[0:00:07] Clint Murphy: If you truly want something and you've created a roadmap, then you just have to do the work. And that can often be a very big stumbling block when you show up every day. The results after a year are astounding.

[0:00:22] Crystal Ware: Welcome to Get Clear with Crystal Ware Ware Podcast the place where we get clear on our goals, own our worth, and learn to be the CEOs of our own lives. I'm your host, Crystal Ware, lawyer and former Fortune 500 corporate leader who found the confidence to say goodbye to a lucrative career and start my own business. Now I'm opening up the playbook and sharing everything I've learned to get you there faster. It may not be easy, but it will always be worth it because you are made for more. So put on your big girl pants, jump on board, and let's reach for the stars. Are you ready to get clear? We have another amazing guest. I know I say that every time because I hand pick and look for guests that have so much to offer, so they are all really awesome. But today we have an extra special guest. Clint Murphy is joining us. He is a CFO by day and by evenings. He is an avid reader investor. He's working on a fantasy novel series. But most importantly for us today, he has his own podcast, the Growth Guide Podcast, and writes an amazing newsletter called The Growth Guide Newsletter that will be linked in the show. And I'll just say right up front, you guys should all go and subscribe.

[0:01:42] Crystal Ware: In addition to that, Clint is also a husband and a father of two boys, so we have that in common as well. And I always love when somebody puts that right up in there with their bio that you're a father and a husband because that makes such an impact on our lives and all that we do. So welcome to the show, Clint, and we are so excited to have you.

[0:02:09] Clint Murphy: Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to having this conversation with you and love involving our children. Now that they're getting old, I'm getting them involved in this creator world. We're launching a YouTube channel my wife's working on, and my son was helping me with the camera work all weekend and figuring out the settings and it was a blast to do that with him.

[0:02:32] Crystal Ware: Yeah, that's so much fun. My kids, I will say sometimes I'm listening back to the podcast that I record because we want to take stock in what we did, what we can do better, what are notes or what are things that I want to move forward? So I'll listen back to some of the podcasts in the car in between, just like short jaunts to their activities or whatever. And my kids are younger than yours, but they are really interested and excited. And I heard my well, I wanted to say seven, but he literally turned eight. This weekend. He said, you know, Mom, I was thinking about that, and me and my friend at school, we were going to start a podcast, too. Could you help us with that? And it just made my heart melt so much that they take in all that you're doing, and it can take.

[0:03:21] Crystal Ware: Time, but eventually similar in the car with my son and asking him, hey, do you know what you want to do when you're done high school yet? And when he first said, Maybe I'll do what you do, I said, you mean me, an accountant? And his reply was, no, an influencer. And I thought, wow, I didn't know I'd become that yet. But thank you, son. That's great that you want to follow me. So it's definitely a fun part of this journey.

[0:03:50] Clint Murphy: Well, and especially if he looks to you and considers you an influencer, which you are. But to be an influencer to our own children is really the most important job. Right? At least 100% to me.

[0:04:02] Crystal Ware: Yeah, 100%.

[0:04:03] Clint Murphy: So kudos to you for doing that and raising great kids and involving them. We can never get them involved too early in my journey, I think about that and how you get to be who you are, and all the little pieces that add up to that. And entrepreneur or creator were not words that I would have used to describe myself. And part of that was just because that wasn't the environment that I was raised in. And my parents did a wonderful job, and I loved everything about growing up, but I just never thought about those things. So now being able to open up and shepherd in those new ideas that I wasn't really around as a child and creating more openings for my kids to think about where they want to go and what they want to be is what I really am personally proud of. So good for you. I love that. And I love that he's learning the camera work and all the technical stuff, because that's the stuff I really don't like.

[0:05:06] Crystal Ware: Yeah, exactly. Although, in fairness, it's probably what we'll outsource. But the idea is just to get them involved early, something with your children even younger. And you starting because if we look back in time, for a lot of us who are adults, none of this was here when we were kids. So your parents not teaching you? My parents not teaching me. It's because it wasn't an opportunity. There was no Internet. There was no socials for some of us. And so I look at our children and say, why would we approach raising them the same way that the generation before raised us? And what that looks like as an example is instead of having a summer job at McDonald's, I want to hire them to work in our social media platform. Pick a platform. You have a job. Your mom's going to assign it. Here's what you're doing.

[0:06:08] Crystal Ware: You'll get paid for it, but you're going to learn skills that you can then use in your life. And so setting them up to start by building the brand I'm working on, and then let's use those skills to build the brand that you want to build for your life. Because I think most young people today should be building a social media brand for themselves to create opportunities and leverage in their lives.

