Do you want to just live an ordinary, mundane life or do you want to live an extraordinary one? What is really required for you to transcend above the status quo and live a truly AMAZING life? How can you create that with your money?
In this episode, Chris Miles will share the ONE THING you need to do to see extraordinary results in ANY aspect of your life. It’s not about working harder or smarter in what you do, it’s about working right. Get comfortable being uncomfortable today!
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The Secret To An Extraordinary Life
Welcome to our show. It’s for you, those of you that work so hard for your money and you want your money to start working harder for you. You want that freedom and cashflow, not 30 or 40 years from now but right now to live that life that you love with those that you love but it’s not just about getting rich. It’s about living a rich life because as you are blessed financially, you can create a greater impact and bless the lives of others. That is the ripple effect you’re here to do. That is a ripple effect I’m so proud and grateful that I’m able to provide for you as well.
Thank you for reading and binging. Most importantly, thank you for taking action and being willing to change your life. Many of you reached out. It’s funny because some of you are like, “I’ve been reading this forever. I finally decided to email and reach out.” Voila, the next thing you know, they’re not only working with us but they’re getting results. I remember we had our birthday type of message for my birthday, not necessarily the company’s birthday. I had my birthday special. We have had clients from that already starting to get some good results, including one client that is almost halfway to his $15,000 a month passive income goal.
I want to give a special shout-out to those of you. You weren’t just a hearer of the word but you were the doer as well. You’re willing to reach out and do something about it. Your lives are starting to be blessed. That is why we’re here. Why I keep doing this every day is because I want to see your lives change, specifically at least 1,000 of you financially independent by 2030. Thank you so much. As a reminder, if you want to see how much passive income you can create, go to our website, MoneyRipples.com, take the Passive Income Calculator, fill it out and see what your results will be. It’s pretty impressive to see what you can create in twelve months. Go do that.
The Secret To A Better Life
I want to talk about what’s that secret to an extraordinary life. I’ve been listening to different books lately like Ed Mylett’s book, The Power of One More. I’ve been listening to other things as well and even seeing some of my relationships and friends. I ran the Chicago Marathon. I was doing that and was blown away at what can create a better quality of life. If you’re reading this and listening to podcasts, the truth is you probably want something more than a status quo, mediocre and boring life. I’m not saying you don’t want to have a good and simple life.
You want something more than what most people get, which is to work their job, try to survive, pay their bills and die. Even if you get some enjoyment, later on, you’ve almost lost that precious time you could have had with your loved ones to be able to have that blessing and time with them while they still want to be with you or have the time to be with you. I don’t want to see you have that life pass you by but if you’re here, it’s because you don’t either. You want something more than that status quo. You want an extraordinary life, not an ordinary life.
That’s what I want to talk about. What is that key? What is the real secret to getting that? I’ve been pondering on that. If I’ve got to dumb it down to one thing, it’s discomfort, not a disease. Discomfort is not being comfortable. Many of you have heard me talk about being a comfortable saver. Many people say, “I’m a conservative investor. I don’t know if I could do these alternative investments,” but when I look at you, I say, “Why are you a gambler? You’re gambling in stock markets you have zero control over and in places that have already been proven not to work.”
I’ve already told you that in my story, I wasn’t becoming financially free. My dad who did everything right didn’t become financially free. None of the financial advisors became financially free nor did any of our clients. There were over 100 financial advisors in my office. Not one of them was financially free from the investments, not just the commissions they were earning. I even had several episodes talking about the evidence, the numbers and even case studies of people that were still worried about running out of money and not being financially free.
After all of that, why would you want to do the status quo? Why would you want to be that comfortable saver because everybody else is doing it, yet we have already proven its 100% chance of failure? Why would you do that? The reason is probably that it hasn’t been uncomfortable enough for you. Especially if you make good money, it’s even harder because it’s able to be hidden by your income generation while you’re in your working years, yet the question you’re going to eventually ask yourself is, “How long are these working years going to keep going? How long do I have to keep doing this?” Can you be comfortable being uncomfortable? That’s the real question.
If you want financial freedom, you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Click To TweetWorking Right
Many of you don’t know this or maybe you do. Some of you have probably heard this if you’ve been reading long enough. 20 years ago and about 20 pounds ago, I was one of the nation’s top amateur ballroom dancers. Many of my pictures have ballroom dance teams of people around me. It’s blurry half the time or it’s VHS tapes. Regardless though, I was one of the nation’s top amateur ballroom dancers, especially in the year 2001. I didn’t start being the greatest ballroom dancer ever. I couldn’t dance at all. started dancing in the mid-’90s in college in my freshman year when I was in Idaho.
