The Mindful FIRE Podcast

Coast FI Unlocked Freedom: Jake Wysocki's State of the Union Practice

• Adam Coelho • Season 1 • Episode 218

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In this episode: Coast FI and financial freedom, State of the Union practice for couples, intentional life design, family travel planning, entrepreneurship journey with Jake Wysocki

Episode Summary

Jake Wysocki shares his journey from mechanical engineering and corporate sales to entrepreneurship, powered by reaching Coast FI. He reveals the quarterly "State of the Union" practice he developed with his wife to design their life intentionally—using structured exercises to assess satisfaction across key life pillars, prioritize changes, and take action. Jake discusses how financial independence enabled them to travel the world for a year before having kids, and how they continue to plan meaningful family experiences while building his business helping coaches design impactful workshops.

Guest Bio

Jake Wysocki is an entrepreneur and founder of Intention Craft, where he helps coaches design world-class workshops and group coaching programs. With a background in mechanical engineering and sales, Jake worked in corporate America before reaching Coast FI and making the leap to entrepreneurship. He and his wife traveled to 25 countries over a year and now live in Milwaukee with their two children, ages 5 and 8.

Resources & Books Mentioned

Guest Contact Information

Key Takeaways

  • Reaching Coast FI gives you freedom to take calculated risks without fear—every step toward FI creates more options, not just the final number.
  • The State of the Union practice: quarterly sessions where c

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Welcome to the Mindful Fire Podcast, a show about crafting a life you love and making work optional using the tools of mindfulness, envisioning, and financial independence. I'm your host, Adam Quail, and I'm so glad you're. Each episode of the Mindful Fire Podcast explores these three tools through teachings, guided meditations, and inspiring interviews with people actually living them to craft a life they love. At its core, mindful Fire is about creating more awareness and choice in your life. Mindfulness helps you develop self-awareness to know yourself better and what's most important to you by practicing a kind, curious awareness. Envisioning is all about choosing to think big about your life and putting the power of your predicting brain to work to create the life you dream of. And financial independence brings awareness and choice to your financial life, empowering you to make your vision a reality by getting your money sorted out and ultimately making work optional. And here's the best part, you don't have to wait until you reach financial independence to live out your vision. Mindful fires about using these tools to craft that life. Now on the path to financial independence and beyond. If you're ready to start your Mindful Fire journey, go to mindful fire.org/start and download my free envisioning guide in just 10 minutes. This guide will help you craft a clear and inspiring vision for your life. Again, you can download it for free@mindfulfire.org slash start. Let's jump into today's. Episode.

Adam Coelho

Jake, welcome to the Mindful Fire Podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here.

Jake Wysocki

Yeah, thanks for having me, Adam.

Adam Coelho

I know we've been talking about doing this for a while, so I'm really excited to jump into your story and specifically this idea that you have around the state of the Union with your wife and your family and how that helps you live more intentionally.

Jake Wysocki

Definitely happy to share.

Adam Coelho

I'd love for you to start by sharing a little bit about who you are, your journey, and what you're up to in the world these days.

Jake Wysocki

Yeah, definitely. All right. So I went to school in Florida, mechanical engineering, but then took a left turn into sales, went to San Francisco. That's where I met my wife in 2015. We decided to quit our jobs and travel for a year right after we got married, before we started having kids and settle down I'll plant this seed here. Our path towards financial independence helped make that easy. Without as much fear of, oh, we're leaving these high paying jobs in San Francisco to go do this thing. A lot of our family and friends are like, are you crazy? What are you doing? And we're like, it's really not as risky as it think, as you think. And actually we spent less money on that year than we did normally just living. In San Francisco, Came back to the same Fortune 200 company I was working for. Got introduced to a a team within my company called the Design Thinking Team. Really love that. it's really the melding of human and process. I really love that. It's like structured exercises, workshop, design. And I joined that team to teach other people within that company how to do what I do basically. And then in 20, 2024, I left my job to do my own business and that was enabled by us reaching Coast Fi somewhere a few years before that and wanted to make the leap into entrepreneurship to go just try something new. I loved what I did. It wasn't a an active aggression, if you will, like I need to get out of this job. Hey, I want to try this thing over here. And actually there's a few pieces that tie directly with what we talk about in the fire community. So I'll just plant it. I'm sprinkling a few seeds here, Adam. So my entrepreneurial journey, I actually wanted to start helping people do, basically stay the unions with their with their spouses, like coach people on how to do this. Life design is what I was calling at the time. And, partway along that path, someone started asking me, Hey, I need help doing this in person event. I don't know what I'm doing. I have some coaches, can you help me?'cause they knew my background, started helping them just for fun. Basically I'm like, you know what? I really love this and I really miss this. So I made a pivot into helping coaches deliver world class workshops without wing it. And that's what I do now as an entrepreneur. So that's my story. Do you want me to pull the thread on any of those?

Adam Coelho

Yeah, definitely. It's an interesting journey and funny how much overlap we have. We went to the same college at the same time. We presumably lived in San Francisco at the same time. Met our wives in San Francisco. And yeah, that's pretty funny.

Jake Wysocki

Then got outta San Francisco.

Adam Coelho

Francisco. And where are you now?

Jake Wysocki

I'm in Milwaukee.

Adam Coelho

Milwaukee, yeah. And yeah, I'd love for you to just talk about coast Fi. Remind people what it is and tell us a little bit about like how did you make it happen?

Jake Wysocki

Yeah, so I actually don't know where my financial journey like truly started. I definitely did the Dave Ramsey thing for a while, which was useful at the time. Now I have different feelings on that, but that's a whole nother show probably. But that was a good start and there was a few other podcasts and eventually I found Choose afi, where I actually heard you first So I'd heard you on choose FI back a few years ago when you were on there. And now we're in some of the same communities as entrepreneurs, which is awesome. And along that path, I started thinking like, yeah, this makes sense. I didn't necessarily have a drive to not work, but it was more the sense of freedom. And so we had started on this path back before 2015 when we quit to travel. We had been saving a lot of money. And basically the answer was it was easy for us relatively because we did have relatively high incomes. We weren't CEOs or anything, but in San Francisco living in a relatively cheap apartment at the time we were able to put a bunch of money away and we maxed out our 4 0 1 Ks For a while, I was really on what I would call the traditional fire mindset, which is just aggressively save as much as I can, even though I might wanna spend money on a trip or something. Let's not do that this year. Let's do something smaller. We did that for a little bit and thankfully, I think it was before die With Zero became more of a known entity. Like especially in the fire community. We started thinking like, maybe we should spend a little bit more. And that's around the time. We had taken our trip like, you know what let's, we don't need to put the pedal to the metal. let's use some of this money to actually live that life now that we wanna live. And that really was like the first big step. It was scary. We almost chickened out. And the question we asked ourself was, would we regret not doing this now just because we don't wanna spend the money? And the answer was clearly yes, we would regret it, it would be harder later when we have kids, it's gonna be harder to travel. And so things like that really were a big influence on my journey. And the enablement largely was just being intentional with what our, as Ramit would call it what our rich life is. We weren't really using that language per se, but that's the center of these state of the unions, so let me put like a tighter bow on this. the answer to your question was, my wife and I had intentional conversations about what we want our life to look and feel like, and that made it easy to say no to things that didn't really enable that. And then we had a clear path to what do we actually need to do to accomplish that? We need to save some money to get down this path towards freedom. More of that freedom enables us to be more of ourselves at work, which enabled us to get better pay through promotions and things. It snowballed into this enablement of let's live the life we wanna live now instead of waiting forever. Does that make sense?