[0:06:44] Clint Murphy: Absolutely. I mean, it can take you so, so many places. There are just so many opportunities. And what I really like, because I still personally have heartburn about putting my image out there, I guess as much as some other people. When you think of influencer, you think of Instagram and pretty photos. And I've just got on Instagram in the last two months. But what I love about what you're doing is that it's not centered around you, your image, it's around your thoughts, it's around growth, it's around ideas, and with the newsletter and even you have a great presence on Instagram, but it's centered on the ideas. And I think that takes us a little more out of the equation. And I feel personally a little bit more comfortable with that. And I'm trying to get around a little bit myself, being the brand and having to put a little bit out there. Like what we were talking about everybody before we got on is whether or not we were going to use the video or this is going to be audio only. And I'm just shifting to having some clips of the video as well and getting comfortable with putting more of that out there. But I think what you're doing also shows, especially to your kids and other people that are out there, other ways that you can do that if you're not comfortable. And it's really more about the intellectual and the ideations and the monetary and all the different avenues that you can go with that, rather than what probably some 16 year olds would say as an influencer, which is somebody on Instagram who is selling clothes. So broadening the definition for everybody is really important.

[0:08:35] Clint Murphy: So on that, you're an accountant by background CFO during the day. How did you get into moving and starting your growth guide efforts?

[0:08:51] Crystal Ware: The short answer is COVID. The longer answer is, in 2018, I made a decision in conversation with my boss at work that at some point I would be retiring early and I would be pivoting to a life as a creator. So the idea was that I would and it's interesting because this is the path I'm actually on now, was that I would write podcast, public speak, coach and consult, and private equity and real estate invest. And when COVID hit in Vancouver, where I live, we had the rolling lockdowns, if you will. So your kids activities were canceled. You weren't allowed to go visit your friends and family. So all those things that you historically normally did that ate a lot of your time, were gone. And so then the question was, what am I going to do with all of my time? And I thought, well, why don't I start some of these things that I never intended to do until I get closer to retirement? Why don't I start them now? And so I launched a podcast and then I needed to promote it on socials. So I jumped on Twitter and within a short period of time, Twitter became the thing. But my realization crystal was that I could use it as a flywheel. So the more I could grow Twitter, the more guests I could approach. By getting higher profile guests, I could bring them back to Twitter by writing threads about the conversations we had and that flywheel would continue to grow.

[0:10:40] Crystal Ware: And so when I would reach out to a guest in the early days and say, I'm going to promote this to my 50 followers on social media and my mom and dad, it wasn't that easy to book high profile authors. But when you're reaching out and saying, we're going to promote it to 350,000 people on social and to 7000 people on our newsletter, it gets easier. In my mind, some of the numbers that will really begin to make a difference and change the game for us will be when I can say we're promoting it to a million on social, 100,000 on the newsletter, and the podcast gets downloaded 100,000 times every month. Those are the three numbers that are in my mind that will tell me, wow, this is legit, this is real, it's time to rock and roll and take this to an even higher level. Because the amount of information that you can spread at that point to help amplify the voice of the people that you're bringing on the show or talking about in the newsletter is so much higher.

[0:11:52] Clint Murphy: It's brilliant. So were those numbers meaningful in some way? Are they targets that I mean, I know you think about things very deeply, but were they based on any kind of research or background? Or were they numbers that you felt that you wanted to hit to have the specific influence and inspiration, touching people, that was your goal?

[0:12:16] Crystal Ware: For me, it's a bit of both. So if you look at that number for the podcast and that number for the newsletter and you run typical sponsorship rates, that's when the numbers start to become meaningful and allow you to have a certain amount of passive income. Although you and I would both say none of this is passive, but it's consistent. So you have your monthly consistent sponsorship revenue for the podcast and the newsletter and the opportunities that you see when you cross 100,000 on social media, the opportunities are so much higher than they were. And every few hundred thousand they go up and up and up. And so the idea that at 100,000 on the newsletter and on the podcast that will generate a level of consistent monthly income that can pay all the bills and lifestyle is good. That then becomes the platform to say, okay, now this can be the full time gig and what will this world look like if I move from doing this at night and on weekends to full time? That's when I get really excited to think how much more it will level up when we get to that stage in the million on social. I don't want to use the term vanity metric. It's a level that starts to get into the daily world, where you run into people who know you from your socials. And this has started to happen, but you start to become a bit of a household name in certain circles. And that allows if I want to write a book, if I want to be a guest on a certain podcast, that then starts to become a reality. If you want to work with a certain brand as your sponsor, it opens pathways is my thoughts.

[0:14:36] Clint Murphy: Yeah. So hitting the magical just around it million followers allows real economics to grow on book sales because we all know that book sales, you can be a great writer, you can do all the things right, but book sales can be hard to really monetize. It opens doors to branding and open doors as your podcast being the front product. It opens doors for you to book yourself for exposure and vice versa to get guests.

[0:15:10] Crystal Ware: Yeah, so right now we've probably just crossed about 350,000 or so followers on social and we're adding about 3500 to 4000 newsletter readers each month. And so if that pace continues to accelerate on the socials, then the pace of reader acquisition should increase on the newsletter. And we're only six weeks in, we're at 7500. So if we continue at that pace, at some point it moves from linear to exponential and that gets exciting.

