Earn Your Worth | Why Financial 'Offence' (Making More $$) is the New Defence

What if the problem isn’t how you’re managing your money—but how much you have to manage?

In this kickoff to the Earn Your Worth series, Terry Condon challenges the default focus on “financial defence” and flips the conversation toward something far more powerful: financial offence. 

This episode lays the groundwork for the upcoming series 'Earn Your Worth'. 

Expect to learn:
 • Why earning more (not saving more) is the fastest path to freedom
 • The overlooked money skill every generation needs
 • How commercial acumen unlocks choices—not just cash

Take the Earn Your Worth Survey to personalise your path through this series and access the free resource guide.

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Transcript

tex: 0:29

Hey there, it's Terry Connor and welcome back to the Money Minded Podcast. I'm here to share with you a brand new series, and this all started about six months ago when I jumped onto a call with a couple of our members, and these guys had started maybe a year and a half ago. And they'd be doing everything right. They'd jumped in, really got busy, put everything in place, mastered all the tools, mastered all the skills, but they were still feeling stuck. They had some big goals that were just too far away in their minds. And they're like, how do we make this all work? And when we went through their situation, I said to them, guys, you're nailing this. You're doing everything you need to do. The problem here is not financial defense. You're doing a great job of managing the money that you make. We need to figure out how to make more money to manage. And after I got off that call, I realized that we have mostly spent most of our time on the podcast and even in the program, that whole emphasis mostly on financial defense. Because financial defense is crucial, there's no amount of money that you can make that's gonna make up for no financial defense, however. Financial offense, which is making more money to manage. That's where things really hit warp speed and relatively small improvements in your income can lead to big gains quite quickly. And I wanna give you an example of this. Let's say you're earning 90,000 a year after tax, roughly the median income here in Australia. And let's say your household spends around 70 grand a year, that leaves you about 20,000 in savings right now, or savings capacity if you like. Now, what if you took on a consulting gig or you figured out some sort of side hustle, or maybe you got a pay rise and you end up earning an extra$15,000 a year whilst at the same time managing to recoup around 5,000 in waste? Your savings has now grown from 20,000 to 40,000. That is a 100% increase in your savings rate with only a 17% increase in your income. Now, that could mean the difference between retiring 10 years earlier if you really want to, or it could mean reaching your goals decades faster, And bringing those big goals closer to you so that you can make'em happen much, much sooner. It's a massive accelerant. And the cool thing is if you're smart about this, making more to save, it's less effort than saving more of what you make But there's something else here as well. If you increase your income in a way that allows you to do more of what you find meaningful, you can actually kill two birds with one stone. I love that quote from Naval. He says, retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. And I see we see a lot of people, deferring their enjoyment. deferring their satisfaction way off into the future, into this far off number when it comes to, retirement. and we see that as really problematic. We're kind of signing ourselves up to a life of suffering, and struggle because we feel like it's responsible. but what if you looked at it differently? What if, instead of trying to escape this job and use money as a way to escape, what if you create a career that you never wanna escape from? Then you can enjoy your money and your life. Now whilst you have the health and the energy. You see, your health is a massive constraint on your ability to enjoy your money. I remember having this conversation with Mitch Parkinson, and you might remember Mitch and Brooke from episode 87. Mitch and Brooke traveled Australia with their young kids in 2024, and one of the things that Mitch told me is he said, everywhere we pulled up to stay with a caravan park wherever we were, we found that we were most likely the youngest people there. By a long way. And most of the folks who are older, they spent all their energy just traveling around. And by the time they got to these places, they'd just set up, sit down, and that's where they'd stay for a week or so. They had no energy to actually do anything. Whereas we'd be going out and exploring all these places, seeing all these new things, and having these adventures. These guys just did not have the energy anymore. And he said that was tragic. and that's why I say the cheat code is boosting your income through work that interests you and that leverages your strengths. So in this episode, I'm gonna give you a preview of what's to come in this series, And we're gonna talk about why financial offense is actually the best form of defense right now. I'm gonna show you the free opportunity that we all have every single day that makes it possible to build an income stream from your interests. And I'm gonna talk you through this series, how it's gonna work, what you're gonna learn, and how to get the most out of it as well. So let's talk about that first part there. Why financial offense is the best form of defense right now. Unless you've been living under a rock, you realize that everyone's been squeezed over the last five years. After the