[00:02:34] Patrick Donley: But, We’re not going to talk very much about any of that. What I really want to focus on is one of my favorite threads that you’ve done on Twitter, which was about how to lead a great life. You’ve done a ton of threads, but this is one I really want to focus on. There were 17 points. I think you wrote it maybe when you were 50.

[00:02:51] Patrick Donley: Can you talk a little bit about that? Just the inspiration for it. Just the process of writing it before we get into the 17 points. 

[00:02:58] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah, you bet. And first of all, thank you for not focusing on the career stuff. I’ve done that before and I’m very proud of my career, but at this point in my life, I’m much more interested in helping people understand how to build a great life, not just a great career, but a great life.

[00:03:12] Kevin Dahlstrom: And I often joke that I learned everything the hard way so that you don’t have to. I’m 52 years old now, and I’ve been running really hard for a long time. I plan to continue running hard, but it’s important to make sure you’re running in the right direction. And throughout my career, I learned a lot of hard lessons on that.

[00:03:28] Kevin Dahlstrom: I did a pretty major reboot of my life in my mid-forties, and that’s really the inspiration for most of my content. that I write on Twitter is just the lessons I’ve learned about how to build a great life. My observation is there is a huge number of people, especially men who find success in their career, but ultimately end up miserable or not as happy as they’d like to be because they’ve become one dimensional focusing mostly on the career.

[00:03:54] Kevin Dahlstrom: They ignored the other stuff for too long and it can become a trap. 

[00:03:58] Patrick Donley: So let’s go into that first point. Talk a little bit more about the common mistakes that you see people putting money and career before experiences and relationships. Can you go into that a little bit further?

[00:04:13] Kevin Dahlstrom: Absolutely. Yeah. And the first thing I’d say is it’s not either or anything of value, whether it’s a career, great relationships, mastering a craft. It takes time and compounding. So the time to start is now, and you should do all these things in parallel. But a lot of the basis for that particular point in that thread was just the notion that if you talk to a lot of elderly people and you ask them to talk about the things that they treasure most in life, what are they going to talk about?

[00:04:41] Kevin Dahlstrom: They’re probably not going to talk about the size of their bank account or the deals that they closed or whatever. They typically will talk about the experiences they had. And the loved ones that they shared those experiences with. And so it seemed to me that’s what we should optimize life for.

[00:04:56] Kevin Dahlstrom: And the reality is we go through life with this notion that first I need to make a lot of money and then I can start building a great life. I call that someday thinking. The problem is that what happens is. Someday never comes and you end up in your forties, you were way down the road.

[00:05:15] Kevin Dahlstrom: Maybe you’ve had some success in your career, but you’ve got broken relationships. You don’t have much outside of work. You’re what I call one-dimensional. And that’s a trap that a lot of people, and again, especially tends to happen to men who are often the breadwinner in the family. It happens to them and it’s a big problem in society.

[00:05:33] Patrick Donley: Yeah, so you talk about like for people that are under 40 that they’re time billionaires and that like a Warren Buffett would do anything to trade places with a younger person. I think there’s a societal script really that we focus on money, we focus on career, and we do put off living the life that we want to lead.

[00:05:50] Patrick Donley: You had a really good thread too on coming up with your ideal life and really getting clear on that. Can you talk a little bit about that and the process for you to create the ideal life that you’re leading now? 

[00:06:02] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah. First, just to touch on this notion that you mentioned of the time billionaire, the basic idea there is if you’re under 40, or frankly, even if you’re over 40 these days, you’ve got roughly a billion seconds or more to live in your life.

[00:06:15] Kevin Dahlstrom: And that’s actually the most valuable currency. And the ultimate question is. How are you going to spend that time? And I argue that ultimate success is control over you, how you spend your time. And of course, a lot of the things you want to do with your time do take money, but it’s often not as much as you think.

[00:06:32] Kevin Dahlstrom: And that leads me to this exercise that you mentioned of what I call defining your ideal end state. I think it’s just interesting how so many of us go through life with only kind of a vague idea. Of what we’re really building toward. And I’m not just talking about the career again.

[00:06:48] Kevin Dahlstrom: I’m talking about what is your ideal life or your best life look like. And so there’s an exercise that I recommend to people and it’s super simple, but it’s very powerful, which is literally get out a piece of paper or pull up in a note on yours. iPad and bullet point out what your ideal life looks like.

[00:07:05] Kevin Dahlstrom: Who are you around? What are you doing with your time? What does your health look like? What does your financial situation look like? And on and on in mine, which I published a few days ago it’s got like 30 bullet points on it. It doesn’t take a ton of time, but it’s a very eye-opening thing to do because you’ll often surprise yourself.

[00:07:23] Kevin Dahlstrom: And in my case, like a lot of the things that. are on my bullet list. Don’t take a lot of money. They I don’t have for example, things that aren’t on my list or things like run a big company or fly a private jet or drive fancy cars. Yet those are the things that many people are chasing. And I think it’s a really powerful exercise.

[00:07:42] Kevin Dahlstrom: Because of my Twitter following, I get a lot of young guys in particular who are in their twenties or thirties or even forties reaching out to me, asking me for advice. And the situations are all different, but my advice is almost always the same, which is start by defining that ideal in state life that you want.

[00:07:59] Kevin Dahlstrom: And then that tends to shed light on the path right in front of you. It shows you what you need to be doing today. But equally importantly, what you need to stop doing to get to that ideal in state life. 

[00:08:12] Patrick Donley: Can you go into some of the bullet points on your list that you came up with? 

[00:08:17] Kevin Dahlstrom: Sure. As a matter of fact, I will pull it up here so I can just read some of them verbatim.

[00:08:22] Kevin Dahlstrom: I published this list just a couple of days ago on Twitter. My handle is at Camp Four. So let me pull up here and read just a few. Here we go. So I’ll just blast through a few of them. The title of the bulleted list is called Kevin’s Best Life. Challenging intellectually stimulating work done on my terms.

[00:08:41] Kevin Dahlstrom: Mornings free to read, write, and think. At least one active creative personal project. Control 90 percent of my schedule. Lots of sunshine and time outside. Ability to live and work anywhere. A small, beautifully designed home with a view, always available for family. And that’s about the first third of it.

[00:08:57] Kevin Dahlstrom: But you get the notion of the level of detail that I go into. It’s like, what does that in-state life really feel like? What are you doing? How are you living? And it’s as I said, it’s such a powerful exercise and I recommend doing it. if you’re married, doing it with your spouse or your partner.

[00:09:12] Kevin Dahlstrom: And again, it just really having that clearly defined North Star really does provide a lot of clarity about the things you need to be doing today. 

[00:09:22] Patrick Donley: It’s a great exercise. I actually pulled up the thread or the tweet last night and talked it over with my wife and we went over a little bit of our ideal state, but it’s a really great exercise to do.

[00:09:31] Patrick Donley: Is it something that you do on a yearly basis, like a yearly review to just monitor how you’re doing or is it? Just something that you’ve set in place and you’re working towards it pretty much all the time. 

[00:09:43] Kevin Dahlstrom: I get asked that a lot. And is it a moving target basically?

[00:09:46] Kevin Dahlstrom: And the answer is yes, it’s a moving target. I think it moves a lot more when you’re younger than when you’re older. When I was in my twenties, I actually didn’t do this exercise. I wish I would have, that’s why I preach about it so much, but I suspect that my ideal instate would have looked a little differently.

[00:10:01] Kevin Dahlstrom: Then it does today, but I would say now over the past few years, it really doesn’t change. I think I’m pretty locked in on what matters to me. And the good news is I’m 52 years old. So you would hope I’m well on my way to living that life. And in fact, I would say that I’m 98 percent of the way there on my particular list.

[00:10:18] Kevin Dahlstrom: I’ve got an incredible life and that’s why I’m so motivated to share what I’ve it almost feels like I know a secret and I want to share it with as many people as possible. 

[00:10:28] Patrick Donley: Was there a mentor or a book or something that inspired you to do this? 