Adam Coelho

Yeah, absolutely. coast Phi is a powerful choice and path in this broader fire movement. Because it makes it so that you just need to cover your annual expenses each year knowing that you've saved enough that it will grow to what you need in full retirement. So that's a powerful path and it's cool to hear that you did that. So sounds like Coast FI enabled you to think more clearly about what you wanted your life to look like and to pull some of those dreams into the present. I'd love to hear a little bit about this worldwide trip. What was the intention? Where did you go? how did it feel?

Jake Wysocki

Yeah. And now let me tighten up a few things with kfi. we weren't at KFI at this time. And I wanna just emphasize this. For anybody listening who's on the path and I'm not the first person to say this obviously, but every step you take towards financial independence gives you more freedom. It's not, I haven't hit my number, I can't do things, it's, oh, I've taken some more steps now I have more freedom. And it's a sliding scale. And so we were well on our way toward that coast fi. And that Coast Fi really impacted my decision to leave my job, which we can come back to in a moment. Since my first job in Gainesville, Florida at a childcare place called O to B Kids, where I worked for eight years through high school and in college. At one point I became a supervisor. And if anyone out there is familiar with Jim Collins, good to great popular business book, there's this idea called the hedgehog concept and it's what is the one thing that you are the best at? I remember the owners of this company did a lot of training for us and that's where I got introduced to things like seven habits of Highly Affected people probably like Rich Dad, poor Dad, and some of these like kind of foundational, classic, almost self-help. And they introduced me to. Basically what was a structured exercise in the form of a goal packet. It's basically answer some prompts, answer some questions, do some envisioning, if you will, think about what you want your life to look like. And I had been doing a practice like that for years in various forms. I adapted to my own needs and I was doing one of these while my wife was in the city at a bachelorette party with her friends, and I don't even know Adam, where this idea came from. The best I have actually connects back to O to B kids. The owners took a trip around the world back like years before I met them, and maybe that was planted in my mind, but I was doing some journaling. Part of this goal packet. And the idea just came to me. We should travel and do something. I hadn't done any international travel besides some Canada stuff and some easy accessible Mexico. I just felt like I wanted to try something different. I wanted to get out there and I wanted to go see part of the world. And this was the easiest time that there'll be for many years because we were just getting married when this idea came up. Anyway I basically wrote a note to my wife, which I found recently. The first line was I wanna work for myself. I found this like a year ago after I actually quit and started working for myself. I could not remember that I even wrote that. But the second part of that was we should take a trip. And I put an in an envelope, put it on the seat. My wife got in the car. She said, what's this? I'm like, I don't know. Read it. Tell me what you think. By the time we drove home back across the bridge to Emeryville, we had decided, let's do it. Let's do a trip. And so that's the genesis of how it happened. And so part of it was thoughtfulness and part of it was just having the freedom because we had saved the money and we knew what we wanted. We wanted some adventure. That led to us saying yes, even though it was frankly pretty scary and a little intimidating, especially with most people telling us like, are you crazy? Whatcha gonna do for jobs when you get back? All these sorts of things. So that's the start. Happy to share some details. I can sprinkle in about the trip if you like as well.

Adam Coelho

Yeah. I'm just curious, like where did you go?

Jake Wysocki

Yeah, so we went to three continents Europe, Asia, south America. We technically overstayed our visa in Europe without knowing it. Four months instead of three. But we were okay. We had our ticket outta there. Our favorite place in Europe was Switzerland. We hit it like right in the spring with the mountains flowers blooming. It was as close to magical as you can get, and I don't use that word lightly. I'm hesitant to use magical, but it was pretty darn magical. It was awesome. Our favorite overall was in Asia and Japan. Amazing. The food, the people, just everything was amazing. It felt very foreign, like not built for tourists, but very approachable and like easy to navigate. And then we did a horseback riding tour for three or four days over New Year's Eve in Patagonia, which was probably the highlight in South America. So it was amazing trip Like the memory dividends that they talk about in that book like talking about it now is bring these back. I'm so glad we did it when we did it. And it's paid off in so many ways throughout our life.

Adam Coelho

love it, That's so cool. And yeah, Die with Zero. it's an amazing book that keeps coming up again and again. I was at this front row Dad's conference last week, and guy on stage was talking about how much that book impacted him. It certainly changed the way I think about things. And one day we'll get him on the podcast. I don't think he does a lot of podcasts, but would love to have that chat.

Jake Wysocki

That'd be awesome. That's a good pairing with J Collins. Those are the two that I recommend to people who are like how'd you do the financial stuff? He said, go read Jail Collins book and then go read Die With Zero. Those are my my one two punch usually.

Adam Coelho

Yeah. I would say those are probably the best fire books for sure. Okay, so let's get into this State of the Union. Start at the top what is a State of the Union?

Jake Wysocki

Yeah, perfect. So a state of the union for us is, basically a workshop. So the world I live in now actually is just a coincidence. But I basically designed workshops for my wife and I to zoom out, do some envisioning, we don't call it envisioning per se, but it's the same kind of thing you talk about a lot with envisioning zoom out, what do we want our life to look like, and then basically how do we get there? It's taken different forms over the years, but we try to do it four times a year. It usually works out to three end of the year, usually gets pushed into January, and then usually we just, that's like our QQ one. We typically block off a half day. We usually do this during the work week. When I was in corporate, I would take half day off and she would do the same. And we'd usually do some exercises, go get lunch, come back and finish with an exercise or two. The core of the state of unions for us now is what we call the pillars exercise. And if you wanna look this up, there's similar exercises out there under the name Wheel of Life. It's basically the same thing, and it's where you take, you look at your life from the main categories we use, I think it's eight now. It's evolved over time, but it's like health, it's marriage, relationship. It's your parenting if you're a parent. And then it's like other relationships maybe financials in there, occupation, a few things like that, right? And what we do, we spend some time first thinking for ourself. And I think anyone who wants to do anything like this, I find it incredibly useful. And this is what I do for my Entrepreneurial clients that I work with now too. It's really important when you have people who are trying to collaborate in some way to take a moment to think for themself first instead of just what are your ideas, different people process differently. And so what we do is we'll go and spend 45 minutes or so usually before the event, like the day before. And we'll go through a series of prompts and it's basically answering for each of these pillars what is our level of satisfaction in them right now. And we give it like an A to f just a natural way to grade it. and actually now what I've tried the last time we did it, and I think we're gonna do it again'cause we really liked it. I actually built an ai conversation partner to help pull stuff out and then summarize it to make it easier to just share thoughts. I have a lot of hope for what AI can help with, and I'm skeptical about a lot of things, but one thing that I find it really good at is listening to me and then summarizing in an effective way so that I can share it more succinctly than, as some people may notice. I'm a little bit verbose at times, so it's nice to trim it down and make it easier to communicate.