I was starting to learn there. I kept learning and trying to get better because it was fun. I enjoyed it. If you know anything about me, I’m the kind of person that likes to always improve, progress and make things better. That’s what happened with dancing, especially when I find something fun. I did that. I moved to Utah in my junior year. I had two full solid years and then moved to Utah. While I’m here, one of my instructors was watching me dance. She was a Latin dance instructor. Although I did well doing the waltz, quick step, foxtrot and those things, my love is Latin dancing.
I love Latin dancing, cha-cha and paso doble. If you’ve watched that, it’s like the matador and the bull. It’s that kind of a steal. Those dances were always my favorite. This Latin dance instructor was watching me and said, “You’re a pretty good dancer. You’ve been working hard at this. I can tell you know a lot of the steps. You’re smart with this but there’s one thing you’re doing that’s not right. If you fix this one thing, you will go from doing decent at competitions to potentially getting in the finals or even maybe winning a competition. You have to change this one thing.”
Guess what that was. I’ll tell you at the end of the show. I’m not doing that to tease you but it does tie in with this whole subject. She saw something and said, “There’s one thing. If you change it, it will make a difference.” I was expecting maybe it was something like a new step or technique. It wasn’t. Here’s a key point. You’ve heard me say this before. It’s not about working harder and working smarter. It’s about working right. Many people work their tails off working hard. We already know that.
People will even try to study things. There are plenty of financial advisors studying their craft thinking that they’re smart, yet the results don’t show it. Possibly, it might be you. You might even be doing real estate investing. You might think you’re doing great. You’re like, “I have a few hundred dollars a month of cashflow coming from that property,” but then if I were to look at your situation, I’ll say, “I can see it. You could do better.” That’s very often the case. Very rarely we say, “Keep doing what you’re doing. You’re awesome. Keep it up. You don’t need us.”
I said that to somebody. I was like, “Honestly, you could hire us. We could help improve things a little bit but you’re doing fine on your own. You don’t need us. If you want to hire us, we would love to work with you but you’re doing amazing for what you’re doing. Keep up the good work.” That’s the thing. We love working with people, whether you’re brand new in this or you’ve even done this yourself for a while. It’s not new but you’re looking for better opportunities to improve things. That’s what we help with.
Let me get back to the point though. Living this extraordinary life requires it to be uncomfortable. She even told me, “If you do this, it’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s going to feel weird. You’re going to feel like you’re doing it wrong.” This same thing also happened to me in my running. It’s funny because if some of you have seen pictures of me way back when I started the show, I was overweight. Whether you knew it or not, I was sick and a little bit unhappy. I was about to go through a divorce. I was overweight. I was eating bad food.
Everything changed, especially after I met my wife, Adhis. She introduced me to organic, non-GMO, not eating as many carbs, potatoes and things like that. I was able to drop over 30 pounds by exercising less. Before this, I was still working out almost every day but I was in pain. I was inflamed. My body ached a lot. I was feeling my “age.” I was in my mid-30s and starting to feel it. After I changed my diet and my nutrition especially, things got better. I was able to start running and then started competing. I started even running half marathons. Pretty soon, I’m like, “I could win the top three in my age group.”
There’s even the occasional race. If it’s small enough and if there’s not too much competition, I might even win it or get in the top three overall. I was like, “This is cool.” What ended up happening? I started to not just work harder, “Am I running?” I realized I needed to work smarter and most importantly, work right. What did I do in 2021? I started working smarter. In 2021, I started using this app, Run with Hal. It’s a great app. If you’re looking for a good running app to even do a 5K race or something like that, Run with Hal is an app I got. It helped me out. It got me on a good regimen.
I’m one of those people. I like to gamify things. If you give me a regimen and step-by-step what to do, I’ll do it so I did. I even overtrained slightly. My time has improved but starting this year, I realized, “I need to do something more. I need to do more than just improve. I want to win.” I made a goal for 2022 and said, “I want to run my fastest race.” It’s a downhill race in California, “I want to run it in about 2 hours and 45 minutes.” The marathon record barely got on two hours. It was considered impossible. It finally got broken with the perfect running conditions, pacers and everything.