[00:10:32] Kevin Dahlstrom: See, that’s the thing is I talk about how I learned everything the hard way.

[00:10:36] Kevin Dahlstrom: So hopefully you don’t have to I had a pretty rough upbringing. There weren’t a lot of positive figures or anyone worth emulating in my life. And unfortunately, I had to learn everything on my own and yeah. There was books and things I read along the way, but, Twitter and a lot of the podcasts and all this stuff wasn’t around when I was in my twenties, and so I really did learn a lot of things through trial and error and again that’s why I like to share this information because I think I could have gotten to my ideal end state 10 years or maybe even more earlier in life, because I spent a big chunk of my twenties and thirties pursuing a misguided notion of what winning was.

[00:11:16] Kevin Dahlstrom: I just accepted society’s definition of winning, which meant. Having a successful career checking all the boxes that society says success means. And so I rocketed to the top of the corporate ladder was making tons of money, lived in a mansion in the suburbs of Dallas, had a beautiful wife and two kids, and all the checks.

[00:11:38] Kevin Dahlstrom: But inside I felt like an imposter. Like I was leading the life of some other guy. who wasn’t me because I wasn’t winning in the way that I defined it. It wasn’t winning on my terms. 

[00:11:50] Patrick Donley: You talked about wearing masks and how in the business world, we often have to just wear masks in many cases, but you end up getting confused and you lose touch with your true nature, who you really are.

[00:12:02] Patrick Donley: Talk about that transition from being, living in the mansion, having the seven-figure salary. Talk about the psychological challenges of making that transition to redefining success, which is actually really hard to do, I think, because we are a program from a pretty young age. 

[00:12:18] Kevin Dahlstrom: It’s very hard to do very few people actually, a lot of people recognize.

[00:12:23] Kevin Dahlstrom: that they have been chasing a misguided definition of success. Very few people actually make the hard changes required to change directions. You mentioned the idea of the masks and just to explain that a bit for your listeners, Carl Jung, the philosopher had this idea of masks. He said, look, we all wear masks just to function successfully in society.

[00:12:43] Kevin Dahlstrom: Masks aren’t a bad thing. You need them. to be able to interact with others. What can happen though, if you’re not careful, is that you should accumulate these masks and you lose sight of the person behind the mask. And that often results in what we commonly call a midlife crisis. And Young said that a midlife crisis is actually the opposite of what we think it is.

[00:13:03] Kevin Dahlstrom: Everybody thinks of a midlife crisis as Oh, wow, Patrick turned 45 and He became a different person. It’s actually the exact opposite of that. What’s happening is the masks are coming off and your true nature is being revealed. You’re becoming who you really are. To others, it seems like you’re changing, but to yourself on the inside, you’re becoming your true self.

[00:13:23] Kevin Dahlstrom: And that was absolutely true with me. And in fact, it happened to me in my classically in my mid-forties. And in my case, I realized like. I don’t know if I can go on one more day living this life because it’s just not what I want. And so we did a major reboot of our life. I quit. I walked away from many millions of dollars with nothing planned in terms of what’s next.

[00:13:46] Kevin Dahlstrom: We moved from Dallas to Boulder, Colorado to be in a better environment, put the kids in a new reboot her life. It was a major change. It was very hard, but I knew it was necessary. And now fast forward. Five or seven years. And it’s the best thing I ever did. Making a big change is scary.

[00:14:06] Kevin Dahlstrom: It’s hard. It’s always easier to do nothing. But I’ve met many people who have taken those bold steps to reboot their life, and have yet to meet someone who regrets it. In fact, in almost every case, they’ll say. Wow. It actually worked out even better than I had hoped. 

[00:14:21] Patrick Donley: Talk about the epiphany you had.

[00:14:23] Patrick Donley: I think you were sitting at a corporate boardroom meeting surrounded by a ton of really wealthy guys at the pinnacle of their careers. But fat outta shape unhappy. Talk about that a little bit. 

[00:14:35] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah, I don’t think it happens this way for everybody. But in my case, there was a moment in time epiphany.

[00:14:42] Kevin Dahlstrom: I was sitting in a boardroom. I was a top executive with a multi-billion dollar company making tons of money. And I was sitting around this table with about 10 other guys who were all way more successful than me in terms of money, but they were all miserable. They looked miserable. Many of them had told me in confidence.

[00:15:00] Kevin Dahlstrom: that they were unhappy. And that was my epiphany is this is not the path for me. This is a path to misery and destruction. And I value other things. I value being healthy. I value being outside. I value my passion for rock climbing and the community that comes along with that. And so I reoriented my life to tie back to where we started this discussion, Patrick it’s all about experiences and relationships.

[00:15:24] Kevin Dahlstrom: I rebooted my life to really optimize for those things. 

[00:15:29] Patrick Donley: So part of that reboot was getting into minimalism, which is your next point. So we live obviously in this consumer society. We’re constantly pushed to think that buying the bigger house or the bigger car or whatever that’s being advertised is going to make us happier.

[00:15:43] Patrick Donley: Talk to us about how you found minimalism and maybe just how it’s benefited your life. We’ll go into, I’ve got more questions after you go into it a little bit more. 

[00:15:53] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah. So first of all, when people hear the word minimalism, I think they often misunderstand what it really means. A lot of people think minimalism is giving up all your possessions, denying yourself of joy, and living a monk-like existence.

[00:16:08] Kevin Dahlstrom: And it’s actually the exact opposite of that. Minimalism is all about less is more. So stripping away things that don’t bring you joy to make room for gorging yourself on things that bring you joy. It’s actually minimalism is somewhat heeded. Stig Bordersen, Preston Pysh, William Green, Kyle Grieve, Robert Leonard, Kyle Grieve, Robert Leonard, Kyle Grieve, Warren Buffett, I’ve got a story that I wrote about on Twitter that kind of went viral where I talked about, I’ll tell the short version, but as a teenager, my dream was to own a Porsche 911 turbo convertible.

[00:16:58] Kevin Dahlstrom: I had posters of that car on my wall growing up. It’s just a beautiful car. represented the ultimate in success to me. When I was in my early forties, I got a big bonus one year at work and I was like, you know what, I’m going to go buy that Porsche. And so I went and had the luxury of being able to write, pay cash for a 230, 000 Porsche 911 turbo convertible, just a gorgeous car.

[00:17:23] Kevin Dahlstrom: I posted a picture of it on Twitter. And I got home that night. I was lying in bed and that car was stressing me out. It wasn’t bringing me joy. It was actually stressing me out. And what I realized was I wasn’t that 13-year-old boy anymore who dreamed about having a Porsche. My dream had changed and I just hadn’t taken the time to clearly define it.

[00:17:44] Kevin Dahlstrom: And so the ending to the story is I took the Porsche back to the dealership. And to the dealership credit, the manager shook my hand and said, Congratulations, you’re the first person who’s ever done that. And so that was a great lesson learned for me is again, back to this idea of really taking the time to search your soul and define what success really means to you.

[00:18:06] Kevin Dahlstrom: What that ideal in-state looks like to you. If you look at my list, nowhere on the list anymore is a Porsche. 

[00:18:13] Patrick Donley: Yeah. And now you drive what? Like a 13-year-old, 15-year-old pickup truck or something like that. 

[00:18:19] Kevin Dahlstrom: I do, and I love it. My truck has 170, 000 miles on it. It breaks down all the time, unfortunately, but I love the car because it’s kitted out with all of my climbing gear.

[00:18:29] Kevin Dahlstrom: So I can walk out of my door right now, get in my car, and go climbing because all my gear is in there and organized. It’s ready to go. 

[00:18:38] Patrick Donley: So let’s dive a little further into minimalism. How were you getting into minimalism as you had this epiphany or did that take place afterwards? And as you were cleaning up your lifestyle, you naturally found minimalism.

