Episode 158 – Coping with Turbulence – Tom Wheelwright & Dan Moore

Description:

Are you prepared for the uncertain future? How do we cope with the turbulence and overwhelm from the world that’s compounding out of control? In this episode, Dan Moore joins Tom Wheelwright in discovering how to build a personal plan of resilience and fortitude, and how to strengthen the only asset you can control in these turbulent times: You. 

 

 

Order Tom’s book, “The Win-Win Wealth Strategy: 7 Investments the Government Will Pay You to Make” at: https://winwinwealthstrategy.com/ 

Looking for more on Dan Moore?
 

Website: www.ciafn.com 

Books: “Control, Influence, Accept (For Now): Coping with a Future No One Can Predict” 

SHOW NOTES:

00:00 – Intro  

03:00 – How to cope with an uncertain future. 

10:00 – The Waterfall Metaphor: Control, Influence, Accept for Now 

14:00 – Dealing with Failure: Emotional Flexibility & Resilience 

17:55 – How powerful and eye-opening can traveling be? 

21:06 – How do we prepare for AI? 

23:10 – How education is imperative for building our emotional intelligence. 

25:15 – Key ways to build emotional fortitude, build empathy, and grow. 

Transcript

Announcer: 

This is The WealthAbility Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money, way less taxes. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

The world’s a mess. We have wars right now on two fronts. We have politics that seem to be never-endingly conflicting and negative, we have a former president with 91 indictments. Pretty hard to be positive and not feel overwhelmed by what’s going on in the world today. 

So today we have an expert on this topic, Dan Moore, who wrote the book, Control, Influence, Accept (For Now). I love the for now part, but I love this idea of let’s control what we can, influence what we can and then accept what we can’t. Dan, it is just great having you on the show. If you would, give us a little of your background, what led you to write about this topic? 

Dan Moore: 

Tom, thank you very much. I’m a real fan of what you do, so it’s great to be here with you today. My story started when I was 18 and a college student. I was going to school in the Northeast, very expensive college. Another student recruited me for a crazy summer job selling books door to door, and he said if I did decently well at it, I could make enough money to double what I could make back home. Well, I ended up starting that as 18 and I retired at the age of 66 from the same company. So never left. 

Southwestern Advantage is a company that’s been existence for 150 years. We work with college students from across the US and Europe, teach them how to have their own business. When you go door to door, it’s a constant battle for attitude, continually battling rejection, feelings of failure, frustration, loneliness, homesickness, you name it. So, over the years, we learned several different things that can help us to influence our attitudes in a great way. As I began to travel campuses and talk with young people and others, I realized that some of these things could be taught in ways that could be actionable. So ultimately, I was challenged to write a book on it, and that’s how the book came about. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

I love that. So we have that in common where you were selling books, I was selling religion. I was a Mormon missionary in Paris, France and learned how to get rejected in French. I just recently just came back from Stuttgart, Germany. We had 200 French people in the room and lot, Germans, then Netherlands, all over the Western Europe. 

But you talk a lot about attitude. You just mentioned it, you talk about attitude. So a lot of things out of our control right now, a lot of negative news. And I think a lot of people are worried not just about the world, but about their own economy. Inflation is still rampant, people are not catching up, and more and more people are falling behind. And of course, as entrepreneurs we’re trying to solve for these things. How do you say or how do you believe that attitude can influence how we feel about the world? 

Dan Moore: 

Well, I think attitude influences how we feel about just about everything. I’ve got three adult kids, one grandchild, and if I review all the different things over time that frustrated me about my kids, I’m not going to really look forward to speaking to them. But if I think about all the times we spend in joyful growth together, experiences we had together, then I really do look forward to that. Just a simple example. 

