lystn

Hey everyone, this is Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s daily call, we are going to be talking around the concept or just the topic of equating net worth with self-worth which I think is something that can be challenging for a lot of people who start in the investing space. I know as investors and as traders, we think a lot about money, we think a lot about prices, we think a lot about securities and markets and it can be very easy for us to fall into the pitfall of equating what we are worth as an individual tying that to what our bank account statement is. I can tell you (just to start off with) I've met so many people through the Option Alpha website, millions of people eventually, hundreds of thousands at this point, coached thousands of people. There is no correlation between net worth and self-worth, meaning that I've met people who are insanely wealthy every standard imaginable, who have poor self-worth, have poor or low confidence in themselves, have bad marriages or in a bad job, just are not happy in their life. And so, if you think that money solves all problems, obviously we know it doesn't, but then maybe it’s worth it to hear it again, but at the same time, I've met people who have zero or negative net worth and have an insane amount of confidence are very happy with the quality of their life, with what they’re doing, with their integrity, with their character. Obviously, it's more important. I think a really good quote around this that you might carry with you today is – “There’s no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to yourself.” That’s by Henry David Thoreau. I think that’s really important. I love that quote. I have it up often because I think the reality is that if you want to have high self-worth and high integrity and high courage and confidence, I think it’s something that you have to work on. I think as humans, we’re not predisposed to be always happy. I really don’t. I think we are predisposed to look for danger, to look for things that might eat us, kill us, hurt us, etcetera. We’re not predisposed just to be happy all the time. We’re always looking for danger and kind of like watching over our back. And so, for me, this whole journey of self-worth and self-improvement, I love because it's always pushing me to the next limit. It’s trying to help me become a better business owner, help me become a better coach or educator for you guys, a better father, a better husband, a better friend, a community member, etcetera. I think it’s all really, really important and I think cultivating all of these worthy things is really important to your self-worth. I think working on the things that you love has no end. There’s an infinite supply or working on the things that you love. The common phrase in this that you hear all the time is – “Do something you love and you’ll never work another day again.” or something along those lines. I probably screwed it up. But it’s really true, if you really love something… Figure out what that something is. Figure out a way that you can work on that. For me, I really love markets, financials, trading. I love that aspect. I’ve also come to love building an online business. I’ve come to love building out courses and designing stuff and designing web pages and doing webinars and doing this podcast. I love doing this podcast. I’ve built all of that (the things that I've learned to love) around my original passion of trading and being in the markets and trading options. It’s built all around that. There’s no end to that for me. I really see, like people always ask me like – “When are you going to stop?” I’m like – “I don’t have any stop date. I love doing this. It’s going to be something I do for a long time.” I love cars, I love classic cars. That’s something I’m always going to be doing and always going to be involved in because there’s just no end to that. There’s always another car. As my wife would say like – “There’s always another car that you like.” But that’s something that you can definitely continue to grow and develop in. But that has nothing to do with net worth. You didn’t hear me talk about that I only love that because it does this. That’s stuff that I like doing because I just like doing it. I think you should try to find things that improve your net worth and improve your self-confidence, so that you can grow as a person regardless of whether you grow your bank account. Now of course, all of that will come if you have enough passion and you help enough people. Something that I've heard somebody say before and really stuck with me a long time ago… This is why I started doing Option Alpha the way that I started doing it almost eight years ago now as when we made this switch in Option Alpha. Originally when I came out and I started doing this because it was just a personal blog and I started like protecting all of my content… This is like way back in the days where Option Alpha was just like Google blog. It was just on Google. There was no real domain to it. It was just a blog that I was doing. I started pulling down content initially and I started protecting my content like I had some secret sauce that only people needed to pay to get to. Somebody told me, “Listen. You got to give away your most valuable resource.” What I realized is that our most precious resource is the time that we have and therefore, if I could give away this precious thing that I have which is time to any other person, to you, to anybody else who’s listening on this podcast and make it a habit of giving it away, I knew that eventually, that would come back tenfold. I don’t care what religion you’re in. It doesn’t matter. If you give away something for free, you provide value, it eventually comes back tenfold to you. It may not come back right away which is why people are not patient enough to do it. See, most people don't give away their most valuable resource or their time or their money because they don't understand that it comes back later on, not initially. You can’t just give someone your time and then they give you their time right away. It doesn't happen like that. I realize that later on in life because as I started giving away eventually all of our stuff at Option Alpha, giving away our free courses, giving away trainings, doing these podcast, making the commitment of time and energy and resources to you, I knew eventually it would come back to me in droves, like in very various passes. Now, I can tell you obviously that we’ve generated income from Option Alpha, we generate money from Option Alpha and we pour it back into research and software, etcetera. We talked about that in another podcast. But what I often don't talk about or maybe haven't talked about enough are the relationships that I’ve built through Option Alpha that I would've never found or never cultivated that are worth way more, way more than any one single product or resource or membership that I could sell to somebody. I’ve give you a case in point here. I recently got connected with an investor, somebody who does real estate in Southern California and we've been starting this dialogue and this relationship now for a couple of months. He's connected me to new people and to new people that I can learn from because I don't know that much about commercial real estate investing. It’s something that I’m interested in. I know a lot about options trading. He doesn’t know a lot about options trading, but he knows a lot about commercial investing. In fact, he invested multiple eight figures into commercial property and does it very, very well. I would've never had that relationship had I not given away courses on my website for free. In fact, when he initially reached out to me, he said, “The reason I’m reaching out to you is because you’ve never asked for anything from me. You’ve just given away all these free courses and I’ve learned and I've improved my value and self-confidence in trading and I heard that you were interested in real estate and maybe I can help.” That's really what it was. It was just him reaching out his hand and saying, “Hey, you helped me and I want to help you.” That is something that you cannot put a price tag on and I think if you can find a way in your life to give away some of your valuable resources, your time, your energy into something that you love, it comes back in droves and it improves your self-confidence, it improves your courage. I mean, it's so invigorating and it lifts you up so much, more so than any money or monetary thing could. I really want to encourage you today to maybe just take an assessment of where you’re at. Please do not equate your net worth to your self-worth. I see this often. A lot of people who just don't have a lot of money yet or are not wealthy yet and they assume that because they don't have money or that they’re not wealthy that they’re not worth anything or they’re not worth people talking to or reaching out to or building something, whether it’s physical or online or whatever, but you are. I think you are worth it obviously and you just have to continue to improve yourself and work on yourself. Make yourself a focus commitment and continue to improve your life. Hopefully that helps out. I know it was a little bit off topic today from general options trading, but hey, that's why I like doing this podcast and I know that you guys really like this. Continue to give me feedback, let me know what you guys think as always and until next time, happy trading!