Welcome to season two of Inside My Canoe Head, a podcast about individual emergency preparedness, living through a pandemic, reinventing yourself and chasing adventure. My name is Jeff. Thanks for joining us today and let's get to it. All right, today we're going to start stepping away from the Apocatop and the world's collapsing and buy 10 years of food and let's run off and build a yurt and start talking about how to design your life, how to create this reinvention that happens to so many people at certain age.
Sometimes call it midlife crisis. Sometimes we call it a pandemic has provided an excellent opportunity for some to through no choice of their own having to make a career change, having to dramatically cut their budget, potentially even selling or walking away from their residents, maybe even losing property or losing a vehicle to represent. It's like there's been some catastrophic economic impacts. But a lot of times what emerges from that, it's like the caterpillar changing into the butterfly.
Sometimes it just takes a traumatic event for you to finally feel like it's the right time to say, you know what, I'm going to chase this dream because I just made it through a pandemic. And so here we go. So today we want to talk about preparedness and minimalism. And the reason that is about designing your life is far too often we spend too much of our time chasing the Joneses.
And you've heard it many times that famous phrase about going to a job you don't like to earn money to buy things you don't need to impress people you don't like. And then you rinse and repeat day in and day out. Well, guess what working from home and so many other things that we have learned are exceptionally effective. So why can't you do this?
Why can't you design your life? Well, here today, what we're going to do is ask you to take out a piece of paper, sit down or just talk out loud if you're bombing down the road listening to this you're on some commute and you're listening away. Just think about this as we go through it will be quick will be simple, but we'll be life changing. And for me this happened in around 2012 when I decided and realized that everything that I was chasing was not what I wanted.
And what I wanted to do was not what I was chasing. And so at the end of it we realized you know what this is probably not the smartest thing in the world to do. So I sat about starting looking for some guidance. Now the world is full of motivational videos on YouTube.
So many people out there telling you to quit your job and run away. That's fantastic for those people who have a million subscribers on YouTube who are getting significant income and they're sitting in a pot of money that they make by making YouTube videos. Well, you and I aren't that person probably. So how do we do that?
How do you design a life from scratch? And let's not worry about oh my Lord, I'm in a house and a big mortgage or I have a massive car payment or I have huge debt. Let's just take it from the perspective of you have a clean whiteboard and I love using a whiteboard because you're going to race on a whiteboard. So just think about it that you have a whiteboard and you're going to design your life based upon you right now.
This is what I did when I was 43 years old and I'm 50 now. So please don't tell me you're too old to change or it's too difficult to change. That is a load of BS. I change locations.
I change cities. Bot and sold houses, quit a job, a career in the army and moved on to taking a PhD as a full-time or student as a retired individual thereby taking a huge salary reduction but chasing my dreams. So please don't sit there and say it doesn't apply to you or you can't do it. So for this everybody loves an acronym.
I live by an acronym in the army. I'm a CMPP. I want to talk about career, money, passions and people. So first is career.
What is your professional passion? And this is something that I learned when I started to get burned out of my previous career is that if you're not swinging your legs out of bed in the morning and you can't wait to jump up and tackle what's in front of you and what you have in that day then you're doing the wrong thing. And by now in your life you may or may not know what that is but just trust me it's not a career you're choosing. That's a bit of misnomer in the name.
It's what you're doing now. This is your first career. So if you're 18 years old you're only choosing your first career. You're not choosing your career for your life.
You're probably going to have five significant ones. You could be a medical doctor then decide to become a lawyer then be a chaplain and then decide to be a carpenter. You can do all of that in your life and there's nothing stopping you. So this is about choosing what you're passionate about.
Don't worry about the income. We'll get to that in a minute. Think about what it is that you want to do that is passionate that gets you out of bed in the morning. So if you're an artist or you love to draw or you love to tell stories and you want to be a writer, this is your personal passion.
If it's what you love then get your arms out of bed and get at it. Location. Where do I need to be to do it? Now there is a famous individual who codified it as this.
There are two types of people in the world. There are people who are somewhere and anywhere. If you're a somewhere person that means whatever occupation you've chosen to be, you actually have to be in a physical location to execute that function. So if you're a plumber or you're an electrician or you're a carpenter or you're a vehicle mechanic or you're a shop foreman in a factory, you've chosen a profession that requires you to be in a physical place.
