All right, welcome to season five of Inside Mike Newhead. This is a Canadian podcast that's all about the integration of leading an incredible awesome life, individual responsibility, individual emergency preparedness, and how do we navigate life's incredible, wild disruptions that we see among a sit-back, grab a beverage, and enjoy the episodes. All right, welcome back to the Ottawa studios. Inside Mike Newhead for this week's incredible episode on individual responsibility.
So we hear about it a lot on the spot cast. We talk about a great deal about who's responsible for outcomes. But really, that's a nice phrase, right? But how does that actually translate to tactical operational things on the ground for you and how do you insulate your life?
I talk about a lot in this podcast about creating an insulated life, wrapping yourself in a blanket of preparedness so that you can crush your life, chase your dreams, take that risky job offer, jump across the other side of the world, all of these things, because you've accepted responsibility for your outcomes, which means you've adopted the concept of individual responsibility. But how does that translate? So today, we're going to talk about the four areas of your life of individual responsibility. How to do it, what it means, and when you've got all four to show you what's possible.
So sit back, grab a beverage, let's get to it. All right, so welcome back. Listen, hey, when you accept individual responsibility, it doesn't mean you are the go-to and you do absolutely everything. The idea of individual responsibility is that you're the planner.
You're the strategy maker. You've developed a way to insulate all four of these things we're going to talk about today. You've developed the strategy. You've implemented the plan and you're either completed or you're in the process of taking the steps to make sure that each one of these are taken care of.
So today, we're going to talk about your animalistic requirements. We're going to talk about financial independence. We're going to talk about physical health and we are going to talk about mental health. All right, first of all is your animalistic requirements.
We talk about that at great lengths on inside my canoe head. That is your shelter, your food, your water, your health, your safety and security. And I've done some detailed episodes in that look back through the library. But the essential elements of this is you live somewhere.
You eat food. You drink potable water. You have a reasonable level of first aid knowledge and some skills to take care of you. You've learned a little bit about situational awareness and how to monitor the world around you to just see threats that may emerge and that you've taken at least a few measures to have some form of self-defense capability.
Should that unlikely event happen and that you are basically living in a place where you can calmly relax and not worried about some gang member kicking your door in and going after you. So those are complicated, right? Those are basic human elements. But the idea of individual responsibility related to your animalistic requirements is you've taken the steps to identify what you need and you execute it.
But the next step that's required for this is that you know what's next. That simply means that you have a plan or a strategy for where you're going to live next if something happens to your current home. You know where you're going to have a secondary source of food products or if your regular dietary requirements are not available what you go to next. Like if, for example, you go to the grocery store to find your regular set of food and there's some supply chain shortage that has it all tanked out, you already know what will fill your health requirements as an alternate food and you go and you grab that.
I know it sounds simplistic, but the idea being is that you have taken care of those individual things that keep you alive as an animal in the environment and you've thought through the secondary, right? This is not difficult. You do it now. You just have to think of it in the context of your individual emergency preparedness, your individual responsibility and look at the animalistic requirements.
That one is a good starting point because you're already achieving it now. You might not have thought of where do I go when my house is no longer available and you may seem that extreme and this comes from a conversation I had on the golf course this week with some random dude that I was paired with as we were banging around the golf course and I had mentioned what I was doing in school and I said, you know, I talked about emergency preparedness. He said, like, people don't think like that. Like people don't think about what am I going to do when my house burns down and I'm thinking, you know what?
They don't because people are very, very happy to ride the waves of normalcy. People are very happy to live in this integrated, awesome, incredible, wonderful, connected, modern society we have without a semblance of concern when one of those elements disappears. But that's individual responsibility is that you understand that this is a great life and I'm going to rock it. But at some point there may be a disruption.
You know, for example, where do you get potable water when your city water is no longer available or gets contaminated? Are you going to wait for some authority to tell you to go to some distribution point to wait in line with a hundred thousand of your fellow citizens to hand water or do you already have that figured out, right? And some of you haven't figured out because you've got 60 days of water stored in your basement like I do, right? So the water system could shut off or get totally contaminated in the city of Ottawa where I live and I'd be perfectly happy for 60 days without needing to go out and get access to other water.
And that's the element of taking that individual responsibility. So you got the animalistic fine. You're not going to starve to death when the grocery stores close or they're not available anymore, etc. Right?
Good to go. But what about your job? And I mentioned to this individualized golfing, what's your plan when you get fired? He goes, I don't, nobody thinks that way.
