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Up Your Average is the “no nonsense” podcast made for interesting people who think differently. Learn to navigate your life with unconventional wisdom by tuning in to Keith Tyner and Doug Shrieve every week.
You just are persuaded. Like, your life is persuaded by whatever's going on in the world around you. Whether you know it or not, you're being persuaded. You're being reformed. And it may be for good or bad.
Keith:And and so that's that's why thinking about what's this ancient uncommon sense because if you are chasing things that aren't for your best interest, maybe having some wisdom involved might help you.
Caleb:Welcome to the Up Your Average podcast, where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life. So buckle up and listen closely to Up your average.
Keith:Doug, what's up? Word up. It's What's happening? It is another warm day in Phoenix. I jump on a plane Sunday around lunchtime to come back to reality.
Doug:Okay. All right. Well, that snowbird life, that's a good life. It is. It is.
Doug:In everyone's financial plan, here's what you need to do, kids. Have your kids move to somewhere really great and inviting so that you can go visit them for a week. Maybe stretch it out to two. Is that how it works, Keith?
Keith:I'm only doing it for them, Doug.
Doug:Yeah. Was this in your financial plan that you forecasted thirty five Exactly. Years Was this a Exactly. Monte Carlo
Keith:I was kind of thinking Florida, but then I got kind of traumatized by hurricanes, but we didn't even have any this year, so maybe it could have been Florida instead of Arizona.
Doug:Yeah, yeah. I can tell you this, and I know we're not here to talk about it, but the snowbird thing, my parents, they go down to Florida. They rent. My dad says that's the best check he ever writes because he can walk away from it when he's done, and you don't have to worry about paying pest control and who's mowing the lawn and whatnot, but they get down there, and I think they're better off for it. It's pretty awesome.
Keith:I would think so. The change of scenery, the sunshine, particularly for people who struggle with that seasonal depression, think just getting some sunshine is a big deal.
Doug:Yeah, for sure. And if you aren't retired or you can't swing it, you could go for a week. You could make that happen.
Keith:Or a weekend. You never know, whatever your budget allows, right? Yeah. It is all about your situation. I wanted to talk about ancient and uncommon sense today.
Keith:What do you think about that?
Doug:Well, as I was thinking about that when you sent me that, I thought, I think I'm just going to ask Keith a whole bunch of questions today, and it's going to start with, Where in the world did you come up with that? What is going on? Have you had too much time at a coffee shop? What's going on over there?
Keith:I think that was the Rock Band of Styx. He's had too much time on his hands.
Doug:Seriously. I get it.
Keith:Let me show you my PowerPoint, if I can, here. So I heard this, and I don't know whether it's true or not, but I heard that the North End Of Boston, which I'll share with you here, if you can see this map of Boston, just the tip of it there, and the roads go in all different kind of ways, all different sorts of directions, and what I heard is that those were simply animal trails that humans just decided they would follow, and then with time, those trails were entrenched, then they got paved and on and on and on, and it seems to make sense when you think about that. So when I think about the uniqueness of the world, I was thinking, I wonder how people's habits are formed. How are your thoughts formed and what is perceived to be smart or wise today versus maybe sometime in the past? And I was doing some research on this conceptually, and I might have talked about it a couple weeks ago, but I'll show you this one as well.
Keith:This is the idea that struck me that became obsolete. I don't know if you even knew this was obsolete, but the poor guy, he was minding his own business and his world got turned upside down because he was living in an obsolete world. Can you see that, Doug?
Doug:Mm-mm, yeah. Yeah, there's one of our favorite dogs. I can't read what the sign says. What's it say?
Keith:Sorry, No, it says, Sorry, we're closed, but what I'm saying is his house is no longer a thing. I don't even know if you knew that. A doghouse isn't even a thing anymore.
Doug:Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're inside the house. Yeah.
Keith:Yeah. To put your dog outside in the snow, Doug, What would
Doug:happen Well, that's true to some extent from Hamilton County ZIP codes, but all you have to do is get outside Hamilton County, and you might still find a outside dog.
Keith:You're not going around where I'm at here. They're pushing them in carts and things around here.
Doug:Hey, back to the cow paths in Boston or the animal paths. I've thought about that. Someone told me the same thing, maybe we're at the same place, and the roads today are basically paved animal trails. It sounds kind of silly, but at the same time, I do a fair amount of hunting, and I know that deer, they like to keep it simple. They don't like to walk up stuff.
Doug:They don't like to walk down stuff. They like to find the most level, the easiest grade. So my guess that's probably what was happening with the animals. Now with cars and stuff like that, it kind of seems silly to have all those windy roads and zigzags, but I don't know. Maybe just a thought.
Doug:I haven't put any time into it, but back then it might've just made complete sense.