Then there are anywhere and this is the boom that has come out of the pandemic. People that realize with a skill set and a passion in a certain specific area and a laptop in the internet, I'm able to earn an income executing what I'm absolutely passionate about but I can do it anywhere. So basically you not only pick what it is that you would love to do. I want to be a writer and because I'm a writer I know I can do that anywhere.
I'm not tied to a physical location or you know what? My passion is to be an electrician. I know I have to work somewhere. I mobile.
I can be and if I get the right license, I'm mobile around certain locations but I do need to be in a physical place. So you understand those and then the last piece of it is do I require a formal education. Now in a lot of places that is required for professional certification. For example, being an electrician, you require an apprenticeship and you require sign-off, you acquire a bit of school and then you require a set of exams to ensure that you can as a journeyman sign-off an electrical and you're not going to burn buildings down.
There are standards to meet. So those are education requirements. If you want to be a school teacher, depending on where you live in the world, each jurisdiction has an education requirement. So it's not taking an education for the sake of an education.
It's taking the education that is necessary and required to do what you do. For example, if you want to be a computer programmer that you can go to a community college to learn it or you can learn it free of charge off the internet if you dig, find, take the free courses, study the YouTube videos, you can learn how to do it on your own. So formal education isn't always meaning a need to pay a tuition to go somewhere. It means I'm going to pursue the knowledge necessary so that I can earn an income doing this career.
So if you wrap up the career part of CMTP, you have the desired passion what you want to do with your life. Your location dependent or independent and you figure that out and you know exactly what piece of education that you need to execute that function. And just in case you're wondering, there's more than enough people that want to be doctors and lawyers and politicians that will keep the whole country thing running just fine. That's not your job.
If that's not your gig, don't worry about it. There'll be lots of people who really find that stuff exciting and they'll be off and doing it. If you want to be a painter, the world needs painters. The world needs writers.
We need imagination. We need creativity in our lives. So please don't, if you want to be a podcaster, absolutely. There's we need all of these things for a full and wholesome society.
So don't think you're short-changing yourself at all. Hey, you may have grown up in a house where somebody told you were a failure if you didn't meet a certain standard. That happens a lot. That's not your problem.
That's their problem. And as long as you understand that and move forward, you are ready to jump to the next one. Remember money. Money is very simple.
Sometimes you can't earn an income right away. If you're a painter, you don't earn an income until you get a job painting for somebody, you're commissioned, or you sell painting. So a lot of times what people in the beginning have to do is take a minimum ways job to pay the rent. But as Gary Vee says, if you're starting off in your 20s, there should be four or five of you renting a bachelor's apartment, sharing your Wi-Fi, and that's it.
And then maybe you've got to work 10 hours a week at Starbucks or McDonald's, flipping burgers to chase your dreams. The principle of money as simple as 50, 30, 20, that's how you become a millionaire at minimum wage. It is not complicated. That means 50% of your income goes towards your necessity.
So the absolute animalistic requirements to keep you alive as a human being in a modern and urban society, that can take no more than 50% of your income. 30% of your income, you are allowed to have fun with. This is where you go out to dinner, you have your Starbucks, you go see a movie, you take a trip, you visit friends, whatever. The 20% is what Tony Robbins calls a wealth tax.
You always take 20% of your after-tax income, and you dump it into your retirement savings. Now, can Canada can be at a TFSA, an RSP, or something, but basically 20% of your income is your wealth tax that goes on you and retires. And this is how Tony Robbins shows in his book Unshakeable that you can retire a millionaire off minimum wage. So all those people out there telling you that minimum wage is not enough to survive.
Well, they're wrong. They're dead wrong. They're just not willing to be disciplined. So 50, 30, 20, remember it, never go around it.
The third one, passions personal. What do you love to do? Some people are activists and they love to give back to a part of society. They like to help the homeless.
Some people are passionate about soup kitchens. Some people are passionate about reading programs in hospitals. Some people are just a personal passion of yours. Your activity mine inside my canoe head, folks.
I love the outdoors. So I am always figuring out ways to get myself into nature canoeing. My pack, rap, or malpack, or rafts is inbound should be here next month. I'm excited about that.
It's all about camping in the outdoors for me, hunting, fishing, all that stuff. So I have a passion that I love to do. I give back to my society where I can, and I have personal passions. I define them and what they are.
And then the last thing is people. Surround yourself by people with like interest. Remember the phrase is always clear. Look at your five closest friends and that is your future.