COVID stimulus, australia's got a lot more money in its supply and the production of things has not kept up. And whenever that happens, when the supply of money exceeds the creation of things, the price of things goes up. And the thing about that is as prices have risen through inflation, incomes always lag inflation. So we're in this kind of window where most people's incomes haven't yet caught up. To what things actually cost. so if like our couple, you feel like you are squeezed at the moment, it's getting harder and harder to be able to save and be able to make progress, It's probably not because you've suddenly become really bad with money. it's because our purchasing power has been taken away because the price of things has increased, yet our incomes haven't kept pace. And at the same time we've got ai, which is changing the game at the moment. It's beginning to automate monotonous white collar work and take those entry level tasks off our plate, and that's making things more productive. But it's also creating huge disruption in the labor force. And I saw this interesting quote from Sam Altman, which was about a week ago, and he said, today AI is a lot like an intern. It's able to work for an hour or two, but soon it's gonna become like an experienced expert and it's gonna be able to work for days. And so right now it's just taking those entry level jobs and. helping with knowledge, but as it gains the ability to do more and do more on our behalf, That's gonna keep moving up the chain as it goes. And so we need to be able to adapt to that as it's happening as well. And basically, this just means that job security, the idea that you have one career, that just isn't what it used to be like. the average job tenure in Australia today is three years and four months, whereas four decades ago it was 10 years. So jobs are just not going to be the guaranteed future income that they were. Now as challenging as this is, it doesn't mean there's no opportunity here. Every change creates that opportunity. There's this concept in economics called creative destruction, and I like to think of it like a bushfire that clears the old for the new And having a strong income and good savings capacity during times like this, it's a huge bolster of financial security and it massively increases odds that you'll have the capital to deploy when assets are on sale because right now we're living through unprecedented economic uncertainty, and that always means volatility, which means that there's gonna be times where prices are spiking, is gonna be times where things are falling. And fortunes are major in these periods of time. If you go back to 2008, you can see that Howard Marx and Ray Dalio in particular, these are two people who had a lot of capital to deploy during these periods of time. and this is why I say that having a good financial offense is the best form of defense during periods like this. Having that ability to save and raise capital and have capital ready to deploy during these periods of high volatility, it's such an advantage. and I've said this before, but I think every generation has its opportunity, our parents' generation, the boomers, their opportunity was property. they were able to buy their property really, really cheaply and have it benefit from the massive inflation that happened once we went off the gold standard. And we've been printing more and more money over that period of time, and that was their generational opportunity. Our generational opportunity is different. our money doesn't go as far as theirs, but our opportunity to make money is far better than theirs. because of the internet. And I'll go back to Naval again. He wrote this quote, which was, the internet has vastly expanded career opportunities, yet most people still haven't figured this out yet. I really do believe that the internet is that opportunity for our generation. It's created all these different ways that you can make money and people can make it really, really quickly. And if you look at the rich list, you'll see that the people that are making money on those rich lists and the people who are on those rich lists, they're getting younger and younger, and the way that they're making money has completely changed. As the economy has shifted more into an information age, it's changed the way that you can make money. It's changed all those opportunities and the internet, that's the most powerful tool for making great money, doing meaningful work, because there is no rules there. You don't have to fit into these. Predefined careers and qualifications and all those sort of things are less and less important. It's more about actual results and the value that you're creating And what this means is that you can boost your income in ways that are much more creative and interesting to you than they ever were in the past. I love that story from Paul McCartney and the Beatles. Legend has it that was sitting in one of these houses and they were writing their next album and they said, oh, it's a bit hot today. And Paul McCartney said, well, let's write a swimming pool. And they used to use that to motivate themselves. They used to think about, okay, what do we want? And let's make our music, get those things for us. And it's kind of similar. the internet is that kind of instrument for us. But most of us are still just using the internet to get information, to move information instead of thinking about it as a tool to be able to build our incomes and build our careers and change the way that we make money as well. and I wanna give you some more examples of this just from our podcast. So you might remember in episode 38, we had Scott Young come on the show. He was a computer science student and he built a reputation, that made him a global