Keith:Yeah. The place where I've spent a lot of time is in the woods and fishers. There's plenty of deer paths there, and it cracks me up because the parks people have a tendency to tell you to stay off the deer paths. They put signs up that say, Don't go on the deer paths, but one of them in particular is on a slope that just almost goes straight down, and in the decade plus, maybe two decades that I've been hanging out there, have not seen a human on that path, but they have a sign there that says stay off of it so that they can't tell the difference even between a human path and a deer path, and that's kind of what I was wondering is ancient uncommon sense as you go about life, what does that really look like? I was thinking of the Apostle Paul's writings, and he said in there, Do not conform to the pattern of this world, be transformed by the renewing of your mind, and what occurred to me is that you just are persuaded, like your life is persuaded by whatever's going on in the world around you, whether you know it or not.
Keith:You're being persuaded, you're being reformed, and it may be for good or bad, and so that's why thinking about what's this ancient uncommon sense, because if you are chasing things that aren't for your best interest, maybe having some wisdom involved might help you. One of the questions I had, how does the world get wiser?
Doug:Well, okay. So what's the difference between a bunch of information and wisdom?
Keith:I think I blew your thoughts when I threw you that thought a few weeks ago about, I can't believe that this is the first time we've had internet or whatever in history like that, to me, it's not unbelievable that there's been a great reset and that thoughts have been changed because when I just look around and see the information around me, it doesn't seem that profound. Like when I think of Silicon Valley and how some art is supposed to be out there, the technology is curious that they come up with, but the wisdom seems pretty sketchy to me. So my thought to that question, How does the world get wiser? My answer would be, One person at a time. I don't think the masses ever will.
Keith:Yeah, so what's that look like? I don't know. For me, it's sorting through my thoughts and trying to decide what is wisdom and what's foolishness.
Doug:Yeah, so okay, so that's what you're sorting out, is don't be a fool.
Keith:Yeah, yeah, and given a lot of time, my conclusion is you can make foolish decisions. The difference between making wise and foolish decisions, maybe the length of your life, that might be part of it depending on how foolish you go, but also the smoothness of your ride. If you consistently make foolish decisions, there's going be all kinds of difficult consequences associated with those that you may live a complete life, but you may live eighty or ninety years, but you're probably going go through a lot of difficulty getting there if you consistently make foolish decisions. Yeah. Yeah.
Keith:So one of the ideas that jumped out at me was if you walk with wise people, your path will be wise, and that comes from King Solomon's writings in Proverbs thirteen twenty is where that idea comes from, and it's really the premise of this podcast is that if we're going to borrow your time weekly, that we should be bringing some wisdom to you that adds to the flavor of your life. If we're not doing that, then we're not taking your time very seriously, and I think we do every week. I think we really appreciate the time that our friends give us. How has that impacted you, Doug? As you're becoming an adult in your 20s and you're looking at the world and it looks intimidating, how over the years have you added wisdom with wise men around you or wise women?
Doug:Early on, even as a kid, I just remembered asking God to help me choose good friends, and those friendships may have even looked a little squirrely, and they probably were because we were immature, but yet even though we were immature, my friends were seeking the right stuff, and so just having friendships with people, relationships are really all that matters in this world, and having those types of right relationships around you can really encourage you. They can pick you up. They can challenge you to take bigger risks. They can challenge you to just go further and see some things inside of yourself that you can't see. Maybe there's some blind spots that are a little reckless and a good friend can point those out to you.
Doug:If you can receive it from that person, you can really make a difference. I've had several really great people in my life who've come around and been those voices for me.
Keith:Boy, that is a good word. I've found that even the opposite of that particular proverb could be true. Part of maybe upping my average over the years has been to maybe space out some relationships that weren't the most profitable for me, and that's a difficult decision, but I think probably as those that are listening, as you're parenting teenagers and you're watching their decisions with that, I think a lot of parents have tried to dissuade difficult friendships for your kids. I know as a teenager, I wasn't very receptive of my parents' feedback about those friends, but over time I've observed that reality that you can have some of those relationships that drag you down, and having the courage to step away from those sometimes, or at least distance yourself, limit the amount of time is a big deal.
Doug:Well, relationships, they're not like a tennis match where I serve and expect something back, then I hit something back, and There are some times where you do have to lean in, but like you're saying, there's some other times when you've got to walk away.
Keith:Yeah, and maybe in that same vein, Doug, is the next bullet that I had thought about is there's some wisdom in refreshing the lives of others, and Solomon talked about that in his Proverbs twelve twenty five and seventeen twenty two is, There is a time for which people need you to lean into them, and one of the descriptions, it's like about their bones being dried up, is that they're so challenged, and so leaning into those friendships and those difficult times, walking alongside of them through their difficulty, life saving or life changing.
