[00:00:00] Intro: We’re saying goodbye to the rigid numbers and strict budgets, and putting relationships back at the heart of personal finance. This is more than a podcast, it’s an invitation to reimagine your money story and journey with us through a landscape of intuitive strategies and abundance. Join a community that nurtures transformative financial mindsets.

[00:00:25] Welcome to Intuitive Finance. I’m your host, Dylan Bain.

[00:00:36] Dylan Bain: It’s Thanksgiving dinner, and I’m sitting down at the table in my grandmother’s basement where we’ve had Thanksgiving for years. Except this Thanksgiving is special because it’s the Thanksgiving after the birth of my first child. So my wife is sitting in the corner nursing our baby, and we’re setting the table and getting ready to go, when my grandmother walks over and hands me the knife to carve the turkey.

[00:01:01] This was something that was reserved for my grandfather, and then my father, or whoever was considered to be the highest man of status around that Thanksgiving table. And I was not the oldest man there. I was a young man. I didn’t understand why I was being handed the knife. And she says, well but Dylan, you are a successful man now. I said, Grandma, what do you mean? She goes, you have a career, and you have a child, and you have a wife. I’m so proud of you. And I’m like struggling, I’m just like coming apart because that wasn’t my definition of success. I’m on welfare! This is when I’m a teacher. I am teaching, I can barely pay my bills. I now have a child, my wife’s in graduate school, nothing in my life feels like it’s going well. My marriage is not doing great because of all the stress that’s in the system. And my grandmother hands me the knife, and tells me it’s my year to carve the Thanksgiving turkey because I am a successful man now. And I have no idea what to do with this information.

[00:02:00] I tell this story, ladies and gentlemen, because it really speaks to the traditional versus modern metrics of success. When we’re trying to measure our success, and — how do we know that we’ve made it, or how do we know that we’re going to be okay? Or how do we know that all of our effort has paid off? This is a fundamental question that comes up at every family gathering. Now, if you’re on Instagram — and that’s where you can find me most active @TheDylanBain on Instagram — one of the things that I kind of chuckle when I see is all these videos about what do you do when somebody says, well, when are you having kids? When are you getting married? How’s your job going? On and on and on. And you see these millennials and Gen Zers that are just getting up and walking away from the table. But what’s going on here, the actual like family relational dynamic that’s occurring at this dinner table, is that your family is taking an interest. But unfortunately, applying their metrics of success to you without ever understanding what your metrics for success are now.

[00:03:00] So let’s talk about some traditional metrics of success versus our modern metrics of success, and what else we could be doing with this information. Traditionally — and I’m thinking as we go further back in time, I’m thinking like pre-1940s, almost into the founding years of this country — when we came to this country and we established what eventually became the United States, we had an idea of what was success. Success was the ability to provide. To be able to get work and to find that work. So if you were a man in that time, your ability to find work and be able to do that work was foundational to what you were considered a success. This of course is one of the major things that people looked for when they were selecting a mate. Can this man provide? Now on the female side of it, the ability to find work and be able to do that work was true too up until they got married, in which case then they would go and work in the home. But prior to marriage, a lot of women would work in sewing factories or different cottage industries, and they were considered successful when they were able to do that work and also then find a husband.

[00:04:07] Traditionally, land ownership has been seen as a traditional marker of success, and this was something that we carried across the Atlantic Ocean with us. The idea that if I own land, then I have influence and I have wealth. And you can see this in the movie, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” where they ask one of the guys Delmar, what are you going to do with your share of the treasure? And he says, I’m going to go back to the bank and I’m going to plunk it down on the barrelhead and I’m going to buy back the family farm. And they said, well Delmar, that’s a nice vision. He says, because a man ain’t nothing if he ain’t got land. So land ownership was this idea that we thought of as a metric of success.

[00:04:43] And then of course, there’s status and communities. This is civic leadership being — you’re having standing within your peer group. And this of course comes in different tiers. You can kind of think of it in in terms of the country club now, but in my grandparents generation — like, were you the head of the Lions Club? But even going further back was what type of status did you have in the community?