Adam Coelho

Yeah, that's interesting. So that AI partner, is that like a voice app that you created? Is it more just written chat or what does that look

Jake Wysocki

Yeah, so I love using Claude. Claude is my daily driver, if you will, and I built a project What I first have it do. Act as a interviewer, just general, how's it going? What's some big wins you've had recently and what's some frustrations you've had or something like that just to pull

Adam Coelho

and you're reading this,

Jake Wysocki

reading it, you're talking to

Adam Coelho

it.

Jake Wysocki

So I'm reading it on the screen, but then I use an app called Whisper Flow to talk back to it. For anybody out there who's doing anything with ai, stop typing, start talking. It's huge changer. Stop typing in general.

Adam Coelho

Whisper flow is a game changer. I heard it on the Nathan Barry podcast and I was like, what is the point of this? This is built into all of these things and it is much better. It works really

Jake Wysocki

well. And if someone's yeah, like I use chat pt. It has voice built in. I just find it to be easier to use, whatever. I'm not getting affiliate commission. Yeah. But yeah, either of mine. You can do it multiple, you can talk multiple times before you enter it in, which I find the biggest complaint with Claude, if you use Claude's voice, once you're done, it sends it immediately. And sometimes I'm not ready to send it. I want to give it my context.

Adam Coelho

Yeah. It's nice to have it just hanging out there listening and then It cleans up what you're saying as you're saying it too. So if you say it multiple times, most of the time it gets it right.

Jake Wysocki

So yeah, we basically have conversations with our computers. Feels like a dystopia, but also it works really well. And then it goes through each of the pillars. Would you rank it and give a little bit of information why? And then here's where it gets really nerdy. I've built for each of the pillars I've found who I consider to be an expert If I were to have somebody advise and be in my corner, so to speak, for this topic, who do I want? So with parenting, it's Dr. Becky for health. I think I have Peter Attia I forget what Esther Perel for relationships with my wife, things like that. And I had AI actually build a profile about what things do they care about a lot and talk about a lot and how would they potentially advise you? Now, it's not the same thing as actually talking to Esther Perel for real life, but it does give a little more nuance than just, Hey, what do you think about these things? Claude or AI in general, it gives a little more direction and I have it pick a few things that it thinks I didn't go deep enough on. So it's like you said, your marriage is going fine, but Esther would ask you, how's your intimacy? Or whatever, and it push a little bit deeper. And maybe there's something there, maybe it's not, but it picks a few things out and then basically it gives a report, if you will, that's easier to then share with each other on the day of the state of union.

Adam Coelho

Yeah, very helpful. So you start by doing this work by yourself. Is your wife also using the AI chat thing or is she doing something like journaling

Jake Wysocki

So either if you listener out there, if you wanna do it however you like, do it however you like. But for us, we both liked that process. We were testing it out and she actually really loved it. She's, one of the things she said was, I trust you and I'm not afraid to tell you anything, but it is different when I'm more, it's auditorily journaling if you will. With a computer, even knowing you're gonna hear the output. It's different just talking to the computer to summarize my thoughts than it is trying to articulate it to you. I feel less pressure. And she liked the same process, so we did the same thing. Yeah.

Adam Coelho

Very cool. Yeah, I could see that being important. And so you look at those different pillars. And that's how you organize the process and your thoughts across those pillars.

Jake Wysocki

Yeah. So I love design thinking, we didn't get into this too much, but a lot of'em are sticky notes And I have a whiteboard in my office. If you don't have a whiteboard and you wanna do something, I'm about to describe. You can also use a big window that works great, or if you have good enough sticky notes, you could use a wall. But regardless, we put up the pillars with sticky notes, and then put those on the whiteboard. And then we'll put like our rating. Just silently, we'll write them up and then we'll take a moment, look at them, and we'll decide which one we want to talk about first. And sometimes we pick the ones that are furthest off. That's usually where we start. Not that means we're not aligned on it per se, but it's just, oh, there's one of us is less satisfied than the other. Let's talk about that. But we do talk about each one and say what were your thoughts on this? Do you wanna go first? And we'll usually trade off and we'll have a conversation. And then on that whiteboard, what we'll do when it seems like there's an exercise called rose thorn bud, that's really common. One in design thinking. It's basically what's working, what's not working, what ideas do we have? Now we've already documented what's working, what's not working. But while we're talking, we'll usually write down on some sticky notes. Here's some things to consider doing differently, or here's a problem that we're highlighting that we don't necessarily have a solution for. And we'll write down some of those things that come out of the conversation, and we'll come back to those later and prioritize what we want to do. Because we can't do everything. So which ones are we gonna do next? But we basically go one at a time through each of those. And that's the foundation of the whole state of the union. It's basically checking in again, once a quarter ish, how are things going, and then what do we wanna do differently is basically the main flow there.

Adam Coelho

So then what,

Jake Wysocki

all right so then when we have all these things, and usually there's at least 10 10 different ideas or problems. So sometimes they're, Hey, we should do this, or sometimes it's. I know this isn't working, but let's not try to solution right now. Let's just communicate and align and we'll solution later problem first, then solution. And we'll look at those. And usually what I'll do is we'll say, all right, what are the problems that we want to solve first Co. And then if there's a solution, and I'm gonna get, do you want me to get really detailed? I feel like I'm getting detailed. Is that useful? That is

Adam Coelho

useful, yep. All

Jake Wysocki

So if you have solutions that don't have an associated problem documented, I would then say, okay, we talked about taking more trips this year or something. What problem is that trying to solve? And then you wanna compare all those problems and say, which problems are the ones that are the most important to us to focus on with whatever the scope is. Now, usually we're looking about a year, So we have a little more like a helpful context is like a year. It's a little bit longer term, it's a little bit bigger picture. If you're looking even a quarter, sometimes that's too narrow for the bigger picture visioning that we like to do. And we'll say, okay, what are the problems that we wanna solve? And then we will rank them. And there's a process called the evaluation matrix. But if you wanna look this up, there's many ways to do it. It's called often the impact difficulty matrix. And what you do is you rank them, you stack rank them one after another in a horizontal line from most important on the right to least important or impactful on the left. And I would usually frame this as, what's the most impactful to our life? If we could solve one of these problems, which one would be most impactful? And you just debate. And there's a little more of a nuanced process of, basically it's you compare each. one at a time and you keep adding to the stack and you keep moving things until everything is next to each other. No two things can be the same. And then you look at the difficulty axis, which is the vertical. You keep everything the same on the the horizontal where it was like next to each other, but you move them up or down relative to each other with difficulty, which can be anything. It could be time, money unknowns, risk, whatever it feels like. And you're debating these. And then what you have at the end. Is a grid, nothing in the same column, nothing in the same row. And that's important because you're basically ranking these relative to each other. Anything on the bottom right is probably where you should start. Anything on the top left is probably, which is bottom right, is high impact, low

Adam Coelho

effort. Yes.