[0:16:01] Clint Murphy: Yeah, that's amazing. And I think we can't take away that it's a credit to what you're bringing forward and all the ideas. So getting into that, I think a lot of that started with how much you read. Have you always been an avid reader or did you kind of take a shift, grow in your knowledge seeking in some recent period?

[0:16:28] Crystal Ware: I have always been a reader and so growing up I was a young kid, we didn't have much money, I'd say lower middle class for most of my childhood. We always had a solid home, good parents and food on the table and that was sort of it. None of the niceties, not going out to eat, not buying the new gadgets or clothes get cetera, but a loving good home. And I had ADHD not diagnosed until my twenty s. And my mother knew something was up, but her way to deal with it was one to put me in as many sports as she could conceivably fit into a schedule. So I was always playing sports, and number two was reading. So her rule always to us was, even with tight money, I will always have budget to buy you books or take you to the library. You will always have something to read. And so I've probably read on average 30 books a year. And the average is probably going up, let's say 35 books a year since I was 11, 12, 13 years old. So it's always been there, grade six, grade five. I'd say that's probably when I remember always reading more than other kids in class and always having at least one book on the go. And then somewhere probably mid 30s, it shifted from a lot of fiction to almost 100% nonfiction. So that happened about four or five years ago, and now it's one nonfiction book every week. So it's definitely shifted, which has been fun and a challenge.

[0:18:37] Clint Murphy: Well, I have so much to say about that. I'm trying to think about where I want to start, but I guess I would start by asking how do you make the time between all that you have going on and a full time job, maybe close to two full time jobs at this point. How do you make time to read a book every single week? Do you use any of those kind of like reading tools? And there's some tricks that some people have on how to get through a book and really take it in without the same amount of time.

[0:19:09] Crystal Ware: The key thing is getting the message out of the book in a way where you're understanding where the author is going and you can take away the key things that will change your life or the life of the listener or reader. And so when I read, I'm reading for that. So it's how do I get the questions that I want to ask in our conversation and what's the real meat of what I'm reading? And so no specific methods. It's just I've learned to be able to go through a chapter and get the essence of that chapter out reasonably quickly and turn it into questions. And if, if I have more time, then I can go even deeper. And I'll have my computer, and I'll be using Click Up as my second brain and taking the detailed notes into Click Up so that I have them into perpetuity, which is a new way of approaching it, that I want to make a definite habit. The other thing, I was talking about this with someone at work because she was asking me about the time for all of this. And my response, Crystal, was, this is what I do. So I don't go out to the club, I don't go out to the restaurant that often. I don't spend that much social time with friends or family. I read, I write, I create, and I spend time with my family I've made it so that my boundaries are largely driven around this world and the specific things that I want to achieve. So I get my workouts in, I do my reading and I focus on moving this needle forward and sometimes possibly to the detriment of some of those other categories. So I'm trying to bring them back in and schedule some meetups with friends or family. What I did realize through COVID though was every weekend doing something with someone, it started to make me realize how much of that time was just killing time.

[0:21:30] Crystal Ware: And so now I kill very little time. It's let's make the most out of it and get things done in these periods of time so that I can achieve the goals that I want to achieve.

[0:21:43] Clint Murphy: Yeah, the intentionality of it is really important and the world that we live in and the pace that we live in and I'm thinking about this all the time. It sounds like we have a very similar background. Even the class that I was kind of raised in, the house that I was raised in, my mom also would tell me she never would say no to buying books. I was a super avid reader from an early age and continue to be. I was telling my son the other night, actually, that there was a period when I was in law school where I stopped reading for fun because I was reading just so many pages of dense, dense material, I just couldn't. And I picked up the trash TV habit because my brain just needed to ventilate itself. But in doing all those things. And then you sit around and think about where we are in the world. Certainly I played sports and we had activities with our family, but the pace of life with my family was definitely more easy going than the pace of life that my husband and I and our three boys have. With all the things going on between our work, my doing this as well, my kids activities, school responsibilities. And yeah, I think that is what a lot of people today experience. And they just go through the motions. And I think when you look in the mirror and you say where do I want to be with success and what do I want to achieve? And why when I look around, why am I not like X, Y and Z or doing this person or having the things that these people have or seeing the kind of success we really have to look in the mirror and say what am I doing? What have I chosen to focus on?

[0:23:37] Clint Murphy: Because where we focus our attention is where we get success. So I definitely think there is a case to be said for balance and having other things going on in your life. But if your dream and your vision for your life and your family is all around ideation and creating a legacy and bringing influence to people and helping others live their best life, because that is really what you're doing. It takes focus and intentionality and I think that it can be hard to do otherwise. There's just so many things that pull us away if we let them.