Doug:Yeah, and if you're doing that with somebody who doesn't know how to communicate or struggles as a communicator, it can be really difficult, and years ago I would just always push through that difficulty, and that for me was not the right approach. For me, what I had to realize sometimes is when you're working with somebody who wasn't a great communicator, a lot of times the only thing you can do is just pray behind the scenes and trust that an invisible God can get the message across to their heart. Yeah.
Keith:I think I want to shout out to our friend Ben that we've been kind of walking through life with him for a long, long time, and I just know there are times with Ben over the years just sitting with him and not saying a word, just letting him know he care. He stopped by the office, what, last week or the week before, and just to see the joy in his face just shows the great benefit of investing that time in people that are just trying to find their way in refreshing their soul by just your presence or your words. Yeah, a good word can go a long way. Probably the wisdom in that as well probably goes to communicating a little bit as well, is that it is maybe the most difficult time in generations of communicating with others because of these devices and the idea that you might be able to speak positivity into people's world, you definitely don't want to text or email negativity into people's world because they can't get context with that. They can keep it longer than necessary.
Keith:If I tell you you've got something in your teeth right now, Doug, you can process that, look in the mirror and get it out, and probably a couple hours from now you forget that I even said anything negative like that, but to write it down, unfortunately people have a way of keeping those things for a long, long time. Well, and I've found the reverse to be I mean, that is true, but the reverse is also true.
Doug:If I've gotten some feedback that I just think is ridiculous, I've got the quickest delete key there is.
Keith:I love So it's
Doug:just gone. I mean, I've done It's just out of there. I can get ticked off and be like, What the heck kind of response is that? And I normally do for about a good ninety minutes to three days. Then after that, it's like, Man, they must just had a bad day.
Keith:I saw a quote this week. It was from the talk show host Dick Cavett. I don't even know if you know that name, but Dick Cavett had a quote that said, It's a rare man who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear, and I just thought that's really true, that when you get feedback that maybe you didn't welcome, it may be the feedback that you need. So having those people that you walk with that are wise, sometimes they can deliver that message better than a more foolish person might do. This is another point of reference that I ponder as I consider our culture today.
Keith:Proverbs 20 two:six, it says, Train up a child in the way that they should go. I know you've been very intentional with your boys. How has that process impacted you? There's a certain intentionality with training children. There's a lot out
Doug:of our control, and so I do think I believe that proverb, and I don't know that a parent always gets to see it. Was Moses walking along in the middle of nowhere for forty years? So you might not ever get to see it, but I think just trusting that that proverb is true will eventually yield results for that person. I'd love to be able to see it, but
Keith:I just trust that it is true. Well, I think even if you don't know that it's going to work out, I think the intentionality of even deciding what you think is valuable to train those children with the intentionality of bringing your best to the kids. Even at a young age, they really, if they're left to their own, I think the repetition of the world system will overwhelm them without some kind of direction, but I know for me a repetitive thing that I told our children was, I'd ask them this question, what is it that you can do that'll cause dad to love you any more or any less than I do today? And the answer was nothing. No matter what I do, positive or negative, I have 100% of dad's love, and was part of the training for my children because I had no idea what they could or couldn't come up with.
Keith:I came up with a lot of crazy things as a child myself. Yeah. And the next bullet that came to my mind, Doug, it was a repetition in Solomon's writing, and it had to do with your words, and a couple points in there that I saw was guard your words and the benefit of a gentle answer. I don't know if They're both in Proverbs 15, so I think he must have been compelled that day when he was writing his journal about choosing your words wisely, but what say you about guarding your words and a gentle answer?
Doug:I think a lot of that. It's tougher for some because some of us like me, we've got stuff ready to fly even before the question or the event happens, and so I think a lot of times for me personally, it's just slowing down. We've got a friend, Don, our good friend Don, and we were talking about him, I think earlier this week, Keith, that he said, Be interested instead of interesting. So when you can take the emphasis off, when I can take the emphasis off myself and be interested in what someone else has going on, it makes it a lot easier to listen, genuinely.
Keith:I think the idea with what Don had said there was to be interested, you have to slow down to ask questions because you're not making declarations or statements when you're interested. When you're trying to be interesting, it tends to be a lot of pride and boasting, I think, and I don't think most people find that too interesting, but maybe they do. I don't know. I found that question, asking somebody what their mom or their dad taught them, that opens a conversation with somebody that maybe you've known that person for a long time, but maybe you didn't know some of their roots on how they got to where they are today, and just creating some thought provoking questions for the people in your life, I think will open some really interesting observations and maybe some depth of friendship that you never imagined.