I do a great job. I should get my paycheck. I'm like, yeah, but what happens when your business closes? You're a fantastic worker.
You do great work. You're a wonderful asset to the company. The company is mismanaged and it goes under. You come into work Monday morning with great plans for this week.
You got a family weekend plan. And all of a sudden you're the doors locked. The doors lock with a sign on the outside of it saying the business is closed or you're called into a meeting Monday morning saying, clean out your lockers. You're all done.
Right? It happens. It happens far more often than you would like to consider. And people are shocked rightfully so.
But what's your plan? Right? The idea of financial independence is that you have a plan. One of the aspects is that you have a plan for when you get fired, right?
You're going to get fired. Maybe not because you're a bad employee, but maybe because your business goes under or hey, maybe a pandemic comes along and a great and a government mandate or lockdown closes the business you work for. Are you just going to sit around and wave your hands in the air and expect the magic government to pump money into your bank account so you can pay your bills until hopefully your job magically returns or are you responsible? So the idea of financial independence is that you are 100% responsible for the income that comes in and you're able to meet 100% of your current requirements and you are saving for your retirement.
I know it's hard to imagine on a podcast, but if you think of the standard, life is four elements, right? Zero to 20, you're just learning to be a human being, getting a bit of education under your belt and understanding the world. 20 to 40, you're learning your trade, you're building up your business, you're starting to earn a great deal of money. Age 40 to 60 is really your hard earning years.
This is where you're massively pumping money into the economy. You are the generation of capital for the economy and you have tons of cash. Age 60 to 80, you're not working, right? So zero to 20, you're not making any money.
So if you look at three periods of your life, the idea of saving for retirement is those middle two periods, 20 to 40 and 40 to 60, you're saving money so that the 60 to 80 happens. It's not the government's job to pay your frickin rent when you're 65 years old. That's your job, right? It's your responsibility to save that.
And that's what financial independence does, right? It doesn't mean you're a multi-millionaire living the Lamborghini lifestyle. It doesn't mean you are doing anything more than earning minimum wage. I mean, Tony Robinson, his book on Shakeable gives great example of an individual who lived his whole life working fast food or sorry, working for FedEx, earning not much more than minimum wage and retired a millionaire.
It's not hard to do. The question is, do you accept the responsibility of that? And if you're 21, are you taking the steps to save money so that you can eat and sleep when you're 60? That's the individual responsibility mindset.
And your 25, clumminate, boom, boom, boom, boom, having a great life, are you forking away as Tony Robbins would call it, a 20% wealth tax into what he also says is your basic ETF stock index fund and leaving it there so that when you're 60, you can live an awesome incredible life to carry you right until your age average 80 or whenever this joyous thing called life ends. That's individual responsibility. That's one aspect of your financial independence. Another one we talk about is lines of income, right?
It's very, very precariously dangerous to rely on a single source of income to support you or a family. No, I work for company X. I have a salary, my spouse is stay at home and I have kids and I pay all of my bills off one salary. I have one line of income.
Well, that's a huge risk and a lot of people in this world assume that risk. But what if that gets cut off Monday morning? Like I mean completely cut off due to no actions on your part, but it's gone. Do you have the necessary emergency savings to cover the timeframe it takes to go to your next job?
Have you figured out what your next job is? Do you know what you're going to pivot to when your current company goes under, right? Or do you have, I always say, I recommend three or five lines of income for a family that's based up off research that was done in multiple places around the world. You're basically looking at idea, a minimum for a family.
However, you define that you're looking at three lines of income as a minimum, maybe five. But if you go that route of having just one income, financial independence means I know exactly what I'm going to do when I get fired. I know how long it's going to take me to start that up, which means if I need four months of time to ramp up the next pivot that I'm going to when I get fired from the current job, I have saved four months of complete expenses. So there's no disruption in my animalistic requirements to see how these are tied together.
So financial independence means you're able to rock your world. You don't need external help. You trade your labor for a salary or you've created a business that generates income and profit that allows you to meet your animalistic requirements, which means you've created this insulated ball that's bouncing around in society that all of the goofballs in idiots of the world, whether they're government mandates or government rules or various other things that happen, nobody has the ability to take away your financial independence and nobody has the ability to stop you from providing animalistic requirements. That's true freedom.
That's true individual responsibility in life. Now that wraps you up. Make sure you can pay for everything and you can chase your dreams. But if you don't have your health, you have nothing.
