RG 295 – How to Become a More Effective Self-Learner with Timothy Kenny
Learning is a vital pillar of building a business. Today, join Timothy Kenny and I as we talk all about accelerated learning; how you can acquire knowledge more effectively, retain it better, and use it to catalyze success in your real estate business.
Timothy Kenny is the author of Accelerated Learning for Beginners, a book where he takes you through a hidden world of accelerated learning. He is also a teacher and speaker, helping ambitious individuals accelerate their learning so that they can build successful businesses of their own.
Timothy has taught at the Harvard Innovation lab, The Tufts University Entrepreneurs Society, General Assembly in Boston, and has been a featured teacher on Skillshare and Udemy, among others. Today, Timothy teaches us all about the most effective strategies for accelerated learning, including repetition, active recall, mindfulness, and much, much more.
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Of course, we also talk business. Timothy and I go over real estate-related topics, most notably: marketing, communication, intellectual property, productivity, and everything in between.
All that said, you don’t want to skip this extremely informative interview. If you want to learn more about how you can improve your self-education initiatives, click that ‘Play’ button now!
Key Takeaways
In school, you learn information to pass a test. In business, you want to keep that information in your head for the rest of your life.
To keep information in your head, you need to pay ‘rent’; active recalls, note taking, and other methods of information retention.
It’s not about how much you know, it’s all about picking the right niche and having enough knowledge to be competitive.
- Weightlifting is one of the best ways to strengthen your maintaining your IQ.
LINKS
https://timothykenny.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennytimothy/
https://apps.ankiweb.net/
https://www.amazon.com/Timothy-Kenny/e/B00D01DVGQ?ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
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Podcast Transcript
Reed Goossens (00:00):
Good day. Good day guys. Now, before we dive into today’s show, I want you to let you know that some of you maybe aware that over the past eight years, I have built a substantial multifamily real estate portfolio here in the US worth over half a billion dollars. And in that time, my passive investors have received fantastic double-digit returns. And now you too can invest directly into my deals for as little as $50,000. So if you’re an interested investor, head over to Reedgoossens.com to find out more that’s Reedgoossens.com. Now back into the show,
Timothy Kenny (00:41):
What I learned in school was, oh, you can cram for this stuff. You can pass the test and, and even do well quite well and then forget about it and that’s successful. So if you have the wrong definition of, of success, then everything flows from that. So now the definition of success is how do I start my first business? How do I get a successful business going and then enjoy the process? So that’s the Tim Ferris of lifestyle design, and then figuring out a business that fits into that lifestyle that you want and experimenting with that lifestyle.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Welcome to investing in the US, a podcast for real estate investors, business owners, and aspiring entrepreneurs looking to break into the US market, join Reed as he interviews go-geters risk takers and the best in the business about their journey towards financial freedom and the sheer joy of creating something for.
Reed Goossens (01:43):
Nothing Good day. Good day ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another cracking edition of investing in the US podcast from Los Angeles. I’m your host Reed Goossens good as always Abby with us on the show. Now I’m glad that you’ve all tuned into learn from my incredible guests and each and every one of them are the cream are the crop here in the United States. When it comes to real estate, investing, business, investing and entrepreneurship, each show, I try and tease out their incredible stories of how they have successfully created their businesses here in the us, how they’ve created financial freedom, massive amounts of cash, and ultimately created extraordinary lives for themselves and their families. Life by design. As I like to say, hopefully guests will inspire all of my cracking listeners, which are you guys to get off the couch and go and take massive amounts of action.
Reed Goossens (02:31):
If these guys can do it. So can you now, as you know, I’m all about sharing the knowledge with my loyal listeners, which is you guys, and there’s absolutely no BS on this show, just straight into the nuts and bolts. Now, if you do like this, the easiest way to give back is to give us a review on iTunes and you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter by searching at Reed goons. You can find the show, every you podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google play, but you can also find these episodes up on my YouTube channel. So head over to Reed goons.com, click on the video link, and it’ll take you to the video recordings of these podcasts, where you can see my ugly mug, but the beautiful faces of my guests each and every week. All right, enough outta me, let’s get cracking and into today’s show.
Reed Goossens (03:18):
In the show. I’m the pleasure of speaking with Timothy Kenny. Timothy is the author of accelerated learning for entrepreneurs. And through this platform, he teaches others about how they can build successful businesses faster, and with more confidence in their success. Timothy has taught at the Harvard innovation lab, the Tufts university entrepreneur society, the general assembly in, and, and he’s been featured as a teacher on skills share among many other things. I’m really pumped and excited to have him on the show today to share he’s incredible knowledge and insight with me, but enough enemy. Let’s get him out here, get a toy. Welcome to the show, how we today, mate,
Timothy Kenny (03:52):
Doing good. Thanks for
Reed Goossens (03:53):
Having me, mate. My pleasure before we get into the nuts and bolts of what you do, cause I’m really excited and just to press for all the listeners out there, today’s episode is gonna be all about productivity and self education and helping moving the needle forward in terms of time management. And we’re gonna talk a lot about what’s called presidential planning. So I’m just, I’m setting the show up for that. But Timothy, before we get into that sort of good stuff, rewind the clock. And tell me how you made your first have a dollar as a kid.
Timothy Kenny (04:18):
Uh, it was doing show doors around the house. It was going around the neighborhood doing, uh, snow, shoveling, raking, uh, mowing lawns. I think that’s part of what got me into sort of the, uh, the ethic of the cold call or the cold email is going door to door. And, uh, just, and I’ve met mentors, I’ve met, uh, just great people just doing that. And it’s, uh, you get used to a lot of rejection and you get used to just sort of putting in that sweat equity early on, and then eventually that builds on itself cuz people start referring you and stuff. So, um, and I think that’s something that young people don’t do enough nowadays and just people and businesses in general, they think it doesn’t work or they think it’s old fashion or it’s kind of tough to do, but I think it’s, uh, in almost any business it’s worth doing.
Reed Goossens (05:12):
And Timothy walk me through your journey into entrepreneurship. You obviously haven’t just landed here creating a bunch of incredible content around accelerated learning. What was the, uh, the Timothy pre accelerated learning?
