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From Screen Time to Real Time: Rediscovering Family Purpose with Aaron Shelly
80 Plays1 year ago
Ever feel the digital world pulling your family apart? 📱 Dive into an enlightening chat where we explore strategies to bring families closer, beyond the screens. Unlock the secrets to nurturing genuine connections, fostering shared purposes, and building lasting bonds. Turn off the tech and tune in to rediscover what truly matters. 💖 #Family #Purpose #Bonding #Values #RealTalk
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Transcript
Digital Life Balance Struggle
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Have you ever caught yourself walking through your front door after a long day at work only to realize your phone is practically glued to your hand?
00:00:09
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Or maybe you've come home eager for some downtime, but instead of spending quality time with your family, you find yourself on a one-on-one session with your phone. If this sounds all too familiar, you're not alone. As technology continues to advance rapidly, many of us grapple with achieving the right balance between our digital and personal lives. Even I must admit, chat GPT is starting to feel like my best friend. If you can relate, then this podcast episode is tailor-made for you.
Introduction to Aaron Shelly
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you
00:00:44
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Stay tuned for an eye-opening conversation with our special guest, Aaron Shelly. Aaron Shelly is an engineer with an MBA with a unique perspective on relationships between family dynamics and business. With extensive experience working with small businesses and startups, Aaron has developed a perspective across marketing operations, customer support, sales, and product development. Aaron's journey began in the suburban neighborhood where he and his friends shared similar backgrounds
00:01:14
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yet their life outcomes varied drastically. This led him to understand how family dynamics can impact one's life.
Families as Businesses
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Through his work and research, Aaron's discovered that families and business share many similarities. And by viewing family through a business-like lens, we can tackle topics such as dating, conflict, divorce, parenting, investing, money management,
00:01:37
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family roles, and generational wealth. Today, Aaron will share his insight and experience, showing us how we can make our families more successful by thinking about them holistically. So without any further ado, let's dive into this thought-provoking conversation.
Aaron's Career Journey
00:01:55
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Looking for career advice, personal development tips, or inspiring stories? Our Matrix Mentors as you covered. Don't miss out, bookmark our podcast, and follow us on social media for a life guide in your pocket.
00:02:07
Speaker
Welcome to the organic matrix, Aaron. Thank you, Samantha. It's great being here. Super excited to talk with you. So Aaron, can you tell us about how you found your line of work? Well, I'm kind of in a weird trajectory. I mean, like I did get an engineering degree, like you mentioned, and then I kind of started to work as an engineer and then I got frustrated. So that's why I went and got an MBA because I wanted more control over my life.
00:02:30
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And then my career has really been operations. I've done development. I've built companies. I've done a lot of, my wife and I run an Irish dance studio, which over the last 20 years. So in terms of, I've kind of just looked for opportunities. I like to own businesses and own equity. So that's really where I've focused. And so I've been, I worked at ancestry.com. If you're familiar with them, they do the genealogy. And then I worked for,
00:02:59
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a startup in the genealogy space that didn't end up well. And then that's kind of where I had some time to think about what I wanted to do. And that's when I helped the guy write a book on business and family and different entrepreneurial outcomes. And in the course of writing that I came up with a model that I thought was superior to his or better for the readers rather. And so I kind of wrote it up and said, Hey, here's the model for your book. And he said, no, that's yours.
Inspiration from Imprisoned Friend
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You write a book.
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So then I didn't really want to write a book. I went through that, still doing business at the same time. And then about that time I got an email from my mom and it had a link to an article that showed a friend of mine from high school, like you mentioned, had been convicted to life in prison for rape and attempted murder. And I was thinking,
00:03:49
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Where did we go wrong so the engineer Brian brain kind of obsessed and I kind of wrote the book, but then I got into another. Executive position of the company that we just grew from about 20 people to 180.
00:04:02
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And so I was kind of churning on this this whole time and now I've had a chance to step back. So now I'm refocusing on this book. So it's sort of a very nonlinear journey and I never expected to come here. Didn't ever really want to write a book either, but I kind of look at how do I help the most people? And this seemed like the thing to do.
00:04:20
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I really honor the work that you're doing and I love that you're taking something that sounds so horrible and honestly scary and taking power into that to enable people with perspective on how to avoid outcomes like that. How was your reaction when you found out that your childhood friend ended up in that situation?
