituals and traditions that that family has.

Because if I implemented those, it might not mean that my son makes 500,000 by the time he's 22, but it could make things a little better.

Right?

And so that's really been the process that.

That Scott Donald has gone through with a hundred of these families and just taken, like, the best bits from each one of them and turned them into SOPs for your family.

So I think the place that I would start.

Let's start with.

With young kids, and we'll kind of talk about older kids.

I remember seeing Robert Kiyosaki speak, and he had just written a book that was called why A Students Work for C Students.

Right.

All the kids that got Cs now own businesses, and they.

They employ people that got A's.

And the whole book just talks about the school system.

It talks about.

It's a very interesting read.

And I saw him speak live, and the thing that stood out to me the most when he was speaking was he said, kids naturally understand money.

We just treat them like they don't.

He said, nobody teaches your kids how to.

How to speak English.

They just observe you using words from the time they're born, and they pick it up.

Sure.

Same true of money.

They probably watched you use a credit card or cash before they got home from the hospital.

They get it.

They understand it.

And I was like, man, this is fascinating.

So my son at the time was about a year and a half old, and we were at a supermarket, like a Safe Way, and he picks up this toy from the shelf, and he's like, can I buy this?

And, you know, I didn't want to have the fight in the grocery store.

And I remembered what Kiyosaki had said, and I was like, well, he might not understand money yet, but I bet he'd understand trading.

And I said, for sure, you can have this.

And he lit up.

I said, but we're not going to buy it right now.

We're gonna go home, I'm gonna show you what toy you have to trade, and then we'll come back and get it.

And he's like, awesome.

Put it down.

Smiles.

No fight.

No anything.

And we leave the store.

And I was like, that was awesome.

We get home, and I'm like, all right, Henry, come here.

I'm gonna show you what toy you have to trade.

He's like, no, thanks, Dad.

I was like, what do you mean?

He's like, I don't want that toy anymore.

So in the span of, like, 30 minutes, he decided he didn't even want the toy.

That would have been a 30 minute fight in the middle of Safeway.

Besides, he didn't even want it.

Wow.

Interesting.

So I'm like, great.

So this becomes my new, my new favorite trick, right?

Every time we're out somewhere is like, hey, can I get this?

I'm like, like, yes, you can for sure.

You can definitely get that.

But we're not going to buy it right now.

We're going to get home.

And when I get home, I'm going to show you what toy you have to trade to get it every time we get home.

Doesn't care.

So it became my new favorite way of, of not spending money.

And then one day we get home and I start cooking dinner and he's like, dad, you're supposed to show me what toy I have to trade.

I was like, ah, something you actually want.

So I show him the toy that, that he has to trade.

And he's like, great, let's do it.

And it was this ride along kind of like smaller than a power wheels, but, but type of thing.

And so I said, you have to trade this.

And he's like, deal, let's trade it.

And then my wife was taking a picture of it putting on Marketplace and my son was like, what are you doing?

And she's like, oh, we're just taking a picture of this.

Somebody's gonna buy it, we're gonna take the money and then we're gonna use the money to buy your toy.

And he's like, can I help?

And we're like, sure.

So I have this picture of him and he's like literally waxing this thing down with a baby wipe.

And you know, somebody comes over, they buy it, they give us the money, we jump immediately in the car and run to get his Buzz Lightyear gun, which is the thing that he wanted.

And he was so freaking happy because he was able to choose.

And so we, we go to the store and you know, I let him get, put the money out and count the change out and, and again he's like, he's only a year and a half old and he's putting all this, all this money down and tells the lady with pride that, you know, he, he got that money and he gets the toy and we start to leave and we walk past in the mall, there's a place that has these flavored popcorn and says, rainbow popcorn.

He's like, dad, can I have that?

And I was like, not today.

And we keep walking and then he just stops and he reaches into his pocket and he pulls Out a mitt of cash.

And he goes, I have money.

And I'm like, all right.

They understand value versus just cost, right?

100.

So I'm like, well, you can buy it.

You still can't eat it because I'm your parent.

So you.

I get to tell you when you get to eat it, but you have money, man, so it's up to you.

Buy whenever you want.

And so he buys.

He buys it and tell him he can't eat it till later in the day.

We get into the car, he's got this Buzz Lightyear gun in one hand, this tub of rainbow popcorn in the other hand, and he's looking so cute.

I'm like, you want to eat some popcorn right now?

And he just lights up and starts eating his popcorn.

And he's just the happiest dude on the planet.

And the crazy part about it is that when you talked about that I can't versus how can I?

I learned that in a book when I was 23.

My son has a hard time saving money.