Timothy Kenny (05:26):
So the, the sort of, uh, wake up moment. I, I say there, I would say there were a couple in high school. I was reading about the four hour work week. And so a lot of
Reed Goossens (05:38):
That show, a lot of that book I should say.
Timothy Kenny (05:39):
Yeah. So, uh, and he really laid out a new paradigm of working from home and, or working from anywhere, working from your laptop and uh, building a business online. And so I started thinking, okay, you know, what’s what kind of path do I want to go on? And, and is this opportunity real? And so I started, I knew like I’ve always had this quote that I like of luck is when preparation meets opportunity. And so you do the preparation and then you start seeing the opportunities. And so, uh, you just kind of get out there and you look, look at a bunch of different things and eventually you’re gonna stumble upon something. So, uh, I was all about preparation. I was thinking, okay, I need to learn business. I need to teach myself business. And, uh, this is actually how all my big courses have come out, come out is just me just coming up with stuff from my own and then realizing, Hey, I’ll put this out there and see if anybody else wants it.
Timothy Kenny (06:38):
And then, you know, that’s how the planning and that’s how the organization stuff came about because I needed that for myself. I needed that to run my business and run my life. So the accelerative learning was the first thing and where that came from was reading a book called priceless. And I was figuring, trying to understand pricing. So this was part of my self-education journey. So I’d read this book and I just like, wow, there’s all this interesting stuff about how D different people value different things that in different ways. And so it’s kind of hard to figure out and here’s some ways different people do it. Um, and so I went to a conference and I was in this little group of people telling me, telling everybody about this great book I just, uh, read. And they, they were saying, so what were like the most interesting pieces of it?
Timothy Kenny (07:21):
And I had this massive disconnect where in my head, I felt like I was now this pricing genius, and I had absorbed all this stuff and my mind was buzzing with ideas. And then I’m asked a very simple question and I can’t actually produce anything. I can’t produce one bullet point. It let alone three. And I’m somebody who did well in school. So I’m used to like doing well on tests and doing well on, you know, if somebody kind of asked me a question like that, I should be able to answer that. And so I realize there’s a, not just a small gap, but a chasm between how smart I think I am or how much I think I remember versus what I can actually do in the moment. And so that made me think, okay, I’ll take a week or I’ll take a month.
Timothy Kenny (08:05):
I’ll, you know, learn how to take notes, learn how to speed, read, learn how to memorize. I thought those were the three pillars at the time. And then I ended up realizing, you know, just my summary of this stuff was better than a lot of this stuff out there. So I thought, oh, let me, you know, maybe I put a, a course on this or write a book about it, see what happens. And, uh, funny enough that book, if you look on Amazon, it, it hasn’t done that well. It’s sort of, I just wanted to write my first book, get it done as soon as possible. So I did that. I want a, by writing that book, I, I applied for the scholarship to go to this very high end business internet business event. And I end up winning a scholarship. I, my theory is cuz I had nothing else going on was because I was had, uh, written a book at a very young age.
Timothy Kenny (08:50):
So I get to the conference and I end up meeting a mentor there, uh, and sort of befriending this guy. He invites me to this, uh, dinner party with five or six other millionaires. All the guys at the table are millionaires. And we go to this most expensive steak place in Washington, DC. Then we go to the, this very high end cigar bar and it’s like two or 3:00 AM. We’re in this ventilated smoking room. And they’re like, like, so what’s, what’s your deal? What do you do? And I tell ’em about my book and they’re like, yeah, there’s no reason you can’t be charging people $10,000 a day to teach this stuff. So once I had that sort of validation, I felt like, wow, all these guys are millionaires. They’re all telling me, just go do it. That was like, okay, that’s kind of my market validation. I just need to go this. And uh, and so everything from that point on was just, you know, continuing to develop my systems and my ideas to where I am today. That’s.
Reed Goossens (09:45):
Awesome. That’s uh, that’s incredible. And it’s those moments that you realize that you’ve been validated by someone that, you know, you have something within you, but then be to be validated by someone who you look up to is, is quite a special moment. I do wanna quickly go back to what you were talking about earlier and something that I also, and a lot of people out there can, can probably relate to is the way in which you absorb knowledge and then how you articulate that back out, right? You, you know, in, in our, we all sit in front of our own cinema, 24 hours a day, seven days, like 365 days a year. And we have these little internal conversations with ourselves and like, oh, I know no doubt and boom, boom, boom, boom. In my head, I’ll be able to, you know, my background’s in engineering.
Reed Goossens (10:24):
So I’m very, I like to problem solve, but then maybe, you know, a skill like speaking in public or, you know, articulating that to someone very quickly and concisely there’s, there’s a disconnect there, right? It’s in my, my head, but I can’t necessarily get it. I’ll spit it out. So what was in your experience and the, the impetus of the impetus of the book, I should say to help people bridge that gap, what was the, what was the biggest learning that you came about through your research that caused that gap to exist in the first place? It’s kind.
Timothy Kenny (10:56):
Of the structure of the traditional education system. At least what we have in the United States and especially in K through 12, where there’s certain fields that are more cumulative, like math and, uh, science to some extent. But, uh, even there, it’s kind of split up, um, into the levels of aggregation, but you, you take a test and, and I got good at game, so I got good at the wrong game. That’s fundamentally what it’s about. You, you cram, you study, you pass the test and then you dump the knowledge. You forget about it. And I teach med students and coach them, med students, law, students, lawyers, and doctors. And it’s funny because they tell me the same thing. They’re going through med school or law school, and I’m saying, oh, we, we should set up your system so that all this stuff you’re learning right now, let’s get into your space.
Timothy Kenny (11:43):
Repetition, let’s get the note cards or let’s get your notes all organized, cuz you’re gonna wanna refer to this, you know, for years and decades to come. And they’re like, oh no, yeah. Like 80% of this stuff you don’t need to know. We’re just learning it for the test. You don’t actually need to know it. So this is going on at the highest echelons. But uh, it’s, it’s the whole system where you’re learning this stuff and you don’t, there is an argument to be made for priming your mind so that when you go into something like up to date or the Wikipedia of your field, you can understand. And, and it’s not completely new information. So there is something to be said for that, but I would argue it’s 80 20, I’d say 60 to 80% of that is probably not necessary in terms of what’s going on med school, law school.
