Executive Summary
The value of financial planning often stems from helping clients realize their goals… both in the literal financial sense of managing cashflow and in the figurative sense of determining what those goals actually are. The former is often 'just' a question of good planning, but the latter takes continual time and investigation. Aspirations like owning a vacation home can be accepted at face value, or they may signal a chance for the advisor to dig deeper into their clients' deeper motivation.
In this 197th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss how to dive into what clients 'really' want – even (and especially) when clients struggle to articulate it themselves. This is important as many of these life decisions are 'expensive' as they represent a deposit of not just cash, but also time and attention – all resources that can be spent elsewhere. Thus, it is essential for advisors to understand what the underlying desire is, such as connection, community, independence, or purpose. Once that underlying desire is revealed, through questions like, "what would having that allow you to do?", the advisor and client can reflect together on the options to fulfill that desire.
One of the most effective ways to evaluate these deeper priorities is through small, intentional experiments. Rather than making large, irreversible commitments, clients can test ideas in lower risk ways, such as renting a similar property in the area where they want a vacation home. Similarly, a client who desires more community might become a one-time volunteer before making a long-term commitment. These experiments can be informative about what the clients truly enjoy, what sacrifices they're willing to make, and whether the experience actually delivered the expected value.
Another thought experiment is to have the client imagine that it's three years in the future, and they've succeeded at whatever they aspire towards. What is their life like? How do they feel? This is especially valuable if the client is stuck between several different paths – often, in describing that imagined moment, more implicit excitement will show for one path or another, informing the direction in which a client can experiment.
Ultimately, these experiments are a practice in the art of paying attention to life's construction. The allocation of capital – be it money, time, or attention – is often what makes up a person's life. So if the advisor can continually hold conversations that nudge clients to look more deeply not only at what they want, but why they want it, clients may find themselves surprised at what 'actually' makes a difference to them in their lives. Over time, these large and small allocations accumulate into a deep value in financial planning!
Authors:
***Editor's Note: Can't get enough of Kitces & Carl? Neither can we, which is why we've released it as a podcast as well! Check it out on all the usual podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, and YouTube Music.
Show Notes
Aligning Your Capital With What's Important To You By Focusing On Where You PAY Attention: Kitces & Carl 180- Use Of Capital And Planning
- Aligning Client Capital To Goals (Which Are Only Clarified Over Time): Kitces & Carl 86
- "Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life" by Luke Burgis
- Why We Spend the Way We Do with Gretchen Rubin (50 Fires podcast with Carl Richards)
- The Most Dangerous Money Habit You Can Have, According to Morgan Housel
Kitces & Carl Transcript
Michael: Well, good afternoon, Carl.
Carl: Hello, Michael. How are you?
Michael: I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I'm managing the very painfully hot season. It is the dead of summer as we are recording this. And as I've probably noted on this podcast in the past, I'm a native Washingtonian of DC, and I love my hometown. And this is an amazing place to visit, but do not come here in July and August. It's just miserable. It's hot. It's humid. No one wants to be outside. This is definitely the tough season for DC.
Carl: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I can't imagine. It's getting warm. We're having a little hot spell now, but at least it's cool in the mornings, and it's not humid.
Michael: Yes. It's the humidity that sets it off. I never really appreciated the concept of "it's a dry heat" until I actually went out to Phoenix my first time. I was like, oh, yeah, this really is different than home. The humidity really is awful at home. Now I understand.
Carl: For sure.
Michael: I don't think I got an appreciation for dry heat, but I definitely disliked the wet heat even more when I went home afterwards.
Carl: For sure. For sure.
The Challenge Of Aligning Capital With Values [01:27]
Carl: Well, what's on your mind today?
Michael: Well, I was going to ask what's on your mind. What are you pondering in financial planning world these days?
Carl: Yeah. funny you should ask. But let me just set up a premise here, and then we can talk about it. My favorite definition – and we all can define financial planning however we want – but my favorite definition and the type of financial planning that I'm most interested in is this sort of this never-ending process of helping people align. And I'm thinking in a Venn diagram right now helping people align their use of capital in one circle. And there's always an asterisk by "use of capital": the asterisk is money, energy, time, and attention. I know we've talked about this before. So meta, and unfortunate, whatever they call it.
Michael: Acronym. I just would have gone with MEAT.
Carl: I know. I know. Maybe I do too.
Michael: I'm a MEAT fan.