Teaching Values and Family Analogies
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Well, I have four children of my own.
00:04:47
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And so my first reaction was what happened? Like where did, we were on the same path very close and then they diverged. So I was like, Hey, where, what happened? How do I understand that?
00:05:02
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Because when I first read it, I'm like, Oh, there's a rapist and guy attempted murder. Like, yeah, go rot in prison. And then when it's like, wait, this is your friend. Where, where was that? And then I thought, how do I protect my children from that? That was my big concern because as a parent, if my kid ended up in that scenario, I'd feel like I'd failed myself. I'd failed the child. I'd also failed society broadly. So that's really where my thought, my churning was. And that's really what we got, got me going on the book is I have to understand.
00:05:31
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What is going on? It's my engineering brain. Like, okay, if, you know, like Elon Musk launches his rocket, it blows up. Great. What went wrong? We fix it. And that's the same type of mentality I think of here. What went wrong and how do I fix it? I would love to, I would love to hear more about what you discovered when trying to figure out this, this problem and what kind of steps we can take at home to be more mindful on what kind of attention we have to give our children to avoid an outcome like this.
Preparing Children for the Real World
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Yeah, I think it might be the phrasing of the question when you say giving your children attention. I think it's much more along the lines of teaching your children, right? I think sometimes we're like, we need to keep our kid busy. That's our job as a parent. I'm going to throw them at, you know, they'll go to these classes. They'll go to here. I'm keeping them busy. Am I, and they're developing skills. Isn't that good. But there's a question of, well, if you're successful in your life, what are you teaching your children?
00:06:30
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And that's where I go into this, you know, if you look at a successful business, it makes more money, and then it hires more people. It has this flywheel effect, right? That's why I call the book, The Family Flywheel, because you make more money, then you'll make more money, then you can hire people, you can have those people, then go build a brand for you. This flywheel effect happens in successful businesses, and it should be happening in our families because they have a lot of the same dynamics.
00:06:56
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But if we don't, I think so many people have kind of focused on just making money. Like, am I a good employee? I'm making money. Am I, you know, if I'm a guy in a family and I'm like, my job is to make money and I go make money, good, I get a good job.
00:07:12
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But if you look at a business and all you focused on this family, then that means you would neglect or not your family. You've only focused on making money. That means you would ignore your brand. That means you would ignore PR. That means you would ignore marketing and sales. That's kind of these social resources that we talk about.
00:07:28
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And so you have to focus holistically on your family just as a business has to focus holistically. You can't just try to always make money. You go hire people and then they try to build your brand. You go hire more people and then those guys will try to go be salespeople. So there's this holistic thing in a business, but it seems like most families have got into this. Well, we make money, we come home, the school system teaches. The problem I see with a lot of school system stuff is that it's not teaching you values. It's not teaching you,
00:07:58
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the wisdom. It's teaching you knowledge. Here's how to do math. Here's how to do science. But it's not teaching you the wisdom. So I think with our with as a parent, I adjusted, I think my focus like, how am I teaching my kids and what do I want them to learn?
00:08:13
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in terms of the values. And if I'm not teaching them, no one really is, or maybe it's their, could be at school and could be a disagreement, or it could be their own other people at school. So I think we kind of need to reframe it in our minds more along, not giving them attention, but helping them and training them.
00:08:33
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I love that and I love that approach and adjusting the language does help with the mindset of what we need to do. Like our parents are meant to be our guides,
Modern Family Dynamics Challenges
00:08:43
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right? Like they're meant to teach us how to acclimate in this world, how to self-regulate. And it's really interesting to me that
00:08:51
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In the new world that we're living in right now, there's more conversation about self-regulation, about emotional intelligence. And I'm glad that we're not just hyper focusing on just developing IQ, but now EI.
00:09:08
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How important do you think it is to acknowledge teaching our kids how to self-regulate in the world since our education systems actually made laws against teaching kids how to self-regulate?