thought leader in the learning and productivity space. After writing the book Ultra Learning. Chris Voss from episode 56. he was an FBI hostage negotiator, he became a world renowned negotiation coach and author, and he's built a consulting practice out of that. become a global thought leader where he makes money from those ideas. Lynn Alden, episode 61, was an electrical engineer and turned herself into a global macro investor and educator, and she now gets paid to publish her research to people all over the world who absolutely love how deep she goes and how greenly she gets, and the ability for her to like peel this back in layers. so Hill Bloom, episode 129. He went from private equity to full-time creator, educator, media entrepreneur, and again, wrote that book, the Five Types of Wealth. I've experienced this myself too. Building this business has been an exercise in really understanding. The internet and understanding what it can do and how to use it to be able to create that income. See, when Ron and I started out this business, we had this hypothesis, right? and we thought, what if we could bring together the principles of performance coaching with personal finance? What if we built the tools, the systems, and the support, and created a proven pathway? Then we could help people make these really big life changing transformations. The problem was that no one believed this could work. many of our mentors kind of laughed us, they just didn't think anything like this was possible. So we were pretty much on our own. We didn't really have anyone who could help us work our way through it. So we were stumbling around just trying to figure out how to make this work by ourselves. And we'd never done anything like this. and when you start a business, there's just so many things to know and so many things you know that you don't know. so we're just trying to get as much information as possible to figure out, well, how do you actually make money? And what I found was most of the information out there it's either really fluffy, like how do you manifest more money? Or it's really scammy, like here's this Amazon drop shipping opportunity and it is going away. They're all tactical. They're all short term and they're all opportunistic. There was no real substance there when it comes to this, and so we were just learning by trial and error by ourselves until I came across this work by Naval, and I've already quoted him a couple of times in this intro, and he decoded this in a way that I'd just never seen before. It wasn't, hypey wasn't about opportunities that are going away. He was giving mental models. He was helping us to put on a new lens and teaching us a new way to think. And we love that way of approaching things. We think that learning how to think is more important than being told what to think. and Naval had put together this body of work, which started as a tweet storm. Then it turned into a podcast and somebody translated it into a book, the Almanac of Naval Ravikant amazing book and absolutely the inspiration for this series. And the more I dug into Val's work, the more I realized that moneymaking isn't some sort of innate talent that some people have and other people don't. It's a set of mental models that let you see the world differently, And for the purpose of this series, we're gonna call that commercial acumen. It's the ability for you to understand how value is created and how it's captured. and when you can combine your natural gifts, your strengths, your talents, those skills, when you combine those things with commercial acumen, that's where you can create opportunities for yourself. And that's how you can learn how to make money. And so once I came across Navales work, I sent it across to Ryan. I said, read this, reread it. Let's keep discussing it. Because we reason that if we could learn these mental models, we could understand the underlying mechanic that drives results. And our thought process was if we could build an understanding of how to apply that mechanic to grow our business, then we could turn our idea into an income stream. But the thing is, knowing what to do isn't the same as knowing how to do it. And it took us a little while to get to the point where we were actually acting on these ideas In the beginning, I still think that we were working off. Quite outdated ideas of earning and money and those sort of things. We were reasoning that, if we wanted to double our income, we had to work twice as hard. And I think that kind of thinking, that sort of linear thinking, it really stops us before we get started because we think, man, we're already working pretty hard. If we wanna make double the money, we've gotta work twice as hard. and that's assuming that time and money have to be linked. And some of the things that we learned through this process is that's not necessarily the case. But it's only when you are absolutely forced to think differently about something and try something different that you actually do it a lot of the time. And for us, we got to this point where we'd already spent six months trying to figure out how to get into financial advice before we realized we wanted to do this coaching model. and that meant that the financial runway we created was running out. And there was a point in time we had to decide what are we gonna do about that. I had just become a dad to twins and I wanted to make sure I was doing the right thing for the family, but I really believed in this idea. So I had to pull out 40,000 for my portfolio to be able to keep living and keep surviving to figure out if we could make this thing work. And it was not a comfortable decision, but that's when we decided to start the podcast and start sharing what we'd learned. And I don't think we would've