Carl: Money, energy, attention and time. So MEAT. And that part's really interesting. I want to make 2 corollaries, actually, so that circle, your use of capital, and the other circle is what's important to you. So the alignment your use of capital with what's important to you is my favorite version. You could say you can call your use of capital, your money, and you could call what's important to your life if you wanted to. There's plenty of versions of this.
But what I have been so... I don't know what the right word is, thrilled and stoked about lately, is how much fun it is to spend time trying to figure out what's important to you. And really, for the sake of what we're talking about, it's so much fun to help other people try to figure out what's important to them. I thought that that was the easy part. I thought that was going to be...tell me your goals, I thought that... So naïve. It turns out, we don't know. We don't know what's important to us.
And so, in fact, there's a great David Whyte...David Whyte, in one of his books, and I can't remember which one right now. It says, "Only slowly do we learn what we really care about and allow our outer lives to be aligned with that gravitational pull". So, this process of figuring out, and the reason I've been so stoked about it and so intrigued is because it feels almost like a crisis of meaning. If you don't know what you really care about, there tends to be, what's meaningful in your life? What do you want to do? Was it Mary Oliver, "Tell me exactly what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.?"
What does it mean to craft a life worth living? Not just a life worth getting through or enduring, a life worth living. I think one critical piece to a meaningful life is under...or at least continually trying to narrow in on what's important to you. And how amazing is that, that that's at the core of financial planning. So I just want to talk...I think it'd be fun to talk a bit about how exactly... what are the things we can do? first of all, is this true? Do you agree? Disagree? Second, what are some things we can do to help clients get more clear about what's actually important to them?
Michael: I think certainly, to me, there's a part of this that's striking. So, on the one hand, uses of capital aligned to what's important to you kind of feels a version of tell me your goals and we'll create a plan to put you on a path to achieve your goals. Right? The plan is how you're going to use your capital to achieve your goals.
Carl: Not a new idea.
Michael: Yeah, yeah. No, no, I'm not knocking it. Just like I'm... So I translate it back to, I guess, my roots, my upbringing in the business. I think what strikes me as you frame it is almost all of our training in financial planners is the how to align capital parts. Not the, are you sure you're aligning it to the right thing? Right? There is a kind of implicit, clients come in and explain their goals and circumstances and then we craft the plan and that presumes they can effectively articulate their goals and what's important to them in the first place.
And I think we've talked about it in the past on this podcast as well. I also have this mindset of, I used to have clients come in and I would ask them about their goals and then we would craft a plan. And now I kind of jokingly say, I never believe them when they tell me what their goals are because I don't think you've actually spent enough time to really figure out what you think those goals are.
So what you're saying connects to me in that frame, but there's... I don't know if it was intended. It feels when you frame it this way, use of capital, what's important to you, we're one step further down beneath the surface. So goals are this superficial thing we build on top of what's important to you. And I tease the goals part, but you're even further down, and oh, yeah, they might not even really actually know what's important to them.
Carl: Look, I think we should... This isn't a knock on, this is just part of the human condition. I think we should assume that we personally don't know what is important to us and the clients don't know what's important to them. We don't. And that David Whyte and a million other people, like Stephen Covey. The last thing you'd want is spend your whole time building and climbing the ladder only to find that it's leading against the wrong wall.
These things are cliché for a reason. David Whyte saying only slowly do we learn, we should just go into the conversation, assuming, with deep empathy and not judgment that the $5 million in a sailboat, when we said, what do you want...? And you're really nice. You said I don't believe them. I almost, in my head, I have this idea of, in my head, I can see my thought, cute story. And this has only gotten worse because of Instagram, right?
And Rene Girard's working on the mimetic desire and Luke Burgis's book, Wanting, all of this is pointing to the same idea. We don't know what we want. And how many times have you seen this play out? We thought we were going to enjoy retirement. We thought the second home was important. Second homes, come on. Are we even at 50-50 in terms of people after they get one, keeping it a boat?
All of these things, we have some idea because maybe we saw it on internet or our friends are doing it. I don't know if I've told the story here, but have I told this... Gretchen Rubin told this story about being at a...she was at a party.
Michael: I don't think so.
Carl: Okay. So Gretchen Rubin told me the story on 50 Fires. She was at Gretchen Rubin, "The Happiness Project." Amazing, really thoughtful human. She was at a party and they were...she and her family were going to somewhere in Colorado during the winter. They were going to a resort town during the winter. And they said, "Oh, great. Because you ski." And Gretchen was like, "No, we don't ski. We like just to be in this place and we like winter and it's cool to look out the window and maybe go sledding or something. Get some hot chocolate, whatever." And the lady is like, "You got to ski. It's so fun. You'll love it." She knew where they were going. She's like, "You should do this." Spent 15 minutes parading her about how she should ski. And Gretchen was like, "We don't ski." And the lady leaves, goes to talk to some other people, comes back 15 minutes later and it's like, "Gretchen, you know what? I don't skiing either." She's like I just...