The reason I think influence is important is because the things we can control are fairly limited, and I’m one of those guys, Tom, that for many, many years I’d teach people you can control your attitude, you can control your attitude, control your attitude. The breakthrough for me was probably 10 or 12 years ago. I was driving to work, minding my own business in my lane, going the speed limit, everything perfect. This young guys hits me from … he hits my car from behind, and I looked in the mirror and said, “Really? You just hit me. What are you doing? You know how to …” 

I started shaking my fist, literally shaking my fist at this kid. And then I realized, oops, I teach this stuff. I began to realize no matter how much we think we can control our attitude, we’re emotional people and our reactions sometimes just burst out in ways that are kind of crazy. What you guide people to do of course, reactions can lead to real problems financially if they overreact, if they jump into something too quickly. So, I just said, well, okay, if I can’t really control my attitude, how did I actually calm myself down? I calm myself down by saying, man, you teach this stuff, Dan, breathe a minute. Self-talk. 

So, I realized that things I can control can definitely influence the things I can’t. The subtitle of the book really is called Coping with a Future No One Can Predict, because we really can’t predict it. You and I have been around the block a couple of times. In fact, I remember when I bought my first house, we were very excited, because we were able to get an assumed mortgage of nine and seven eighths percent, because the going rate was 16% at that time. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

I remember those days. 

Dan Moore: 

Oh, they were thrilling days, indeed. The mortgage broker said, “Congratulations, rates will never be this low again.” Of course, we know what’s happened over the last 10, 15 years. I’m sure many of your listeners that are younger and in the housing market right now are so frustrated, “Oh my gosh, 6% and 7% mortgages, what’s going on with the world?” 

That’s a prime example of something we cannot at all control, we can’t even influence mortgage rates. What we can do is control our approach to it by being reasonable, by doing our research, doing our homework, consulting with the right kind of people. These are all controllables that can influence the results we get. So that’s kind of the thesis of the book, the accept for now is pretty obvious. 

I’ve got just a limited amount of emotional energy, I think most of us are that way. Any of my energy that I waste on stuff that I just need to accept for now, it’s not available for other things. So by learning to just focus on what can I control, what can I influence, the things I got to accept for now is park them there. I’m not going to forget about them, I’m going to park them for the moment, come back to them when I’m more capable, more able. That’s really the whole thing behind the CIAFN. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

Interesting. So what think’s driving all of this uncertainty in the world, all of this, I’m right, you’re wrong type of attitude, and this feeling like I’m out of control? Whether it’s Russia wanting to control their borders. If you believe what Putin says, he’s looking to control his borders. Whether it’s the upset in Palestine and Israel, whether it’s the upset in our politics here. It seems to have accelerated exponentially over the last few years. What do you think’s driving that? 

Dan Moore: 

I think it probably has accelerated. But as Solomon said, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” These cycles, even in the Middle East are 2,000 year old cycles. Russia and its desire to take over the world periodically, it’s been going back since Peter the Great. So I think what’s changed in the recent years is that we have this digital echo chamber, our online communities that are just always there. We pull up our phone, we see an alert for something, we look at it. And if it’s something that we’re really frustrated by, we tend to dig into it even more. We start seeking support for that point of view and all of a sudden, we’re getting really frustrated, really upset. People that are in that business enjoy selling ads. The more attention they get, the more ads they sell. And so you get these extreme positions that appeal to people that already have an extreme position and it tends to reinforce it. 

So my personal thinking is not the internet’s bad. Of course, it cannot be. It’s not going anywhere. It’s not going to go away anywhere. But it’s just how we use our time, what we choose to resource as far as information. Sources makes a huge difference in that whole approach. So I don’t know if it’s really accelerating or if it’s one of those moments when things are really, really not good right now. But there’ve been other conflicts that have been worldwide that have been… horrible things happened over the last century, even 2, 3, 4 as you look back at history. I just think we’re more aware of it now because it’s always in our face. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

That’s interesting. Well, they always say fear sells, right? Fear sells better than greed. You have two major emotions that you sell on, fear and greed, and fear sells way better than greed does. Even to now you have FOMO, fear of missing out, which is really just greed. But it’s using fear as the driving force rather than the greed. So they’re so related. So we definitely seem to have an incentive and people are incentivized by creating this uncertainty. So how do you kind of tamper that? How do you calm that down? 

