MMM: So Jesse, I think I first heard of you through your customers – the oddly dedicated fans of You Need a Budget. But knowing is much more powerful than not knowing, and with all that in mind let’s begin our little interview.Īn Interview with The Uncommonly Effective Entrepreneur Sure, habits are notoriously hard to change and some of us are compulsively self-destructive. Because overall, the vast majority of your life’s results comes not from birthright or large external events, but from small behaviors, repeated thousands of times over the decades. You may be a completely different person with a different history, but life doesn’t care about that stuff. The reason I think it’s useful to study other people, and take a few notes on exactly how they run their lives, is because of the surprising effects of daily habits. But around here, we just call it complainypants. The alternatives of blaming the system, citing luck or privilege or tragic events in our past, striking out at others to prove that their success is invalid and other favorites may well be justified and politically correct and sympathetically documented with great intellectual rigor in reputable East Coast publications. But I’m still a big fan of the cheat sheet approach to life optimization: if you want things to change, it helps to look at somebody who is getting the results that you want, and see how they are doing it. And indeed, if you are happy with the life results you are getting right now, you should continue to do exactly what you’ve been doing. You may not want your life to look exactly like the life of either Mr. Now, all of us have different desires and goals in our life. All while being a genuine and honest person who actually cares about the world, constantly challenges his own assumptions (the family of 8 lives in a normal suburban house but is just about to close on another place that is a bit smaller), and maintains life-of-the-party wit while never drinking anything as mood-altering as even an earl grey tea, ever. In his spare time, he has casually dashed off more than one small self-published book, then a big-publishing-contract major book (not yet released), while the rest of us were thinking of how to begin our Table of Contents. Not just an entrepreneur but a benevolent leader of a software company that seems to treat its employees and customers like gold. Then there are smart economists like the Freakonomics guys or Ezra Klein who not only break down the complexities of our world with meaningful analysis, but go on to build insanely popular media empires like Vox, built on educating the populace rather than pandering to it with consumerism and fear.įigure 1: Current incarnation of the ever-evolving You Need a Budget softwareīut for me, the ultimate role model of simultaneous you-are-too-lazy guilt and inspiration is Jesse Mecham, the founder and CEO of a software company called You Need a Budget (YNAB for short).Ī dedicated husband and father to not just one or two, but six inquisitive and charming children, not just in shape but genuinely pumped up due to a rigorous Crossfit training regime that he blasts through with an equally impressive wife. Both of them younger than me, raising more children, managing employees, staying in good shape, writing interesting blog posts and occasionally zipping off to deliver an entertaining keynote speech to a thousand people here or there. You’ve got entrepreneurs like Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income fame, or Ryan Carson who runs the online learning company called Treehouse. Also, plenty of people you’ve met have their financial and family lives together AND still get a lot more done than you.” You get uneasy if somebody tries to plan activities for the coming weekend before lunch on Friday. But you’re kind of known for being the Anti-Commitment guy. “Sure, Mustache – you’ve found great value in simplifying your own life. As I wrote that last article on making sure your life isn’t too busy, a nagging thought kept coming up in my mind.
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