[00:18:50] Patrick Donley: I know you did an interview. We talked about it before the episode started recording about with Mr. Money Mustache, who was a huge influence on my own life. Talk a little bit about how you found Mr. Money Mustache. At what stage of the game did minimalism enter into your life? 

[00:19:06] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah. I think before that big epiphany, it was more accurate to say I was pursuing maximalism.

[00:19:12] Kevin Dahlstrom: I was just listening to what society said and Hey, if you’re winning, you have a huge house. If you’re winning, you have a boat. And I did all those things. And. I realized that it wasn’t fulfilling and I did like you, I discovered Mr. Money Mustache or Pete, who is now a good friend of mine.

[00:19:28] Kevin Dahlstrom: He lives here in Colorado as well. I learned about the fire movement, in which Mr. Money Mustache is the most prominent proponent of fire, at least on social media, and his writings really influenced me. This was right around the time I was starting to have this awakening around what I really wanted in life.

[00:19:45] Kevin Dahlstrom: And I realized that, yeah. What’s crazy, Patrick, is I was already a wealthy person financially so when I had this epiphany, the good news is by having my head down and focused on just one-dimensional success, I made a bunch of money, but I still didn’t feel freedom. It’s crazy, like to be worth millions of dollars and still not feel free and what Pete’s writings, Mr. Money Mustache’s writings really taught me is, Oh, I actually am already. I already have financial independence. I just need to restructure my life a little bit to take advantage of it. And so the FIRE movement is really the core of it is really that it’s much easier to gain independence by controlling your burn rate, by controlling your spend, than it is to just follow the traditional retirement model of saving up 10 million and then retire at 65 and do nothing.

[00:20:34] Kevin Dahlstrom: That’s absurd. That’s so outdated. The idea is like creating a lifestyle that allows you to gain, to inch your way toward financial freedom much, much sooner. Understanding that most people are going to continue to do some form of work even after they quote-unquote retire. My life’s a good example where you notice the number one bullet point on that, that in-state list that I mentioned was challenging, intellectually stimulating work.

[00:21:00] Kevin Dahlstrom: I’ve found that I’ve tried retiring a couple of times. I found that I’m not happy if I don’t have a little skin in the game and I’m not doing challenging work. So yeah, I’ll continue to make some money that doesn’t necessarily mean I have to have a full-time job because I do have financial independence.

[00:21:15] Kevin Dahlstrom: And so I think it’s really a matter of what the epiphany for me and all of that was just redefining. or I guess rejecting the old, tired factory work retirement model. 

[00:21:29] Patrick Donley: Can you go into some of the calculations that Mr. Money Mustache uses on how to calculate your number? 

[00:21:37] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah. So the whole FIRE movement is based on what’s called the 4 percent rule.

[00:21:43] Kevin Dahlstrom: I like to say it’s the 25 to 1 rule. So the idea is that There have been studies that have been done over the long course of history that show you can safely withdraw 4 percent of your assets. Every year your assets will never get smaller. They’ll only continue to grow through good economies, bad economies, recessions, whatever.

[00:22:04] Kevin Dahlstrom: This is a long-term play. What that means, is because at 4%, it means that whatever your annual spending is, you need to have 25 times that. In assets to be able to withdraw 4%. And if you can live on 50, 000 a year, you need to have 625, 000 in assets. And it’s pretty, pretty simple math, but the power in that equation is it allows you to look at both the income and the.

[00:22:34] Kevin Dahlstrom: The expense side of the equation and what you realize very quickly is I can get to financial independence much faster if I am able to create a lifestyle that doesn’t rely on consumption, that doesn’t rely on me spending a lot of money on things that I don’t actually really care that much about. And so that’s the very, very short version.

[00:22:50] Kevin Dahlstrom: I wrote a thread on the. on fire or the 4 percent rule. There’s lots of content out there on Mr. Money Mustache’s blog. And otherwise, I highly encourage people, strongly encourage people to go read up on the FIRE movement in particular, some of Mr. Money Mustache’s writings, because even if you don’t fully adopt it, I think it’ll change the way you think about personal finance.

[00:23:14] Patrick Donley: So for our listeners that aren’t familiar with the FIRE acronym, it’s financial independence, retire early. There’s another book that I loved called Your Money or Your Life, which was a precursor actually to Mr. Money Mustache, which goes into the same kind of concepts of what he’s espousing, but it’s great stuff.

[00:23:32] Patrick Donley: Definitely. I totally agree with you that it’s something people need to check out. You interviewed him. Did you have any kind of interesting takeaways from the interview? Any interesting kind of little tidbits that you learned from him? The one thing I’d say about Pete. Is he’s a true believer? He definitely practices what he preaches.

[00:23:51] Kevin Dahlstrom: And I would say even on the extreme. And so because Pete is on the extreme, I think those are the best people to learn from because most of us like Pete famously for many years now has published his annual spending. Even with a wife and a kid, his annual spending was something like $27,000, which most of us probably would struggle to live on $27,000 a year.

[00:24:14] Kevin Dahlstrom: But the principle applies at any level. Even if if you live on a hundred thousand, $200,000 a year, the principle still applies. And so I think that’s one thing I took away from my interview with Pete is he practices what he preaches and among. There’s a lot of bad financial advice out there.

[00:24:31] Kevin Dahlstrom: In fact, it drives me nuts that I see a lot of personal finance influencers on Twitter, on YouTube, and elsewhere, just giving really bad advice, bad financial advice. And so I like to find people who really practice what they preach. 

[00:24:47] Patrick Donley: Let’s get into that. You did a post called, it was about five smart money moves that wealthy people make.

[00:24:54] Patrick Donley: that the average middle class American doesn’t. Can we get into that a little bit and touch on some of those smart money moves? 

[00:25:01] Kevin Dahlstrom: Sure. I’m going to pull it up real quick here on Twitter, so I can actually reference it. Yeah. So the thread was called Top Five Money Moves of the rich. And this is basically things that anybody can do to start building wealth.

[00:25:14] Kevin Dahlstrom: It’s what the smartest, wealthiest people do. And so for example a lot of it’s like simple things, but practiced. And compounded over time. The rich accumulate assets is one. You want to spend your money on things that grow in value, like real estate, for example, or stocks, and not spend a lot of money.

[00:25:37] Kevin Dahlstrom: On things that depreciate in value, like cars being the prime example. Cars are the number one offender. Buying a new car, especially if you’re not financially independent already, is a disastrous financial move. It just is. It’s the number one destroyer of wealth. It’s why I could drive anything I want at this point.

[00:25:54] Kevin Dahlstrom: Stage, but I still don’t just cause on principle, I’m just not going to invest my money in things that lose value. So people smart, wealthy people accumulate assets, real estate. One thing I learned fairly late in life is real estate in particular is a system that really is.

[00:26:10] Kevin Dahlstrom: Stacked in our favor, whether that means just owning your own home as a starting point or buying other properties, eventually participating in real estate, private equity funds like I do educate yourself on real estate and start investing there. And then compounding I’m sure we’re going to talk a lot about compounding in the next few minutes, but compounding is really the key to anything.

[00:26:32] Kevin Dahlstrom: It’s small. Actions done consistently over time add up exponentially. And so practicing all these behaviors, keeping putting money into assets that increase in value over 20 years builds extraordinary wealth. And then another one is avoiding debt. Debt is a huge destroyer of wealth.

[00:26:54] Kevin Dahlstrom: You should only use debt to buy assets that are going to grow in value like a home, so a mortgage would be considered a smart use of debt, but buying a car or buying. Buying clothes or whatever on with debt is a bad idea. And then the last thing I mentioned in that thread was to make everything a money move.

[00:27:12] Kevin Dahlstrom: So it becomes really a kind of a fun, almost like a game to live your life in a way and have a mindset such that everything you do is done with a mind toward. inching toward financial success or financial independence. And again, I’ll go back to the fire movement. People should educate themselves on fire because that’s a core principle.

[00:27:32] Kevin Dahlstrom: It becomes, it’s almost like a lifestyle more than it is just a financial strategy. 