00:09:23
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Yeah, I think there's some interesting perspectives on how, you know, that's, that's where we get into the, the issues of, well, how should it be done? But yeah, like you say, the emotional intelligence is super important. I mean, if you go into mental health or mental fitness, as some people like to talk about it, how do you react to failure? Is failure good? Is it bad? Is it neither? How do you look at this? And so I think it, he says, my, my job as a parent, I've seen it as I'm trying to,
00:09:52
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There's two perspectives out there. The world is a dangerous place. I need to protect you from it. Or the world is a dangerous place. I need to prepare you for it, right? So if I protect you from it, at some point, my layer of protection will be pulled back and you will be exposed to whether it's when you go to college or when you go to your first job, you will be exposed to that. And that will be a difficult thing for you to handle because you're so unprepared.
00:10:20
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And so that's the stuff that I think is important is you're looking at this, like, how do I prepare you for this hard world? We just can't make it soft extensively. Like, I mean, I've traveled all over the world and man,
00:10:35
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The US has it pretty dang nice. I lived in Russia for two years. They do not care about human life the same way that we do. I was in China kind of the same thing. They don't value individuality. There's so many different things that I think we take for granted. So I think it's a lot about
00:10:53
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for us as parents in having our kids go through this cycle of failure and learning that, okay, you took it, you failed. That's part of the learning process. And then you teach them how to overcome it, and then they overcome it. If you're familiar with Carol Dweck's work on mindset, her book, Mindset, talks about the growth mindset. If you get into this loop, then every failure you can look at, no one likes to fail, but you look at it as a learning opportunity.
00:11:23
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And so that is the big thing that I personally think you need to do. So that's why I took my kids like snow skiing, cause I'm in Utah, you know, so you will fall down and the first time you ski, you will fall down a lot. But then if you go about 10 or 20 times, you'll, you'll get really good at it and you'll get all of a sudden the slopes start getting steeper and you want to push yourself. So it's teaching kids this process.
00:11:48
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of learning and how to deal with the failure because it happens in work. Nothing comes easy. You hope things work out. They don't. So it's really that process of overcoming and that failure is positive. I think that's one of the biggest things to look at.
00:12:05
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I love your quote so much about I have to prepare my kid versus protect my kid because we were speaking earlier about my family dynamic and how I was raised by two women and a household with only women. Mind you, we had no uncles, no grandpas.
00:12:25
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literally no men, period. And I was raised with that mentality of, I have to protect my babies, protect, protect. And then I was in this perfect little bubble and so naive, thinking that we grew up in a safe world. Yeah, I understand I was a child, but growing up with that mentality that nothing can hurt me because I'm always protected was something that I landed in so much problems in college.
00:12:51
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having the benefit of the doubt for people that didn't really deserve it. And so that really brings perspective to me as a future parent. And I love that you brought that message really clear to our audience right now because it's instinctual for us to want to shelter our children, but it does not serve them as adults. Well, and that's that is one thing that you often see women are more nurturers and men tend to be more of what I call challengers in the book.
00:13:21
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And it's never, it's not always the same, right? It's just, if you have too much nurturing, you're over protected. And if you have too much challenge, you're often under nurtured, right? You get injured a lot and then you can just develop kind of open wounds mentally and physically. So you kind of need this dynamic of someone challenging
Impact of Technology on Families
00:13:39
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and that's verbal, that's emotional, that's physical.
00:13:44
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Right. That's kind of like, if you thought about like, if you go to the weight room to the gym, you need someone who's putting a little more weight on you to see where you can go. And then you can overcome that. Sometimes you fail and they help you. They spot you. So you're not getting killed, but you want that nurture and challenger in you and in the environment. And I think it's, it's important. And as you said,
00:14:06
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There's a book called the boy crisis where it actually talks about with when children are raised without a dad, a lot of the girls have problems. You know, there's a lot often rapes. I think it's like 90% of rapes happen in that environment because the girls don't understand how men are thinking, how they communicate, you know, how they're those type of things. Whereas if they're raised with a dad, they usually have that experience. So that's, that's kind of the thing, the challenge that you often run into with some of the,
00:14:33
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the newer family dynamics, and I talk about those in the book, is it's you're often missing a piece that you're not even aware you're missing. And so it's a little bit like how do I get these other pieces involved, whether I need more nurture, whether I need more challenge. And you can sometimes see that even in, you know, straight relationships where you see the, they're both nurturers or they're both challengers or they're both just unavailable because they're working so much. So these aren't
00:14:59
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necessarily unique problems, but they often show up more in those types of relationships. Absolutely. Thank you so much for bringing this to the table. I want to also segue into how technology influences our family. How do you think technology has challenged how families communicate and interact both positively and negatively?
