James: Hello and welcome to impactful.
The show where I speak to one of my friends about what has
impacted them most in their life.
This could be a book that changed their perspective, a
tool that made their life better.
Just a small thing that brings them joy.
Hopefully you'll come away from this conversation feeling inspired
or with new things to explore.
In this episode, we have Arvid Carl, who is genuinely one of the new.
I know you might know him from selling his company feedback, pander, or for writing
for his blog and podcasts that beached strap founder art is super thoughtful and
is, have been developing those thoughts in his book, zero to sold and the embedded
entrepreneur, thank you to ellos for sponsoring this episode of impactful.
ELO is a Twitter analytics tool that gives you the metrics that
actually help you understand.
And grow your audience with one glance.
ELO helps you see which kinds of tweets get most impressions,
likes profile pics, and more.
So you can grow your Twitter audience, head to elo.co and use
the code impact to get 25% off your ELO subscription for life.
Arvid welcome to the podcast.
How are you?
Arvid: thanks so much for having me.
I'm super happy to be here.
And it is actually a really good tool.
Just going to say that, like, that's a, that's a good sponsor,
your phone for the show.
I really, really liked what they're doing.
James: Well, that's a double sponsor.
I appreciate your
Arvid: Well, you know, Twitter user, you got to use these things and.
James: so avid, let's talk about your first thing that's impacted you, which
is learning that failing is fine.
Arvid: Yeah.
Like I've, I've done a lot of experimentation in my life and I'm glad
I'm doing more of that because at some point early in my life, I was quite
afraid of failing and just a couple of years ago the trial and error is
needed to grow as a person And errors are a part of trial and error, right?
It's not just trial and success And to understand that era's a part of
this and therefore to learn and grow.
You have to make
James: have to make
Arvid: makes it so much easier to reframe failure into a growth mindset.
And I still have doubts and I still have second thoughts in my life,
but I still do things and I do them anyway because of and experimentation.
is just at the forefront of this.
And what really helps me with this is trying to get
From my experiments And just turned them into notes and reflect on
those notes and then write about it.
And that's why I use notion and just like regular markdown files to write
down anything that comes to my mind.
I even have pen and paper always next to me, either on my desk
or in the car or wherever I am,
When something comes, some reflection happens, then I know that I'm growing.
And even if it's a reflection On failure this doesn't work.
I still write it down
because there's value in failure and reframing.
This makes anything that I do a potential success and then therefore
I'm not disappointed if it doesn't work out because I'm always
James: out because I'm always
Arvid: and that's, why learning to that failing is fine.
as One of the biggest things that really changed my life
because I'm not afraid anymore.
And I know that if I fail, yay, learn something.
James: Hundred percent.
And I learned that lesson from reading the obstacle is the way by Ryan holiday.
After I read that, and there was a chapter on failure and the worst outcome
of failure is that you learn something or that you can move forward from it.
So reframing failure is a fantastic way to impact your life.
Let's move on to the next one Arvid which is learning to be financially literate.
Arvid: Yeah, I was raised in Germany.
And for some reason, German, the German education system
does not really teach you.
In terms of individual financial literacy, you get economics classes
about like the bigger grander scale of things, but they don't really teach
you what saving is or what investing is, or what compound interest is.
I was never taught that by school.
And also my parents
didn't teach me because they also had no idea they were working class people.
They were shying away from financial instruments because people had been
burned, like going to that local, tiny bank and giving them money.
And that was invested into the wrong fund.
And then it was lost.
So.
Nobody ever really talked to me about this and told me about this.
and it wasn't until I was in my thirties, reading Tony
Robbins money master the game.
Like that book just made a difference in introducing me to the concept.
I know that Tony is still selling stuff.
through those books.
So obviously it's not The most objective guide, but just
being exposed to the concept.
In A form that is also empowering and supportive and that's
most of Tony Robbins' work.
And in many ways that's just
flip that switch.
And that turned me into somebody who researched financial
independence, financial literacy, the, the fire movement.
The idea that early retirement is an option that you don't have
to work for six until you're 60 and then live all of that stuff.
And how to get there was a strong, strong revelation.
to me Because you make decisions differently.
If you know, where this financial decision might lead you 20, 30 years
down the road, if you don't understand compound interest and making.
money work for you instead of just working for money,
James: It's absolutely something that needs to be added to curriculums or around
the world to, to be able to learn that because I am really bad with money of it.
I'm really bandwidth buying things and not living within my means.
And it's taken me a lot of reading and educating myself
to try and get better at it.
And I just wish that that had been ingrained into me like
a base level while I was.
And let's go and get their bond, which I absolutely love.
And this has impacted my life a lot.
So tell me how learning, how to cook has changed your life of it.
Arvid: Well, I always like to eat this.
That's not a secret in my life and I've I've never been like
a picky eater or anything.
I, just enjoy lots of things.
And I at some point I figured out that if I want to be able to eat
as many different, interesting things as possible, well, I'll need.
to be able to prepare them.