[00:27:37] Patrick Donley: Yeah, it’s completely a lifestyle. I wanted to get into it, You’ve been in fintech for most of your career. You started Swell, which we actually, I want to get into Swell because it’s a mission I think of yours to help.

[00:27:49] Patrick Donley: The average person acquires wealth the top 1 percent or top 5 percent have all kinds of services and products available to them that helps build wealth with Swell. Can you go into a little bit about what you’ve done with the company and just the mission that you’ve got with the company of Swell?

[00:28:08] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah. So there’s no question that the, our financial system is in general is rigged heavily in favor of the wealthy. The poor people not only have access to less opportunities in the financial system, they pay more for everything. And so I think we’ve reached a time where we desperately need to democratize our financial system.

[00:28:28] Kevin Dahlstrom: The challenge is consumer finance, banking. These are super-regulated industries. Essentially, the big banks, or banks in general have an oligopoly. On the market, they have this thing called a bank charter that allows them to have superpowers to do things that other companies can’t. And there’s been a lot of investment over the past 5 or 10 years in FinTech, financial technology, a lot of startups trying things.

[00:28:53] Kevin Dahlstrom: The reality is it’s proven to be banking has proven to be an extremely difficult industry to disrupt. And I founded a company. A few years ago called Swell which had the mission of disrupting. We were particularly focused on the credit card industry, credit card debt in the U.S. just topped a trillion dollars for the first time in history.

[00:29:12] Kevin Dahlstrom: The average APR. people are paying on that debt is over 20%. It’s a huge problem that doesn’t get talked about enough. And we’ve set out to disrupt it. The current news is I sold my company Swell. back in May. So I’m no longer the CEO and founder of Swell., but the mission continues, but it’s something I am.

[00:29:31] Kevin Dahlstrom: Really personally passionate about, which is not only just basically helping people get ahead because banks have proven that their motive is anything but to help you get ahead. It’s to help themselves get ahead and there’s a huge need for new companies, new financial services, and new products that help people get ahead, whether it’s in managing their debt.

[00:29:55] Kevin Dahlstrom: Their investments and so on because financial literacy is very low in the U.S.

[00:30:12] Patrick Donley: What’s your next project that you’re into? 

[00:30:15] Kevin Dahlstrom: Oh man, I have far more projects than time. That’s a challenge of mine. In fact, I just came back from two weeks up in the mountains near Telluride, Colorado, and I came back very convicted that I need to really prune my life a little bit.

[00:30:29] Kevin Dahlstrom: I’m really overcommitted because there are so many things I’m excited about. But that being said, I do think it’s absolutely critical to have projects you’re passionate about, multiple projects going on at any given time, whether it’s work-related or purely personal. One project that I’m deep in the middle of right now.

[00:30:47] Kevin Dahlstrom: And I can’t talk a lot about the details, but I’m hosting an event here in Boulder in early September for 18 friends, most of whom came from Twitter. And it’s a bit of a pilot test for an idea that a big idea that I have. So coordinating an event and curating it to my level of excellence has been a huge undertaking, much bigger than I expected, but it’s been also a great creative outlet.

[00:31:10] Kevin Dahlstrom: for me. And so I’m a huge believer in you need to express your creativity and that can look lots of different ways. It can look like doing a home renovation project and using your hands and actually building stuff yourself. It could be a writing project. It could be exploring a new business opportunity like I’m doing.

[00:31:25] Kevin Dahlstrom: I think that’s really important. To be fulfilled. 

[00:31:29] Patrick Donley: You talk about that. That’s one of the other points of a great life is being multidimensional, not just being focused like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, like focusing all their energy. They built great things but at the expense of being multi-dimensional.

[00:31:43] Patrick Donley: So yeah, I think minimalism fits into that. You’ve got time to pursue those passion projects. So all good stuff. I want to switch to talking about the next point, which is fitness and nutrition. So one of your points I think was you want to be at the top. 0. 1 percent of guys. You’re a, is it guys your age or just in general?

[00:32:04] Patrick Donley: Yeah, pick whichever. Yeah. So let’s get into that. When did you get into fitness and nutrition? Talk about some of the things that you’re practicing to really build a great life in that domain. 

[00:32:15] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah, I’ve written a lot about this I’ve always been into sports and athletics my whole life, but in college, I had a.

[00:32:24] Kevin Dahlstrom: Huge health challenge. I didn’t know it at the time, didn’t realize until years later, but I had a severe bout of Epstein Barr virus and Epstein Barr is the virus behind what we call mono and for most people you get it and then your immune system suppresses it and you move on with life. It’s always there, but your immune system keeps it under control for some people.

[00:32:44] Kevin Dahlstrom: And I was one of them. It runs unchecked and it can create huge health problems. It causes your hormones to go out of balance. It causes psychological problems. You’re deeply fatigued, muscle weakness, like a whole host of problems. And that happened to me in college. And it was a huge wake-up call because I had always thought of myself as exceptionally healthy and fit.

[00:33:04] Kevin Dahlstrom: And now all of a sudden I could barely drag myself out of bed. And so that really began a journey where I went deep into Understanding how to rebuild because mainstream medicine has had back then and still has today very few answers for any chronic condition. In fact, I dodged a number of bullets along the way, things that doctors wanted to do that just didn’t feel right to me.

[00:33:28] Kevin Dahlstrom: And so what I learned over time is there’s no shortcuts. It’s a lot of it boils down to just diet, nutrition, and. An exercise. And so that’s become a huge part of my life. And also at a more fundamental level, you only get one life to live on this planet. Why wouldn’t you want to like your body is your vessel for experiencing life?

[00:33:50] Kevin Dahlstrom: Why wouldn’t you want your vessel to be in tip-top shape? Why wouldn’t you want to drive a Ferrari and not a Yugo? And so it’s just it’s just a logical thing to me. I think it’s really sad when someone Let’s themselves gets obese or way out of shape because you literally can’t experience life to its fullest.

[00:34:08] Kevin Dahlstrom: If your body is not healthy. A great example, is that you can’t have great sex if you’re not healthy. And so I guess you can choose to opt out of that or miss out on it I want to experience life, everything that life has to offer. And so I made make, I’ve always made health and fitness.

[00:34:25] Kevin Dahlstrom: A top priority for me. In fact, it really should be the top priority because it really is true that the old saying that a healthy man has a hundred problems, a sick man only has one. It really is true that if you don’t have your health, you have nothing. 

[00:34:40] Patrick Donley: I had a little bout with diverticulitis a while ago and it put me it just put me down.

[00:34:45] Patrick Donley: And yeah, you’re right. When you’ve got a health crisis like you had in college, you actually had to drop out of school when that happened, right? 

[00:34:54] Kevin Dahlstrom: Oh yeah, it was severe. In fact, I dropped out for a semester, but even when I came back a semester later, I was still very ill. And I limped, limped my way through college and then slowly began to rebuild.

[00:35:06] Kevin Dahlstrom: So it was, no, it was devastating. 

[00:35:09] Patrick Donley: To your point, when you have a health crisis like that, you realize how important your health is and it’s not to be taken for granted. And like you said, you need to focus time and energy on it, like as one of the top priorities. 

[00:35:19] Kevin Dahlstrom: And the older you get, the more time and energy you need to put into it.

[00:35:22] Kevin Dahlstrom: So I always, I call it tightening the screws. When you’re in your twenties, you can get away with you want to stay fit, but it doesn’t take a whole lot. Your body’s working in your favor as you get in your thirties, forties, or fifties, you have to be able to devote more and more time to your health.

[00:35:37] Kevin Dahlstrom: That’s why, by the way, all these things are connected. That’s why it’s important to control your time. Because if you’re still working 60 hours a week in an office, it will be very hard to devote another 20 or 30 hours to your health and fitness. And so you’ve got to gain control of your time as you progress.

[00:35:54] Patrick Donley: Have you come across it’s Dr. Peter Attia, the book Longevity? Have you read that at all? 