Jake Wysocki

relative to the others. Exactly. And then the opposite is true, low impact, high effort is probably something that, probably compared to everything else you shouldn't focus on.

Adam Coelho

Deprioritize.

Jake Wysocki

Yeah. So basically we prioritize that way and usually we pick one thing or two things. I'm a big fan of J Pap isan, for example. The one thing. Doing things sequentially, Most of these things are usually quadrant two, which is important but not urgent. Versus quadrant one would be important and urgent. Usually those are getting handled themselves. The things that are easy to not do about your life, to take that big trip to really look for a new job, to, what, whatever it may be that might have an impact. And they don't have to be big by the way. Usually those things are the things that keep getting pushed aside'cause there's nothing forcing you to do it. So that's why I like to pick one, maybe two to focus on, and then you can always come back and do more. But usually by that time you'll have another stay of the union.

Adam Coelho

Okay, cool. So let me just recap what I understand so far. So you start this process by yourself looking through the eight pillars. Yep. And. You have a process for being interviewed by Claude, but I assume there's a list of questions that you go through and that gives you a sense for how are things going. And you rank A to F give it a grade on each of those categories. Then you come together and you put this up on the wall, literally. You put this up on the wall and you look at, how are we feeling? I gave it an A, you gave it an F, right? So wherever there's the biggest disconnect, that's where you start talking and you talk it out. You talk through it, you identify some ideas, some problems that might be impacting that score, and from there you put those problems on the impact. What was the other axis? Difficulty. I keep wanting to say effort, but it's the same thing. So impact, difficulty matrix. Basically ranking them in terms of how important they are to your overall satisfaction of life, right?'cause now you're comparing them all right? Yes. Across all categories.

Jake Wysocki

Yes.'cause you can't do everything, so where you're gonna focus your effort.

Adam Coelho

Very cool. and so now you have a prioritized list of problems to attack and you choose one or two to focus on for the next quarter. Yes. And I got it so far.

Jake Wysocki

So let me put a sharper point on the clawed piece. So people out there who are like I don't really use ai. if you just want a really low lift way to try this tomorrow for example you could just say go look up a Wheel of life exercise and find the categories and see if they make sense for you. And just make sure that it makes sense. Directionally don't overthink it. And then just have each person take a few minutes in that session and then rank it, and then put them up and then just talk about it live, explain it out, live to each other. Also works fine. It's it, I love these. Think for yourself first, which you're doing a little bit of here. If you do the quick and dirty version It'll get you probably 80% of the way there. And I would start there.

Adam Coelho

I also agree with the do it yourself first and then come together and do it together. That's how I run my workshops and things like that. When I do my ask what's possible workshop with teams. it's helpful to think about it before you get into a lot of these workshops, you have a couple of minutes maybe five minutes to talk about it. You don't want to be thinking about it while you are talking. You should have a little bit of thinking, and then as you put it into words and get feedback from others, you're gonna refine those ideas. A hundred percent. Yes. Very cool.

Jake Wysocki

I can share with you what's next.'cause we left with problems to solve. That's the area that you're focused on. And then we usually say, all right, we wanna solve this problem and this problem. Maybe there's just two. Then we if there's an obvious solution, sometimes there's one that's already come up, we already agreed with, we already agreed on it, we don't need to rehash it. Or there's a time and a place for these big creative exercises but that's often not needed. You just need to decide what you're gonna try. And I like to think about these in terms of like mini experiments, almost. Let's just try something. Let's, what's the simplest way we can go try this? Another way to think about this, by the way that relates a lot to the fire journey, especially with if you're gonna make a big change with something. If you actually wanna try retiring, for example, or try a different job or something like that. It came from another Jim Collins book that I just read called Great By Choice. And it's this concept of firing bullets before cannonballs. And these bullets are like experiments, but it's a low cost, low effort, low risk way to try something before you fully commit. And for example, if it's, we want to we think we want to take the kids international travel. We think they're old enough to not drink the water and have diarrhea for the entire trip. Now how do we test that out? First, maybe that's not the main concern. Maybe it's can they just handle a long plane ride? So is there a place that's more accessible than like an international trip? They need passports and all these other things that we could try maybe combine it with an existing trip that we wanna take with family. We did this to Hawaii this past year. That came out of a conversation my wife and I had at a state of the union with what kind of trips we wanna take. We actually had a conversation very similar to this. your family wants to do a trip. You haven't done a trip in 25 years. We also wanna start traveling more with the kids. Why don't we do a big trip to Hawaii, which is accessible'cause it's the United States, but it's a long physical trip and relatively large, and let's try that. And we wanna do a trip anyway, so it's only adding like a little bit of extra instead of a whole big let's go to Japan or something like that. So anyway the point is when you're thinking about what the solutions are, just do a little bit of brainstorming, pick something, what's the simplest way to do it? Because the killer of dreams in my opinion is, oh, I would do that except now I have to do all of these things. There's this laundry list of things. maybe there's a simpler way to get started. And I went to UF for engineering. So I think about physics, like it takes more effort to get something moving than it does to keep it going. So how can you make that initial effort as low as possible and then you can keep adding energy into that system

Adam Coelho

Yeah. Makes sense. Very cool. I'm with you so far. Is there anything else as part of the state of the union process?

Jake Wysocki

Yeah, so usually we have one, rotating topic that depends on what comes up in that previous exercise that we go deeper on. Or that we already planned.'cause it's like we know we want to talk about travel comes up a lot.'cause that's one that we often talk about in these,'cause that's usually zooming out. And we like to have two years of travel roughly earmarked, not necessarily planned, but we wanna do a big, so for example, the last time we did this, we mapped out spring break this year, Portugal spring break next year, Japan don't know if we're gonna make it to Japan. We have 10 days. So this is what we do. Just to use a specific example, let me zoom back out and answer your question first, and then I can zoom in. So pick one topic that you want to go deeper on, because the pillars is still pretty tactical. It's what do we want to change in the near future? But maybe you do, maybe they listeners go download your envisioning exercise and then that's the second thing you do and you spend some time really thinking about the life that you wanna live. Now, tactically speaking, I would probably flip those that order, start with the vision and then do how satisfied you are.