I mean, you can rack up all the experts in the world that are telling you that on a regular basis. If you don't have your health, you have nothing. I'll tell you in the zombie apocalypse, you watch zombieland, number one is cardio. That's all about health, right?
It doesn't matter what your plans are. It doesn't matter the size of your bank account. If you don't have your health, you have nothing and you are placing yourself at an exceptionally higher level of risk for something to occur that would prevent you from meeting your financial independence or maintaining your financial independence or meeting your animalistic requirements, your physical health is simple. It really is.
It's super complicated if you look at what's online. It's super complicated if you look at all of the videos on YouTube and the books and the self-help and everything else there. Let me dumb the world down for you. And I'm a pretty simple guy and this is how I figure it out.
Eat food. Food has one ingredient. Don't eat a manufactured good. That frozen pizza, that's a manufactured good.
That's not food. Eat food. Real food. Food that you make in your home.
That treat myself every once in a while to skip the dishes or Uber eats when I've had enough on a Friday and I don't want to cook. Sure. But eat food. Eating food is cheap.
I'll come on this podcast with anybody who wants to talk about the fact that it's too expensive to feed people. It's not. It's actually really cheap even in today's inflationary times to feed a family if you eat real food. The rest of the world lives off beans, lentils, and periodic pieces of fish and meat.
Here in North America, we live off this massive meat-based diet. That's luxury in the human experience. But eat food. The human body was designed to move.
And it's not hard. You need to move. Spend an hour or two a day of your waking hours moving your body. There's a great scientist that did it.
It's named by Mark D. He did a paper on how to simplify human health. He got it down to three things. Your human body was designed to walk long distances.
Your human body was designed to sprint short distances for short periods of time and to periodically carry heavy things. That's your physical fitness. Now, if you want a basic prescription, I'll tell you. These guys are wonderful.
Over at nerdfitness.com. It's all body weight, no gym required, basic stuff to do. I mean, you can do the push-up challenge or anything. Going to the gym is great.
You get to build a great body. You get to bond with a bunch of people, create social capital, and have a place to go where you feel good. But to be healthy, all you need to do is to walk. The human body needs to move an hour or two a day around.
Every once in a while, go to a sports field and just do some sprints and then just carry heavy things. Do push-ups every day. You can find it. It doesn't cost any money to stay healthy.
It costs a lot cheaper to eat healthy, good food. Just do it. That's all it is. It's not complex.
But that's individual responsibility. You're putting in basic, simple foods that provide the nutrient that your body needs. You spice them up with some spices or hot sauce to make sure they taste to your palate. You eat that.
You do regular physical exercise, which does not mean a gym membership. If you do 25 push-ups a day and you walk for 45 minutes, do that for 60 days. You will feel like a million bucks and add three or three or four liters of potable water drinking a day. You're going to feel like a million bucks compared to you do.
The second part, the last part of physical health is get sleep. Just have a comfortable calm place to sleep. Get your six, seven or eight hours to sleep and whatever works for you. Wake up at a regular hour.
If you're having problems sleeping, Jocko Willnick talks about this all the time in Spock. He gets up at 4.30 in the morning every day and he shows any Instagrams, a picture of his watch when he gets up. Let's get at her. The idea being is, and it works, trust me.
If you want to regulate your sleep, don't go to bed at a certain hour. Get up at a certain hour. Seven days a week. You're going to alarm seven days a week for five, six in the morning.
Then don't drink coffee or anything with caffeine. You have a morning coffee when you get up at five o'clock in the morning. Have your one or two cups of coffee and then don't drink anymore caffeine the rest of the day. As you put this on a repetitive cycle, your body will become exhausted when it's tired and you'll find yourself naturally falling asleep nine, nine, 30, 10 o'clock at night and your body will generate that way.
It won't work if you try to go to bed and force your body to sleep. It only works when you force your body to get up. Regular, calming, restful sleep. It's how your body repairs itself and how your body heals.
The whole body system works when you're in a semi-horizontal position and you're in a certain level of sleep. That's when your body releases all of its work to repair torn muscles, fixed problems in your system. That's all done while you sleep. The last part and so incredibly important is your mental health.
After 28 years in the army, I've spent around time around a lot of people who have some significant mental health challenges. Let's just be blunt about this. You have to figure out the things that cause you stress, that cause you anxiety and figure out how to remove them from your lives. Whether they're human beings that cause you stress and you need to say thank you very much, firing a customer in business is hard.