Timothy Kenny (12:25):
But what I learned in school was, oh, you can cram for this stuff. You can pass the test and, and even do well quite it well, and then forget about it and that’s successful. So if you have the wrong definition of, of success, then everything flows from that. So now the definition of success is how do I start my first business? How do I get a successful business going and then enjoy the process? So that’s the Tim Ferriss of lifestyle design and then figuring out a business that fits into that lifestyle that you want and experimenting with that lifestyle. So that’s the starting point. That’s the success principle. And for me now, and part of my planning is being in the flow, being in the creative flow and having wellbeing. So enjoying the process and just being in the, and sort of optimizing for that.
Timothy Kenny (13:16):
So I’m big into that, but, uh, in school it’s about playing that game of passing the test, getting the grades and then getting to the next level in business. It’s about what’s that larger success gonna look like. And so you’re not just learning pricing to pass some pricing test and then forget it. You want to know that for the rest of your entrepre entrepreneurial career, which might be 50, 75 years. So when you’re thinking at that time scale, it’s a completely different game. And so you have to have a system that’s designed around that. And the fact that we live in a culture where everybody is optimizing for the wrong thing, it’s a new paradigm. So once you realize, okay, I actually do need to know this stuff. And because it’s self-directed education, I’m my own professor. I now have to act like a professor. I need to go out, put together my syllabus, pick the textbook or the books I’m gonna read.
Timothy Kenny (14:09):
And then I need to decide, okay, what’s the stuff that I do is gonna be evergreen knowledge that I need to know for the next several decades. And then I need to have a space repetition system to make sure it stays up here long term. And this is actually a real estate, uh, connection, which is the way I think about, uh, mental real estate and, and space repetition is you need to pay rent to keep stuff in your head. It’s like having the penthouse suite in a high rise. That’s how it is to keep stuff in your head. So you wanna decide, is it more efficient to keep it in a second brain in sort of a notion or Evernote or OneNote or something else, or does it really need to be up here to recognize opportunities? It does need to be up here because you need to see it in the moment.
Timothy Kenny (14:52):
If you don’t see it, it’s invisible to you. So you need to pay the price of keeping it up here and the prices you need to do space repetitions, you need to do active recall. You probably need to use something like Anky. And so you need to pay the, the rent to keep it up here. And the rent is highest the first few months. And it goes is down exponentially. So you need to get a lot of repetitions early on. And then over time it gets cheaper and cheaper, which is kind of the opposite of like how an apartment would be. But that’s, uh, that’s kind of the game of memorization. And so people don’t realize that. And so you cram and you, you, you spend that money up front and you pass the test, but then because you don’t need it anymore, you kind of, you know, let that apartment go. You let that knowledge go. And then you don’t have it when you need it later on.
Reed Goossens (15:38):
So I’m all about, you know, getting to the bras tax that is boiling it down to actionable items right now, you, you, you talk about retaining knowledge. I get it. And I completely agree by the way. And it’s, it’s, it’s similar and probably all across all the Western world, the way in which we study for stuff, you know, craming well forgetting about it. I remember craming for engineering courses and going to the exam doing well, right? I don’t know the hell a more circle is a stress diagram, all that sort of crap that I just never need in my life. But let’s talk about the re retention of this knowledge, what, and exactly what techniques you would advise to entrepreneurs and business owners who have a curiosity about something, but don’t necessarily know how to go out and take the right action in order to, you know, we, we’re all fundamental students. They talk about the 10,000 hours, you know, uh, mechanism about, you know, you gotta commit 10,000 now is to knowing something really, really well, but what in our, as we learn, and as we grow as entrepreneurs, what other techniques can we do to retain better knowledge as we are learning as we are going through, you know, down the road that, you know, we’re trying to figure it out for, in terms of creating a business from scratch. Yeah.
Timothy Kenny (16:52):
So I wanna preface it by saying, you’re not gonna like the answer because you’re not gonna like how much, how expensive it is to actually do this. And the only flip side to that is the business world is kind of a competitive arena where if you, it’s not about having infinite knowledge, it’s not about knowing everything. It’s about knowing more than other companies or, or other entrepreneurs that you’re competing with. And so, and to the extent that you can partner with other people and collaborate and cooperate with people, you can fill each other’s weaknesses. And so there’s that dynamic to it. So it’s important not to get too focused on, oh, I just should memorize every book. And every short to it’s about what is the dynamic of the situation, where is there more supply than demand? Where is there more demand than supply? And so you can work really hard at McDonald’s, but there’s, there’s a lot more supply maybe than demand for that kind of labor versus some engineering field where there’s much more demand than there is supply.
Timothy Kenny (17:52):
And so people are getting paid a lot more, not cuz they worked harder, they just picked the right niche. And so that’s an important component and it’s not about knowing more it’s about being in the right niche. And then do you have the right amount of knowledge to be competitive in that niche? So that that’s the starting point and that’s kind of market research. You could think about it that way. Um, and that’s so important and people like to skip that, but it’s, you know, to really get down to bras tax it’s, you need to get a space repetition system that means spacing out how you’re doing, how you’re getting repetitions on knowledge. So that’s the first piece and no matter what you need to do that that’s high yield, that’s high re uh, ROI for that. The other high ROI thing is you need to do active recall.
Timothy Kenny (18:36):
So active recall is whether it’s a basically think of a note card, you’ve got the question on the front or the prompt. You’ve got the answer on the back. And when you question your brain and your brain is forced to go shuffling around in the mental filing cabinet, it’s fine to the thing, pull it out, bring it back and give it to you. That process itself builds the my on that line. So think about a, a, an electrical line going from the telephone pole to your house. So that has insulation on it. It’s just, it’s not just a raw copper cable or what, whatever metal cable it’s got insulation around it. And that insulation keeps the, the electricity from just fraying around and instead staying focused on that one line and making that transmission more efficient. So in the same way, mentally you’ve got neurons that things hop from neuron to neuron and then you’ve this fat called my, and it Mylan when you send something down that line and then it comes back that Nates, that neural connection, that sort of set of hops.