00:15:23
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On the positive side, we have access to so many great people, right? I mean, you can listen to podcasts. You can listen to these great thinkers. You can go take Harvard classes and, you know, Stanford classes and there's Coursera. There's so many options out there to learn from great people. And I think it's for me, I was like, when I got in high school, I got really bored because a lot of the teachers aren't really that energized about their subject, but you get into college and all these people are like, I'm doing research and I love it. So.
00:15:53
Speaker
That's why I tried to pull that in for my children. But yeah, I think it's a little bit around the downside of technology that I've seen for women and Jonathan Heights work at NYU. He talks a lot about this too. If you give a woman or girls, sorry, smartphones, they tend to do a lot of social media, right? I saw that with my daughters. They're trying to stay connected. But the downside is they tend to be
00:16:21
Speaker
comparing themselves against every woman in the world. Like women are really good at comparing. I'm not as attractive as that girl. Well, yeah, you know, and I'm not as strong as freaking Thor, you know, but guys don't have the same desire to compare. So I saw with my daughter,
00:16:38
Speaker
It was much more, a lot of more time on social media, a lot more time comparing. And then we ended up into some of the eating disorder things sometimes, you know, like that type of stuff, because they're trying to deal with those. And for boys, you end up with, they usually get into video games.
00:16:57
Speaker
So they don't have the same social media comparison, but a lot of times they'll waste their time instead of finding kind of the games of life that will actually make them productive. So my son got into video games, which I also am in. I like video games, so it's not bad, but I had to help him and give him specific times and say, Hey, if you want to.
00:17:17
Speaker
play video games, then you also need to do read business books, take classes, and those type of things. So it's kind of on both sides of the technology. It can be really positive. It's just the downsides can be quite negative if, especially if you're not monitoring or keeping track of it, then like I saw with my daughter a few times, she's kind of got into these negative loops. And so then I had to, I was like, okay, we got to take your phone for a little bit.
00:17:42
Speaker
we got to get you out of this. So that's the big the positive is that we have access to the smartest people like you mentioned in your thing chat GPT and Google, you can literally answer any question you would ever want to know. And you can have the smartest people. So there's that great side.
00:18:02
Speaker
And then there's the side of, and you can just waste time on social media or playing video games and you get completely disconnected from reality. So I think as a parent, it's all about how do you help them minimize the negatives and teach them how to, like with my daughter, I think it's a bad idea to protect your kids from all social media. Oh, do you can't have Instagram? You can't have tech talk because then when they get to college, I don't know what your experience was. Then they go.
00:18:30
Speaker
Oh no, there's no rules. And then all of a sudden everything, the wheels come off the bus. So you're kind of trying to teach your kids in the house. Again, it's a scary world. I have to expose you to stuff gradually and then you'll become more, you'll adept at using it. So technology is a great tool. I think people will sometimes blame it for things, but it's really just a tool and we need to teach our children how to use it effectively.
00:18:57
Speaker
I love that you said that and I agree it is a tool and it's very much worth taking the time to investigate how it can be used for the youth today. As we even think about our experience as business owners using chat GPT automates so much work for us. Like something that would take me four hours to create would take me 15 minutes and it's just fantastic.
Balance in Relationships
00:19:20
Speaker
It frees up so much time and there's so much more opportunity now using your creative mind. I love
00:19:27
Speaker
How you balance technology moderation with your son because it's totally okay to be in love with technology it's the future if you can learn how to make this technology feed you in the future. And you learn at a young age how to navigate through it so it's not a shocking college like you said all the wheels of the bus is there is an art to using social media like i had a while time in college.
00:19:50
Speaker
I am very grateful that I didn't put my entire college experience on social media so that now in my professional career, it doesn't have to follow me like that. So I love that. And I love that you're still allowing a space where they can still have access to it. So it's not such a leap when they're without your guidance.
00:20:14
Speaker
Yeah, well, and I think it's a parent's role to try to stay up on technology. I mean, I'm in a technology space, but if you sit there and just let technology
00:20:23
Speaker
progress. I mean, like, Oh, here, what does chat GPT do? And I mean, when I was young, there was the porn stuff that started in, there was those type of things. And it's just like, yeah, but how do you mitigate? And video games became much more popular. When I was young, we had to buy games. So I'd have to go work, then I could buy a game, then I'd play it. It'd be simple. Then I have to go work some more. Now there's infinite number of games for free on your phone, you know? So this is the difference of like, what does it mean? And what are the changes?