[0:24:19] Crystal Ware: Yeah, in that focus and intentionality, because I don't want people to listen and think, oh, it's just another hustle culture bro, because that's not the way I'm living my life. I mean, I'm building in there a fair amount of time for meditation, for holding space, for just relaxing with the family. And it's just to your point, it's a level of intentionality to say, what is my day? What is my week? What is my year going to look like and how am I going to approach it to achieve what I want? And that's the key, is so many people. If you take everything we're talking about and doing and you boil it down to three steps, because everyone loves three steps. Can't be two not enough, four is too many. So if you go with three, you need to know what you want. You need to understand what it takes and then do the work day in, day out. And so all three steps are roadblocks for a lot of people. One, they don't necessarily actually know what they want. And so you can look at the people across the street or the neighbor and say, well, I want what they want. Well, what is that exactly? Why is it material?

[0:25:43] Crystal Ware: What do you actually want in your life? What do you want to achieve? And then once you know that, build the roadmap. There are so many people who have done what we want to do. And so if we look on socials, I can look on any channel. If I want to know how to grow a podcast, if I want to know how to grow a newsletter, there are people who have YouTube videos about that, or their Twitter feed or their LinkedIn feed is 100% about growing a newsletter. So you can say, oh, well, I can read that person and understand now how to grow a newsletter. I can create the roadmap. And for most of the listeners, a crap map is better than no map. I had a guest say that to me once and I'll never let that one go. A crap map is better than no map. And then step three, you have to show up. So if you truly want something and you've created a roadmap, then you just have to do the work. And that can often be a very big stumbling block. Well, how do I start?

[0:26:44] Crystal Ware: How do I do the work? How do I show up every day? And when you show up every day, the results after a year are astounding.

[0:26:52] Clint Murphy: Yeah, it's consistency. That message is everywhere. I mean, maybe it's because of what the space we're living in. I'm sure you see it too. The kind of people that I'm attracted to. They're talking about this messaging, consistency, consistency, consistency. But it appears very challenging for 70 80% of people. And that's where I go back to looking in the mirror. You don't have an extraordinary life without taking extraordinary steps and doing things that other people are not doing. If it was everybody was doing it, it would by definition no longer be extraordinary. And I think it's a hard pill for people to swallow sometimes and I probably don't come across as firm, I guess would be the nice way to put it on the podcast as I am in real life. But to a large degree my friends sometimes have said you're too harsh, you put things too bluntly. But I just think that you have to do it and somebody has to show you. If you're telling me that you have a problem and you want to achieve X, Y and Z and you're coming to me what feels like for some guidance or some mentorship, I got to just say the hard thing. I got to say what you are missing and it's usually are you really willing to do the work and be consistent if you want to run a marathon?

[0:28:28] Clint Murphy: Anybody can run a marathon. How you feel about running the marathon is different. If you want to feel good in running the marathon you have to consistently do the work for at least twelve to 16 weeks, if not 20. And that's where I learned very early on that not everybody was willing to do the work. I actually signed up for my first marathon marathon training with a very good friend at the time and it was three weeks in that she decided Friday nights were becoming harder because we had to run on Saturday. Why built my life around my running. And everybody knew. And sometimes it's a joke even now between my husband and I. Are you running in the morning? Like this is the stupidest question you could possibly ask me unless I tell you specifically I am not running. I am running. And we don't really do anything on Fridays. And it's that consistency built over a lifetime that transforms and allows me to do things that other people aren't doing. But I just think it's really interesting that we literally hear the message everywhere, but we don't see it in practice that much.

[0:29:39] Crystal Ware: 100%. And when I was in a men's group I was similar with a lot of the young guys to what you're describing in that they'd come with their problems and I'd be probably a little harsh in assessing them. But even if I look back to when I was in my twenty s and early thirty s, I wasn't succeeding in a lot of these areas until I addressed probably three. Things have changed in my life over time and for most people I think this ties into why they're not getting things done and what I look at is I start to think about because I like to use analogies for the listener is if you imagine we're all biologically advanced computers in our skin suits. So then you say three key things we need to work on. One, our hardware. So that's our subconscious thinking, and a lot of that is created in our childhood. So we need to understand, bring the subconscious to the conscious, understand how we were wired. What are our limiting beliefs? Where did they come from? How do we rewire our hardware or purchase new hardware? Number two is software. And so that's our conscious thinking. What are those negative loops that are constantly being repeated in our head about what we can't do, why we're not good enough? So just really nailing down our subconscious thinking, limiting beliefs, our software, and then the last one becomes our operating system.