Dan Moore: 

To me, it’s really important that we slow ourselves down a little bit. Daniel Kahneman wrote a book called Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. Sometimes we just need to slow ourselves down, particularly when it’s dealing with big decisions. Because if we think fast, we’re going to jump into things too rapidly and later, trying to unwind that is almost impossible. So I think one thing we can learn how to do when it comes to trying to manage our own attitudes is breathe a second. Just breathe. Literally breathe. 

Navy SEALs teach something they call box breathing. Inhale for a count of four, hold it for four, exhale count of four, hold it for four. They do this in combat. So I figure if a Navy SEAL can do that in combat, I can do it when I’m looking at my investments. Breathing helps calm our heart rate, it helps get our thinking back on a rational plane. Do that, first of all. 

Second, just back up the lens, zoom out a little bit. If I’m being influenced by this particular point of view, I need to zoom out, check out some other points of view. There are very few things we literally have to decide on this second, we literally have to. People selling them of course, would like to think that we can decide right that minute. But there are very few things we have to do right then. So if we’ve done our homework, we can prepare, we can talk to people, I think that can help avoid some of that knee-jerk stuff that gets us into big trouble. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

So you talk about you’ve got control, influence and accept. Is accepting just giving in? What is it that you choose to accept? Because you don’t want to accept everything. Certainly, you don’t want to accept things that are bad for you, you don’t want to accept things that are within your control. What is it? How do you choose what to accept and what to say, “Well wait a minute, I think I could influence this, I might even be able to control it,” how do we decide what we sit back and say, well you know what, I’m just going to accept this.? 

Dan Moore: 

It’s not 1, 2, 3 kind of answer, I don’t think, Tom. In fact, the illustration I use in the book is kind of a good one. Imagine there’s a waterfall. Waterfall has all the stuff that can happen to us. At the bottom of it, there’s a diverter that splits it into three channels, the control, the influence, accept for now. We can have some control over which of those goes into. And accept for now, they may be things really important to us, but we can’t dwell on them and get freaking out about them. We can do something to control our influence. Then the things we have to accept for now, not as compelling. 

Example, I’m very concerned about what’s going on in Ukraine. I work with a number of college students from the Ukraine. Their families are there, it’s a horrible situation. That’s where I wear this pin everywhere I go. I can’t do anything about Vladimir Putin’s heart or his head or his mind. What I can do though is support causes that are important, use my voice. I can control that and therefore, influence other people perhaps to do the same thing. 

Accepting for now doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore it and pretend it’s not there. This is not about passivity at all. It’s about controlling what I can, influencing what I can, and maybe eventually I can change those things for the better. Not easy to do that of course. But the history of humanity has shown many horrific things can be changed. If people unite around the right goals, they focus on the right values and they can control what they can, influence what they can, eventually every dictator dies. We all do. Eventually, totalitarian regimes are replaced by something else, sometimes something worse, sometimes something better. But if we simply sit in a corner and worry, this is the real thing, I’m trying… worry doesn’t help us at all. Controlling what we can, influencing what we can, that’s what makes the difference. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

So you talk a lot about influence. So influence, to me that seems to be the big… what do you mean by that? And for example, what would be some examples of how you might influence something that you’ve accepted for now but you want to influence it? 

Dan Moore: 

Well, here’s just an example. One thing we can control is what we say to other people. What we say to other people has a big impact on them. So it can influence them. Nobody can directly control somebody else, not for long, unless they’re a pretty strong human being and they’ve got all kinds of psychological weapons at work. But we can influence other people by the way we speak to them, the way we respond to them, the way we react, we definitely have an influence on those other people. The more people we can influence in a certain direction, the more that direction can grow and become bigger. And so that’s just a really simple example. 