Timothy Kenny (19:42):
And it’s kind of like, uh, the natural, uh, paths that animals make or that early people made before. There were roads just through the forest. And as you go through through them more and more, they kind of naturally get its faster. The, the leaves get sort of trampled on the small brush gets kind of pushed away. And so in the same way, mentally each time you get that space repetition, you’re building mile and you’re building that insulation around that line. So it’s gonna be faster and it’s gonna be stronger next time. And so the comes down to what is the most efficient way of building that connection, that retrieval. And so active recall says, you don’t wanna just reread something. You want to question yourself, try to pull that out and then bring it back. And if you can’t pull it out or if it’s very difficult, you wanna look at that flashcard sooner rather than later in a week, rather than a month.
Timothy Kenny (20:32):
If it’s very easy, you wanna look at it in a quarter instead of a month. And so there’s these algorithms and I recommend people start with something like Anky, cuz it’s free and it’s the most well, uh, used thing a N K Y yeah, a N K Y uh, a N K I sorry. And it’s, uh, it started being very popular with language learning, but where it, where the rubber really meets the road, cuz people always question well, okay. Yeah, it’s it. You can use it for vocab. And that’s seen as sort of, kind of very, uh, low level knowledge. But what I learned for several years now, medical students and law students is that they’re using this stuff for some of the most difficult and wide ranging knowledge where you have to know a bunch of different stuff in a bunch of different fields and they’re using an to memorize and learn all of it, not just little pieces of vocab.
Timothy Kenny (21:24):
And when you look at the U S M L E step one, which is their test after for the first two years of med school, which ma is basically, it’s basically like the NFL draft combine. It’s like, this is where you determine where the rest of your career is gonna go for the most part. And so, uh, they’re using flashcards for this stuff and it’s very competitive because you’re competing for a limited number of spots at the highest prestige, uh, hospitals in the country and in the world. And so people take it very seriously. There’s a lot of money on the line, cuz you’re be gonna be making hundreds of thousands a year. And so they’re not messing around and you learn neuroscience when you’re a med student. So you learn how the brain works. You learn how learning happens. And uh, Ali doll is a big YouTuber.
Timothy Kenny (22:06):
He popularized a lot of this stuff. Evidence-based techniques for studying this stuff emerged out of the med school com uh, studying community. And they all use an so it’s not really a question now of, of what to use. You use an and you need to get your knowledge in there. You need to, it needs to be a daily practice, just like going to the gym for an hour. You gonna have to be doing an for an hour. And if you’re a med student, you’re doing a, for two to three hours a day, just like if you’re a bodybuilder, you’re in the gym for three hours a day. So there’s no getting around it. It’s not fun when you get started, just like going to the gym is not fun when you get started usually, but you need to do it and you, you learn to enjoy it and you, you enjoy cuz you get the results.
Reed Goossens (22:46):
And, and are you also saying that to be, to people who are established, you know, those people who have got businesses going to continue to grow using this technique as nearly a form of like meditation or as you’re saying exercise or, uh, whatever it might be that you get pleasure out of? You know, for me, I love going surfing, right? It turns the mind off. I get to just be with myself. Is that something that this technique is, uh, something we, we should be doing as part of our daily ritual?
Timothy Kenny (23:15):
I think it should be part of your daily ritual, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily like a mindfulness practice or a meditation. I mean, you can meditate depends on how you define meditation. But if you define meditation as having a solitary focus on one thing and being at peace with that, and being in the flow while you’re doing that thing, then you could consider it, uh, a form of meditation. But I, I wouldn’t in the classical sense of how most people imagine what meditation is. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily, you know, sometimes I will do some people, you know, reading the newspaper is like a really enjoyable thing. They do each morning with their coffee and their bagel or, or whatever. Some people like that’s not what they would enjoy doing at all. So, and some people would hate going surfing. And, and like, I remember when I was learning to surf and it was like brutal and I like, I, I almost got pulled out to the ocean by these huge, uh, undercurrents in California when I was, and I was like. And I was a lifeguard when I was, uh, growing up. So I was like, oh, I, this should be pretty easy. And it was brutal. So yeah.
Reed Goossens (24:17):
So, sorry, let me clarify. Um, when I say meditation, I meant morning, morning ritual, you know, like people wake up, you know, don’t turn your phone on, have a glass of water. You may read for a period of time. You may meditate. You may go to the gym, you may journal all these practices in order to set your day up correctly, to there before you get involved in the emails and the business and people being at you. I was just sort of getting at like an achy could be an, could be a, uh, a part of that ritual over time. Definitely.
Timothy Kenny (24:47):
Yeah, definitely. So I, I would treat it as similar to like a gym ritual and, but make it a daily thing. I, I mean, some people go to the gym everyday or at least have some form of exercise. Funny enough, uh, I’ve read a fair amount of literature on like what you can do to maintain your IQ over time. And weightlifting is one of the biggest, best things you can do for, for mental, for maintaining your IQ, which is so counterintuitive, but better than walking better than yoga, better than like all sorts of stuff that you would, you would never think weight specifically, you know, resistance training, weightlifting bench pressing. And they found that that’s the top dancing is another, a big one. And I do both of those. So it it’s, it’s amazing.
Reed Goossens (25:32):
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Reed Goossens (26:07):
That’s awesome. Um, I wanna pivot now into what we was talking about a little bit in the green room earlier on about this idea of building IP, right. And how do you go about building a brand? And, you know, we’re talking about real estate and I was giving you an example of, uh, a gentleman who’s been on this show, Dan priestly, and how he talks about KPI status, keep her some influence. I talk a lot about this, on that, on this show. Tell me how you look at that, that area of building your brand and your sort of your worth and attracting you’re back to what you said earlier, attracting what, uh, your value is in and around creating digital assets, not maybe necessarily physical assets, which is obviously what this show is all about real estate investing, but, but, but creating those more digital assets.