[00:05:02] Then of course, there’s also trade mastery. Success was when you were considered a master of a trade. And we can see this in our names. Smith and Miller were professions. You became Bob the Smith — we call now Bob Smith, when you were considered to be a master smith. And then eventually that becomes your last name. And the same was true for Millers. And the same was true for all sorts of different professions. My grandmother on my mom’s side, her maiden name was Schneider, which in German means tailor. And so she came from a family that when — if you go all the way back to Germany before they left — they were literally a family of tailors.

[00:05:38] And then of course, traditionally family. Marriage was seen as a rite of passage, a bridging from one stage of life to another for both the man and the woman. And of course, then having children — you can go all the way back to biblical times. What is the promise that God makes to Abraham in the Bible? Well, your descendants will outnumber the stars. So the idea of being able to have a family and have a big family was a metric of success. In my wife’s family, the traditional Lebanese Catholics, the marker of success is that you get married and you have a family and you have lots of kids. And the bigger the family, the more blessed you’re viewed within that group. So success is something that’s tied to your ability to have kids. So much so that after one year of marriage, my uncle-in-laws sat me down and said, hey if you’re having trouble with kids, there’s clinics for that. And I said, what do you mean? They said, well she married you to have kids and you’re not getting on it. And I said, well, no, no, there’s some other things going on here, but they didn’t want to hear that, right?

[00:06:41] So then, those are the traditional markers of success. To be able to provide, to have land, to have status, community, to have mastery in a trade, and of course, to have a family. In a more modern context, though, a lot of these have changed. So if you’re thinking in a traditional context, then you’re not going to be able to translate into the modern versions of success, because in our modern age today, we don’t think about your ability to provide. No, we think about career. You can provide, but we don’t really look favorably on somebody who just has a J-O-B, a job that they just show up to. They do the thing. But if you have a career, and you’re climbing that corporate ladder, or you’re entrepreneurial and you’re starting businesses and selling businesses, we value that as a marker of success.

[00:07:24] One of the things that I really wanted when I left teaching was I wanted to stop having a job — that’s what teaching was — and I wanted to have a career, which is what I’m doing now. Something that I’m growing in, that I’m being able to constantly be able to level up. And of course, another modern metric for success is the idea of financial security. This is not necessarily saying, I’ve got all of my bases covered. I’m independently wealthy. I’ve been able to financially independent. No, that’s not what financial security means. It means that you have freedom from financial stress. Or, to put it another way, you don’t think twice about ordering the guacamole at Chipotle because you know you got it covered. That’s a marker of financial security. That is part of our modern metrics for success.

[00:08:09] A big one that we have is the idea of work-life balance. The ownership of our own time. The ability to be able to separate from work. And this is something I found to be paradoxical, as I’ve climbed the corporate ladder and as I’ve become more successful economically. When I was a teacher, I had no work life balance. It was insanity how much I worked on the weekends, and over the summers, and all the different things. And that was just my teaching job, never mind the other two jobs that I had. And then when I moved into the Big Four accounting firms — that’s a notoriously stressful job, it has notoriously long hours — but I’d actually taken a reduction in hours to take that job, even though I was still turning in, on a pretty regular basis, a 70-hour week.

[00:08:53] So as I’ve gotten more successful, I’ve had more and more ownership over my time, and that’s super valuable to me. And that’s something that other people look at and be like, wow, I really — you’ve really made it. You have that work life balance. The ability to not answer an email or a phone call on the weekend is a metric of success. But if you stop and think about it, it’s a metric of success that will not make sense to an older generation that didn’t grow up with the internet in their pocket.

[00:09:18] Another modern metric of success is our social impact, or at least the appearance of. This is why you see so many people who are into activism, or I want to be of service, or they’re doing something for the ‘gram. The idea here is that they want to be seen as somebody who’s making an impact in the world because it’s how we’re measuring success.