I can’t control what people say to me, but I can learn to be controlling the things I say to myself about what they say to me. And it’s the notion of what we call self-talk, which is a really important part of the book. There’s an entire chapter devoted to it because it’s that important. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

You also talk about mental and emotional flexibility. Is that a flexibility in values? Where does that flexibility come in? 

Dan Moore: 

I’m glad you used the word values, Tom, because the one thing we should not be flexible in are our values. If the speed limit is 70, going 70.2 isn’t 70. Our values should be what they are. Flexibility means how quickly can we understand that things are different than the way we expected them to be? We all have these preconceived notions. The simplest one is the weather. We make plans on a weekend for a great day. We get out there. Of course, the weather’s exact opposite what the forecast was. How often do we just say, “Oh, it’s not supposed to be raining. I can’t believe. It’s not supposed to be.” Well of course it’s not supposed to be raining, but it’s raining. Mental, emotional flexibility just says, “Okay, so it’s raining. Cool. I can adapt. I can deal with that. I can move forward into something different.” 

The twin to that is the resilience, and that’s the part that says, “Maybe we’ll go dancing in the rain. Instead having a picnic, we’ll go dancing in the rain. That’d be fun.” So it’s twin things. It’s the attitude of realizing things aren’t the way I thought they were going to be, let me let that go. Resilience says, “What’s plan B? What do I go into next?” And the more we can develop this skill, the more we can almost do a two-step with the unexpected things. The emotional flexibility says, “Okay, this is not really what I planned on, but it’s happening, so now what can I do about it?” And I think that’s why it’s important to have both of those things lined up. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

So let’s talk about that question. How do you develop that skill? 

Dan Moore: 

Okay, there’s a couple of ways to do it. One, is we’ve got to get into situations we don’t know what the heck to do. I think the only way to develop mental-emotional flexibility is to be in unpredictable situations. If we always do exactly the same things, eventually we get stale and dull, we don’t even notice things anymore. So new experiences are really important, experiences that test us, cause us to grow, can cause us to reflect and figure out, okay, I’ve got more strengths than I thought I did here. This is good to know. But I’ve got some serious weaknesses here too. That’s good to know. So I think we can develop that attitude and approach to things by getting into situations like that. 

Failure is just a good example. Nobody would write a book called, Here’s Why You Should Wake Up Every Day Hoping to Fail. But the fact is, you and I both know nobody can actually succeed in life without experiencing a great deal of failure, some level of it at least. So instead of fearing failure, let’s figure out ways to deal with failure. There’s a man named Mark Batterson, who wrote a wonderful bullet called, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day. And he says, the cure for the fear of failure is not success, it’s failure. You got to develop sort of an immunity through small doses of this stuff. So that’s one way we can develop more of this emotional flexibility and the resilience. Get into new situations, go ahead and fail from time to time. Just try to make sure you don’t fail in ways that hurt other people. If we can possibly avoid that, that’s the most important thing. The collateral damage to our own failures can really be devastating. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

Well, you were selling books door to door, so you certainly know about failure. Nobody has success all the time. Baseball players know about failure, where if they get three out of 10, they’re highly successful. What are some situations you think we could put ourselves in where we could have failure, but failure on a small scale. Getting rejected on selling a book, that’s a pretty small scale failure. When I’d go knocking on doors and we’d do 200 apartment doors in the evening and every one of them would reject, to me, that’s really failure on a small scale. So what are some suggestions you’d have for our listeners as to things that they might do just to get that opportunity? 