00:20:50
Speaker
And for a parent, it's troublesome and it's tricky because it's so much work, but that's why we have other parents. That's why we can keep learning on different podcasts, different books, those type of things. So that's really our responsibility as a parent. I mean, if you think about it, it wouldn't be any different if we were like an animal out in the wilderness where like, watch out. We were talking before the show where you're going to move down to the south and you're like, well, there's gators and then there's snakes and you need to get taught on the dangerous world.
00:21:19
Speaker
If the world changes, your parents need to stay up on it as much as they can.
00:21:25
Speaker
Absolutely. I love that you mentioned that we can also like add different like outsource certain help like similar like a business in the sense that since I didn't have like a father figure but I was a collegiate and a high school wrestler and I had male coaches and I wrestled with men and so I learned a lot about discipline and like learning how to do hard things learning how to get hit in the face and get back up again
00:21:50
Speaker
And, you know, I owe them a lot of my success and a lot of my stubbornness and a lot of my persistence to those mentors in my wrestling community. So I love that this is brought into the conversation because, yeah, as a parent, we will get overwhelmed, like if you have a full time job and both parents have to work to provide for the household. But there's like other there's other resources that can be used to inspire children that doesn't involve technology, like putting them in a sport.
00:22:20
Speaker
putting them into martial art like for discipline or even doing something like rock climbing and what you mentioned earlier like the skiing like learning that you can get up after falling down even 10-20 times.
00:22:32
Speaker
Yep. Yeah. I do think it's important to understand holistically where your kids need help, where you as a parent need help. I think one of the bigger problems that we're seeing now is a lot of kids who are raised in a single parent household, they don't even know how to have a partnership.
00:22:51
Speaker
So they don't know about conflict. They don't know about, can I disagree with this person? How do I do this without burning the bridges? So there's that level of complexity of like, well, I don't know how to be in a partnership, whether it's a business or a family partnership. So I need someone to teach me about it and I need to go through those skills.
00:23:12
Speaker
And like you were saying, there's, I think the EQ side is kind of more the feminine side, usually like the social and understanding the emotions. And the masculine side is much more the IQ power, you know, trying to get it. And again, you need both. You can't be the best, but a total jerk to everyone because then you don't get very far in business. And the other side, you can't be super nice to everyone, but completely incompetent. That also doesn't work. So you need to kind of balance it.
00:23:40
Speaker
Absolutely. On the topic of balance, is there any specific techniques that you recommend people to try to achieve that kind of balance? Techniques in terms of for themselves personally or for the family? Both. So for them and their position in the family, I guess.
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think to balance someone, to balance your family, that's where I kind of have in the book, it's the different resources, the financial resources, it's the social resources and the human resources. And you should be, just like a business, you should be investing in relationships, those social connections. You should be spending time with your neighbors, developing your groups, like you say, with other groups, whether it's a sports team, you should be developing in those social.
00:24:31
Speaker
You should also be developing in your financial, right? If your financial situation is not getting better year over year, just like in a business, it's like, uh, we're losing money or we're staying flat. This is bad. So you want to keep this, you know, kind of balance as well as you, you know, managing your health and your time and your skills, developing new skills. That's an important part. So that's where I'd say in balancing a family and for yourself, that's, those are the things you look at now. Balancing individually, I think is more tricky.
00:25:01
Speaker
There's points, you know, when you were in college, you probably didn't make very much money. You know, you're completely out of balance. You're like, I'm totally investing for social resources or human resources and some social, but I'm spending my financial resources, right? So it's never a balance of like day in, day out, I'm in balance. For me, when I was working as this executive,
00:25:24
Speaker
I was long hours and I was thinking about it and I would travel a lot. So it was out of balance in some ways, but then now I have time to pull back. And so I can regain some of that now neglect when your children are young, you can't ever get those years back, you know?
Understanding Values in Relationships
00:25:38
Speaker
So it's, it's really like, what, what can you, what are the trade-offs that you want to make? So I think balance, it's much more about how you're balancing the trade-offs that make sense for you.