[00:09:34] And then, of course, last but certainly not least, is health. Fit is wealth. If you go back to the turn of the 20th century — so in 1900, obesity was considered to be a sign of fitness. This was a sign of wealth because you had the money to be fit. In our modern age, where we have car dependency, hyperpalatable processed foods, and calories galore that are just completely empty of everything nutrition. Obesity is the norm because that’s what everyone’s able to do because they don’t have the work-life balance to be able to address their health. They don’t have the financial security to have the food. So now when we’re looking at people who are fit, we’re seeing that as a marker of wealth and success, whereas 100 years ago, it was exactly the opposite.

[00:10:24] And I bring all of this into the podcast and into the discussion because it’s a huge thing. If you don’t understand what the metrics of success are for you, there’s no way that you can possibly chart a path going forward. And what’s worse is that intergenerationally, our metrics for success are completely different. And the work-life balance one is the one that I always, that I think is so easy to see here. Because to my grandfather, he just did not understand the idea that I would have to work on a weekend for a salaried job. It just didn’t compute to him. But of course it didn’t, because he grew up in a world where you couldn’t take work home with you. He was a machinist in a factory, and he lived a very solid middle class life with less than a high school education as a machinist. You can’t take the screw machine home with them. Whereas I’m sitting at a desk that has two computers out of it, one of them my W2 job computer. I could be expected to work all night. I could be expected to work on the weekend. When you can work from anywhere, you can work from everywhere. And when you can work at any time, you can work all the time. So that work-life balance thing is something that doesn’t compute. It doesn’t even compute to my parents who at least are aware that some people work from home now, but it’s — still, they just don’t get that.

[00:11:40] And so when you’re trying to have conversations with people from different age groups and different demographics, you’re going to end up with a different definition of what is successful. And so if you’re measuring yourself against that person’s measurement of success, chances are good, you won’t be successful for you. And to be able to look at these and be able to redefine for ourselves, what is our version of success? What are the metrics that make me feel successful? It’s super important. And I go back to right at the top of the show, telling the story of my grandmother hands me the knife to carve the turkey — I was shocked. I was gobsmacked. But all the other men at the table turned, and there was this look of pride because I had finally made it. And they just didn’t understand how desperately poor I really was. There was nothing in my life at that point that made me feel like a success, but to them I had had all the things. I had a job, steady income. I had a wife, and now I had a kid. And success at that point was being a great teacher and continuing to put food on the table and raising this daughter. That was what success was, be a great teacher. Only later did I understand that be a great teacher didn’t mean get paid to be good at what you do.

[00:12:54] And so, I had to redefine my success and give up the idea of being a great teacher because I wanted to do something different. In this case, provide more margin for my wife and opportunities for my kids. My wife used to get her hair in a twist over the idea that we didn’t have enough margin in our lives. We didn’t have enough room. Our expenses outstripped our income. And she used to say to me all the time, if we just had more margin. If we just had more margin, if you could just give me more margin, then everything would be fine. And so success became, for me, providing margin for my wife. And why did I want that margin? Because I wanted opportunities for my kids. I wanted them to go to summer camp. I wanted them to be able to ride a horse. I wanted them to have hobbies. I wanted to buy them art supplies and never have to think about it. That’s why I went through graduate school. That’s why I went into public accounting. Because it was what the path I needed to follow in order to provide margin for my wife. And I’ve talked on this podcast before about my vision during that time. It was a house with a yard, with my kids playing with a green ball, with steaks on the grill, food I couldn’t afford, while my wife walks up to me and says, honey, I love what we built. That was the vision that drove me to providing more margin. That was what the definition of success was. Success was when I bought us a house. Yeah, I could only do that if we had enough margin. So that’s what I set my sights on.

[00:14:08] And when I — as soon as I bought the house, I took a moment, I took a breath, and I looked around and I went, now what? Because my marriage was in shambles. I wasn’t showing up as a father for my kids. And I had to redefine success again. So success stopped being constantly looking for the next thing, and success started being what type of impact am I having for my kids and on my wife and on society in general? My definition of success now, it’s growing this podcast, it’s finding more coaching clients, it’s creating courses and bringing them out there, helping people put relationship back at the heart of personal finance, because it’s time to remember we’re humans again.