Dan Moore: 

One thing is to make a list of the things we’ve been avoiding doing. You see it’s a phone call, somebody needs to hear something from us. We postpone, we procrastinate, we put it off, we forget about it. It gets worse and worse. So doing something that we just know we need to do that we don’t really want to do, maybe it’s going to blow up in our face. That phone call could just be a total disaster. As soon as we hang up the phone, we realize, “Hey, let me check my heart. I still have a heart, still breathing. I lived through it. What did I learn from that?” We always feel better because we got it behind us, it’s out of the way now. So that’s one of the simplest ways to do, just make a list of things you know should be doing, haven’t done them for whatever reason, dreading doing them, and knock one of those out, today. Knocking it out today will move us really forward in a good way. We feel better about ourselves than if we sit back and dread it and get into this paralysis mode. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

I like that. I’ve always thought about the idea that if you don’t ask for something, you can’t possibly get it because if you ask, the worst that can happen is that you say no. But if you don’t ask that, there’s a no on the… you can never get a, yes if you don’t ask in the first place. So really putting yourselves out there like that. 

Let’s talk about a couple of other things. One of the things I love to do is travel because I love to see how other people live and what other people talk about. To me, I think that’s maybe something that gets me out of my own box and something that has helped me a lot. Have you found that when you’ve traveled? 

Dan Moore: 

Absolutely, very important. My wife is an immigrant from the Azores islands and her family moved to the US when she was almost 14. She grew up under a dictatorship there and when they finally were able to leave to come to the US, they brought one suitcase each and that was it. So when I married into the family, most of them didn’t speak English. Typical immigrant community in the US surrounded by native speakers. So traveling to her home island, her home country was my first real experience with getting my eyes opened. It’s a whole different way to live, whole different way to learn, a whole different way to act about different things in the universe. 

This past year when I retired, we’d made a decision that when I did retire, I wanted to take a longer trip someplace different. So we spent five and a half weeks in India and Nepal. The beautiful thing about that is being kind of an American white guy whose bible believing character, to go to a place where it is mostly Hindu, mostly Buddhist, and we’re talking about 1.4 billion people in those categories, was eyeopening. It was tremendous. It was so valuable, so powerful. 

We got to Nepal and saw the reconstruction of Kathmandu. You may recall in 2015 there was a horrific earthquake that hit there. 10,000 people died in the space of an hour. About 80% of it has been rebuilt bit by bit. But the meticulous cataloging of even small sticks from these temples put in specific spots, they could rebuild it exactly as it was before, just blew my mind. And the love they have for their culture, their history, everything else is like, oh my gosh. In the US what we’d have done, we’d have said, “Horrible earthquake. Let’s build some new skyscrapers here.” So that was just a really current recent example of how important travel can be to getting that open. 

I also feel like travel can get us in touch with things that are often arm’s length and we can hang on to them, it’s important. Example of that, we went to Auschwitz this past spring. And ever since I was 18 and I read, Man’s Search for Meaning, and I saw Schindler’s List and I’d read a lot of things. I read Elie Wiesel’s book called Night, but I’d never been in a concentration camp. And going to Auschwitz was not something we really wanted to do, it’s something we felt we had to do, we needed to do, to understand the horrific nature of human beings and the incredible nature of those that survived. 

This January, we’re going to go to Vietnam, we’re going to go to Cambodia because in my generation, the defining event was the Vietnam War. And so to go there and to see Vietnam, to go to the killing fields of Cambodia, I don’t want to do those things, Tom, but I feel I need to. And I always come back just changed in some important and powerful way. We don’t have to be international travelers to do that. Sometimes we go to our own community, to a part of town we’d normally would avoid, and see if there’s something we can do to help out, to volunteer in some way. Makes a humongous difference to ourselves and the people we’re trying to influence. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

I love it. So let’s switch gears just a second here to something that is disrupting everybody’s life right now, especially those of us who are authors and speakers, AI. What are your thoughts about, again, control, influence and accept for now when it comes to AI? 