Timothy Kenny (26:57):
So I, I think, you know, when you’re modeling a business and you’re think about your business role, no matter what you’re selling, whether it’s physical or digital, uh, either you hope that you build it and they will come, which they’re mostly not going to. And if, you know, with real estate and commercial real estate, you’re thinking about footfalls and foot traffic. So are you located in a place where there’s gonna be foot traffic? If you are, then you can build it and they’re gonna come because they were sort of coming ways, but they weren’t necessarily coming because you they’re just looking for somebody like you. So that’s communication, fundamentally marketing is communication. And so, and that’s intellectual property. That’s what language is, it’s intellectual property. And so you need to get your message out in front of other people. So really doesn’t matter whether you’re selling something in the metaverse or selling a course or selling real estate, you need to generate leads.
Timothy Kenny (27:48):
And then those leads need to turn into customers. And that’s all intellectual property. Doesn’t matter what you’re selling. That’s why somebody who’s really good at marketing can go from selling one thing to selling another being in different verticals. And, you know, it’s kind of the same thing. And a lot of people who’ve gotten rich in realest state. It’s not because they knew the most about real estate it’s because they built platforms where people were finding real estate, they built the Zillows they built, or they were early adopters to that. And all these sort of dinosaurs who were like, oh, let me put an ad in the yellow pages. Uh, Elon Musk was the one who invented, well, not invented, but hi, his zip two. He, he dropped outta Stanford getting into, uh, high tech battery stuff, which he’d later used at Tesla. And he, he created zip two, which was basically taking the yellow pages and white pages, putting that online and then taking that the physical Atlas, like those big, uh, road Atlass and putting that on the computer and doing the first.
Timothy Kenny (28:44):
And he has from that. So thinking that, oh, I’m, uh, a sort of dinosaur real estate agent. I’m just gonna put an ad in the local newspaper or the yellow pages, or maybe like on the, on the main street, I’m gonna have my office on the main street and I’ll have all those pictures in the windows and, and not realizing there’s all this digital traffic on the internet. And, and so a lot of people got very wealthy in real estate just because they found a new way to get leads. So, and, and so you need to find a way to get out there where people who are interested in your product and that’s all IP, that’s all digital, not, it’s not all digital, but it’s all IP, regardless of whether you’re selling real estate physical or, or digital or nonphysical things.
Reed Goossens (29:28):
No, I think it’s important. And, and back to what you, you’ve created a business around a thing that you were very intrigued with, which is terms of that chasm of having knowledge in your brain, but not able to be being able to communicate it or retain it in a certain way that that intrigued you. And through that intrigue, you were able to then determine how can I make a business out of this? And you did that through creating IP, through creating courses online. And I know, uh, um, you have been very successful on a lot of the online coaching platforms in and around teaching this accelerated learning. So I, I, I
Timothy Kenny (30:04):
Think that’s, yeah, I need to re correct that actually, cuz I, I kind of got the causality wrong there. I read the four hour work week and I was thinking I wanna start a business. And so I started teaching myself, you know, just cobbling together, what looked like the good books and courses out there on how to do business. And then I was, I was like, okay, I’m gonna do this. And hopefully I’m eventually gonna come around an opportunity and then that’ll be my product or that’ll be my service. And so funny enough while I was teaching myself, I realized, oh, my product can be teaching like improving how you educate yourself, cuz this is a problem for me. It’s gotta be a problem for a lot of other people. And so that’s, that’s what kind of got me going down that, you know, that priceless book, uh, and pricing book was just the specific sort of moment when I realized, oh, this is gonna be the thing that I sell. This is gonna be the product that I, that I use my generic entrepreneurial skills, Ari to sell hour to, you know, do business around.
Reed Goossens (31:04):
Yeah. And, and where I was going with that was through an entry, you were able to create a product for someone to El to, to benefit for other people. And that in itself was an IP to then, um, monetize and create your own following and your own income. And that’s, that’s just an, an example for those people out there listening who are thinking about starting businesses and not necessarily understand them. I don’t have the, the idea just yet, but you are taking very simple ideas and replicating them and repurposing them in a way that will understandable for other people. And thus that help create your following and create, you know, monetary value for you. You go
Timothy Kenny (31:42):
To engineer school and you learn how to build arbitrary things. You go to culinary school and you learn how to, uh, cook, uh, arbitrary things. You, you learn the broad things. So it’s the same way with business. I think
Reed Goossens (31:54):
That’s it. That’s it. Matt, I wanna get a little bit into your presidential planning. I know that’s a big part of what you are trying to push this year in 2022. Tell me a little bit more about planning.
Timothy Kenny (32:04):
Yeah. So I, I got this concept and I’m all about modeling. So I got this idea to, to coach, uh, med students and law students from, from tiger woods. So he had achieved sort of as, almost as much as you could achieve in the sport of golf. And he was looking for a challenge and he decided to go train with new Navy seals and the Navy seals have something called hell week. And it’s sort of the, the maximum challenge thing. And there’s actually an industry that has grown around this in the last 10 or 20 years. CrossFit is kind of an example of it, tough, utter type stuff where, where it’s sort of people go through these challenges and they yeah. Spartan. So, um, and these originate in the military. And so they’re sort of different tasks that test future soldiers for their capabilities. And so it’s funny that tiger woods chose that.
Timothy Kenny (32:56):
And, and you don’t think of golf as being a particularly rough and tumble thing. So he was looking for that next challenge. Michael Jordan was the same way he wanted to go into, uh, BA there were different things with Michael Jordan, but he wanted to get into baseball. And so you, you have people that get to the top of their fields. They wanna look at other fields. They wanna look at what, you know, what’s the next challenge. So I wanted to find doubt, what’s the most difficult thing to learn who are the sort of Navy seals of the accelerator learning community. And I identified med school, and this is kind of another story for my childhood, but my mom put me in a sewing class where I was the only boy in the class. And I, I, this came up when I, I was telling her about this, um, med school, us milli step one core.