[0:31:19] Crystal Ware: So our habits and our daily routines and our behaviors, and I like to refer to something as your get shit done muscle. And I tended to do it the same way you did. So with marathon running. And you don't start a marathon by going out and running 5 miles or 6 miles. You start by getting a pair of running shoes and going for a walk, and then you walk longer, and then you jog a mile, and then you do 2 miles, and you work your way up. And when you do that and you use, for example, Steven Covey's begin with the end in mind. The end is a marathon, and it could take you six months of training, and you work your way all the way back to, what do I need to do every single day to get to that marathon in six months? And when you do that, you teach yourself that you are a person who can do things. You are a person who can compete a marathon. You'd already taught yourself, I am a person who can complete law school. So now I've completed law school. I've completed a marathon. Hey, if I want to save money to buy some real estate, I know I can do that. I just have to have a plan for how much money do I need by what date? And then I'm going to work backwards to how much do I need to save every week, and I'm going to save that so that I can buy that real estate.

[0:32:44] Crystal Ware: And once you start applying that mentality to everything, that's where the consistency comes from. But there has to be that what's at the end. And that comes back to our previous know what you want. And so many people are plugged into the matrix. I wake up. I go to the same job. I come home, I eat, have a beer. Some people might get high, and then I go to bed. And then I wake up, and I do that exact same thing every single day. Party on the weekends, relax downtime. Rinse and repeat. And then after a year, three years, five years, ten years say, why aren't I living the life I want?

[0:33:41] Clint Murphy: Yeah, and I was actually listening to Habits and Hustle this morning with Jen Cohen and she had a guy on called Ozen Varrel. Have you heard of him?

[0:33:52] Crystal Ware: No.

[0:33:52] Clint Murphy: He has a new book out. I can't remember the title of it again because I was taking away the message, not necessarily because those are usually in the show notes, but he was talking about living unconventionally and not conforming. And that kind of what you just described is a form of conformity that people are just living these preordained lives. Like, I'm going to work for a big company and I'm going to be there nine to five, and then I'm going to come home and do what everybody else does, watch some TV, have a beer, relax, wake up and do it again. And I think there's a lot of beauty in that and that can work for a lot of people. But if you ware not happy or you're not feeling satisfied, you're not feeling fulfilled, that is where you should start looking at this. And that's actually kind of why I ended up with the name for this podcast of Get Clear because I really believe in helping people get clear on what they want in life. And then to your point, once you have clarity on what your vision is going to be, where you are headed, you can build out that roadmap. And there are many, many ways in which you can achieve or ways that you can get there. So you absolutely have to have a vision. And have you ever even thought about it? I don't know that a lot of people had thought about it. I remember as one of the earliest memories I have, besides reading books and childhood, was the vision that I had for my life. I didn't really have a roadmap. I came from lower middle class, just like you.

[0:35:35] Clint Murphy: But I did have a vision and I think that has what has carried me through and for other people if they haven't but now you're feeling stuck. Those are the starting points. So I love and I wrote so many notes about that I love that know what you want because that's exactly the starting point for me, for every conversation, for everything you need to know. One of the other questions that I wanted to ask that I think would be really helpful for everybody and something that you focused on and kind of what part of your podcast and your newsletter is based on is how do you develop ware skills that put you in the top echelons? And how can an average person try to tackle that and work towards building up rare skills that kind of position them to achieve unique targets?

[0:36:34] Crystal Ware: Yeah, so what I'd focus on there for the listener is, and this is definitely one that I will write a newsletter article on is. You're often told when you're young to focus on in demand skills. The problem with in demand skills is arbitrage. As soon as something's in demand, everybody wants to do it, and then the value of it goes down. So it's in demand because it's worth a lot of money. But as soon as it loses, or as soon as the number of people doing it increase, the value drops. Whereas rare skills continue to hold value, and likely if you continue to invest in them, they'll go up even exponentially over time. So what are we talking about with ware skills? Let's take, for example, we'll use me and we can talk about my path. So when I first started as an accountant, I was worth a certain amount of money to the firm because I could do a certain amount of work. And every year I learned more about accounting, so I could clint the ladder at the firm and do more and more. At some point, though, to differentiate yourself, you have to say, well, how am I going to be different? And so I'm going to invest in certain skills that the other accountants might not have because they're generally quantitative, probably introverted, don't necessarily like people. I'm using all the tropes for accountants. So I'm going to invest in learning as much as I can about emotional intelligence.

[0:38:05] Crystal Ware: I'm going to invest in learning about leadership, and then I'm going to take it to the next level. I'm going to spend time investing in how to be a better writer and public speaker, because the more we can add skill sets that aren't here's where it's ware, you take skill sets that aren't necessarily paired together. So you're an engineer, but you're also a public speaker who can with well and lead. So now when I'm at Google and I want to pick someone to lead a team, do I want to pick the best engineer or do I want to pick a person who can convey ideas, who can get the team going in a certain direction, and who can share that knowledge with the rest of the company. So you're starting to look at it and say, how do I differentiate myself? By pairing up multiple skill sets that other people don't have. And if you start to think of it as a stack, how do I build that skill stack? And ideally, building it in a beautiful T shape, where you have certain areas where you've gone super deep. So even though I don't necessarily talk that much about accounting, it's something I'm pretty darn good at after 23 years. But my t has broadened. And where I like to focus is on the writing, the reading, the creating, the leadership team, building the other areas of the T. Somewhere in there, there's raising capital, there's selling, there's marketing. So you're learning, because as you climb the company ladder, you're looking at all the other departments human Resources. And you're not going as deep in their department as you are in your own. But you're going deep enough that you have an understanding of what happens in those departments and the skill sets that make each of those leaders better leaders.