Dan Moore: 

AI’s going to be like surfing blindfolded at midnight in an earthquake. I think there’s no way to know how it’s going to develop, what’s going to happen with it. On the one hand, you’ve got people trying to, quote, control it and put some rules around it, put some fences around it. Got other people who say, “No, let’s just let it go, see what happens there.” I can’t predict either one of those things and which direction it’s going to go. But I can say we have an obligation to understand it, to get to know it a lot better. I should know this stuff. I was in publishing for a really long time. So I’m going to get into a workshop. Even though I’m no longer actively employed and learn about AI. I’m going to understand it a little bit better. I think what we have to develop as a society is the realization that AI is the latest version of the electronic calculator. 

In other words, my gift when my parents gave me after I got out of high school was a slide rule. And people say, “What’s a slide rule?” Well, watch the great film called Hidden Figures and you’ll see the women there calculating on these devices called slide rules. Within a year, they were completely wiped out, obsolete by Texas Instruments, handheld electronic calculators. AI is many, many mega times bigger than that of course. But if we use it correctly, it can be a tool so that we can apply our brains to other things instead of just the laborious nature of what we used to have to do on that slide rule. So no way to know how it’s going to work. I do hope governments will invest in people that are thoughtful and people that are aware and not just treat it like a weapon and also not be afraid of it, because it’s not going to go away. We have to understand it better. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

Well, one of the fun things with AI, you talk about making mistakes, is you can go in and make mistakes and it’s almost like a video game, right? Make mistakes, try it out, check it out. But it sounds like you’ve talked a lot about education. Of course, you were selling books. So obviously, education I presume is pretty important to you. How big of a role does education play in what we might call our emotional intelligence? 

Dan Moore: 

Plays a massively important role. Most of us can think back to when we were in kindergarten. I can remember my kindergarten teacher now, and this is a really long time ago, and I remember her as being a warm, supportive person, always with a smile and encouraging. I don’t think I could pick her out of a crowd, but that’s what I remember about her. That helps build emotional intelligence when we treat people well, even really young people. My concern with teachers, and I have a daughter who’s a school teacher, is they are so caught up in many things that are political, many things that are pressure from families, within a given school, you have factions just as you do in the Congress. And teachers are often not given the ability simply to do what they need to do. Love their kids, take care of them, nurture them, make it work really well. 

Unfortunately, anytime we politicize anything like education, it’s going to become a real mess. My hope is that the politicians will realize teachers are the most dedicated people in the world. And if they can just support them a little bit more, help them out more, let them teach, let them do what they need to do, the emotional intelligence in kids would be built up in great ways. You know, as well as I do, that in many inner cities, the kids that come to school, without school, they wouldn’t have a breakfast and they wouldn’t have a lunch. They wouldn’t have that nurturing sense of anything if they didn’t have those capabilities. So school is more than just helping people get ready for college. For many kids, it’s the ability to just have enough nourishment to keep them healthy and keep them alive. So I’m a huge proponent of schools and the changes that are going on in schools with charter schools, private schools, magnet schools, there’s so many things are going on and I think it’s really a good thing. As long as we realize it’s all about the child. The child is what counts. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

I love it. So what would be one or two things maybe at the top of your list for people to do in order to build say emotional fortitude, emotional strengths so that they could learn about control, influence and accept? 

Dan Moore: 

I think one of them is to think a lot about what’s important to us. There’s a chapter in the book called Values. Values should be like a judge and a jury that guide us in the right direction, like a compass. And the values that are so important to us should be those things that we would be willing to live for, and the most extreme case, we might even be willing to die for. Hopefully, nobody will ever be in that case. But things we’re willing to live for. Do we want to live for support of others? Do we want to live for encouragement of others? Do we want to live for building others up? Or we just want to live for consumption? Do we want to live to see who’s got the most toys? Do we want to live to see, can I have more power than you might have? 