[00:36:00] Kevin Dahlstrom: Of course. Yeah. Atiyah is a rock star. I’ve been in that movement way before it was cool. It’s really fashionable now I was doing what they now call biohacking 20 years ago, 25 years ago.

[00:36:12] Kevin Dahlstrom: So I’m familiar with Atiyah and all those guys. And yeah, I think it’s great that it’s becoming. a huge focus now. 

[00:36:21] Patrick Donley: Diet-wise, what are some things you do? Do you have any kind of special diet that you implement? 

[00:36:25] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah I think one of the keys in diet is not to be overly dogmatic because if you are, it will never stick.

[00:36:31] Kevin Dahlstrom: So if you look at my ideal in-state list, one of the bullet points on there says eat an 80 percent clean diet. I found that for me I avoid things that I know I don’t do well on. For me, for example. Ever since my illness in college, I’ve been super sensitive to alcohol, like way more than most people.

[00:36:49] Kevin Dahlstrom: And so I use, I still drink, but I do it very sparingly, but generally just eating really clean food. Most of the time, everything in moderation, including moderation. So I definitely have binge days and I like my ice cream and desserts. But if you can stick to an 80 percent clean diet, plus exercise, you’re going to do great.

[00:37:08] Patrick Donley: Let’s move on to the next thing that we have in common, which is writing. You spend, I think a lot of time doing the Twitter threads. I think a lot of your mornings are spent doing writing. In a lot of ways, it’s a superpower. If you can write well, especially with Twitter, for example, there are a lot of people on there, including yourself because of their skill in writing have really been able to grow their followers and provide great content.

[00:37:29] Patrick Donley: Talk to me a little bit about. Writing for you, how you got into it, your practice, any kind of tips and tricks that you have for being a better writer. 

[00:37:38] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah. And I would actually say Patrick, that writing is a superpower, even if you’re not good at it, because the real benefit of writing goes to the writer, not to the reader.

[00:37:48] Kevin Dahlstrom: Like the fact that if you can for example, if you write on Twitter and you can amass a following, whatever, tens of thousands of followers, that’s like the icing on top. It’s great. It’s very flattering, but the real value of writing is in the writing itself, not in the publishing and having other people read it.

[00:38:04] Kevin Dahlstrom: And I believe that it sounds like you do that developing a practice of writing is critical because there is nothing on earth that sharpens thinking like writing. And again, you don’t have to be a good writer, but I think just that getting into that practice and I’m big on routine. A big part of the biggest part of my morning routine is.

[00:38:23] Kevin Dahlstrom: Sitting down and writing with a cup of coffee and the amazing thing about Twitter in particular is there’s like this, Writing often requires inspiration and when I wake up in the morning and I go through my Twitter feed, you know in 10 minutes I’ll usually see something that inspires a thought and so at any given time I’m in the midst of writing 10 or 12 or 20 different little pieces or threads or tweets.

[00:38:47] Kevin Dahlstrom: And the vast majority of them never see the light of day. I don’t, I publish maybe one in 10 or one in 20 things I write, but the other 95 percent that doesn’t get published is still immensely valuable to me because again, it really nothing sharpens thinking. My advice to anybody is just to start.

[00:39:05] Kevin Dahlstrom: Start with five minutes a day. It can be crappy writing. You don’t have to publish anything. If you think you’ve written something that’s great, publish it on Twitter and you’re going to be shouting into the void. And you may shout into the void for months and months, but that’s fine.

[00:39:19] Kevin Dahlstrom: I could go on and on about the value of writing. And in fact again, just like fitness, as you progress in life, I think you want to be able to devote more of your time to activities like writing. I probably spend, I don’t know, at least five to 10 hours a week. Writing, depending on what’s happening that week.

[00:39:39] Patrick Donley: Was that your experience when you first got on Twitter that you were writing into the void and there wasn’t a lot of feedback? 

[00:39:45] Kevin Dahlstrom: Oh, absolutely. That’s how it all starts. And I think my account’s a little bit different than a lot of my peers on Twitter and from day one, I said, I’m going to write for an audience of one, which is me.

[00:39:59] Kevin Dahlstrom: And if I’m pleased with it, that’s my only bar. And I’ve stuck to that now three years later, I’ve stuck to it and it’s worked pretty well, but I do, I’ll be if I’m being honest like I do see some of my friends who’ve like really learned to write content for engagement. They write content specifically to drive views or comments or followers or whatever, and they’ve got way more followers than I have, but I just can’t make myself do that.

[00:40:23] Kevin Dahlstrom: Like I just have no interest in writing garbage or engagement bait. That’s maybe to my detriment, but what I will say is the nice thing about sticking to your guns is the followers that the 50, 000 or whatever followers that I do have, they follow me because they truly enjoy my content.

[00:40:40] Kevin Dahlstrom: They don’t follow me because I posted a clever piece of clickbait. And so that’s something I’m proud of. But yes I started off with zero followers. This is really during the pan beginning of the pandemic and you’re shouting into the void, you’re commenting on other people’s posts.

[00:40:55] Kevin Dahlstrom: And it’s it’s one of those like slowly than all at once. It’s a snowball effect. I would say like anything in life, consistency is key. 

[00:41:03] Patrick Donley: I agree. I think people lose a little authenticity when they do the click-bait tweets. And Kevin Kelly had a great article on a thousand true fans. I don’t know if you’ve come across that before, but it’s great.

[00:41:14] Patrick Donley: Great article just about being authentic and crafting stuff that your fans are going to love. I think that’s what you’ve done. What I find really valuable and helpful is just you’ve got a great message that you’re consistent with and it’s just great content. So you’ve got. True fans. 

[00:41:32] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah.

[00:41:32] Kevin Dahlstrom: For your listeners. I highly recommend reading that essay. Just Google 1000 true fans, Kevin Kelly. And he wrote that article by the way in 2008. And the basic idea behind that article was, Hey, these days with the internet if you can amass. a thousand fans who are like really true fans of yours, you can make a living.

[00:41:52] Kevin Dahlstrom: And the article was actually a little bit of ahead of its time because that wasn’t really true at the time he wrote it. But I actually believe now in 2023, if you have a thousand true fans, you actually can find ways to monetize and make a living off of that. And so it’s an amazing world we live in now, but I absolutely agree with you that I’d rather have one true fan.

[00:42:12] Kevin Dahlstrom: than a hundred sort of casual followers or people who are following me for the wrong reason. 

[00:42:18] Patrick Donley: Do you have any other writing resources that have been helpful for you in crafting a practice? Something that comes to mind real quick for me is the morning pages. I don’t know if you’ve ever done those. 

[00:42:29] Kevin Dahlstrom: I’ll be honest.

[00:42:30] Kevin Dahlstrom: I’m a little bit of an outlier in this in that I’m not a big book learner. So everything I do, I tend to learn by doing, and I definitely draw inspiration from other writers that I admire. And a lot of them are on Twitter, but I haven’t really done any structure. I haven’t really used any structured approach to improving my writing or learning.

[00:42:48] Kevin Dahlstrom: So yeah, I really couldn’t point out any resources. 

[00:42:52] Patrick Donley: Yeah, that’s one I would mention. Julia Cameron, I think is the author’s name, and it’s just a daily practice of writing three pages, just stream of consciousness, almost just journaling, just whatever’s on your head getting it down on the page and creative stuff starts to come out.

[00:43:06] Kevin Dahlstrom: One thing I’d say though, and I’m going to be a little bit of a contrarian here is three pages is a big ask. I think that’s a nonstarter for most people. Like most people simply aren’t going to do this. Great to say. But start with one sentence, literally write a sentence down and that you think is interesting or clever and then build from there.

[00:43:24] Kevin Dahlstrom: And the other thing I’d say is one of my pet peeves, and it happens a lot in today’s world of there’s unlimited podcasts you can listen to. There’s tons of business books. And I think often people try to substitute doing with learning and they listen to all the podcasts, they read all the books, but they never actually do anything.