Not because he's a bad saver, but because he's so great at creating value.

He doesn't see the point.

He's like, if I need something, I can figure out how to go do something.

He was, he was.

When he was like 8 years old, he did a.

A lemonade stand.

And it was like, by donation, he made $160 in like four hours.

Yes.

And when he went to go make the lemonade stand, he was like, I was like, well, you have to pay for the.

You have to pay for the, for the lemonade.

And he's like, no, I don't.

I'm like, yeah, dude, that's how business works.

And he's like, dad, I have friends that have lemonade stands.

I know it works.

Dads pay for the lemonade.

I'm like, not here, they don't.

Right?

And he decided that he wanted to, you know, do some fresh squeezed lemonade because he'd had that before.

And he said, I think people would like it more that way.

And he sat out there for like an hour and a half with nothing, dude, nothing.

Nobody stopped.

Everybody smiled and waved.

And I think that a couple hours later, everybody was like coming home from wherever they left from and they remembered he was there.

Because all of a sudden, like, just past the line where I think I would have quit if I was a kid, he pushed through it.

And then all of a sudden, car after car after car after car, and they're just like 10 bucks.

And he's like it's by donation how much change you want?

And they're like none.

And he just stacked all this, this money up.

And so it's not about the money.

It's about this idea of being able to create value.

And it's about understanding that you don't need a job or somebody else to give you the money.

If you can create value, you can do it.

And I remember when he was, he was a bit younger, he was probably, probably three, almost four.

And he found this like actual power reels that he wanted.

It was like 600 and I saw one on Marketplace and it was like 175 bucks or something like that.

And so I bought it right away.

He didn't have the money for it.

And I told him, you can drive it home from the place that we got it from, which is down the block, but you can't ride it again until you pay me back.

And the way that he paid me back was we made a little chart and we said $175 equals 35 $5 bills.

Didn't teach him anything about how to make money.

All he knew was that the problem was I need a way to get 35, five dollar bills.

A bunch of five dollar bills.

Here we go.

And his little brain went to work on it.

And I remember he would, I remember one time he had $40 from taking bottles in and he could not wait to take his two twenty dollar bills and to trade them in for eight five dollar bills.

Because that got him closer to his goal in his mind.

Love it, love it.

And he's just checking off the boxes of 35 $5 bills.

And we had people in our family were just like, you can't make a four year old pay $175 for something.

Like it's going to take him two years before he saves it.

I was like, no, he'll save it by the summer.

Three weeks.

Everywhere he went he was like, what could I do for five bucks?

What could I do for five bucks?

What could I do for five bucks?

And he has this value creation mindset of looking for and finding opportunities as a four year old.

And now he's 14 and we're having conversations about, hey, look at this other kid that's 15.

And instead of him doing art, what he did is he did art and now he puts it on T shirts and he sells the T shirt over and over and over and over and over again.

How do you do that type of value creation?

How do you think in these terms?

Right?

Leverage.

So all These things that I learned, like 20, 30, some people learn it at 40, 50, and it's just about him going through the same steps and learning it sooner.

But if I jump in and say, oh, let me pay for it, oh, let me do it.

Oh, right now I'm robbing him of the capability that he would learn.

So a lot of this is understanding capability, saying what can I do to be able to help my kids learn in some of these different areas?

And if you're not sure how to do it, I wasn't trained this, this stuff growing up, so I couldn't pass it down.

Right.

Once you know it, once you have a generation that knows it and teaches it and teaches your kids how to teach it.

Now you have a generationally and so if, if you weren't taught this stuff, that's, that's fine, that's cool.

I wasn't either.

Scott's somebody who had a family that did learn.

This is great.

Grandpa sold a, a bank for like a couple billion and they've just gone on to continually learn this stuff.

So this is what we do is we teach families how to do this.

We teach kids how to be value creators, how to be capable.

And so, you know, it's just really a decision about this is what I want to be able to learn for myself and what I want to be able to teach to my children so that they have wings.

So that.

One of my favorite quotes about wings is that a bird doesn't spend time worrying about ability of the branch it's on because it trusts her wings.

When you have wings, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

If the whole H Vac industry went out of business overnight, it's not going to happen.

But if it did, Sam Wakefield would be fine because he's got wings.

He knows how to build online courses, he knows how to sell, he knows how to do in home sales, he knows how to do marketing.

So once you build that capability, it can't be taken from you and you can trust your wings.

This is such an incredible conversation and I love how it's rounding out the, this full, you know, roots versus wings concept to, you know, develop these thriving individuals, right These, these incredible humans that we've been given the responsibility to do something with.

Right?