done this if it wasn't for Neal's work because we wouldn't have thought about this as actually an opportunity for the business. There were a lot of people. Who were starting podcasts at that time, but podcasts weren't really thought of as a way to actually build a business or a way to turn your ideas into income or anything like that. And it was like the universe kind of winked at us a little bit because we started to get referrals from these early clients. They were sharing episodes and we had momentum. We got traction quite quickly. then COVID happened about six months later and we realized that we'd built a national audience because we started getting people booking in from all over Australia. And I remember the first time somebody booked in that we didn't know. And it wasn't a referral, it was just a complete stranger. And I remember going, man, that's amazing. And then we had the first stranger from a different state. Then we had a first stranger from a different country. And for a little bit of time we started working internationally. We came back to local after that. that all happened in the space of months, and the numbers started to reflect that as well. So we started to cover our cost. That was a major milestone. Then we made a one K profit that was a milestone, and we made a 10 K profit, then a 10 K week, then a 10 K day, then a 10 K hour, And what we've learned in this process from people who've gone before us, like Naval and many others, has allowed us to turn that idea into an income and a lifestyle that gives us choices that are really important to us. Like for me, walking the kids to school without rushing back to a desk is an important choice, and being able to do the pickup is an important choice. Rarely taking meetings before midday is another important choice. Being able to train when everyone's leaving. As soon as I finish recording this, I'm gonna go to the gym. When everybody's leaving the gym, then we can work on the road. We can holiday around peak times without having to ask permission. And the most important thing for me is that I can own my day, set my schedule, and work in a way that works for me. And all the way doing this. We're making a meaningful impact seeing clients succeed, and that to me is worth more than money. Every time we get to publish a success story in this podcast, it's just the best thing to be able to share that with you. and I have to say as well, like having gone from a career where you can predictably save money to knowing how you can predictably make money, it's very different in terms of financial security. Once you know that you've been able to make$10,000 an hour, you feel very differently about what's possible. I'm telling you this because, we had no idea how this whole thing worked. We had no idea about the internet or anything like that. But over the last five, six years, you do pick up a lot of this stuff. And I'm telling you that there's no kind of special skill or talent around this. There's just curiosity. That's all you need to be able to make this work. You just need to be curious and you just need to have a goal that matters to you, and you can learn so much of this stuff and it can change things so, so fast. Okay, so let's take a beat for a second. What we've covered so far is how important financial offense is, and more specifically, how important it's right now'cause of the uncertainty, the volatility that we're all facing. And also you can see the opportunity we have as a generation with the internet. It has massively expanded the arena of opportunity for us. We just need to learn how to use it instead of being used by it. I wanna give you a bit of a preview on this. Earn Your Worth Series and what you'll learn. So this series is about sharing everything we've learned so far and we continue to learn.'cause there's no kind of stopping in this space. There's always so much more that you can actually learn. But I've gone back and I've collided all the information, all the insights. into one sort of space and try to put it together in a way that makes sense. and what I've tried to do is go, what do I wish I knew when we started out? What do I wish I knew even before that? what was I acting on? What could I act on to increase my income based on understanding how important commercial acumen is? and if I can share with you one core insight from my experience, what I've learned is earning more isn't about working more hours, it's about creating more value. And commercial acumen is just simply the way to create that value and learn how to capture some of it. And when you combine those skills and strengths with commercial acumen, then you can do work that energizes you, serves the market, and earn your worth, which is what this series is gonna be about. And one thing I wanna say is you don't need to be in business to benefit from this. You just need to think like a business person. and that's essentially what commercial acumen is about. In fact, there's probably an argument to state that you could benefit more from this sooner faster as an employee, because so few employees think like this. Most people are going into work, clocking in, clocking out, and waiting for a pay rise instead of making themselves more valuable and then demanding it. there's a couple right now in our program who have done an awesome job with this. They started about four months ago, and in that period of time they've identified that financial offense as a constraint, and they've got busy addressing that constraint. And what that's meant for them in four months is that they're 10 X their saving capacity. and they've probably fast tracked their investing journey by about five years. and I would be shocked if they're not$500,000 better off in retirement just based on