Adam Coelho

Yeah, that's what I would think. But yeah, so it's good to hear that.

Jake Wysocki

Yeah. So you can mix and match. It

Adam Coelho

could work either way, Where are we now and where do we want to go, but I think you'd probably want to have a little bit more of a. Alignment on the vision, and then you can evaluate your current position based on that vision.

Jake Wysocki

So actually, let me give a sort of packaged response here. If you've never done something like this with your spouse and you want to, I would keep it simple. I would do an envisioning exercise. my wife and I, we did yours at the beginning of last year. And even though I've done things like this before, it's always useful to go back to the, basics. I think it's basic to think about what you want your life to look like. People don't even spend time to think about what they want out of their life. They don't.

Adam Coelho

No, they don't.

Jake Wysocki

It's wild to me. That's

Adam Coelho

why it's always so well received, because when they get up the courage to actually do it, it's wow, that was awesome. That was fun,

Jake Wysocki

So if you wanna do this, go do Adams envisioning exercise first, then do

Adam Coelho

a simple version, which you can download@mindfulfire.org slash start.

Jake Wysocki

Thank you. And then go do a simple pillars or wheel of life exercise and then go deeper on one topic because you don't wanna get bogged down when you're doing the pillars on whatever things come up you're really trying to assess, you're almost triaging, if you will. Like how your life is, and then pick one of those to talk deeper about. And I design exercises for a living, so I usually have an exercise that we do to think through it, but really you can just talk about it, have some time to go talk about something and answer some questions So if I can go just deeper for a minute on the travel one that we do. It's called the the family board meeting. they talk about you only have. 18, you don't even have 18 summers with your kids, or 18 years with your kids.'cause when they're really young, sure you do, but they're inoperable to a certain degree. They're not really aware of what's going on. And then even when they're getting closer to graduation they're probably off doing their own thing more and more. So the thing that my wife and I thought about a lot was what do we wanna do before they're out of the house? On one of my wife and i's trips that we take, we try to do a trip, just us every year. We were in new Orleans and we had sticky notes up on like the hotel window. And we were mapping out the next however many years that the kids are still gonna be, under our roof presumably. And what kind of experiences do we wanna have? Just like high level safari. That'd be great. Will we do that? I don't know. It's expensive, it's big, but if we think we wanna do it, we should start seeing what that would look like and start putting it on our radar so we can actually make a plan to get there. Right?

Adam Coelho

Yep.

Jake Wysocki

So we brainstormed, like these big kind of tent pole trips, I would call it. We put them on the window and we prioritize, okay, which ones would be good for earlier in their life? And we just thought through which ones would make the most sense. And we have a rough plan. And then we usually then look at that and say, what's changed? Has anything changed? Fundamentally, what do we wanna do in the next couple years? Do we wanna start actually planning that Japan trip? And it's yes, cherry blossoms. So then we look at like, how do we actually do that? Could we do that on spring break? I don't know if that's long enough to do a Japan trip. Oh, guess what? The next two years, our spring break here in Milwaukee is budding up right against Easter. And we don't usually travel for like family for Easter. So we can use that time to extend spring break and let's go do that big trip. So that's how we have these conversations. We give some space to do the deeper thinking, the more strategic, intentional thinking, and then set some flagpoles, if you will, in the future. And then we'll do the detailed planning as it gets closer. So those are the kind of things that we do during these state unions.

Adam Coelho

So just like long range visioning and planning and roughly laying it out.

Jake Wysocki

Actually that's really good. So first is figure out generally directionally where you want to go. You need to know where you want to head, but you also need to know where you're starting, which is what the pillars or the wheel of life exercise gives you. And then you wanna know how you're actually gonna get somewhere, right? And then that's like the third step. So figure out where in general you wanna go. How are you doing now? And then what do you wanna do differently to get closer to where you actually want to be? So that's generally how I think about this.

Adam Coelho

Interesting. Okay. Is there more or is that pretty much the process? That's

Jake Wysocki

basically it. Usually at least once a year I'm happy to share this. So I have two kids, but my wife gave birth to three, my second daughter was a twin, and she died in 2020 after she was born. And so this is when it really became like an official thing. By the way we've always done these conversations, but now we have what's called Josephine Day and so part of this has become a ritual. it would be a little unfair to say it's because of that death, that now we wanna look into the future, but we also mark that as like a special moment. So we always do something special, like to go out to eat just for lunch, something simple. Spend some time thinking about that event and how it's impacted our life, and then what do we want to do about it? So it's not necessarily an overt we need to live the life that Josephine can't have. It's not quite that saccharin, if you will. But it really was the catalyst to formalize this process in the last four or five years now. But to answer your question, is there anything else you can add? Whatever else you want, whatever else is important. That's what made me think of bring this up. But we'll go out to eat.'cause we usually don't go out to eat too often. And it's a good excuse to, to do all these things in one like event that we can look forward to.

Adam Coelho

Got it. Thank you for sharing that, and I'm sorry to hear that. I think it puts a fine point on why this is so important and why you are so intentional about doing this. Yes. So would love to hear your thoughts on doing this at the end of the year or at the beginning of the year. Like looking ahead to 2026. I mentioned to you before we started recording that my wife and I are doing something similar tomorrow, which I had no plan for. So this is very helpful.

Jake Wysocki

at least the start of the plan. Yes.

Adam Coelho

This is very helpful. But is there anything different when you're looking at next year versus next quarter?

Jake Wysocki

So I honestly would say there doesn't need to be, the only thing that for me might change is maybe the scope, and one thing I've played with but haven't formalized is do I want to do a specific extra activity or that third activity, like the travel that I keep talking about? That shows up. Is there a specific activity that's rotating that happens at the same time every year? So like a yearly review quarter's probably good enough for most cases, but sometimes it's useful to zoom out and look bigger picture even than a quarter. So if you wanted to do that if you're just designing this, I would probably say let's look at the last year, what worked really well. Like just something super simple. What worked really well, what do we wish we had done, what do we wish was different? What were the biggest stresses in our life? And that'll help bring a little bit of context as well. That should probably filter and overlap, but usually the pillars is a little more like, how do I feel right now? It's useful to zoom out and look kinda like a retrospective, if you will. Got it. Okay. And I would keep it super simple. There's ways I could make this really complicated and lots of structure, but the simpler, the better, especially when you're starting. And then only add complexity when there's a specific thing you want out of it that you're not already getting naturally.