Michael: Yeah. This not where I thought that was going.
Carl: She was just like, "I just realized I didn't know that you were allowed to not like skiing. If you're going to go..." So her whole point really was, man, what do we really want? So I just want to introduce a concept that I've been calling forcing functions. And one way to help clients get clear about this is to just run small experiments. Right? So sailboat, $5 million in the sailboat, we could pick anything, right?
Have you been on a sailboat? No, you haven't. Okay. Maybe let's go out for an hour. We're just going to run small experiments. And I think of these as forcing functions. You could take a pottery class or going to art museums. You could design anything. I'm currently using big adventure motorcycles as a forcing function. I got a motorcycle with my son, we're riding them up in the mountains. These are the kind of bikes that can go on the road and off the road and you pack them up and you go out for 2 or 3 days.
It's not about the motorcycle. It's not about the pottery class. It's not about the art. It's about the forcing function will ask you questions. Right. So if you sign up to get better at yoga, when the day comes that you've got to go to pottery class, yoga, whatever, you're going to be forced to ask yourself a question, "Do I care about this more than the 15 other things I could be doing right now? How much do I care? What type of person am I? I signed up for this thing. Am I going to go? And once I go once..." Right?
So you have some inkling of what might be important and we design a forcing function. And the point of the forcing function is not the thing. The point of the forcing function is the questions it will demand of you. And this is something you do with clients, right? Gosh, I'd really to be more involved in my community. And you and I are both like, "Okay. You're saying, I'm not... I believe you, but let's test this." And I'm saying cute story.
So we write down more involved in community. Three meetings later, we say, that more involved in community thing, is that still on your mind? Yeah. And then we can say, okay, what would that look like? None of this should be new to anybody listening. But if we start to understand, it's actually not about being more involved in the community. It's about the questions it's going to force us to confront, to decide what we mean when we say something's important to us.
Why Commitment Matters To Determine What Clients (Actually) Value [13:30]
Michael: I think I'm struggling a little bit in listening to this. Or if I start trying things, as you're highlighting here, this is the question coming to mind, "Am I finding what's important to me or am I just finding what I like and don't like?" Right? I tried the pottery, wasn't really into the pottery class. To the art museum, really enjoyed that. It was kind of neat to walk around and see the things. Is that a difference between the 2 or, again, I feel like... What do I like? I don't mean this in a negative way, but what do I like feels a little bit more superficial. What's important to you, again, feels like this really deep-rooted thing. So...
Carl: Yeah, no, it's really...
Michael: ... how do I make sure I'm getting into the important part and not just the what do I like part? Or maybe that's good enough that I get to the what do I like part. If I do more things that I like, I feel like I should be happier.
Carl: No, that's a really important distinction. I guess when I was thinking of art or pottery class, I was thinking of, what is the value that I'm hoping to capture from that experience? So the thing doesn't matter so much, right? Deciding to train to run a ultra marathon in the mountains of Utah. Well, the question would be, what value am I trying to capture? Well, maybe I'm trying to capture that I'm the type of person who's disciplined enough to do that.
Maybe I'm trying to capture a sense of community because I'm going to run with my friends. Maybe I'm trying to capture a sense of health. And so it's the expression of the value that we're trying to understand. I'd really like to...man, I've always loved art. I'd like to go to more galleries. That's amazing. What is it that you hope that that would do for you? Well, just a deep sense of meaning, or I may want to volunteer there, or... I don't know. I just have never taken time for myself.
I don't know what... Sometimes I think we get caught... I know I do. I know I get caught up in staying at the surface level of the thing and not asking around, okay, why is that? I want to retire. I want a second home. Well, what is it about the second home? Oh, it'd be a place to gather. Well, see, as soon as we get gather with the family, now we've got something that we can experiment with.
Michael: You frame it that way, reminds me, client a long time ago, say Sherry for anonymity purposes. What was similar in that vein, she was coming up on retirement and she wanted to buy the vacation home in Myrtle beach, which for mid-Atlantic is the cooler place to go for the summers. And it was like, "why do you want to have a place down Myrtle beach?" "Oh, my grandparents had a place down there when I was growing up, I have very fond memories of doing these trips and seeing my grandparents. I want to create that kind of family gathering experience." That's why your gathering comment struck it for us. She wanted to do the family gathering experience thing.