That’s the fastest runner in the world. I wanted to run in 245, which would put me as some of the fastest people in my age group being 45 years old. What did I do at the beginning of this year? I hired a marathon coach. I said, “I need some extra help and outside eyes looking in.” That marathon coach got me working and doing some pretty cool stuff there. She did something very similar to what my other ballroom dance coach did. She got me to do uncomfortable things. She had me training, running and doing things.
I remember the biggest week I would ever have with that app that I was mentioning before. I would run 35 miles in one week and then 50 miles the next. I dreaded and hated those 50-mile weeks, much like Muhammad Ali hated his training. It’s like, “I hate the training but I love winning. I love being the champ.” That was true for me. I would hate and dread those 50-mile weeks because that means I would have to run 20 miles or maybe up to 22 miles on a Saturday.
The Results
I’m getting a new coach. She’s very good at teaching mindset as well as body, intuition and things like that, even telling me to feel my body during races and how to train my body during that on practice runs and getting me to do it right, not just have a regimen or have something that I’m doing but do it right. She’s giving me feedback one-on-one based on my circumstance. That’s what I did. I was able to run the Chicago Marathon. It’s the first time I did one of the big six world majors where the best people around the world come to run these races.
It’s like the Boston Marathon, one of the most popular and oldest ones. You’ve heard of that probably. There’s the New York Marathon. There’s Berlin and Tokyo, as well as London in the six. I decided to run my very first major. I qualified for it last year while using the app. This year, I said, “I ran pretty well but I want to run this one.” Based on that qualifying time or the time I had in Big Bear last year when I ran that race, they put me in the runner’s gate where I’m with runners. They’re running between a 3-hour 5-minute and a 3-hour 10-minute marathon.
This is a flat-course marathon. I ran one in 2020 in Utah. I ran over three and a half hours. It was miserable. I usually run downhill races. I love them. They’re fast. I was going to be running this one. When they said 305 to 310, it’s the 3rd-fastest corral out of 13 corrals. I was like, “Good luck but I’ll go for it.” My goal was only to get in the top 8,000 runners because there are 40,000 runners. If I got to the top 8,000, that’s the top 20% of the world. I’ll take it. I ran it. For my training, I followed what my coach told me to do even while I was fueling and everything during the race.
What shocked me was that I was faster and stronger than I expected. I ended up running that race in 3 hours and 7 minutes right in the middle. I was hoping to get around 320. I was like, “If I can get to 320, that’s a great pace. It’s a solid effort.” I ran at a half minute per mile faster than I expected, which put me under the 2,900th place. I was in about the top 7% or 8% of that. I’m not saying this to brag, although I am very proud of it. There is a key point here. I was uncomfortable in that training. I was uncomfortable even at that time.
I had to mentally talk to myself and say, “I deserve to be here even in that corral with those people at that time.” Surely enough, Chicago must have known what they’re doing when they did their time conversions based on courses. I got right in the middle of exactly the time that they expected me to get in that corral. I thought for sure I would get beat by everybody in that corral. Instead, I ended up beating them and even some people in the corral ahead of me that were ahead faster times.
I was very happy with that. This gives me great momentum because now I’m going to be running the race right about now. I’m going to be running the next race at Big Bear and hoping for that 245. It seemed pretty farfetched but after Chicago, I thought, “Maybe it’s possible.” This is key because when it comes to your money or any aspect of your life, you want to be more successful. You want to have a more extraordinary experience. Creating something beyond a status quo requires you to get uncomfortable and do something that’s not convenient.
Success is not convenient at all. If you want convenience, go to a convenience store. It will make you fat, sick and broke because you will pay way too much for those products. That’s what it is. Convenience stores don’t need to. It’s like security. If you want security, go to maximum-security prisons where you will get the best security. If you want freedom, you have to get out of prison. It’s not convenient and comfortable. It requires personal responsibility. It requires you to focus and do what most people will not do. It requires you to take steps and actions that people won’t do.
It will make you look weird at times. It will make you seem strange. People will say, “Why are you doing that?” It’s worth it if you want something more than what those people have as well. You cannot live the same old life doing the same old things. If you want something different, you have to do, be and think differently. That is exactly what we’re trying to teach you on this show. Many other people are out there teaching this stuff but I want to come back to you. If you want a better financial situation, you have to be willing to do things that feel uncomfortable, don’t feel right and feel different. That is the importance of what you need to do in your life.