That’s a way to live. But I think if people understand their values, then they can slowly start making choices in the right direction that will then reinforce their actions. And that’s what gives us a lot of resilience, a lot of emotional strength. If we’re acting consistently with our values, we feel better. We all know that’s true. If we’re not acting consistent with our values, if we’re hypocritical, if we say one thing and do another, we don’t feel as good about ourselves in the long run. We can convince ourselves, I did the really clever thing, I pulled one over on that person. But at the end of the day, we know we didn’t. And so that subtracts from our strength and that subtracts from our resilience. So I think it’s really important people spend a lot of time in conversation and thinking about those things, what’s right, what’s wrong, and try to do our very best to live it. It’s not easy, it’s murky, not clear cut in many cases. But that’s just one suggestion. Think hard about those things. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

So how do you feel about how important it is to hang around people, spend time with people that share your values and not hang around people that are contrary to your values? 

Dan Moore: 

Well, I think it’s critical we spend time with people that reinforce what we think is important, but we can’t insulate ourselves from other people either. We have to be aware of their points of view. In fact, I really think it’s important we learned how to understand their point of view well enough that we can explain it to them in terms they’ll agree with. It’s a really good thing to do now that we’re coming up to another presidential election. Find somebody that feels very different than you do, invite them for just a chat and say, “What I’d like to do is take just a second with your indulgence here and try to explain your point of view to you and make sure I got it right.” And if we can do that, we learn empathy, we learn to understand their point of view, and says, “Yeah, you do get me.” 

The times I’ve done that with people, they then say, “Well, tell me more about how you feel.” It just makes them that much more open. Hard to do that because we get angry and we get frustrated, we get mad at each other. But if we can learn how to do that, it’s okay to spend time with people with different points of view. I think we have to, it’s how we grow. But if we want to really be reinforced in our own growth and development, spending time with people that believe in growth and development’s important. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

I love that. I’ve spent a longtime subscriber to the Wall Street Journal in the last, about six months ago I decided I need to subscribe to the New York Times, because I want to see the other side. Those two are certainly on two different sides of most every issue. And it’s been fascinating. It’s been so good to be able to hold two opposing views at the same time and be able to see both sides of it. I think that’s terrific. 

Dan Moore: 

Really important in the line of work you’re in, advising people in their investing, because people can buy into one philosophy and one thought and not pay attention to things changing around and get in serious trouble with that. I’m the guy that correctly predicted five of the last three stock market declines. So I’m not one to talk. But I think it’s really important that we keep open to those different points of view too. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

I appreciate that. So besides buying your book Control, Influence, Accept (for Now), where else can people find more about what you’re doing in your work, Dan? 

Dan Moore: 

The website that I work with now is called www.CIAFN.com. CIAFN stands for Control, Influence, Accept (for Now).com At the moment, it talks a lot about my own background, the mission of the book, the purpose of the book. Some of the endorsers are people that are academics, some are local folks. One is a woman I’ve known for 40 or 50 years, very involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Another one is a 28 year old TikTok influencer with a million followers. So the whole thing is that these are people that read the book or want to endorse it and speak to it, and they’re all mentioned in the website as well. So we’ll be posting more things later on in the website along these lines. In the book, there are specific exercises in every chapter though that can help us get better in these various areas that we talked about here today. So I would encourage the people to get the book, but don’t just read the book like reading a book, actually go through and do the exercises. They’re worth it. They’re fun too, and we learn a lot from that kind of thing. 

Tom Wheelwright : 

I love it. Thank you Dan Moore. Again, the book is, Control, Influence, Accept (for Now), Coping with a Future No One Can Predict. Certainly a very timely topic for us and certainly very timely and important for those of us entrepreneurs and investors because we do want to control what we can, influence what we can’t control, and accept for now and knowing entrepreneurs, we only want to accept it for a shorter period of time as we have to accept it. And then we’ll go back to influencing and control. And when we do, I truly believe we’ll always make way more money and pay way less tax. Thanks everyone. We’ll see you next time. 

Dan Moore: 

Thank you, Tom. 

Announcer: 

You’ve been listening to The WealthAbility Show, with Tom Wheelwright . Way more money, way less taxes. To learn more, go to Wealthability.com.