[0:40:11] Crystal Ware: So how do you do that? One, you read as much as you can on the subjects that you're interested in. Two, you have to actually do it. So if you want to be better at selling, you have to sell. If you want to be a better writer, you have to write. If you want to be a public speaker, you have to speak publicly. That can be on podcasts, that can be toastmasters is a great one for a lot of young people, or you can be on social audio media rooms, so there's a lot of paths to do it. The other thing that I love to say to people is you sit around the table at work and you look at those people that have a certain something that makes them unique and very good at what they do. And I like to say pick and choose those attributes from all the guys and gals around the table and say, what do I want from that person that I'm going to make mine? So how do they sit in the meeting? How do they hold their hands? What's the pace of their speech? How do they enunciate their words? How do I see them with persistence? How is that person with consistency?

[0:41:26] Crystal Ware: And I'm going to take all of their best skills and I'm going to make them mine one at a time. So you copy them until it's part of your toolkit, and then you pick another skill from another person. And so the person that you see three years from now is completely different than the person three years earlier. And that's to me, the element of rare skills. So we've gone deep in certain areas, I like to say ideally quantitative areas, because people in quantitative areas tend not to go the other ways on the T. So go deep in a quantitative area and then branch out into all these other areas and pick up the skills you need. That, when combined, differentiate you from the average person.

[0:42:20] Clint Murphy: And so when we're talking about that, I know the gist of what you're saying is the combination is really what's going to make you stand apart. But you did mention writing. Do you think in our day and age that writing well and being able to convey a succinct but special message is still a rare skill?

[0:42:43] Crystal Ware: It's one of the rarest. And that may sound odd, especially with Chat GPT, but if you read Chat GPT, it's not great writing. It doesn't grab you and sing. And if all you did was write with Chat GPT, you probably wouldn't grow on social. But it can be a good tool that you can use. So why is writing valuable? If you could write well, you can think well if you ware writing about the right topics and you're writing about them consistently and you can get the person on the other side of the table to read it and say, I understand that's what you're going for, I understand. I agree. And so the more that you can especially crystal when you can take complicated topics and make them simple, that is very rare. So can I write about a balance sheet in a way where everybody says, oh, I actually understand that. I didn't understand my accounting class in college, but I understand a balance sheet now in a carousel on LinkedIn. That's a skill set that I think is very rare. And the only way you get it is one, you continuously work on your thinking and two, you write as much as you possibly can. The more you write, the better you get at it. The more you write, the better you think.

[0:44:15] Crystal Ware: And interestingly, I do believe the more you write, the better you are as a public speaker because when you are thinking more clearly, you're able to convey your thoughts better. When you get good at conveying your thoughts on paper, you can get better at conveying them to the audience in spoken word. So I think there is a connection between the three and I definitely think it's one of the more rare things in our society.

[0:44:44] Clint Murphy: Yeah. And so how much time do you spend every day or week writing?

[0:44:51] Crystal Ware: I had thought to quantify that I must write for somewhere in the neighborhood of seven to 10 hours a week.

[0:45:00] Clint Murphy: Yeah.

[0:45:01] Crystal Ware: That's significant, I would guess. Yeah. And it's been that way for a few years now. Yeah. So maybe an hour and a half a day.

[0:45:14] Clint Murphy: Do you do more focused on journaling? Obviously you're writing your newsletter, so that takes thought and effort. But other than that, are you working on specific projects, journaling or some combination thereof?

[0:45:28] Crystal Ware: No, for me it's mostly I mean, there's a fair amount of writing at work. I'll write a lot of memos as part of my role as a CFO and so I do a lot of writing at work. I wasn't even thinking to add that.

[0:45:42] Clint Murphy: In, but yeah, probably double.

[0:45:45] Crystal Ware: Yeah, I do a lot of writing. There even a lot of emails and I would say at home it's a few things, it's the newsletter, it's some content for the books and it is the social media posts that I do because those usually take at least an hour, two, 3 hours to write.

[0:46:07] Clint Murphy: Yeah, you talk about that. And again with the parallels of our story. I worked in corporate Fortune 500, kind of between finance and legal and I had to write quite a few memos and quite a few kind of process driven sheets to convey ideas to people that did not understand the technical aspect. So how do you convey what executives need to know in a manner where they can have enough comfort to make a decision, but you're not bogging them down in the details because that's your job. And I really, for some reason, the transverse between that and writing for ideas, for motivation, or for a book, somehow it doesn't feel the same to me because you're saying that and I'm like, oh gosh, I've written a lot more than I thought. I mean, I wrote my first book when I was in 6th grade and unfortunately lost that spiral notebook. I was devastated. So I've done a lot of writing over the years, but the kind of writing, targeted writing, where I feel like I'm going to make a difference in what I'm conveying, I really had not thought about the time I spent in my professional life writing things that didn't seem or feel to the world important. But I'll have to think back on that a little bit more now.