What we do with them though, is up to us.

And you know, of course it, I love how it lands squarely right back into that concept of, you know, taking radical responsibility, you know, not not allowing or to hitting the easy button, say, okay, well school, hope school will teach this or, you know, because we all know how we went through school and they didn't teach us how to balance a damn checkbook.

I mean, come on, you know, so how, why would we expect it to be any different now?

In fact, it's worse because, you know, just look at all of the different things that are influencing our kids.

Like we talked about the top five.

I feel like we were in an episode of David Letterman for a minute, but it's, it's just as powerful.

So, man, this is, this has been awesome.

I cannot wait for episode four, which will be coming up soon.

And for everybody that's listening, go back and check out episode number one.

And number two, this is number three.

It's a four part series that we're doing and this will live in the, in the history books for, for this podcast.

It will be highlighted as one of those moments of the elements that absolutely 100 are.

The most effective way to increase your sales numbers is by fixing your life at home.

And it's.

Yet just last night I sat with a, an individual.

He's.

And y', all, this number's gonna blow your mind.

He has grown and sold, sold over 50 companies.

Five.

Zero and a lot of them sold at nine figures.

And I had dinner with him last night.

And this, this whole concept is the same, right?

It, all of this doesn't, it doesn't matter where we are.

Every bit of this, this is the same conversation we had last night and what he was saying.

And he's got one of the, of the most incredible sales training organizations that I've come across.

He's like, the secret is to help people sell better.

It's everything else and it's what we've been, you know, we've been talking about for so long.

So long.

And this is one of those core elements that's one of the big ones that affects us.

Even if we don't think it does, it's there.

It's constantly living rent free in the back of our mind.

Every little thing that's right or wrong at home is there affecting you.

Even if you think you can compartmentalize it, you can't.

I'm just here to tell you that's not possible.

So, man, thank you for being on the show again and I cannot wait for the next episode, man.

I know everyone's building up the anticipation to want to contact you more.

So after episode four, we're gonna, we'll make sure that some, some links and things are in on the episode so you can be able to get in contact with Jimmy and the organization to learn more about how you can learn more about how to, how to grow your family, right?

Treat them like the, you know, your own internal.

They're your internal employees, right?

Your.

Your friend, your family.

That's.

It's what we have.

If everything else falls away, that's what we're left with.

And man, I, I love it.

So give us some, some, some parting words here.

It's time to land this plane.

And dude, it is.

As always, it's been great, great hanging out with you again and just constantly learning.

Awesome, man.

Yeah.

I think my final words would be it.

It doesn't have to be as hard as you think.

And something as little as, instead of giving kids chores, give them gigs.

So here's a list of gigs and here's what you can do.

And this gig's worth $5.

This gig's worth $3.

And give them things that they can do where they get paid for results, not that they get an allowance.

And then take any types of purchases that you normally make.

There's all, all this money that we already are spending.

And when we go to movie theaters, we don't.

We don't pay for popcorn and pop.

Kids need to pay for that.

When kids go to a birthday party, we don't buy the gift.

They need to buy the gift.

So we give them more, way more opportunities to earn money than almost any other family that we know by giving them these gigs to do.

But then we give them more responsibility in learning how to be able to spend that money where they want to spend it.

It.

And it's not something that's more work because jobs get done around the house.

It's not my job to go and make sure the chores are done.

It's their job to come to me and ask if it's done well enough for them to get paid.

So there's a lot of things that are in here where it might seem like a lot of new things.

You don't need all of these things.

We're talking about some of the top 100 families in the world.

Just take a thing or one thing at a time, right, and go implement it.

And that's, that's really what it comes down to.

And a lot of it's already already done.

We can link up, we can link up fig and eagle.com in the, in the show notes and we'll give you like a hundred gigs that you can give your kids to go do so they can start doing that, that type of work.

So all this stuff is literally just writing your own SOP or finding a successful family that's successful in at least one area of the of their family that you want to emulate and copy and just steal their sop.

And all of a sudden, life gets easier and easier and easier.

If you do the stuff in life that is easy, life gets harder and harder and harder.

You go get fast food all the time, might be easy now, but life gets harder and harder and harder.

You skip the gym, it's easy now.

It gets harder and harder and harder.

You work some overtime right now.

Life actually gets harder and harder and harder in your family life down the road, you do the stuff now that's hard.

And life gets easier and easier and easier and easier and easier.

Yeah.

Love it.

Success leaves clues, everybody, and that that's what we're going to land on.

So thank you again for being on the show, everybody.

I've got stick around.

I've got some announcements that we're going to go over.

And until next time, everybody, be someone worth buying from.

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