And so she went and did the vacation home and did the thing and very much long lies when you said and 2 years later, was like, "I love the gatherings with my children and grandchildren. And I really hate being a landlord of a second vacation home that's a thousand miles away from where I am" and ended up selling the vacation home because she loved those memory moments, but it was too much trouble.
And so it came back to a conversation. So then she was...Sherry was in really upset and now she was grieving the loss of losing the vacation home and not being able to do the family gatherings and realized she had put herself through a year of anxiety, self-inflicted torture between these family gatherings are really so important to me, but I really don't like being responsible for a second house. That was really, really stressful for her. And the place that we then landed was to say, "Sherry, why don't you just buy really nice week, one-week getaways for the kids and the grandkids to... Pick reasonably a warm, beautiful locale in the Southeast?" And there was like, oh, we couldn't do that. That just costs too much money to do the thing.
We kind of pushed her, well, have you ever actually priced it out? And so, eventually, she did. This was a few years ago. These were $15,000 or $20,000 trips for her to do one of these one-week getaways at a place that would work for her and the size of the family. And then we came back to her and... But the place that you bought was $400,000 or $500,000 and you financed it, you were paying $20,000 in interest to the bank for the place in Myrtle beach before the upkeep and the property taxes and all the other things that were driving you bonkers.
So, to be clear, this is cheaper for you. This is actually less expensive and you can do the gatherings and just go back to the place you like. And if you don't like it anymore, you pick a different one. And that became their thing. And it actually became a rotating thing. They would do on your, I forget where the place was. The 'on' year was a place in Florida. It wasn't Marco Island, but something like that.
And then the off year, the odd years, they would try a new location because basically they were trying to find something that might be better than the other one, but then they didn't want to do that too long. It's like, we'll go back to our number one spot and in the off years, we'll try a new spot to see if that becomes the new number one. If it does, well, that'll be the new one going forward. If not, we keep going back to our other one. And they rotated, I think, 2 or 2 times over 10 or 15 years to find places that upgraded. But it all came back to, she was so fixated building up towards retirement to get the vacation home in Myrtle beach. And what it turned out was, she didn't want a vacation home in Myrtle beach.
Carl: That's right.
Michael: She wanted an opportunity to convene her family for a special experience every summer.
Carl: Let's break this down. Because that's such a great story. And I could tell you hundreds of stories. Well, I don't know if I'd say hundreds, but I can tell you a lot of stories about that exact experience. And so, to me, the thing, right, the Myrtle beach, let me just real quickly... So we have 2...well, we've already had a couple more, but Morgan Housel, when he was a guest at the Society of Advice call, he and his wife, Gretchen, both ran experiments, and he thinks he should be a car guy.
He grew up as a valet in Los Angeles, right? Everybody tells him he should be a car guy. He's got some money now. And so, every once in a while... But he's like, "They don't do anything for me." He's like, "If they did, I would buy one." So what he does every once in a while is he rents one on a business trip. He goes to the Hertz counter and is like, "You know what? It's $200 extra dollars. Give me the Porsche." And he said, every time, by the time he gets to drive off the lot, before he even gets off the lot, he's like, "I admire this. This is beautiful. This is amazing, but I don't want one."
So what happened with that Myrtle beach with Morgan, with Gretchen Rubin, all those stories is there was a thing. And what we're trying to get at... Do you... I just get so fired up about this because of the value advisors can add here. If we can sort of fair it, if we can sort of fair it out, if we can sort of discover, what's the value you're trying to realize. And sometimes around here, we call that value creation and value capture. We think a lot about, okay, what's the value you're going to capture here? What's the value you're trying to express here?
Here's one more. My wife and I did this with going to movies and dinner with friends. We wanted to spend more time connecting with friends. We thought what you do, because we'd seen it on Instagram, right? We'd been told since we were young, you go to dinner and a movie with friends. That's what you do. So we did that 2 or 4 months in a row. And we realized the worst way to connect and build relationships with friends would to a noisy restaurant and then to a theater.
So instead, we were like, "Let's just invite people over to our house. We'll get all the ingredients for a meal and we'll spend an hour prepping the meal together." And we'll spend 2 or 2 hours prepping, and making, and sitting down and eating. And it turned out it was a little less expensive, but that wasn't the point. The point was, what's the better way of expressing.