[0:47:54] Crystal Ware: Yeah, because they really and especially with Twitter, this is why I found Twitter as the right spot for me is they definitely tie together. So when you think about your writing at work and you're trying to write to executives and convey ideas simply, you're generally trying the military call it bluff, bottom line up front. And so you're really trying to get here's the key point I'm trying to get across, and then I'm going to get it across simply. And so when you think about Twitter, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to teach people complex things as simply as possible. So bottom line up front, what am I here to teach you? That's the hook. And then you're walking them through the Twitter thread, which is a series of tweets. And each tweet is meant to convey an entire chapter, if you will, if you're summarizing a book in one tweet. So how do you boil that chapter down to 280 characters? And so the more you practice doing that, the better you get at distilling information to its core, which is why I tend to have a lot of three or five bullet lists of, hey, here's what you need to work on for this 12345. Because I've gotten used to taking that subject and boiling it down as small and tight as I can into something that I can convey to the audience to say, this is what you need to do to get good at this. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

[0:49:26] Clint Murphy: So how do you stay away from all the negativity on Twitter? I wrote down for myself, Twitter question mark. Because the way that you've positioned it now, it sounds like, well, that may be somewhere I should be, but I have had clear of even I mean, I don't even know that I've ever looked on the app on my husband's phone because of all it feels like it's drowning in negativity.

[0:49:51] Crystal Ware: So I'll give you a little bit of a story from that TikTok when they were interviewing the CEO and they ware throwing the crazy questions at him, one of the guys was asking, hey, why does my TikTok always show this, this, this, and this? And it was something that older male senator probably wasn't necessarily thinking about when he was asking, but you curate it. So TikTok shows you the videos that the algorithm thinks you want to see. Twitter shows you what it thinks you want to see. What shows up on your Twitter feed are the people you follow. So not everyone, but people will say, oh, Twitter is toxic. It's so negative. Well, it's only toxic and negative if you've curated toxicity and negativity. Twitter, for me, is a beautiful place where I learn and grow and develop. Because the people that I follow are in those spaces, that doesn't mean they're all the same as me. If you're a person who believes there's left and right and red and blue, there's people all across that spectrum, different ideological views. But the people that I follow have the same mission. I want to be better tomorrow than I am today, and I'm on my path to get there. And so if you're following people like that, similar to early in this conversation, the people you said, those ware, the people I'm attracted to, when you fill your feet up with those people and you consistently put that message out, it's very hard to get negativity. Sure, every once in a while.

[0:51:38] Crystal Ware: My friend Steve sent me this weekend. Some person said to him, Why don't you just die, Steve? It's like, okay, well, that's not a very nice person, but I'll usually just reply to that person and say, wow, that's not very nice, and then move on with the rest of my day. And often when you reply to someone with something like that or you say, hey, something horrible must be happening for you in your life. I hope everything gets all right. Sometimes they'll follow you back or say, oh, wow, something is going on. I shouldn't have reacted like that. I'm sorry. Don't engage in it. Don't fight it back. I don't go on the platform to get in ideological wars with people and to like, you believe this, so you're wrong. And as soon as you do that, then yes, it's going to become the worst place in the world, because there's so many people that have picked sides of fences that aren't even real and are just lobbying bombs back and forth over the fence at each other. I just don't go read that. I just go read, hey, here's how to work out, or here's some thoughts from atomic habits that can make your life better. It's like, oh, okay, well, I'll go read that.

[0:52:55] Crystal Ware: So choose what you're going to read, choose who you're going to follow, and curate your feed in a way where it's actually one of the best platforms I've ever seen for learning I love it.

[0:53:08] Clint Murphy: Well, and that's why the way you positioned it, it was so positive and so aligned with what I want for my life. So that's why I wrote it down. Maybe I'm going to have to check it out. Don't be afraid to try something new and put your preconceived notions behind you. And that's what I always tell people. So I have to take the same advice. Well, Clint, I know we don't have all the time in the world. You do actually have a full time job to attend to. I have so many more questions. So we might have to circle back at some point because I like to take it where it naturally flows. And the pre planned questions that I had, I think we got to like one because you had so much to offer and so really good message. Meaty topics and everybody, if we are watching this, I have a whole page of notes to go through. I think the last thing I would say for you to leave us with, to leave the audience with, because as you just mentioned, the mission is to be better tomorrow than you are today. And your entire newsletter and everything else is around growth and growth orientation and making sure that you are better. So for somebody that's really new to this, that has just decided they want to grow and learn and see what their capabilities are, what are some small or the number one kind of guidance?