what they've done right now. And if nothing else changes. So this can change really, really quickly. And these guys aren't in business, they're employees. They're people who've got jobs. so let's talk about this series and how it's gonna roll out. So in episode one, I'm gonna do a deep dive into that money mechanic I talked about before. What is that underlying money mechanic. I'm gonna show you what that is. I'm gonna show you how pervasive this is, and once you see it, you're gonna know directionally what to do. To be able to increase your income.'cause it's actually quite predictable when you see it like this. And it gives you almost like a signpost of, okay, I'm gonna move in this direction. Gotta go that way. and once we've done that, the rest of the series is about putting that mechanic to work and doing it in a way that's predictable and reliable. So I've gone back and profiled all those individuals, pulled outta the common threads, turned the patterns that I can see into principles, turned those principles into a process, so that you can start to. Figure out how do you actually apply this stuff? How can I apply it for myself? then in episodes three to five, we're gonna do a deep dive into each component of the framework with codified case studies so that you can actually see how people are doing this stuff. And in episode six, I'm gonna show you how to bring it all together to build your own development plan, show you what needs to be in that development plan. And this is all about productizing yourself, which is another concept for naval. If you see yourself as a product, how would you make yourself more valuable and capture more of that value over time? the big secret here is you don't get money. You actually attract it by who you are. There's this guy MJ DeMarco. He says, money's like a cat. The more you chase it, the more it evades you. He says, what you wanna do is you wanna create the conditions where money comes to you. In that analogy, he's like, you wanna know how to crack that can of tuna and make it so the cat feels safe to come into the room, see the tuna, and then come to you? And that's essentially what this whole thing is about. How do you actually make that happen over time? So these episodes are gonna be pretty short. They're gonna be based around one idea and real world examples from my own experience, from people that we're working with, and the people that we've learned from as well. now. The last thing I wanna share with you is how to get the most outta this series. I don't even want you to think about this as a series. I want you to think about it like a guide. And so the best way to get the most outta this is to. Actively learn. And one of the best ways to do that is to think about having a learning intention. In the show notes of this episode, if you scroll down in that episode description, you'll find an Earn Your Worth survey. In this survey, there's a bunch of questions in there that'll get you starting to think about what's really important to you and what you wanna get outta this series. It's also gonna help me shape up this series and make sure that I'm meeting you where you're at, making it as relevant as possible. That is gonna help you calibrate your brain around how to use the information in this series. It's also gonna help me make sure that the information's better for you, And at the end of that survey, I'm gonna share with you the companion resource guide that goes with this. I've compiled all these resources, put'em in one database for you so that as you're going through this series, you can readily access and see what I'm referring to as we go through. So step number one, if you wanna get the most outta this series, is to fill out that Earn your Worth survey. The second thing is join our Facebook community because every Tuesday I'm gonna answer the most commonly asked questions from those people who filled out that survey as we go through. that's another great place to be able to start discussions and extend that learning as well. The last thing I want you to do to get the most outta this series is to share this episode. Find somebody who's got similar goals, who's got similar ambitions, appear. If you like a comrade and create a conversation, share this episode with them and say. Let's go through this series. Let's discuss these episodes as we go through. This is a form of interactive learning. It just helps you internalize this knowledge a lot better, and you'll find that you'll start acting on it sooner because you're making better sense of it,'cause it's the way you see it and the way they see it, and what you're gonna actually do with this information. So if you wanna get the most outta this series, those are the three things that I highly encourage you to do. Fill out the Earn Your Worth Survey, join the Facebook community and share this episode. Okay, so that's it for this preview. The main thing I want you to take away is that making more money is a byproduct of creating more value. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to work more hours or sell your soul. You can make more money doing work that you find meaningful because of this thing called the internet. And building commercial acumen, that's what allows you to turn your interests into an income and it's the major cheat code for retiring sooner, creating a life that you never wanna retire from, right? So that's it for me from this episode. In our next episode, we're gonna be diving into that underlying mechanic. What is it that makes prices rise? And how do you make your own price rise, if you like, so if you wanna be notified when these new episodes drop and they will be dropping more frequently, make sure you're subscribed if you're not already. See you in the next episode.