So the way I to look at this is, Myrtle Beach, we're immediately going to be like, okay, what's the thing underneath there. And she's going to say gathering the family. And we're going to say, amazing. Myrtle Beach is one way together the family. And that might be, I wonder if we should run an experiment. What are some other ways? Let's just play a game up here on the whiteboard. Let's see how many ways we could think of. Oh, you could go on a vacation. You could remodel the house and invite everybody there. How many ways could we come up? And then we can run little experiments.
How To Dive Deeper Into Clients' Underlying Wants [24:12]
Michael: So take me back for a moment. I like all the thought experiments, but that started with, so how do I get my conversation to... The client says, I want to buy a place and I want to have a vacation home in Myrtle beach.
Carl: Oh, how do you get even that first statement?
Michael: I got there and aside from saying, no, you don't really, tell me what you really want, how would you open that conversation?
Carl: So they actually say, I want to buy a home.
Michael: They say a thing where it's not the actually important thing, but they say the thing. We say, tell me about your goals and they put all the things in the guide or whatever it is. So...
Carl: Totally. And we should pause. It might be the thing. Who knows? Maybe the house in Myrtle beach is exactly what they've all... And it's going to turn out. So I just think we just learned to ask more questions. And I think that's where, as you pointed, out our training, there isn't anything about this in financial planning school.
So when somebody says I want, and they seem to be like, man, it's really well thought out and it's really clear, and $5 million in the sailboats, very specific or the house in Myrtle Beach, very specific. So we just write it down and we move on. I just think we learned that... One of my favorite phrases, Rabbi Shira Stutman used it with me. She was like, "Could we investigate that a little bit?" I thought that was a great statement.
I also love the idea of just being like, oh, wow. I'm trying to train...it's a why question without feeling like an interrogation. So, oh, wow, Myrtle Beach, that sounds amazing. Tell me more about that. Or you could even do the, let's pretend you're there. You got the house in Myrtle beach. What is it about that that's important to you?
Michael: Oh, it's nice way of framing it.
Carl: Yeah. What would go on there? Let's pretend 10 years from now you've had the Myrtle beach house and you're writing in your journal. What would you say about that? And so what we're trying to suss out is like, oh, so it's about family or, oh, it's about independence or it's about community. And then we can say X is one way of doing that, which I think sounds great. We can build a planner on that, but just for fun. What are some other ways you can see realizing that value?
Michael: Is it's funny to me, even the context of your comment earlier, we try to do some things towards what we think is important and it becomes a forcing function to create further clarity. Because I'm like, so that's what Sherry did. The forcing function was bought a house at Myrtle Beach and 2 years later was tired of doing upkeep on second house in Myrtle Beach. I mean, that actually was a forcing function for her to get there.
Carl: And I think that's a good thing.
Michael: Not the best financial deal with the ending out on the real estate brokerage and the property taxes and the rest. But that actually literally was the journey for her.
Carl: That's right. And that should be celebrated. The question you're pointing to is, hey, maybe there's a smaller...maybe there are other ways to do it.
Michael: Yeah. Could we have surfaced this earlier and gotten earlier to the heart of why are we really going down this road of the house of Myrtle beach? And then maybe we would have found a less expensive or less stressful way to do the test to figure this out.
Carl: Yeah. What could you have done? Let's say she said it's about gathering the family and Myrtle beach has been fun. I have all these memories. So it's still Myrtle Beach. What's the smallest experiment we could run?
Michael: How about Airbnb-ing a nice Myrtle Beach place for a week and see what it's like.
Carl: That's exactly right. Have you tried? I had this conversation with somebody who absolutely was sure they wanted to have a house in Southern California to spend the summers. And, "Have you been there?" "Yeah. We go there for 2 weeks every year, I'm like, "Should we just try a month?"
Michael: Have you lived there where you have to actually just do regular groceries and laundry and then you still feel the same?
Carl: Yeah. And I just think it's you don't know that stuff. I think, to some degree, we're... Your example of Myrtle beach is great simply because it was a forcing function. And sometimes, how great is it that you realize, you got the chance to ask yourself the questions and say, "You know what, there's probably a better way to do this." And she made that change. That's a massive financial planning win for a client to be like, "Wow, now we're going every other year to different places and it's so much better and I don't have all the stress." And the only way you knew that was you took a step forward, right? It just happened to be a really big step.