[0:55:03] Clint Murphy: What would be the number one tip that you would give somebody?

[0:55:06] Crystal Ware: Number one tip for a lot of people who are beginning anything is start small. So you and I have talked about some pretty big things and big goals and big paths, but we started small. And so anything you're going to do, start as small as you possibly can. So that first step is easy for a lot of listeners if you haven't built that get shit done muscle that we talked about earlier, work on building that. You build that by doing things consistently every day for long periods of time. So start with small things. I'm going to brush my teeth at this time every day and I'm going to floss when I'm done. Okay? Do that every day for 30 days. You've developed a habit. You've taught yourself that you can do things. Now do something more complicated and continue every month to do something more complicated than the prior month. What you're doing is you're training that muscle. Once you've done that and you've started to develop that muscle, then you can choose, what are some of the things I want to achieve? And then once you know what those are, YouTube, Twitter books, Wikipedia, now chat, GPT can be used to help you create the path.

[0:56:34] Crystal Ware: So go to those tools, use them to gain the knowledge. Study, study, and then do the work. So if you're a young person and you decide, I want to make some extra money as a copywriter. Read as many books as you can on copywriting. Focus on the big ones first, and then write as much copy as you can. Find people to follow on YouTube or on Twitter or on LinkedIn who write about those concepts. Study what they're doing, and you can teach yourself to be a copywriter in under six months. It's going to take years to be a great one, but you can get pretty good pretty fast if you're consistent. So break down. What is it I want to do? Build your get shit done muscle and then go after what you want. Start small, increase slowly so that you don't stop. That's the number one thing we want to avoid, is stopping. As soon as we stop, we're at zero again. And sometimes we may never start.

[0:57:42] Crystal Ware: I ran into a barber in Texas when I was getting a haircut and it ended up he was following me on social and what he remembered me for was saying, it can sometimes take us four years to do something that'll take four minutes. And that's because we stop and then we go back to the Matrix. So never stop. Start small, keep going bit by bit, day by day. You're going to achieve something you never thought possible. A year, 3510 years earlier.

[0:58:15] Clint Murphy: Yeah, absolutely. And to give that an analogy of what a lot of people experience regularly of what not to do as the other side of that coin is if you wake up and you decide you want to change your health, habits. It's not going out and saying, I'm going to work out six days a week for 75 minutes and I'm going to lift really heavy weights. That is a surefire way to overdo it. Stress yourself out, stress your body out. You start with two or three days a week. For some people, that may be stretching for 15 minutes three times a week, watching TV. To build the habit, start super small and then build from there. Because once you see that you can do that and how good you feel in doing those small things, or the marathon analogy earlier, walking a mile or two, and how good does that feel three days a week? It's not going out and saying, I'm going to revolutionize my life. I'm going to change all these habits and I'm going to wake up at 05:00 a.m. I'm going to work two hour or I'm going to write for 2 hours and I'm going to meditate. It's not doing that. It's taking actual small steps and building up over one year, two years, three years, four years. And I really love what you just said.

[0:59:32] Clint Murphy: I feel like this applies to me and I'm filing this away. It can take four years to do something or learn to do something that ends up taking four minutes, like some kind of speech. You can work up to that. It can take you time for your mental positioning, your ability, your belief in yourself to get it done. But the key is that you get there at the end of the day that you achieve it and you get there and you don't let the obstacles hold you back. So Clint, this has been so incredibly fabulous. I try not to ever have any expectations of where the conversation goes, but honestly, I could sit here and have a Tim Ferriss conversation and just let it go for 3 hours if time was no issue. So I want to sincerely thank you. You have left us with so much stuff. I know I've been enriched and have growth from just this conversation alone. So thank you for sharing this with everybody. Where can people find you on social media? It's going to be in the show notes.

[1:00:30] Clint Murphy: Yeah, you can find me. The best spot is thegrowth Guide, which is our website and that has links to all of our socials podcast, newsletter, et cetera, or Twitter is probably the area most popular and it's I am Clint Murphy on Twitter.

[1:00:47] Crystal Ware: Amazing. Well, thanks again, everybody else. You guys, I told you you were in for a treat today and it really was. I want you to remember that everything that you dream of is possible. You have to work hard for it. You have to stay consistent, but it's all doable. So remember, keep going, stay consistent and keep getting clear and clearer and more clear on what you want, and that is ware. The magic happens. Until next time, we'll see you later. I'm crystal ware. Get, get get clear with crystal ware. Listening in. If you loved what you heard, it would mean so much to me if you shared it with your friends. Tag us on social media so we can give you a big shout out. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

[1:01:31] Crystal Ware: If you want more, head on over to the website where you can learn all about what we do to serve and support our entire community. Until next time, keep dreaming big and getting clear. You are made for more, so start living like it today.