[00:14:50] And it’s not just me. I have a very good friend and somebody I consider a mentor who was one of the top alcohol salesmen in Colorado. He was brilliant at what he did. He knew everybody in the bar scene. He was a brand ambassador for the best alcohols around. And he would go out to the bars, and he would sell, and he would sell, and he would sell. And then COVID hit, and it all went away. And he started to have to look at it and be like, well my metrics for success are now gone. I don’t even have them anymore. It’s not even possible. The bars are closed because COVID’s here. Oh, and by the way, he’s in the midst of a life transition, and where does he come through? He starts realizing that grief is a big part of life and living. He starts realizing that men’s work is a thing and that men need help, so he becomes a men’s coach and a grief guide. And his version of success is such that he can start to help people walk through these dark hard places in their lives. It’s not hitting a sales metric anymore. It’s helping strike a chord in someone’s soul. And when people look back at it and say, well the bars are open up now, why not go back to it? Because it doesn’t feed him anymore. He, in fact, doesn’t drink anymore.

[00:16:00] And I’ve seen this before. One of the people I went through my undergraduate with, we both went through the computer science program. And she went directly from that and into the consulting world doing tech consulting, eventually becoming one of the top VPs at a corporation in their computer department, doing IT work and digital transformations and all this other stuff. And then one day she just said, you know what, I’ve got four kids and I’m done with this. And everybody thought she was nuts. The company actually came back and was like, how much? Just name a number. And she named a ridiculous number. And they said, sure. That would have been, to anyone else that is uninitiated into thinking of themselves as a full human rather than just an economic resource, would have thought she was absolutely insane to say, no, I’m going to retire to Indiana and open an organic soap company. And yet there she is doing it, being wildly successful by her own definitions. Does she make money? Yeah. Does my friend, the alcohol salesman make money? Yeah. Do I make money? Yeah. All that’s true. But that’s not the definition anymore.

[00:17:04] In fact, as I look at this and I’m working my way towards self-employment and building this business, one of the things I’ve had to face for myself is that in my family, self-employed equals unemployed. Self-employed people are looked down upon in my family because when you can’t find a job, you become self-employed or a consultant. And we’ve seen — we’ve had our share of family members go through MLMs. Those are terrible. But the reality here is, is that I can redefine the definition of success. If I’m growing this business and I make it into a brand, and I make it into something that people come to me to help put relationships back at the heart of their personal financial visions, their stories, and their journeys, I have been successful.

[00:17:50] Crafting your own personal financial success story starts with a vision. You have to ask yourself, who am I and what do I want? Where am I going? And maybe it’s not a completely defined, in HD, 4K vision. Maybe it’s just a vague sense that here isn’t great, but I want to go over in that direction. Fantastic. Starts with a vision. Creating a vision for you. And once you have that, then you ask yourself, what’s for me? What is for me? What is the thing that I want? What are the things that are for me right now, and what are the things that I’m working so that they can be for me in the future?

[00:18:30] And an example that I’ve used in the past is pickup trucks. I used to have a pickup truck, and I have no animus to anybody who owns a pickup truck. However, I know a pickup truck isn’t for me. And this is a conversation I have all the time with my neighbors. All of my neighbors have a Ford F-150, 100% of them. And they always say, Dylan, when are you going to get a Ford F-150? Hey, you got to have a Ford F-150. And I know if I get a Ford F-150 and I parked it in my driveway, people are going to come out of their homes and we’re going to have one moment of neighborhood solidarity while they all talk to me about the new trim package on my Ford F-150. But it’s not for me. That’s not what I’m about. That truck would not serve my life. So I’ll stick with my Nissan Sentra because it serves everything I need. And when I need to upgrade, I’ll upgrade to something that’s going to serve my life at that point. What else is for me? Well, what is for me is working my way to self-employment. What is for me is having a loving relationship with my wife. What is for me is not letting the small little slights that people will throw in my way get under my skin. That’s for me. What’s for you? Where are you going with this?