If you are the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong damn room. So make sure that you surround yourself about with people who are chasing their dreams, not your dreams, but chasing their dreams. They're passionate about the future. They give back.
They're joyful. They're happy. And they're going forward in life. Surround yourself by people like that.
Remember friends are the only family you get to choose. Your blood family, maybe fantastic individuals, but you did not choose them. Nature did that for you. Your friends can choose.
Some will go. Some will leave. Sometimes you have to fire a friend. It's life.
But surround yourself by passionate people. Now we talk minimalism because it's actually fairly simple. And the principle that I use, I own only what is necessary to facilitate the life that I just designed. So I'm an outdoorsman.
I spend a lot of times outdoors. I hunt and I fish. So I need firearms, bows. I need fishing gear.
I need alpaca rassin bound. I got my camping gear. I don't have any excessive whatsoever. I spend money on quality gear.
So it lasts several years. But I have the gear to facilitate my personal passion. I'm a podcaster on the side. I love this.
It's one of my favorite things to do in life. I invested in a few minor things to make sure that the podcast would work well. My career, my PhD, my build my company, I invested in a quality IT so that I could have a good website so that I could sell my services to people around the world. I only own the possessions necessary to support the life.
And if you just remember that phrase that your possessions exist to support you executing the life you want. That's it. Love people use things. It's a famous phrase by the minimalist and it is so true.
There is nothing that I own just own. I have very, very few things I could count on one hand that are just nice to have that I have just because I have them. I am very, very specific about that. The clothes that I have, they fit or they don't fit.
They wear them and they don't wear them. Sometimes a lot of times I get called boring. I'm playing same golf shirt every time I golf. Perfectly fine.
It's clean. Why can't I golf? Like for example, three times a week in the same shirt every time if I clean it. Why do I need a second shirt?
Those are questions that you ask yourself. So if I need a second shirt to be able to golf, then I get the second shirt. But I've yet to figure out a reason why I need a second shirt to be able to golf. So I have the same pants and shirt that I golf in all the time.
It's perfectly fine. I don't need more. But other people will tell you, oh no, no, no, it looks ridiculous when you do that. And again, think, remember, those are other people.
Those are you. Don't surround yourself by people who are trying to tell you what you're doing is incorrect or wrong, etc. You don't want yes, people. But remember, one of the principles of stoicism is not to care what other people think to put it in the most generalities of senses.
Don't spend any time worrying about what anybody else in the world thinks about the life that you've designed and your choice of material possessions to support that life. Now we talk about preparedness. Our other favorite thing on this channel, we've done it on many episodes. The key to this is now to conduct a preparedness assessment based upon the specificities that you've identified.
You go through our 12 step plan, which is earlier in season two, and it shows exactly how you go through a personal preparedness assessment based upon you, the family, the people that you responsible for, the cushion of time that you wish to be prepared for, and then you review your integration and support and dependency on the 10 factors or sectors of critical infrastructure. And then you build out the plan. And the plan will tell you a set of skills you may need to gather and potentially, but not always, you may actually need to acquire a few things here and there. And so you're building the preparedness plan to support your life.
Preparedness is not the center of your life. It is something you use to support your ability to execute your ideal life. When preparedness starts to interfere with your ability to execute your life, you start to become like some of these nuts you see on YouTube. It seems that everything about their life is preparedness.
Grab these 10 things now, back up on these 15 supply chains or busting, get these 12. And it just seems that their life just revolves around preparedness. And that's a life of anxiety. That's a life of fear.
And it's a life, a lack of self trust and lack of self esteem that comes out in people that are constantly worrying about preparedness and constantly worrying about societal collapse. It's more of a lack of their ability to trust. Because remember, it's about you being able to carry on and everything we say on inside my canoe head is all about you designing a life for yourself and being able to execute that life in the way that you want to. And the idea of preparedness, it just wraps that blanket of security around you to better facilitate your ability to execute the life that you want.
It doesn't negate or take away. The whole reason you enter the preparedness genre is that you want to make sure that irrespective of whatever disruptions will occur, you are able to manage through the disruption and you come out in a better state than everybody else. And you're able to carry on with all of the things that matter to you and carry on with your normal life that significant disruptions don't under normal circumstances knock you completely off your foundation. And if they do, you're even prepared for that.