Timothy Kenny (33:39):
And she was like, oh yeah, I put that you in that course, cuz I want you to become a surgeon. And so that was like, you know, it’s been kind of fun learning about it, um, from that perspective. But I wanted to do sort of the most challenging thing and people think of, uh, surgery being a neurosurgeon brain, you know, it’s not rocket science. They think of these certain fields as sort of the most challenging fields. So I wanted to go there and uh, and challenge myself in that way. And then, you know, another part of my I’m big into modeling. So just looking at people and saying, how did they do what they do and who are these successful people in different areas and how did they achieve that? And I also look at who’s spending the most money on stuff. So med school, law students, they’re spending tons and tons of money on tutoring on, uh, courses and help.
Timothy Kenny (34:26):
You have people tutoring, med students for three, four, $500 an hour. And that’s normal little bit less in law, but, um, it’s, there’s big money there because they know there’s big money at the end of the rainbow. And so that’s, they think, oh, it’s worth spending the money here. And so, and, and that’s part of why it’s so competitive and why you should look there for, oh, how are they doing things there? It’s, it’s like, if you’re looking for nutrition advice, you go for somebody who’s like the nutritionist of the, uh, Newing England Patriots, cuz like, you know, that stuff’s dialed in, not some random person just off the street. So you get, you look for people who are in a very competitive environment and what are their best practices. So I wanted to go at like, okay, how do CEOs think about planning, but then also how does a president think about planning and Eisenhower?
Timothy Kenny (35:16):
This came up in my interview with Tiago forte. I told this story about, uh, Eisenhower setting up the interstate system. Eisenhower is really the great systematizer of all the us presidents comes out after world war II, great general. He built a lot of his general ship around just organizing, uh, grand commander, something of, of, uh, of shape, uh, allied Europe. I, I forget the, the acronym, but he was big into organizing throughout his military career, brought that into the white house and set up a ton of systems, productivity systems within the white house. And so I, I, I started with the interstate system and then I looked at, oh, I wonder if he’s done any other systems turns out he was the great system at tie of all the presidents and were still living with his legacy. And so that got me interested in, oh, I wonder what other stuff is kind of other systems, how they work in the white house and how they’ve been optimized over the years and they’re spending a lot of money on it.
Timothy Kenny (36:11):
So you look at somebody who’s spending a lot of money on their planning organization and learning systems and you say, I’ll wonder what best practices they have. So I started looking around for stuff and nobody really writes about this. Nobody really talks about it. So I went on this journey to understand how do things work at the presidential level? What, you know, when, when money is not an op is not a, uh, it’s kinda like in real estate, like when somebody has infinite money, like how do they build their house? How do they build their library? How do they build their, uh, master bedroom and, um, bathroom? And, and like all that stuff, they just want the best of everything. So when the president is sitting there and they have the best of everything, what do they do? What systems do they use? What strategies do they use to plan to organize, to learn? And so I wanted to model that and sort of take my material to the next level. And so that’s the stuff that I’m coming in the pipeline. Um, and my presidential planning course came out about a year ago. I, I taught another course called how to think like a pods, which is part of my, uh, thinking skills line of premium courses. And then the presidential learning and president organization are coming out next.
Reed Goossens (37:18):
That’s incredible. That’s, that’s incredible. What, what can people, and I’m sort of jumping ahead here, but where can people go to learn more about this presidential learning and all the courses you’ve got going on?
Timothy Kenny (37:29):
So I’ve got a lot of courses on platforms like UTME and scale share. And that’s the stuff that I developed several years ago and this sort of like the entry level stuff. And then you just need to get on my newsletter. I’m still kind of, I’ve never been I’m, I’m really focused on doing my research and kind of creating stuff. And I’m pushing myself now to really put myself out there more and do the marketing and have like a presentable website and everything. So it’s, you know, there, isn’t a lot of stuff on my website. You just need to newsletter. That’s where I launched stuff. And um, yeah, that’s there isn’t really much out there otherwise.
Reed Goossens (38:06):
Awesome. Awesome stuff, mate. Well, look, Timothy. We, uh, I wanna thank you for coming on the show and towards the, the end of every show, we like to dive into the top five in investing tips. You ready to get into it? Yeah, let’s do it mate. Number the question I one is what’s the daily habit. You practice to keep on track towards your goals.
Timothy Kenny (38:24):
So, uh, I’m actually not hugely into, to daily habits. And, and I’m really about that’s the key with presidential planning is its long term planning. So it’s four year, eight year, 20 year, 50 or a hundred year part of what, what actually another big thing that got me into the presidential planning was how do you do longterm planning? And I started looking around like, how do you do a 20 5,000 year plan? How do you even think multi-gen generationally? And when you’re dealing with states and inheritance and stuff like that, and, and high net worth, I’ll try net worth people with lo you know, several homes and EV all, all that stuff they are thinking at that level. They are thinking 20, 50, a hundred years in the future, Michael sailor with his Bitcoin stuff, talks about how do I pass down a hundred million dollars a hundred years from now to my great-granddaughter or something.
Timothy Kenny (39:12):
So that’s, that’s part of the check. And so nobody really does this kind or very few do this, um, at the longterm, unless they’re high net worth large companies, fortune 500 fortune, 100, especially very large companies do long term planning, oil companies. For example, they think about how do we transition out of oil when it runs out in 2050, for example, and then you have governments go minutes are doing their 20 5,000 year plans. And so there was nobody else to learn from, in terms of how do you do that ultra longterm planning? How do you plan to live for a hundred years? What is your plan to keep knowledge in your head for 50 to 75 years? And so I don’t, I actually, my day to day is about staying in the flow and kind of going where my in tuition tells me to.
Timothy Kenny (39:57):
And my focus is much more on, I, I have in the back of my head at all times at an intuitive level. Now, what is my ultra longterm plan? What are my four year, eight year, 2050, a hundred year plans? And then I let my sort of unconscious mind decide what to do. And that’s what keeps me in the flow. That that’s what keeps me product. So I, I feel like a lot of people grind against the gears of like, oh, I really don’t feel like doing this, but I have to do it. But when, when you’re like a child, when you’re just sort of like, or you’re playing that video game, you’re binge watching that Netflix thing. It’s no effort. And so how do you get to the place where it’s no effort, but you’re also highly productive. You need to be in the flow, you need to be optimizing for the, that long term. And so, and you have to have that right balance. That’s great.