Doug:Yeah, for sure. All right, here goes the one.
Keith:This is the fastball from your financial advisor In Proverbs sixteen:eight, it talks about, Don't weary yourself to gain wealth. I think in some of those verses, it even says, Wealth will find wings and fly away. What do you think about that idea of wealth and how the development of it works out into the lives of people?
Doug:Well, we've seen several examples of how wealth can work in the lives of people. One of the things I really admire about all of our clients is they've done a great job with what they've had to work with. And the majority of people, they're not greedy people. They're not trying to keep score. They're just trying to have a great life.
Doug:They're trying to be able to provide a Friday night out to eat dinner for their family or a vacation. And so I think to use your wealth to influence your relationships that are most important to you is a great use of your wealth if you're using it for other things. Don't know. The best form of money and wealth is when it's spent purposefully on the ones that you love the most, and that could be you're saving for college. That could be you're saving for retirement, but it could also be, We're going to use this to go out to eat tonight, or, We're going to use this to buy a really nice kitchen table.
Doug:But just the purpose of wealth, I think, has a lot of opportunity to help relationships.
Keith:I think even the patterns of wealth, even in my career, I've seen what the system says is wise in regards to attaining wealth, that maybe some of those things that have just happened in basically a generation that people have believed about, well, can detract from the accumulation of wealth. Very simply, when I graduated from college, credit cards weren't readily available to the ordinary person. The only place, when I was in college, you could get a credit card, doesn't even exist anymore, was a Sears and Roebuck credit card, and I thought I had arrived when I had my little Sears and Robot credit card, and it maybe rescued me once when the airlines lost my luggage and I needed some clothes for an interview. But today, the evolution of credit cards, people have leaned into those maybe more heavily than they probably should have, and consequently it detracts from the accumulation of wealth. As I watch in our culture, I watch other cultures that have different ideas of accumulating wealth in America today that are battling against the difficulties and the affordability differently than maybe some of us were taught.
Keith:So I noticed that different cultures are living multi generations in houses versus trying to get one young couple into a house because of the cost of housing, and so there's ways I think that you can accumulate wealth without wearying yourself, but it definitely, today is a more difficult time to accumulate wealth without wearying yourself. If you don't think differently, I can see it becoming very wearisome for people.
Doug:This book right here, Nick Murray, The Excellent Investment Advisor, this was the first book that I read about our industry back in the '90s, and it really made an impact on me and still makes an impact. I keep it right in front of me, and I want to thank Nick Murray for that. But he talks a lot about goals in here. I like to just think, Okay, what are your visions? My friend Lance likes to say a squinty eye vision.
Doug:Do you have a squinty eye vision for what you would like to see happen? And then make that happen. Let it be known to other people. Let it be known to your financial advisor, to your spouse, maybe those people who have wisdom in your lives, and then go for it. Those visions or goals, when they're tied to your closest relationships, you just can't lose.
Keith:I came across this verse that's right in line with that, Doug, is Proverbs sixteen:three. It says, Commit your works to the Lord, and your plans will be established, and I've been spending a good amount of time with Caleb, bringing him up to speed and explaining parts of what it looks like to be an advisor, and when I just prep for that, we call it weekly wisdom. A half hour every Wednesday morning, I sit down with him and talk through some of these things, and when I think of where Gimbal is today and where it started, the idea of it getting to where it was today, had I envisioned it when it started, I probably would have been overwhelmed with all of the things that it took to get, but it's kind of like you said, it's starting with a small baby step and realizing that the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. So I think then kind of the final attribute within the idea of wealth in the Proverbs is in Proverbs 34. It just talks about hard work and diligence that I think the more that you can lean into a diligent way of living life, I think you're going to probably find a smoother path, particularly today.
Keith:It seems like the opportunities for diligent workers are greater than ever in America today, in my observation.
Doug:Well, and if you really are into something, you're willing to suffer through it, And so by being willing to suffer through some stuff, you're going to find purpose, you're going to find meaning, you're going to find fulfillment, but it's going to be through those hard times when your work ethic is there during the hard times that you'll look back and be really grateful for the stories that you built up. I was talking with one of my friends today. They own a business in Downtown Carmel, and she was out shoveling. She shoveled the whole parking lot at like 4AM. And I mean, who does that?
Doug:Well, the person who has vision, the person who loves their client, their customer, that's who does that. The whole freaking parking lot. I mean, that's pretty impressive. That's some suffering. That's some suffering working for I
Keith:love it. Well, I hope that this wisdom is just an on ramp to our friends, that they'll be willing to chase more wisdom and offer their wisdom to their friends to help up their average. And in the meantime, Doug, I look forward to seeing you face to face sooner than later.
Doug:Okay. See you guys.