[00:43:41] Kevin Dahlstrom: And it becomes a form of procrastination. So in anything that you do, my advice is to have a massive bias toward action. Like literally before you think like, how can I educate myself? Just go do it. And then you’ll understand exactly what you need to be educated on. 

[00:43:58] Patrick Donley: Let’s get into the next thing that you focused on, that you wrote about in the tweet, which was the importance of not doing dumb things.

[00:44:04] Patrick Donley: This kind of reminds me of a Charlie Munger thing about how he just doesn’t want to make stupid decisions, basically. Talk about some of the dumb decisions that you see younger people make that you just want to shake them, things that maybe you did in your own life. 

[00:44:16] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah there’s a lot of talk about the things you should do, like the strategies for success, but there’s not much talk about the things you should not do, like the things you should avoid.

[00:44:26] Kevin Dahlstrom: And in my opinion, those are equally important. And I see young people making mistakes like that all the time. And we actually talked about some of them when we were talking about the fire movement and personal finance. Like a lot of them have to do with just making dumb financial moves. I’m going to say something probably a little bit provocative and controversial Student loans are a great example.

[00:44:45] Kevin Dahlstrom: Is that if you’re going to take out student loans, you better make sure that you’re doing it for a career that will allow you to pay those back pretty darn quickly. And a lot of people do, or running up credit card debt for buying things that aren’t assets and things like that, that can actually, what ends up happening, particularly when it comes to finance is they keep you from freedom.

[00:45:05] Kevin Dahlstrom: They trap you into now having to do things that you probably don’t want to do for a lot longer than you otherwise would. And yeah, I’m a huge advocate of Don’t do things that make your life miserable. And you could talk about vices, addictions, whatever, you keep those things in check. And that’s for some people, I would argue that the more important side of the equation is to stop doing unproductive, unhealthy, toxic things.

[00:45:31] Patrick Donley: Which takes me to your next point, which is the, and ties into minimalism, but the importance of keeping a low burn rate, not getting yourself into financial trouble that you’ve got to lead a life that you don’t. really love and don’t want to be leading, which often happens. 

[00:45:47] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah, it’s the consumption trap, right?

[00:45:48] Kevin Dahlstrom: And this is hardwired in me because I grew up in a, an environment in a childhood where the future was always so uncertain. And so I have a bit of a depression-era mindset and even though I’m a wealthy person, I still keep our burn rate quite low with the option to reduce it even lower if I needed to, which is a little bit.

[00:46:10] Kevin Dahlstrom: I guess doesn’t even make sense necessarily at this point in my life, because I don’t have to, but it makes me sleep well at night. And again, as you mentioned, it ties into this idea of minimalism, where what you realize is actually the less is more you’re actually not, you’re not more miserable when you.

[00:46:29] Kevin Dahlstrom: Do less and spend less. You’re more happy. 

[00:46:32] Patrick Donley: Yeah. And it just keeping that low burn rate just gives you optionality in life. It just gives you tremendous more choices than you would otherwise. 

[00:46:41] Kevin Dahlstrom: Absolutely. Mark Cuban actually preaches about that. He’s if you’re trapped financially, then you’re going to miss out on all the opportunities that come your way because you’re just not in a position to pursue them.

[00:46:52] Patrick Donley: Let’s move on to your next point, which was the importance of finding your happy place in the tribe. In your own case, you were living, I think, in like suburbs of Dallas, moved to Boulder. You found your people by climbing. Talk about the importance of doing that for people and the challenges of it. 

[00:47:08] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah, I’m glad you talked about the place and the tribe together because they are, they really are very intertwined and I have a somewhat contrarian or I guess maybe unpopular point of view on this, which is I actually believe the place where you live is as important, maybe even more important than your choice of life partner.

[00:47:28] Kevin Dahlstrom: And the reason for that is your life partner, let’s say your wife or my wife, they can only influence your happiness so much. In fact, if you’re relying on your partner to be happy. That’s probably a recipe for disaster anyway. But the place you live, I refer to it as your aquarium. You’re literally immersed in it 24 seven.

[00:47:45] Kevin Dahlstrom: It influences everything that you do. And one of the things that it influences is the community. So, I’m a great example when I discovered rock climbing 25 years ago. For many years, I lived in Dallas and made it work. Even though Dallas is a terrible place for a rock climber to live, it was very difficult for me to build a community of other climbers.

[00:48:03] Kevin Dahlstrom: And then finally I moved to Boulder and it was like a huge tailwind behind me all of a sudden. Like I’m literally staring out my window right now at rock. There’s a huge community of rock climbers here. They’re motivated. They’re easy to meet. And everything. It’s like the rising tide that floats all boats.

[00:48:20] Kevin Dahlstrom: Everything just gets better when you live in your happy place. Yet so many people simply live where they live because that’s where they live. And they have a vague notion that they’d like to be somewhere else, but they’ll never take action on it. And so it’s a huge thing for me. It’s if you don’t love where you live, then I have the courage to move and there are lots of reasons not to move.

[00:48:42] Kevin Dahlstrom: Lots of excuses, family, work, whatever. I have found that where there’s a will, there’s a way. And if you really want to do it, you can find a way to make it work. 

[00:48:51] Patrick Donley: Can you talk about how you went about it or how you’d recommend somebody that’s living in some place, maybe they grew up in, they haven’t left their hometown, they don’t like it.

[00:49:00] Patrick Donley: How do they go about like finding a good place, maybe taking little experiments to figure out where they want to be? 

[00:49:06] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah, no, I think it’s worth like you should definitely visit some places and find your happy place. And there are a lot of factors to consider. It’s individualized. I think before we started recording, I’d mentioned that we did a trial run of a month in Boulder before we moved here.

[00:49:20] Kevin Dahlstrom: And in our case, it was a no-brainer because if you’re a rock climber or you’re into the outdoors. And you’re still doing business stuff. Boulder really is it’s not even close. Boulder’s at the top of the list because you’ve got a major university here. You’ve got a business community. You’ve got a major airport, 30 minutes away, world-class climbing, running trail, running everything right at your doorstep.

[00:49:40] Kevin Dahlstrom: Great weather throughout the year. So those are all the factors we weighed and it was a no-brainer for us. But yeah I think what I would say to people is start taking baby steps. Go explore a place, see what it feels like to live there. Start doing the research, and start getting your finances in order so that you can do it.

[00:49:57] Kevin Dahlstrom: In my case, I waited way too long and basically just ripped the bandaid off, like just said, look, we’re moving. And to be honest, my family wasn’t even completely aligned on this. But it was something that I needed. I was in my forties at the time and it’s something I needed. And sometimes you have to make hard decisions on behalf of your family that may not be popular.

[00:50:15] Kevin Dahlstrom: You fast forward five years now and my family loves living here. It’s of course, this is better than living in the suburbs of Dallas. 

[00:50:23] Patrick Donley: Change is hard though. I’m sure you’ve got two girls. They probably had their friends in Dallas, all of that, like that initial step is you’re going to get some pushback, I think.

[00:50:31] Patrick Donley: And that’s to be expected in most people’s cases. 

[00:50:34] Kevin Dahlstrom: Change is hard, but people need to remember that all the good stuff goes to those who are willing to be brave and make bold moves. All the spoils go to the bold. 

[00:50:46] Patrick Donley: Let’s go to your next point here that you say is important for living a great life.

[00:50:50] Patrick Donley: And that’s helping others, having an abundance mentality. That’s one thing I’ve loved about being on Twitter, real estate, Twitter, or small business footer, whatever it is. People really have this abundance mentality of sharing their playbook, and answering DMs. Talk a little bit about in your own life, how service, and helping others look for you.

[00:51:08] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah. The secret is that. Helping others is actually a selfish endeavor because the thing that most people don’t realize is when you help somebody else, you are the biggest beneficiary, both directly in terms of the way it makes you feel and the fulfillment you feel from that. But even if you play the long game, the good things you do always come back to benefit you.