Reed Goossens (40:41):
I love it. I love thinking a little bit more of the long term because so many people do talk about 30, 60, 90 day goals and, you know, 10 year, uh, one year goals and five year goals and 10 year goals. But to, to, to sort of even take a step back further and think 25 or a hundred year goals is a completely different way of thinking about it. So, uh,
Timothy Kenny (41:00):
So, and that’s a special thing about real estate is very few other industries force you to think in terms of a 20, 30 mortgage. Correct. And so that’s one of the special things about real estate that I think is really cool. That
Reed Goossens (41:12):
Is 100% correct. Uh, question number two is who has been the most influential person in your career? I
Timothy Kenny (41:18):
Mean, I, I kind of have to go for Tim Ferris because that was really the paradigm shift that set everything else up as a, you know, instead of just going to college and taking the traditional path, that was the thing that really set up everything else. Uh, you know, another person was, uh, Tony Robbins, Ted talk. Yep. And one of the important lessons that I got from Tony Robbins was looking at who are these people who are very wealthy, who are going to his seminars and they’re not fulfilled. They’re not happy and they’re in their forties and their 50 in their sixties. Maybe they’re getting divorced. Maybe their kids are addicted to drugs or whate you know, they’ve got other problems, money, isn’t the problem, but they’ve got the other problems. Mm. And so it made me realize you need to have a holistic understanding of planning.
Timothy Kenny (42:05):
You need to have a holistic lifestyle plan. So kind of connecting to Tim Ferris, you need to have, you need to cover all your bases and a big thing about presidential organization or just my organization’s system is I, I was very methodical about being very, very comprehensive, like encyclopedic level comprehensive, making sure there’s nothing MIS missing from the system. And so what I got from that is, you know, if you don’t plan 20, 30, 50 years in the future, you’re that 50 year old person going to Tony Robbins seminar with the money, but everything else has fallen to pieces. And some of these things you can’t, once your kid is addicted to drugs, you can’t just undo that once your kid is, you know, so you actually do need to, you know, prepare way in advance so that you don’t, you prevent the mistake from ever have happening.
Timothy Kenny (42:55):
You don’t, you don’t, uh, announce of, uh, prevention is, is worth more than a pound of cure. So I, I think that’s Ben Franklin. So you wanna, you, you wanna avoid being that person. What I that’s, what I realized at a young age is you wanna avoid being that person. Who’s at the Tony Robb seminar at 50, 60 years old. And now you’ve gotta go back and UN do 30 years of learning, and you’ve gotta do this, all this reworking. You want to prevent yourself from even having to do that by setting things up right. And doing your long term planning way ahead of time.
Reed Goossens (43:26):
No, I think the big thing there is intentionality, right? And so many people on this podcast, we talk about success. We talk about, I’ve been to view hundreds and hundreds of, of CEOs and, and business leaders and stuff like that. And some of the they’re all very successful in business, but, you know, I’m sure if you scrape below the surface, there’s there. They, I talk about pillars on this show and, and, and, and a table, you know, back to my structural engineering analogy, you know, you, can’t a table, can’t stand with just one leg. And that, that might just be the business leg. You need to, to have health, you need to have, you know, uh, spirituality or, you know, religion or whatever you want to go to. We also need a family, you know, like all those things are there to support you, to keep you, to keep it stable.
Reed Goossens (44:07):
And if you focus too much on one thing and don’t have intentionality around your planning, you couldn’t get up to a stage where yeah, you have a kids, hate you, your wife hates you, your, but you’re really successful in business. So I think that’s all in and around intentionality. So, so, so love that, uh, question number three is what is the most influential tool in your business? And when I say tool, it could be a physical tool, like a journal or a phone, um, or, or a person in your organization, or it could be a piece of software that you just can’t run your business without. What is it?
Timothy Kenny (44:39):
I mean, I use OneNote. That’s where I keep my knowledge. And I think that’s, you know, I think about it in terms of a personal Wikipedia and that’s kind of what your organization system is. You’re gonna link out from, if you’re using notion, you can have an embedded, uh, database and I’m building some stuff with notion. So, um, and, and that’s where things are headed to having sort of, there’s certain there’s structured information, and then there’s less structured or unstructured information. So structured information is like, can it go in a spreadsheet? Can it go in a database? Unstructured is like a blog post or your daily journal, or what it ever a checklist, something, that’s a list that’s kind of like a, a database or a mini spreadsheet embedded within a larger kind of piece of unstructured content. And so kind of like embedding a spreadsheet within a webpage, like a WordPress webpage. So, uh, you wanna have both of those. So Google sheets or notion you wanna have a way of keeping struck information organized in a structured way, and then stuff that can’t be structured like that, or as best left unstructured is put in something like a personal Wikipedia. And so you combine those two things and the technology isn’t so important, it’s more, they understand the, the underlying principles. And then you choose the right technology for the time and place that you’re in and your use cases.
Reed Goossens (45:56):
Yeah, no one note is such a big influence in so many people’s lives. I use Aun there’s, there’s so many different ones out there, uh, obviously use slack. So having that in one place and having a piece of software that can bring all your systems together is really, really important. I like how you talk about the structured versus unstructured. I think understanding where things go is also really
Timothy Kenny (46:14):
Important. I, I wanna add one other thing, cuz it, the real estate angle to this is kind of like renting versus owning. So part of why I use OneNote and I, I tend to prefer things where you can have a physical local backup where you sort of own your data as opposed to having it on platform and who knows what’s gonna happen to it. And you’re sort of renting it’s more are curious. So, uh, that’s a big thing to think about is like, you know, if you’re planning to keep knowledge for se 50, 75 years, maybe pass down to your children or mentees or whatever, then it needs to be stable for a long period of time. And so you want to actually think pretty carefully because there’s a huge sunk cost of once you’re deeply invested, just like you’re invested in a home, there’s a lot of moving costs and transaction costs. So you wanna pick the right platform and then stick with it or, or only really upgrade or, or move or migrate to a new platform if there’s really a substantial reason to do so. And so you wanna be careful about
Reed Goossens (47:15):
That? No, I completely agree with that. Uh, for sure, mate, last question. Where can people reach you to continue the conversation they wanna be in your sphere? Where do they go?