[00:19:37] Number three is, where is that success? Like seriously, where is the success you’re looking for? If you’re sitting there, and you’re, say, a school teacher, or you’re a firefighter, or you’re a factory worker, or you’re working in a mortgage banking operation, wherever you are; is the success that’s in your vision right where you are? I’d be willing to bet you it’s not. It doesn’t mean that it’s this far flung area. It just means it’s not right here right now. So where is that success? And sometimes, that means that you might have to move physically. Pick up stakes and move. When I was first started dating my wife, one of the things she needed to do to feel successful was to go spend some time abroad. She wanted to go and live overseas. So her and her best friend, who was maid-of-honor at her wedding applied for a job in jobs in Japan. Well, our friend got it and she didn’t, so she moved to Taiwan. That’s where success was for her. So she had to leave her entire context and go overseas. And for me, success was winning this woman’s hand in marriage. And so when I looked at it and said, I could be in Milwaukee unemployed, or I can go to Taiwan and have a job, was an easy decision for me to make. Because success was with that woman, and she was in Taiwan, so I was going to Taiwan.

[00:20:53] So where is the success? Maybe the success is in a different career. Maybe it’s in a different department. Maybe you’re at a company and you’re working in the accounting department. And you’re like, I just really don’t want to do this, but I would really — I’m really kind of fascinated by the regulatory side. Okay. That’s where success is to you? Go! Good, go over there. And that’s okay.

[00:21:12] Number four is to ask yourself, who has what you want? So if you’re looking at it and saying, I really wish I could be that guy, or oh, he’s got it all figured out. I wish I could do what he’s doing. Okay, good. You found out who has what you want. Now go ask him two questions. What do you do and how do you do it? That’s it. And whatever they tell you, do that thing, on a scale of 1 to 10, at a 12. And I will promise you that you might not find the success, but you will make progress. And that vision, as hazy as it might have been, will start to come into focus because you just took one step. The most important step in any man’s life that he can take is the next one. And so just take the next one. Take that next step. Start working in that direction. Small, little things. We’ve had people on the podcast who’ve all talked about the compounding rate of return of small decisions. Josh Wood talked about TNT. Tiny, noticeable things. Because TNT moves mountains. I just wrapped up an interview with another gentleman who was talking about, if we took off from Denver, Colorado towards Australia, but we altered the flight path by one degree, where would we end up? And the answer is, I don’t know, but not Australia.

[00:22:23] So go and find those people who have that compass for you and ask them, what do you do and how do you do it? And then go do the thing. If you’re looking at it and you actually sit down with that person and they described to you what their life is really like, so that what is different from the Instagram or the LinkedIn account or the Facebook story or whatever, wherever you saw this person. And they started saying, well, yeah like, it looks great, but here’s all the bad things. And you go, you know what? That’s not for me. That goes back to number two, that’s not for me. And that’s okay. But at least now you have more information.

[00:22:55] Crafting your personal financial success story is an iterative process. It is constantly evolving. It’s constantly moving from one stage to the next to the next. There are seasons to life. And that’s okay. The point isn’t to win the game because it can’t be won. The point is to be able to keep playing. And I know this lesson all too well. Because as I started to cut into that turkey at the Thanksgiving dinner, carving of turkey for the first time in my life now that I was a successful man because I got married, I had a job, and I had a kid. And I’m sitting there saying, but I’m not successful by my own metric. I’m willing to let them see me that way because I don’t need them to see me any other way. But I know for myself that there’s something more. And I don’t know where that is. And truth be told, looking back on it, it was another three years until I figured it out. But the success was that I got in the game on that day. I started to understand there was more to life. That I wasn’t satisfied. That while I was successful in everyone else’s eyes, I wasn’t successful in my own. That was when I started to have just a little bit of a tickle. And I needed to make a vision of my life and find out what’s for me. To go to where success is and to figure out who’s going to help lead me along the way. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for us to get on the path.

[00:24:13] Outro: Thanks for listening. The conversation doesn’t end here. Please share the show with friends and make sure you keep up with all the latest updates on Instagram and Threads @TheDylanBain, and dive deeper into the world of finance with me at DylanBain.com, where you’ll find insights, resources and strategies to reimagine your money story.