If you want something different, you got to do, be, and think differently. You can't live the same old life doing the same old things. Click To TweetLiving The Life You Want
Coming back to my ballroom dance coach, what did she say? She said, “If you change this one thing and do this right, you can start winning instead of getting in the semi-finals or the quarter-finals of competitions at nationals.” I did that one thing. She says, “It’s your core or your center of gravity.” It wasn’t a step. It wasn’t about doing it more or doing things that I’ve already been doing more. It was something different. She’s like, “The thing is your body is out of control, which makes you work harder because you’re not doing this one thing. If you do this, everything will get tighter, cleaner and crisper. You will dance better. The judges will notice.”
I started practicing that. It was uncomfortable because I’m like, “This feels weird.” She’s like, “Look in the mirror. Look at what you’re doing. Look from an outside perspective. From what I’m seeing, it looks better.” I said, “It does but it feels so weird.” She’s like, “Keep doing it. Keep practicing it until it feels natural and comfortable.” I did keep practicing. It became natural and comfortable. Pretty soon, I became part of it. As I did it, she was right. I would spin. I could do multiple spins. Have you ever seen people do spins? I was doing that stuff. I was able to get through it and hit it.
The next thing you know, I’m starting to get into the finals with the competitions and even winning the 1st, 2nd or 3rd place in those competitions. Even when I went to the nationals, I won fourth place in one of the dances there. I didn’t have my normal dance partner. I could have easily beaten my roommate who was number three in the nation. I almost got him. I would have beaten him if it weren’t for that but still, I was able to place because I had to do what was uncomfortable. It wasn’t convenient. It felt like I had to start over again and relearn all over but as I did it right, it worked better. It saved me more energy, making me more efficient as a dancer. It looked better.
That is true for you in any aspect of your life, whether it’s in your relationships, marriage, health, money or spiritual life. It’s true with everything. It’s not about working harder or smarter. It is about working right. The best way I found for me to do that if I want to start doing something right is to get that outside perspective even if it’s the things I know how to do and say, “Have you noticed blank? Do you notice you might be missing a blank? You could be doing this like those people.”
I’m like, “You’ve got a rental property but do you notice your return on equity is lower? You could sell that property, buy a bigger property or multiple properties, cashflow double or triple what you’re doing and get your goal faster than your current trajectory.” Even those that are already doing those things sometimes can do it better. For those of you that are doing brand new, it’s even better because you’re doing something that probably nobody around you or very few people that might be around you know how to do. It creates better results.
You are in the right place at the right time. The right opportunity is right now. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to take advantage of that? How are you going to make your life extraordinary? Will your desire be greater than your excuses? It’s your desire for freedom and for having more time with that family back so that you have that life. To be able to have that enjoyment is worth it.
I’ve mentioned my dad as my inspiration on this show many times. I was talking to him on the phone. He got a Facebook account. He barely figured out how to use it. He’s like, “I noticed you were staying in front of some tall buildings.” I’m like, “That was Chicago.” He said, “What were you doing there? Was that business?” I said, “It was a marathon.” I told him what I did. He already knew that with my business. He’s like, “I know some business things going on too.” I don’t tell him about my business that much.
I’m like, “Things are going amazing. I’ve got my YouTube channel and my show. It has been doing awesome.” I tell him about how we’re growing and things that we’re up to. He’s like, “Congratulations. I’m proud of you. You’ve done something I never managed to do myself. Here I am.” He’s alive but he feels like he’s not living anymore. He’s not living the life that he wanted. That’s not to brag about me. I had to make the same choices that you had to make as well.
Those choices on a daily consistent basis require me like you to get uncomfortable. Those little decisions I made over time and those little things are what got me to where I am now and where I’m going too because I’m not anywhere close. I don’t consider myself an ultimate success. I don’t think I’m amazing that way. I’m a normal guy trying to do the predictable right things that create extraordinary results. That’s what I wish for you as well.
If you have questions, you can always reach out to us through MoneyRipples.com. There’s a way we can serve you and help you. Let us do it. I want you to live an extraordinary life. That means you cannot live a life of convenience because success is not through convenience. It’s not through comfort. It’s not about being a comfortable saver. It’s about being someone uncomfortable doing the right things. Go and make it a prosperous week. We will talk to you later.