Timothy Kenny (47:24):
Uh, go to my website, Timothykenny.com um, on Twitter, not that active on Twitter, but um, Timothy underscore Kenny. Awesome.
Reed Goossens (47:33):
Mate, look, I wanna thank you so much for jumping on the podcast today. I just wanna reflect some of the things that I took away from today’s, uh, conversation. And I really think your first thing that you said luck is preparation meets opportunity. I think that’s so, uh, it was such a good little sound bite there because it is true. You do create your own luck through being prepared and looking out for opportunity. I, I loved how you have been inquisitive about something about in, in the sense of trying to get something outta your head. You think you’re smart, but you can’t necess articulate it. And then going and creating a whole structured learning, uh, and productivity courses in and around that, uh, to help other people learn quicker, retain more knowledge, be the best entrepreneurs they can be. Um, and finally, I think some, you know, for those people out there just to reiterate, uh, and key a and.com, uh, is definitely one of the things that you mentioned to go out and check and check out in terms of adding to your data, the ritual in, in, in regards to the mental repetitions to, uh, retain more knowledge.
Reed Goossens (48:35):
And I just, you know, thank you so much for jumping on a strong sharing, your incredible knowledge. Josh, did I leave anything out?
Timothy Kenny (48:40):
No, I think that was awesome. And, uh, I think, you know, with real estate, I I’m, I’m big into just thinking broad and thinking, you know, not getting too wrap up in, in a certain professional identity of, oh, I’m into this one thing and trying to eventually get broader into just being a, an entrepreneur or business person and, and looking at where the next and that was what was big with Elon Musk. That’s part of the reason I brought that up is he realized, you know, I can just take this yellow paper, uh, yellow pages or white pages and put it online. I can just take this Atlas and put it online. So we talked a little bit about the metaverse and you know, digital real estate. So Facebook, Google, what are they selling? How do they make money? They’re selling ads. What is an ad it’s screen, real estate?
Timothy Kenny (49:26):
What is an newspaper selling it’s real estate on a piece of paper. So, you know, instead of getting too wrapped up in, in like, I’m this one thing it’s, how can you abstract away from that abstract up to the next level where you can see opportunities of, Hey, you know, that’s, you know, that open, uh, like Uber just started this thing where you can people put this a little ad on, on top of their car and like that’s a new piece of real estate. So, uh, jerseys in, in professional sports, on NASCAR cars, like there’s all these different elements of real estate with a metaverse, you know, in, in a, in a library each, each of those books is kind of taking up some real estate and kind of, uh, owns a top or being on the bestseller list. Uh, New York times’ bestseller, that’s a form of, you know, owning a piece of real estate for a certain period of time.
Timothy Kenny (50:20):
So, uh, I like to think in terms of different types of assets, this, something that I talk about in presidential or, uh, planning, and you think about what are the different types of resources I have, whether it’s real estate or intellectual assets, financial assets, sort of human resources, or just people in relationships trust. And then what can I do with those different things? You know, taking out a loan, you’re sort of paying interest, your paying for time. You, you’re not paying for a house in cash, you’re taking out a loan, you’re paying interest. So, you know, being able to think more abstractly about what are the different types of resources and then how do I combine them in different ways, kinda like a chef to create different things and, and see new opportunities. And if you don’t do that, you miss out and you think, oh, I’m in, I’m in real estate.
Timothy Kenny (51:11):
Very you know, you never think about metaverse you never think about digital or other types of yeah. IP. So, you know, just broaden your horizons and try to, you know, take, this is how geometry started. Geometry started with assessing land and, and having the little, that’s, why it’s called geo geo for earth geometry, meaning measurement optometry measuring the eye optic eye. So these fields come out of just studying something at an, at a concrete ground level, but then they, they grow by abstracting away from that and sort of, uh, taking it to the next level and saying, oh, we can apply geometry to a piece of paper to origami, to designing a newspaper or magazine. So, uh, you know, this is where you take your thinking skills. You take, I, I have a mental models course. This is where you take something that works in one area and you abstract and you start thinking, how does this apply to other areas?
Timothy Kenny (52:10):
And that’s where creativity starts. That’s where you find that opportunity where you can be an entrepreneur and, and figure things out before somebody else and, and find that startup idea or find that next angle for your business. And so I think it’s important, you know, take what you’ve learned from real estate and, and spend a little bit of time, you know, five to, and percent of your time reading magazines of other industries or reading textbooks of other industries. And that’s how you start to recognize patterns and kinda like Elon Musk, you, you take mental models from one area, you apply them to other areas, Warren buffet, you take ideas and business models from one area. You, you start to see all businesses as sort of a financial state and, and, and a combination of people and resources and how they all work together and you see the similarities across different verticals. Yep. So that’s kind of what I wanna leave people with of, you know, that’s how you take things to the next level. And, uh, if you wanna learn more about how to do that, of courses that, that get into that.
Reed Goossens (53:11):
Awesome. Awesome mate. Well look, and one other thing that the, the IP that, uh, and I suggested this to you earlier in the show, 24, 24 assets by Dan priestly, he’s been a guest on the show. He’s written down that book for those people out there. It’s a good way. I do it once a year, taking stock of what IP I have in my, in my business, both digitally and physically, uh, it even goes down to stuff like contracts, uh, that you have in your business that you can easily just like whip out and, and, and send to people. So well, mate, look, I wanna thank you so much for jumping on the show today, enjoy the rest of your week and we’ll catch up very, very soon. Sounds good. Thanks a lot. Although you have another cracking episode, jampacked with some incredible advice from Timothy re to ke over to Timothykenny.com to check at everything that he is doing over there. I wanna thank you so much for taking some time outta your day to tune in, to continue to grow your financial IQ, because that’s where we’re all about on this show. If you like this show, the easiest way to give back is to give it a five star view on iTunes. You can jump over to my website to see all the show notes from today’s show and much, much more, and we’re gonna do it all again. Next week’s remember, be bold, be brave, and go give life a.