[00:51:29] Kevin Dahlstrom: And you can call it karma. You can call it whatever you want. But I’ve seen it happen over and over as you’re putting positive energy out there. You’re helping others. Everybody wins. And so that’s on my ideal in-state life list. That is explicitly listed as something that I want to make a priority.

[00:51:47] Kevin Dahlstrom: And to be honest, that is what Twitter has largely become for me. I still have a policy today that I still hold too, even though it’s a lot of work, which is I respond to all dms and I end up spending hours every week doing that. So it, it is a burden, but I view it as an honor and a responsibility that I have.

[00:52:06] Kevin Dahlstrom: If I’m gonna put this content out there, I need to be able to help people understand and implement it in their own lives. And so that’s become an incredible conduit for me. And honestly, again, back to this idea of it being a selfish endeavor, the feedback I get, I just got a message from a guy.

[00:52:22] Kevin Dahlstrom: The other day he said, Hey, just checking back in at five months later, you gave me this advice. Here are the changes I made and it’s worked out better than I expected. I get chills right now, just talking about that. That’s what it’s all about for me. 

[00:52:35] Patrick Donley: Super satisfying. And it does, it feels great. So I just really commend guys like you.

[00:52:39] Patrick Donley: There are others on Twitter that do the same, but it does take a ton of time to answer DMS. And it’s very generous. So thank you for doing that. You answered mine. I appreciate it. 

[00:52:50] Kevin Dahlstrom: Again, it makes me a little uncomfortable when people say that, even though it is flattering because, to be honest, like a lot of it is just selfishly motivated.

[00:52:57] Kevin Dahlstrom: It’s it just feels so good to do that, that I want more and more. 

[00:53:02] Patrick Donley: Makes sense. The next list or the next item on the list was to. Avoid toxicity, avoid the haters, and get toxic people out of your life, whether it’s social media or in real life. Can you go into that a little bit about how you’ve gone about doing that?

[00:53:16] Patrick Donley: Maybe how you handle negativity and haters online? 

[00:53:20] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah. So I’m going to expand it beyond online to just life in general, because this is a lesson I wish I had taken to heart many years earlier is I think we have a tendency to. Cling to relationships or even, or maybe just let them linger with people who are taking energy from us.

[00:53:37] Kevin Dahlstrom: And I’ve really become convicted that in any relationship, there has to be at least an equal energy exchange. Like you have to be able to get back as much energy as you give. And it’s always of course, in different ways, and it’s not always. Balanced in the short run, but over the long run, there has to be an exchange and it’s setting boundaries if that’s not the case.

[00:53:57] Kevin Dahlstrom: Again, having grown up amongst a lot of toxic relationships, it’s been life changing for me personally. to set boundaries and hold to them. And really think about who’s in your inner circle and to curate that very carefully. You want people who can basically who are positive and will help you grow as a person.

[00:54:17] Kevin Dahlstrom: And no bad vibes are allowed in my inner circle. It doesn’t mean you don’t have problems and you don’t tackle them and help each other out. But again, in general, the relationships have to be a positive energy exchange. 

[00:54:31] Patrick Donley: Yeah, it’s the cliche about being, and it’s true, but it is a cliche about being the average of the five people that you’re around the most.

[00:54:37] Patrick Donley: So it’s important to curate that very carefully. 

[00:54:40] Kevin Dahlstrom: So true. Yeah, it really is true. 

[00:54:43] Patrick Donley: So the next point on here was the ability to say no, and this is a little bit. Tied into that, just the ability to set boundaries. Talk about how you’ve gone about that. I’m sure you get a lot of requests for your time, your energy, and your money.

[00:54:55] Patrick Donley: How do you think about saying no to things? 

[00:54:58] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah I think there’s a seasons of life aspect to this. So I wrote something about this a while back where when you’re younger, you need to be saying yes to most things like within reason, because you need to put yourself out there, explore opportunities.

[00:55:11] Kevin Dahlstrom: But when you get older, let’s say in your forties, fifties and beyond, you’re going to find yourself meeting this. Say no more than yes. And what it’s really about is just living your priorities. If you say that something is a priority, you can’t do everything. So if you say that something is a priority by definition, that means you have to say yes to things that align to that priority and say no to things that don’t.

[00:55:31] Kevin Dahlstrom: And so that’s again, one of the huge benefits of defining that, that ideal end state life. It makes it really easy to know what to say yes and what to say no to. And once you have real clarity on that, you’re gonna get really good.

[00:55:46] Patrick Donley: I want to get into your podcast, it’s called compounding, and that’s one of the other items on your list on how to live a great life. Talk about how why you named it compounding. It’s a great podcast. I’ll put links in the show notes to some of the episodes that I’ve listened to that I thought were really great, but go into that a little bit about compounding and the importance of it.

[00:56:05] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah. So my podcast is called Compounding. The reason it’s called compounding is I just think that’s the key to everything in life. Small, consistent effort over time becomes exponential, whether you’re talking about money fitness or relationships, whatever you’re talking about. The idea behind my podcast was to talk to exceptional people who have built great lives.

[00:56:25] Kevin Dahlstrom: They’ve not just had success in whatever career field they’ve chosen, but have built great lives. My podcast is quite different from most in the sense that number one, I do all of them face-to-face. I just think there’s a dynamic that happens when you’re face-to-face that doesn’t happen through Zoom.

[00:56:40] Kevin Dahlstrom: But as a result of that, I do very few podcasts. So like in the two years compounding has been around, I only have seven episodes. So I’ve really had to focus on quality over quantity. I’m really proud of each and every episode. And that really is the basis is like talking to people and learning from people who have been there and done it so that we can apply those lessons in our lives and start compounding the same.

[00:57:01] Patrick Donley: There are great books too that speak to this. Atomic Habits comes to mind about just 1 percent improvements, incremental improvements, and how over time the exponential growth of whatever habit you choose, whether it’s money or fitness or whatever’s pretty incredible. The growth after a longer period of time.

[00:57:18] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah. Look, I’m 52 years old and I will say my life is a testament to stacking 1 percent gains. And if there’s anything that sets me apart from my peers, it’s that I never stopped. Like  I kept doing things consistently and in a sustainable way. And what happens is over time. That doesn’t just put you 10 percent ahead of people that puts you 10 X ahead.

[00:57:39] Kevin Dahlstrom: And I’m not bragging, but I’m saying when you look at various aspects of my life, I feel like a lot of the people who were my peers 10 years ago are no longer my peers simply because of compounding. 

[00:57:50] Patrick Donley: Maybe it was you. I can’t remember who, but somebody said that the flex as you get older is being in really great shape rather than having a, whatever, a great title or a salary or something like that.

[00:58:01] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah, no, I said the tweet was under 40. Money is a flex over 40 fitness is a flex because if once you’re over 40 lots of people have money like in big titles and whatever But not many people have money and are really fit or really good at some other craft 

[00:58:18] Patrick Donley: So that brings me but to the next point about three behaviors that you wrote about that would elevate anybody above 95 percent of all people can you go into what those three things were?

[00:58:29] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah. And this was really just a funny way of highlighting the fact that the bar is so low out there, folks. If you want to get ahead in life, I’d said, you just need to do three things. And this is B this is very sincere. So number one is show up on time every time. So just being reliable and consistent and showing up on time that already probably puts you in the top 20 percent keep your promises, right?

[00:58:53] Kevin Dahlstrom: So if you say you’re going to do something, do it. Now you’re in the top 10 percent probably, or if not 5 percent and then show enthusiasm for whatever you do. And those three things, I believe, actually, if you do those three things consistently, you’re in the top 1 percent of human beings. And it seems so simple, yet it’s so rare for people to do those things.

[00:59:14] Patrick Donley: I had a friend of my dad’s. He took his son to the DMV when he turned 16 and he was like, son, look around here. This is your competition. This is who you have to beat. And like you said it’s a fairly low bar if you do those three things. 