Adam Coelho

Yeah. and I think, you mentioned the family board meeting, that is a huge book in the front row dads community that I'm in. I think it is great. And I have maybe done one, I need to get that on the calendar. So I think one thing to add on to this process and that I plan on doing tomorrow is just like I. Map out the gear and put the, there's like that jar and the rocks and the pebbles in the sand. The gist is for those who are unfamiliar, it's, if you don't put the big rocks in first, everything's not gonna fit in, right? Because if you put the sand first, then the big rocks are gonna sit on the sand and then the pebbles will sit on the big rocks. But if you put the big rocks in and then the pebbles and then the sand, it'll all filter down and fill the jar. And our calendars are the same way. And there was this great kind of workshop in front row dads that was led by this guy, Scott Groves, and he basically said, don't tell me your values. Show me your calendar. And most of the time we say we value things like family and time, with our spouse, but we let work and busyness and things like that get in the way of actually making that happen. So if you want these things to happen, you need to actually put them on your calendar. And so that's the big intention for tomorrow. But I think this other stuff is very helpful. And I think, it's the vision and the calendar, but I think the checking at where we are and how we're feeling reflecting on the year, I think is really important. And the categories or pillars is a really useful way to. Organize that conversation and reflection.

Jake Wysocki

I don't do sports too much, but I'm gonna pick up the football and run with it for a second. I think that works. I went to school like we talked about during the Tebow years, so at least, I was definitely paying attention then. That was a lot of fun. And we actually do that sort of in tandem with some of these travel, so I can share with you how we approach that. And here's what I wanted to share too. I think I got so many thoughts, Adam. Let me, lemme think where I wanna start. Lemme start big picture. What I hear you talking about that I hear other people that I know saying, whoa, I don't plan more than like tomorrow. I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow. You want me to put stuff on the calendar? I don't even know what I'm gonna be doing. Then my response to people who think that way is, that's totally normal. Many people think that way, but imagine this. What do you want to do? Go put it on the calendar. And it's not locking you in unless you're buying a ticket for it. But it's providing that space to be intentional about how do I want my life to look and how can I do that? It's by saying, I want to do this. This is how I wanted to spend my time and making decision. And it doesn't mean you can't change it, it's so much easier. Oh, we came up with a phrase, my wife and I.'cause we've had many people in our family, like with the Hawaii trip we led the planning. My wife primarily did the heavy lifting. And they were happy to let us do it because many of them I love them and they don't like the plan as quite as much as we do. But our view on planning is you can't pivot from nowhere. It's a lot easier if you have a plan to start with to say, oh, something came up that I want to do instead of this thing that I said. So maybe I just move that to next weekend and it makes it really easy. And you just keep pushing it off to forever, which might never come. Soapbox of planning I'll stand off it for now, but I love planning, at least to a certain degree. It's different than locking it in or providing rigidity. I think it actually gives more freedom, but

Adam Coelho

yeah, I totally agree. And I hate planning. Like I am not a planner. I am a visionary and so I just wanna set the vision and then move towards it. However it happens, but that is the opposite of how my wife thinks. She is very much a planner. And but I, when the guy Scott introduced this calendar approach, it's that makes total sense, right? If you don't block these things on your calendar, it's just gonna fill up with stuff and you are going to be reactive to that. But if it's on the calendar, like for instance, we wanna go to St. Thomas sometime in February, right? We don't know when we are waiting for hopefully things to open up and become a little cheaper, but if we don't have that, on the calendar to some degree, things might come up and we might not actually be able to make that happen.

Jake Wysocki

Totally agree.

Adam Coelho

Okay. And then, yeah, go ahead. If you wanna add something.

Jake Wysocki

Yeah, I was gonna share how I would actually approach this. So I think all the things we've talked about flow together. So if I was, Adam in your shoes right now, tomorrow I would do if you need some envisioning, maybe you feel like you've done enough of that and that's okay too. So that recommendation for someone who hasn't done anything like this ever before, you should start with envisioning, in my opinion. Then do pillars and you can keep it really light, but that will help get the gears thinking of, okay, our friends and family category, we feel like, we never get to see our friends. And that might inform what you want to put on your calendar for this next exercise. And how I would do it is, I think in terms of I usually start, maybe I'm up here, if you're watching the video, I'm up high. It's probably more foundation. I like to start with foundation first and then get more specific as you get more detailed. So the way my wife and I do it, if you have a whiteboard, you can do this really easily. We'll map out a year, a calendar basically on, I have a big whiteboard and we'll start putting sticky notes of here's the things that we know we are expecting to do Christmas travel whatever Thanksgiving, kids have this kind of event that we already know is coming. Put the stuff that you're already committed to. that you already know is on your radar. And then start to think about what are the other things that we want. Okay. We want an international trip this year and we think it's gonna be in February. And I put this calendar just on the month. It's not the days, it's just January, February, March, April, et cetera.

Adam Coelho

And

Jake Wysocki

so we'll put some sticky notes on those months about where they go, and then you can get a really good gut sense. It's wow, February is really busy with a lot of things. What if we just move that thing that's optional to March? There's nothing in March right now. And it makes it a lot easier to just get a high level and then put it on your actual calendars and side note, please have a shared calendar of some kind. That's a whole nother soapbox for me. But it's so easy to not know what everybody's doing. But if you have a shared calendar and you actually use it, I can just see, oh yeah, my wife is traveling that week. I probably shouldn't book my client thing at that time. It just makes everything easier. But having those things on the calendar makes it really easy to make decisions when new opportunities come up.

Adam Coelho

talk a little bit more about the shared calendar and the like, how that actually works. So let me just speak to why I'm asking this. cause we have, I have my work calendar, my mindful fire calendar, which is my primary, and then I have like my Gmail calendar. My wife has a Gmail calendar, which she barely uses, and she has a work calendar within her company that she does use a lot. And so whenever I have something that I need her to know about, I add it to her work calendar. But I don't think I can have access to her work calendar. So that's the context.

Jake Wysocki

I'm in the same boat. So my wife works W2 as well. She has a work calendar. So I'll, let me start with how it's structured. So we primarily use the Google ecosystem. And my work is also technically on Google, but it's individually separate from my personal account. So I have my intention craft email, my business stuff. I have a, Jake Personal, Noelle has her own, I've created a separate calendar for both of us, Jake and Noelle. But there's a nuance here. Separate that Gmail

Adam Coelho

account.