Failing a family member and kicking them out of your life because they cause you stress and anxiety is something that is challenging for a lot of people to do but absolutely necessary. You figure out the things that cause you anxiety and then remove them from your life. Sometimes that's going to be a sibling, a very close friend, business associates. You remove things from your life that cause you stress.
If there's a problem outstanding that you're worried about or some event coming up in the future that you're worried about, solve the problem, address it. I know it's simplistic and easy to say, but having been around so many people with mental health challenges and people are so worried about the future and so worried about things beyond their control, I revert on this podcast a lot to the stoic philosophy. It helps a lot with your mental health. I understand mental health is a long journey and it's not simplistic and it's not flipped on a switch.
The idea of the stoic philosophy is that we live in a world of the dichotomy of control. There are things that are within your control and that you can influence and there are things that you can't influence. There are things that are beyond your control and the stoics will tell you that there is no need to waste any energy fearing about things that are beyond your control, that you amor fate, which means you just accept the results. Sometime in the future, you're likely going to get a phone call that one of your or both of your parents have died.
If you're going to spend your life worrying about that day, you're worrying about something that is outside of your control. That will be a horrible experience when it happens. You will deal with it. You will move past it.
You think about things that are within your control, right? And then you address them. You solve the problems. You don't sit around.
You don't stew on things. You don't worry about things, right? It's the idea of are you oppressed? You know, in this today's world, you have this massive victim mentality, right?
You have people assuming the fact that their station in life is because they were oppressed and things beyond their control and it's not their fault where they are in life, etc. So they take all of this blame for their current level of anxiety and life and they assign it to somebody else, which means they don't have to do anything about it because it's beyond their control. Oh, they could if they would, but it's due to somebody else. So therefore, they don't do anything about it.
They're setting themselves to live a life of being a victim, right? I'm oppressed. I'm a victim. I can't get things done.
Oh, if this person had only hadn't done that to me, blah, blah, blah. But if you accept individual responsibility for your own mental health, you just have to figure out a way to stop letting things bother you. You know, if somebody's a jerk and calls you a jerk, why do you choose to become offended? Why you're choosing to become offended?
Why are you making that choice? Why are you allowing somebody else's opinion and their attitude and the things they say occupy real estate in your brain? You're doing that. It's not the fact that they're a jerk and they're calling you names or they're writing stupid things about you on social media, right?
That's not causing you anxiety. It's your decision to allow that rent space in your brain. You've heard that, you know, the living free of rent in your brain. You have to frame the world like that.
It's not simple. It's not easy, but you have to learn how to no longer allow things outside your control to cause you stress and anxiety. You know, foreign wars are horrible things. What's going on in Ukraine is horrible.
It causes me no stress and anxiety because I have no, I have absolutely no control over it. So I do not allow it to cause me stress and anxiety. Is it a horrible thing? It doesn't limit what's going on, but I manage that mental health the best I can.
So if you think about those four, you look at individual responsibility from you being the planner and the strategy designer as we started off with today and you take responsibility for providing yourself, your animalistic requirements and knowing exactly where and how the backup for those are, you've created your financial independence model. However you want to do that, knowing that external actions by somebody else, including a boss firing you will not permanently affect your financial independence. You are taking steps necessary to ensure that when you retire, you are going to be able to pay your own bills and you're not going to be milking off the government money. You've taken the necessary steps to maintain positive physical health to the best of your ability and you're managing your mental health and the stress in your life.
If you have all four of those sorted, you are individually resilient and you are individually responsible and you are insulated from the world. Those four are the blanket of preparedness that we talk about at Inside My Canoe Head that is the entire theology of what we do here, wrapping yourself in a blanket of individual preparedness so that you can go rock an incredible world and chase your dreams. That blanket of preparedness, my friends, is made up of these four elements. Figure those out, take responsibility, have a backup plan for each and then go kick life's ass.
Thank you very much for joining us this week on Inside My Canoe Head. Up over our website at www.tripplewinsidemycanoehead.ca. Leave us a little note, sign up for our newsletter, they come out weekly or biweekly. It's a little bit sporadic right now as we're going through summer vacations.
We will get back at it once we hit September, post Labor Day and everybody gets back at a post summer life. Keep the suggestions coming in. If you have anything you would like to hear in an episode, if there is a topic that is very much on your mind, drop us a line at chiffattproperperinesslabs.ca, hit me up on buying me a coffee or just buying me a coffee. I love and I'm fueled by simple, wonderful coffee.
Take care and stay safe.