[00:59:28] Kevin Dahlstrom: Honestly, even among success quote-unquote successful people, I’m astonished at how few people can actually just manage their time.

[00:59:35] Kevin Dahlstrom: And show up. It’s not that hard, like just to show up on time for things or if you say you’re going to do something, just do it. And we’re all busy. We all have that excuse. It’s convenient, but you either commit to keeping your promises or you don’t. Yeah, it’s almost impossible to not have success.

[00:59:50] Kevin Dahlstrom: If you do those three things, 

[00:59:53] Patrick Donley: Good points. I want to get into this next one, which is the importance of seeking truth or the importance of exploring religion. This was a topic that you went into with one of your guests pretty deeply. That I love. So can you talk a little bit about that, exploring religion, exploring and the search for truth, and how that’s shown up in your life?

[01:00:12] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah I like to think of myself as first and foremost, a truth seeker. I’m a Christian. So from a religious standpoint, that is what I practice. But even from a broader standpoint. I think that you have to have a real lack of imagination to not believe there’s a lot more to this universe than we understand.

[01:00:29] Kevin Dahlstrom: We learn more and more every day with the James Webb space telescope or whatever, like just how many billions, if not trillions of galaxies there are out there in all likelihood. There are many billions, tens of billions of earth-like planets. There’s probably life out there.

[01:00:43] Kevin Dahlstrom: Like what’s the meaning of all this? Like where did it all come from? And I think at some point in life, you’ve really got to start thinking about these bigger issues and make some decisions for yourself. And I’m not one to push religion on anything, anybody. In fact, I never talk about it on my Twitter account, but all I encourage people to do is find your own truth.

[01:01:02] Kevin Dahlstrom: Start asking those questions, start educating yourself because there’s so much out there. that is a mystery and that can’t be explained by humans or by science. 

[01:01:14] Patrick Donley: And it’s just absolutely fascinating to learn about whether it’s outer space or religions, the different world religions and philosophies like all of it is super interesting and beneficial to anybody to learn more about and study.

[01:01:27] Kevin Dahlstrom: I think so. I think it’s way more interesting. So I’ll use this as an opportunity to talk about something because it ties into this idea of being multidimensional. So I’ve gone on a few like I would call high-end guys retreats, where it’s like a bunch of successful business guys go away for the weekend.

[01:01:44] Kevin Dahlstrom: We go to Santa Barbara or we go to Mexico or whatever your listeners can probably guess it. Some of the types of groups I’m talking about and the problem I have with those is they’re insanely boring to me because a lot of these guys just want to sit around and talk about business 12 hours a day.

[01:01:59] Kevin Dahlstrom: God bless them. Like I’m sure that’s going to help them be successful in that endeavor. But when I’m hanging out with people, I want to talk about a lot more, like I love business, but I lose interest in that after a few hours. And I want to move on to other subjects. I like to talk about these bigger topics and it’s something that just doesn’t happen much anymore.

[01:02:16] Kevin Dahlstrom: So that’s a little bit of a pet peeve of mine. It’s look, if you owe it to yourself, to at least ultimately a lot of the things we do in the day to day world, especially in the business world, they add up to nothing at the end of the day. On your deathbed, all that stuff adds up to nothing. What adds up to something back to our original point was experiences, relationships, and some of the big ideas and thoughts you’ve had over your life.

[01:02:40] Patrick Donley: Next one that I know obviously is super important to you being a rock climber is the importance of getting outside, being in nature. getting in touch with whatever our caveman tendencies are rootedness to the earth. Can you go into that? 

[01:02:55] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah for all of humanity’s history, we evolved to live in harmony with nature and with the sun.

[01:03:02] Kevin Dahlstrom: And what’s crazy is like modern man has existed for roughly 300, 000 years only in the past 50 years. Have we really retreated indoors and live under artificial lights, never come into contact with nature? It’s insane, if you think about it, to think that won’t end really poorly. And we’re seeing the results of that in our health, right?

[01:03:21] Kevin Dahlstrom: All these chronic conditions. So I’m a huge believer in the answers are found outside. And get outside, get sun exposure regularly. And that’s a huge component of not just health, but of just living a happy life. 

[01:03:36] Patrick Donley: I’ve got three kids that are often glued to screens, glued to video games, and it’s like a huge challenge to get them outside.

[01:03:43] Patrick Donley: I saw a study done that kids that spent something like over two hours a day on video games are very likely to end up fat, lonely, depressed. I shared with them this. I’m like you guys need to get outside, go on a bike ride, go swimming, do something. 

[01:03:58] Kevin Dahlstrom: What I say to that is, duh. How is that not obvious to people?

[01:04:03] Patrick Donley: The last item here is you wrote about the grass being greener and there’s a quote I love called, Comparison is a thief of joy. So talk about that final point about the grass often being greener on the other side. How do you avoid comparisons? 

[01:04:17] Kevin Dahlstrom: Yeah, it’s hard. Especially in the age of social media, there’s levels to the game.

[01:04:22] Kevin Dahlstrom: And no matter what game you’re playing, there’s always someone who’s a level above you that you can compare yourself to. And you feel like you’ve never really been successful. So I think that’s part of it is like realizing finding satisfaction by embracing what you have. And that’s something I struggle with particularly because I’m a high achiever.

[01:04:40] Kevin Dahlstrom: I’m a, I like to chase shiny new objects. I like to get better, to improve, to have more, all those things. But you really have to keep that in check. And when it really gets dangerous is when you get into this grass is greener type mentality. And I’ll use it for, as a simple example, marriage, right?

[01:04:57] Kevin Dahlstrom: And so when you’ve been with anybody for 10, 20, 30 years, it’s really easy to have those thoughts of, How much greener the grass is on the other side, but you have to check yourself and then remind yourself of all the good in your life that you’re not embracing. And then all the bad that will come if you go chasing green grass all the time.

[01:05:16] Kevin Dahlstrom: That’s a, that path only leads to misery. And I’m. I used marriage as an example, but it really applies in any area of life. So one of the things I mantra that I remind myself of regularly is happiness is a choice. It really is every day you wake up, you’re going to view the glasses half full or half empty.

[01:05:35] Kevin Dahlstrom: And it becomes self-fulfilling. And so if you should always wake up, choose to believe the glasses are full and then little subtle behaviors and attitudes will make that come to fruition. 

[01:05:46] Patrick Donley: I think you wrote like it’s an asymmetric upside, right? By choosing to be optimistic and positive. 

[01:05:52] Kevin Dahlstrom: There’s no downside to choosing to be happy.

[01:05:54] Kevin Dahlstrom: But there’s a huge upside and the converse is also true. Choosing to be miserable. There’s no upside whatsoever. You don’t, nobody wins from that, but you sure do lose a lot. 

[01:06:05] Patrick Donley: Kevin, this has been awesome. I really have enjoyed going through this thread. I encourage our listeners to check it out on Twitter.

[01:06:11] Patrick Donley: For anybody who wants to get in touch with you or learn more about you, talk to us about a few ways they can do that. 

[01:06:17] Kevin Dahlstrom: There’s only one way. Twitter is my hub for communication. So find me on Twitter at camp four, that’s C A M P the number four, that Twitter handle comes from camp four is the name of the climber’s campground.

[01:06:29] Kevin Dahlstrom: at Yosemite National Park. It was the crucible of American rock climbing. And so many years ago, like 20, 2007, when I signed up for Twitter, I got that camp for handle. 

[01:06:40] Patrick Donley: Anything else you want to add before we close out anything that we didn’t touch on that you maybe wanted to talk about? 

[01:06:46] Kevin Dahlstrom: No, Patrick, this has been a great discussion.

[01:06:48] Kevin Dahlstrom: So I invite people to follow me on Twitter and DMs. If you have any questions or want to make a comment. 

[01:06:54] Patrick Donley: Awesome. Kevin, thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. Okay. Thanks, Patrick. Okay, folks. That’s all I had for today’s episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I’ll see you back here real soon.

[01:07:06] Patrick Donley: Thank you 

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