Jake Wysocki

These are all Gmail. So it's a separate, technically I think this is on our, we have a Jake and Noel like Gmail that people can send to, and it goes to both of our emails. But this one might just be an additional calendar that we created and shared with both. Does that make sense? Okay. So

Adam Coelho

both people can, yeah. I see. So one owns it that both of them can add, edit, delete,

Jake Wysocki

And that's actually to be really specific, we used to have a Jake and Noel, but this is actually a Waki family calendar. Yeah. And then to get a little more detailed, and you don't have to do this, but I found it useful for the kids having activities. Now I actually have Gmail accounts for each of the kids. But I think, again, I think this is just an additional calendar view, if you will within the Google ecosystem. But we have one for each of my kids that we can just switch'cause we have access to it, we can just switch on I use Notion Calendar just to get super specific to actually manage my calendar. I can switch between the different calendars that I have access to and put stuff on those individual calendars and also see them or turn them off and on. Now the piece that I don't get is, like you mentioned, I can't see what my wife is doing, but really that's only an issue if she's gonna be out of town or like out when she normally is not out. Or if she needs my attention and time, like during the normal workday. So if there's gonna be a conflict during the work time usually is the only time I send stuff to her calendar. And so one example is we both work from home. We usually watch part of a TV show. We're watching the really uplifting Handmaids Tale right now, by the way.

Adam Coelho

That's right. Feel good stuff.

Jake Wysocki

Very feel good. But we'll watch part of an episode while we eat lunch'cause we're both here and it's a nice way to get a little bit of time But anyway the point is that is actually not our family calendar that I mentioned. That is my personal calendar shared with. My wife's work calendar and then when I do booking stuff, I have both personal and work on there. So if time is blocked for either of those, it just shows his unavailable for people trying to book time with me. So those are a few of those breadcrumbs. Does that make sense?

Adam Coelho

Yeah. I think so. So what are you adding to the shared calendar?

Jake Wysocki

Yeah, so the shared calendar is more like family events. We want to take a trip. So it's on the calendar, it's on everybody's view. My wife might share that with her personal or with her work if she wants to. Since I'm in the same ecosystem, I don't really add it unless I need to block it if I'm gone like during the week or something, I may block it on my work calendar. But that is where most of the family events I have blocked on there. That's just how I manage my calendar. I usually have it pretty full up with like blocks of stuff and sometimes blank stuff. But yeah, that's what I use the shared calendar for.'cause the problem was she doesn't have that on her work calendar. So if I need to move lunch, I just move lunch and then she can accept it if she wants, and she'll see it on her work calendar and it'll be blocked for her work stuff. Or she can say, no, I can't do that time eat by herself, no problem. so the point the problem that's solving is it's helping with communication. So I don't need to say, Hey, can you do lunch at this time? I just change it here and then, it'll automatically go to her work computer, which she's on right now, and she'll tell me if that'll work or not.

Adam Coelho

Things like

Jake Wysocki

Okay. Yeah.

Adam Coelho

thank you for walking through that. That's helpful to understand. One thing that, with regards to putting things on the calendar and designing your year, I think the other thing that we walk through in that exercise I did in front row dads. Was to design your day as well. And maybe starting with a morning routine or a miracle morning or something like that, going to the gym at some point that's where I need to create more structure because I feel like I'm just waking up and being like, what am I gonna do today? That is not a great productivity hack, I will say. But things just don't happen. My kind of, part of my problem is I put things on the calendar and then ignore them. But I think it's just a matter of being intentional. What are these things that I'm gonna do because they support me and my family every single day. And so building those into the calendar, makes a lot of sense, I think.

Jake Wysocki

Yeah, I think that was probably John Meyer that call we were on. He talks about daily non-negotiables a lot. That's right. My take on that, and I talked about this a little bit, I'll just share my recommendation. I actually wrote about this is one of the first things I wrote about when I first quit. I pivoted. But one of the first things I wrote about is the ideal week. So I like looking at things from a week perspective, blocking them off. And this is written about, like Michael Hyatt, I think is kinda the one who made it really famous. But the ideal week I think is better than just daily. If daily works for you. Great. I find my days are a little bit too variable to have a really consistent, every day I'm doing this. So I like to think, what are the big blocks of or what are the big stones, if you will, the things that I really wanna do. Now here's the nuance and we don't need to go deep on task management. but people put due dates on things that don't actually have a due date. I see this as similar with a calendar, whereas if you're putting on a calendar, it needs to be something that you really are going to do or really try. It's not just aspirational. It's, I'm committing to doing that. That's what goes in my calendar.

Adam Coelho

I'm committing to doing it then Yes. This time on this day,

Jake Wysocki

and maybe if something comes up, you push it a little bit, but you're moving it, you're not ignoring it completely. Yeah. If you find yourself continually ignoring it, That's also human nature. Yeah. It might just say you're not ready to do it. I would then say, delete it. Confidently and happily delete it and say, I'm just not doing that thing. Delete it. And then if you're feeling like during one of these state of unions or something I really need to go be more consistent with working out or something, I'm gonna do that spouse, would you help me stay committed? Here's how I think I can do that. For me, because I'm an entrepreneur, I drop the kids off Monday, Wednesday, Friday. My wife and I usually will go many times if her work allows it, and I'll drop the kids off, walk to the gym after dropping the kids off. And that just becomes like that sort of mini habit stack. But I have that blocked in my calendar all the time so nobody can accidentally grab time. And I'm usually really consistent and my wife is aware of this. And so she'll be like, are you gonna the gym today? I'm like, yes, I am going to the gym today. Thank you. I was gonna complain about my back, but you're right, I can do an arm workout instead or something.

Adam Coelho

Okay. I like it. Very cool. So Jake, thanks so much for bringing me through this process and we dove a little bit on the calendar aspect, but I'd love just to hear your overarching, philosophy you clearly are very thoughtful and intentional about how you live your life and would love to just hear you. Your overall philosophy? I'm an aspiring intentional liver, right? I do in some respects, and I don't know the respects, but I see a lot of value in it. So I'm curious to hear why it resonates so much for you and how you're bringing it into your life.

Jake Wysocki

Yeah. Thanks Adam. So let me pin this on the name that we chose. My wife helped me choose this, but intentional felt like it had to be part of my company's name, intentionality versus effectiveness. Even. I do eff effectiveness more than efficiency, but like these other words are useful in certain context, but I think intentional is such a universal good. You could take it too far, but I think it's pretty hard to take it super far. I think just with a little bit of intentionality, which I define as just considering what you wanna do and how you might get there, just like being thoughtful about the future, basically. This is inherent to the whole fire movement. It's like there is a point where enough is enough that we could then retire in the future. What does that look like? What does that date look like? A lot of people, as has been talked about many times in the fire community, a lot of people don't think what's next after that. So I think you should be intentional about that too, but just the thought of, I can get to a point to go do this thing that many people would only dream of. That's already being intentional, but thinking about what I want my life to look like. Let's do some envisioning thinking about intentionality in terms of. Building the life you want, not running away from something you don't want. That's what I think is important. And if I could leave people with a thought on this, it's just, you don't need to do it as intense as I might do it, I'm probably not as intense as I may come across here. By the way, I am pretty intentional. I'm pretty structured. But it's not all the time, but just take a moment and think, before you do things, ask, why am I doing something before you go do something? And often you're gonna realize, you know what? I don't know why I do that. More specificity to why you're doing something will go a really long way Just take a moment, be thoughtful. The opposite of being intentional. In my opinion, is not unintentional. It's drifting. You're doing things, but you're not doing them on purpose. You're doing them because society tells you to because that's what your parents think you should do. That's what you always thought you should do, but you're not actually thinking about what do I actually want? That's my plea to the audience. Be a little more intentional.