Michael: But ultimately, that comes back to, okay, right. So we're trying to align uses of capital with what's important to you – what's really important to you. I was struck when I asked you, how would you frame that to the client and you had this mini mental exercise. So picture yourself in the house of Myrtle beach. We've done the thing. What's important to you about? What you've just created, right? You're literally asking a version of the what's important to you about that, right? You set a goal, you stated a goal. What's important to you about that goal or that outcome?
Carl: You what I've done lately that's been fascinating? Yeah. I've used a lot lately. I've used... There are 2 options. Let's pretend it works. I want to build this business. So just use this with a friend. I want to build this business. So interior design business, and I'm going to have 8 to 12 employees and we're going to have this office. I was like, okay, that's amazing. Let's paint this whole vision. This is incredible. Now let's pretend it worked. I want you to go in and work with your favorite AI tool or your journal. And 3 years from now after it worked, I want you to write the journal entry of it working.
And then there was another option in this case. So there was 2 options. I was like, write both journal entries and see which one feels more... Because it often can become so clear when you talk with somebody. One of them lights them up and one of them is like...feels the responsible one, the important one. And it becomes very clear when you hear them repeat back, you're like, "Can I just point out to you? The energy..." And you're giving the client the opportunity to do that by reading their own journal entries. Right?
And your favorite AI tool has been really helpful with that. Like, hey, let me just talk to you about this experience. And then you read the journal entry, and you're like, huh, becomes pretty clear which one's important. So, again, we're just talking about ways to figure out what's actually important to us. What does it mean to craft a life worth living? What does it mean to have to life worth planning for? Well, you gotta have things that you care about.
Michael: So take me back once more. I know we got to wrap up soon, but you've talked about ways we can visualize this future or different alternatives about how we can go about it. You can start some conversations about what's important to you about that. You framed up some of this as forcing functions, which, to me, is a more... Forcing is a strong word. So take us back now to, what are forcing functions? What am I doing with forcing functions? Is that a different tool in my toolbox than some of the other conversations and approaches we're talking about here?
Carl: Yeah. It's one of my favorite ever since it was introduced to me by my friend, Rob, which has got to be a decade ago now. Forcing functions is just one way to think about the process of trying to figure out what's important to you. Right? In David Whyte's words, only slowly do we learn what we really care about. Designing, careful design... Because another word for a forcing function could be an experiment, careful experiment design around... The goal of using a forcing function or an experiment is we want it to ask us questions so that we'll have some clarity based on...we'll have some information that we could not have unless we actually go through the experiment.
Your friend, Sherry, in Myrtle Beach could not have known, probably no matter how many spreadsheets, she probably couldn't have known until she did it. So that was the forcing function. So I think the way to think about, for me, I think I want to be more involved in outdoor trips and I'd like to be involved as somebody who has some medical training. Okay. That's really interesting, Mr. Mr. Client, Carl. And I would be very interested to design a forcing function. How much experience do you have? Tell me more about that. What's this 2? Okay, not a lot of experience. Well, what if you went to a first aid class, a wilderness first aid class? What if you went to wilderness first? So I did this, I tried to go to wilderness first aid class. I couldn't, I got sick, all these things. And I finally was like, I'm signing up for a wilderness first responder, which is a lot of work and I'm going to go. What happened when I went to go, when I went to get in the car, a bunch of questions came up.
Forcing functions, the goal of the forcing function is to ask you questions that generate new quality information, new signal. And so I was like, how committed am I to this? Do I really want? I could just stay home and watch TV with my kids. I could go on a bike ride. I could... Well, no, I'm pretty committed. Oh, wow. It turns out I got my wilderness first responder. It's time to renew it right now. I'm like, am I going to renew it? What have I learned since I last?
So the forcing function is just to force yourself or a client to put them in the amazing...put themselves at risk for new information to occur about what's meaningful to them. Right? And I think we can get a lot better at this, just really careful experiment design, really care... The forcing function is not about wilderness first responder. The forcing function was about, hey, how could I be a useful human in my community?
Michael: So can I get close enough to the thing to figure out whether the thing was the thing?
Carl: That's exactly right. And I think the more playful we can be around it... Forcing function has a hard edge, and I love that, but the more playful we can be, hey, you know what, let's just write some ideas on the board. What if you went for an hour? What have you listened to a podcast? Hey, I found this great book. It's about exactly what you were talking about. Try reading the book. To the degree we can be the people helping people find deep meaning in their lives and calling it financial planning, come on. How about that, Michael?
Michael: That sounds beautiful. Thank you, Carl.
Carl: Yeah. Cheers, Michael. That was really fun.