And the key message is that I'm not a motivational speaker and maybe someday I'll decide to do that. But the issue here is that this is about personal choice, right? This is about you deciding to do with your life what you wish based upon your own personal goals, desires, and achievements that you wish to reach. I'm taking a PhD not because I'm smarter than anybody else, but because it's actually a personal goal of mine.
I'm challenging myself to see if at age 50, I can go through an additional five years of education to come out the other end as a doctorate and have a PhD in something. And it's just a personal goal. I don't need it to execute some of the functions you can teach university and be a professor with a master's degree in certain area and years of work experience. So you just chase what is for you.
Don't let somebody else design your life for you. So that's the purpose of today's episode is simply to say, Hey, listen, there's a lot out there about preparedness and there's a lot on TV about minimalism. And you have a lot of products. So for example, if I was to tell you got a great job opportunity to execute your digital nomad lifestyle in a different location, how easy is it for you to relocate?
And I'm going to think that not the fact that you own a house or anything like that, but I'm going to think that the number of your physical possessions and the amount of junk and stuff you have is going to be a limiting factor in your ability to rapidly pivot over to a different part of the country or a different part of the world. Listen, if you're in anywhere, right now, there is a worldwide competition on for countries that are actively trying to get you to come in and work and run your digital nomad lifestyle from there. The times are going away because you know, I was born Canadian. There's no requirement for me to stay in Canada.
I don't have to stay here. I have because of my Canadian citizenship. I have it for the rest of my life. If I leave this country and never come back, if there's a better deal and a better gig somewhere else, why would I stay?
Like rationally start thinking that way. Why would you stay places like Estonia and Latvia in Eastern Europe have fantastic programs for people to come in and move in and start running the digital nomad. The island of Dominica, which one of them I've been looking at in the Caribbean has as you know, they're not developing resorts and golf courses. They're spending all their capital money on digital infrastructure.
If you look at Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand, it's one of the most well-connected places on the face of this earth and they're building an entire industry, an entire economy around digital nomads. So you have 24-hour work sites, work-sharing sites that are available. They're top-level internet. They have all of the services required, all of the western ideas of gyms and all these things have built up around it.
And countries around the world are doing this because they realize there is a huge volume of individuals who have developed a scale and because of the nature of the internet and today's world. Call them freelancers, call them whatever you want to. They're able to execute their task and make themselves money from anywhere on the face of this earth. So now what they're doing is they're not shopping around apartments in their hometown.
They're literally shopping country versus country to determine where to go. Countries that are realizing that this is a huge potential for income because these people make money. They rent. They're usually young but not always.
They spend money on the economy. They're not tied anywhere. So if you create this landing zone for them that is incredible. They'll come.
They'll stay. They'll tell the world about it. And before you know it, you have 10,000 digital nomads living in your country that are just booming your country's GDP, which is fantastic for every nation. And again, I'll ask you that question.
Just because you're an American, why do you have to live in America? Like why can't you just pick up and go to the Philippines or Vietnam or Laos or wherever else you want to go in the world because you have a citizenship in a certain country like I don't, I get the ties to it. And I'll give you a final example and then we'll shut her down. In here in Canada to retire and go into long-term care where you need significant medical support in a home care situation in Canada can cost you five to eight thousand dollars a month for all the necessary services.
You can get the exact same level of care in the Philippines for a thousand dollars Canadian a month. Why would you be bankrupting yourself or bankrupting your family by growing old in a respite care in Canada when you could be living like a king or queen in the Philippines and still have tons of money left over. Like to be all my friends and family are here. Well, welcome to the digital world.
Guess what? We have airplanes. They fly around the world. You can FaceTime anybody anywhere.
So stop making excuses, build your dream, define your life, only get the necessary possessions that allow you to execute the life that you want, conduct your individual personal preparedness assessment, determine exactly what you need, and then get out there and rock this world. You've got one life. That's all you have. Time is the only commodity you can't buy.
It's the most important thing. Stop wasting it. So thanks for joining us this week on Inside Mike Newhead as we close out season two. We've got a couple of more rapid fire ones coming this week and then we're going to take a couple of weeks break and launch season three.
Thanks again. Drop your comments to Jeff at preparednesslabs.ca. Leave a rating or a like or comment or something. Tell me what you think.
Be honest, be straightforward. Get your vaccine. Science works. Wear a mask where required and go out there and live an incredible life.
You deserve it and you're worth it.