Adam Coelho

Alright Jake, let's jump into the Mindful Fire final four. Are you ready? I'm ready. Alright. So the first question's all about envisioning people who have listened to this for a long time know that envisioning has changed my life in a lot of ways and is the core of the things that I teach on this show. And in my ask, what's possible workshop, I'm curious, what's your big vision for this next chapter of your life?

Jake Wysocki

Yeah. I don't think we even talked about this yet somehow. So the entrepreneurial journey is a big part of it. I wanna become, so I made a profit this year, which was a huge step on that journey, which was great. Congrats. Thank you very much. so it's becoming a self-sustaining successful entrepreneur so that we continue to have more options in general, but the kind of big thing that's on the. Five-ish. Year horizon is we'd love to travel with our kids for an extended period of time as well. Maybe take a year out of the country and go do different things. So that's the thing that we're starting now to this next state of the union that my wife and I are gonna do in January. That's, I think, gonna be a big topic. Okay, let's start actually mapping out what would that cost, like what might that look like? And start putting those plans in place. But that's the vision. We'd love to travel with our kids like we did in 2015.

Adam Coelho

Very cool. You're thinking like slow travel or? Yeah, more like we did bouncing around.

Jake Wysocki

We did more we didn't do really slow travel on our trip. We did 25 countries on the 2015 trip. So this would probably be like one quarter one location kind of thing, is generally what we're thinking.

Adam Coelho

Very cool. Are you familiar with Boundless Life? Have you come across that?

Jake Wysocki

Yes. Yes. I think my wife has talked about that. I've definitely heard of it. Is that the place that like hooks you up with like schooling and stuff? Yeah. It's basically

Adam Coelho

Designed for families that wanna, it's like study abroad as a family yes. Like the kids are there and like you have a little community and a cohort. Yeah I'm very interested in that. I think it's pretty pricey, but it is.'cause it's concierge. They're doing all of that for you. Obviously you could figure all that out. But it's, it seems pretty cool. And one of my friends her name's Julia Martin. She's a manifestation coach and she's created all these incredible things in her life. And one of those things was going on this boundless life trip and she just did it in Spain. And posted some podcast episodes about the experience and why they did it and how it was going. And just looks like an amazing experience. I share that vision of wanting to bring the kids and do some time in another country and get another perspective.

Jake Wysocki

We should definitely coordinate When we get to those points, we'll have to make sure we cross paths.

Adam Coelho

There you go. Sounds good. So the second question is, what piece of advice would you give to someone early on their path to financial independence?

Jake Wysocki

The biggest advice I would give is just keep going. I think it's really easy, especially in the early stages. That it feels like this impossible goal. How could I possibly do that? I'm only saving$10. Like at the beginning it's really about saving more, most likely. It's really figure out what you want to do and when and how you're gonna get there rather, and what's your plan to get there and then start executing on it. But it feels really hard. I was talking to somebody or I heard them on a podcast. I don't remember what the numbers are. but it's like when you are 50% of the way to your FI number, you're actually like 80% of the way there. But it's hard to, it's like the compound effect is really deceiving. So you may not feel like you're making very much progress and you may be tempted to give up or this isn't even worth it, I'm never gonna get there. Just trust that you will get there, keep going. And it's kinda like entrepreneurial journeys. It's not about like how fast you get somewhere. It's time in, like time in the seat

Adam Coelho

Got it. Very good. Yeah, just keep going. And as J Collin said on podcast I did with him, trust that it will work. Just keep going. And trust that it will work because it has worked and it will work.

Jake Wysocki

Yes.

Adam Coelho

Time in the market is a very powerful thing.

Jake Wysocki

One quick bonus there. The other piece is on your financial journey, don't forget to live. It's easy just to think about the numbers, but you should have fun along the way.

Adam Coelho

So the third question is, what piece of advice would you give to someone getting started with meditation and or mindfulness?

Jake Wysocki

Okay. So we talked about this a little bit. I've had an up and down journey, with meditation. I've tried it a few times. Every time I try it, it's useful and then something knocks it off my calendar, And so for me, what I would say about mindfulness and meditation, in my personal opinion, you don't have to meditate to have a strong mindfulness practice. If I were to rephrase. The conversation I had about intent, I could probably replace just about everything with being mindful. I think those two things are basically the same. So for being mindful, it's pausing. Taking a moment like I really loved how before we started recording, you said, let's just take a deep breath. And that's just taking a moment to just center yourself and just prepare yourself for the next steps. It only takes five seconds. It doesn't take a lot. So that's what I'd recommend people do. you don't have to meditate to be mindful. You obviously can. But it's being thoughtful, so there you go.

Adam Coelho

I always describe it as. Meditation is like strength training for different aspects of your brain attention, meta attention could be awareness, compassion, whatever those things might be. Mindfulness is a capacity that you can train with meditation. It's a capacity that we all have and I just describe that as a kind, curious awareness. Seeing clearly what's happening right here, right now, in my mind, my body, and my external environment. And yeah, it's really just seeing clearly what's happening without resisting it which is a practice within itself.

Jake Wysocki

I love that.

Adam Coelho

Alright, and last question, Jake, is how can people connect with you online and learn more about what you're working on?

Jake Wysocki

Thanks Adam. we didn't even talk about the work I do. That wasn't the point of me coming up on this show. I really wanted to give back to the fire community that has impacted my life so much. But if you are out there listening and you're a coach and you want help with a group coaching program or designing a workshop, that's what I do. And you can find me at intentioncraft.com and connect with me there. So I'd love to help you out if you want, but honestly, I'm just happy to be here to give back.

Adam Coelho

I really appreciate you taking the time to be here, Jake and I really love this process. I'm excited to try it with my wife. So thank you for the time and for sharing your wisdom with the audience.

Jake Wysocki

You're welcome. Thanks for having me. Lemme know how it goes.

Thanks for joining me on today's episode of the Mindful Fire Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, I invite you to hit subscribe wherever you're listening to this. This just lets the platforms know you're getting value from the episodes and you want to be here when I release additional content. If you're ready to start your Mindful Fire journey, go to mindful fire.org/start and download my free envisioning guide in just 10 minutes. This guide will help you craft a clear and inspiring vision for your life. Again, you can download it for free@mindfulfire.org slash start. Thanks again and I'll catch you next time on the Mindful Fire Podcast.

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Adam Coelho

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