And in some sense,
now, in retrospect, after going through my whole entrepreneurial career, I
understand that my desire to be able to cook and to learn how to cook is
very much an expression of my desire.
to be independent.
Self-determined as like, there is a reason why there's so many people
who sell and exit their businesses then buy a farm in the middle of.
nowhere And
do woodwork it.
Like I've seen this three or four times.
And just in the, in the, in the hacker entrepreneurial space, just
a couple of big names out there too.
People want to live a self-sustained
and a self-controlled life.
They want to.
The wealth that they built themselves and key, and that sustains their life
without any outside independence.
And that is a, is a, is a big driver in, in most entrepreneurs
that lives obviously,
and learning how to cook is a non-entrepreneurial facet of that.
To me, I learned through YouTube
really YouTube taught me everything and a couple of cookbooks here.
and a lot of experimentation, which kind of harks back to what I first
said with the being happy to fail cooking, you can fail quite easily.
Try baking.
That's just chemistry.
Like you do some tiny bit wrong.
everything's ruined, but at some point you'll get it more, right?
Not perfectly fine, but you, you get it right there.
And then over time you develop through this experimentation and a
really solid skill in preparing this.
meal, same goes for almost any other activity.
And for me, that has made.
For example, I've made like dozens, hundreds of different kinds of risotto.
And now nobody else
in the family makes risotto because they know I just do it best.
And that is a skill.
Like I obviously like being the person in the family to do a thing, just project
that into the marketplace out there, be the person that is the best person.
at that thing.
And then your work is valuable.
So it's a kind of life lesson.
really to be So self determined and independent, that you're good at.
More than anybody else.
James: what's your favorite cookbook out of ones here?
We're looking at
Arvid: funny enough.
I inherited one from the nineties.
James: from the
Arvid: Twenties or something from my grandmother, a German cookbook.
and I, what I love about this.
it is that it completely skipped all modern technology because
There wasn't that technology that was no like food processors, that
there was no microwave there.
was no like, you know, like battery operated potato masher, anything
you had to physically apply.
For food to change its shape or form.
And.
the reading, those recipes just really gives you the insight into how.
Happened to turn into the meals we have now and what the point was.
So I, I don't really even know the cookbooks name because it just says
cookbook, you know, in Germany, in the twenties, they didn't have that
many books but I really, really enjoy.
reading super old books.
To understand the origin of the meals and to the intentionality
of those meals as well.
It's super exciting.
There is one out there.
and I think it's the unofficial Harry Potter cookbook I really liked that
cause I'm a big Harry Potter fan and there's all the recipes from all
the things they have in the movie.
but.
actual recipes, like mostly British recipes, obviously.
And we've been cooking a couple of those and it's, it's quite enjoyable.
you can do a little Harry Potter.
themed evening or anything, and you make like trickle tarts and some, some Yeah.
Black pudding or whatever it's, it's really enjoyable.
So if you are.
I'm a Harry Potter fan, I recommend that.
But most, any, any book will do as long as you act, as long as you do it.
James: And the, the final thing that impacts you, I think,
is a great one to end on.
And you, you touched upon this in the previous previous thing, but talk to me
about why freedom is so important to you.
Arvid: Everybody defines freedom differently, right?
To me, it means being able to do what I want to do whenever I want to do it.
And that's something I learned when I was younger, I thought freedom means just
having lots of money and playing games.
I over the last couple of days have actually tried to play some games.
Cause I'm, I was just In a, in a state where I had a lot of
time and I wanted to play games.
I just figured I didn't enjoy it anymore.
They used to be a time
where playing video games was the, the height of all activities.
Not that case for me anymore.
For me right now,
it's being able to do my work, which is writing, which is communicating
with founders whenever I want to do.
And not doing my work when I don't want to do it,
that is my.
understanding of freedom.
And to me, it's just really removing All distractions and all interruptions
from what my focus is having an empty calendar, having a schedule
that only I get to fill nobody else.
There's a book out there called life profitability by RDP.
He wrote an amazing book on balancing.
That's like having a profitable life, but also living a life.
And this ties back into financial literacy because it's about What can I do today?
that will sustain my life.
So I don't have to work until my sixties To be able to enjoy Which at that point
is mostly over or at least dominated by.
other things like physical health problems and stuff like that.
So to me that is what freedom really is
It's to enjoy my life right now, right here.
do the things that matter to me and have, control over my schedule.
and that kind of yeah, it does tie in all these other things,
because it's about determination and, you know, financial choices.
and in the end, yeah.
Doing the experiments.
James: Well way.
Thank you so much for the four things that have impacted your life.
I appreciate you coming onto the podcast into the recap you had
that learning that failing is fine.
Financial literacy, learning how to Kirk, and then finally
understanding what your freedom is, and then defining that freedom.
Thank you for coming on.
Arvid: Absolute pleasure.
Thanks so much.
James: Thank you for listening to this episode of impactful.
What I hope you've coming away, feeling inspired and with new things
to explore all the recommendations discussed in this episode will be
listed and linked in the show notes.