00:25:50
Speaker
much more, and for your family, more so than every, you know, like sometimes people in relationships will go like, we need to keep it 50 50. Well, you don't do that in a business. I'm in sales, you're in marketing. We work a hundred percent, a hundred percent, and we worked and together we're more. We have a synergy. So I think we should focus much more on a synergy type thing in a family where you may be out of balance personally, but as a family, now you're collectively balanced.
00:26:18
Speaker
I could see how that could be so much helpful for going further along than for each member of the family trying to take on all the same tasks. Yeah. It seems like such a no brainer. And yet I think a lot of the reason we have divorces now is because a lot of people are trying to marry someone like them. Oh, you like to work and you like to do sales and cool. And then you get married and you're like, well, now we're competing against each other for the same jobs.
00:26:43
Speaker
My wife and i have run this irish dance business now for twenty twenty five years i think and i do all the technical stuff i do the website marketing music all that type of stuff and she teaches dance i actually do not know how to dance irish at all.
00:26:59
Speaker
Right and that makes a great business for us because we appreciate each other right you're how much more appreciative are you of people who are doing stuff that you don't really know how to do you like thank you so much for helping me out. Right even today i had to go clean the snow so that people can get Irish dance know that come to our classes.
00:27:18
Speaker
My wife's like, she's so glad that she doesn't have to do that. So there's this combination of appreciation for different skills and different responsibilities. And sometimes you're like, you know, like today, I'm like, I'm outside, I'm freezing and my wife's inside and it's nice and warm. And my wife's like, Hey, thank you so much. That's all I need because it makes me feel appreciated. But then she's going to go to class and teach for the next four hours. And I might be home playing games or watching something.
00:27:44
Speaker
but I can appreciate that and she can appreciate it. So I think in relationships, it's much more useful when you get a complimentary partner than someone who's just like you.
00:27:57
Speaker
because then you're like, I hate, I mean, I don't really love doing the laundry. My wife likes folding it. I actually said I could do, I did it when I was young and I'm like, I could do it. She's like, I like to fold it. So those are the things where look for the synergies and look for the compliment. Try, don't try to get into this 50-50 nitpick because A, it's really annoying to try to keep score and it never will be fair by, you know, was it, she teaching, how do we even measure these things? It just doesn't even make sense.
00:28:25
Speaker
I love that topic because it's so true and it sounds a lot more harmonious because what I find is a common problem I see in marriages and relationships and in human nature, something that is a blind spot for us is our controlling nature as a species. Like we control the environment, we control the market, we control other people, we want the tendency for children to bully each other. It's more of an instinctual thing. It's not like a problem. It's a developmental thing from being in the animal kingdom.
00:28:54
Speaker
You know, like we are all in that world of dominance. It's a real thing. And so when you find somebody that compliments you, it's like my boyfriend knows how to build computers. I'm not going to be over his shoulder trying to control how he builds that computer. I have no idea how it works. That's one less argument. But if you were to go on my podcast and tell me how to do my podcast.
00:29:14
Speaker
That would go out well, like I'd be like, no, no, this is this is mine. This is where I control things. So I like that a lot more because we tend to a lot of people tend to it's easier said than done a lot of things. Right. Like we could look at a problem and think like, oh, I have the answer, but then actually embedding, like embodying that answer and getting it done with grace. Like that is a lot harder. Yeah.
00:29:39
Speaker
Yeah. I think you're a hundred percent right. When you look at the execution of stuff, well, you're just going to do a podcast. You just turn it on and record. It's like, yeah, that's not it. So, and it's the same thing. You're just throwing pieces of a computer together. Yeah. It's it. Everyone has these.
00:29:54
Speaker
What do they call it? The more you know, the more you know, you don't know, right? So the less you know about a subject, then the more you're like, Oh, I didn't, that should be easy. And then the more you get into it, you're like, Holy layers upon layers upon layers. And so I think there's an extra level of humility there when you see stuff and you can understand, yeah, that's as way more complicated.
00:30:14
Speaker
There's different challenges and it's good that you can deal with them because I don't want to. And that's where just like in a business, if you're starting a business, you want a sales guy and you want a product guy. You do not want two sales guys because then no one's making the product and you don't want two product guys because then no one sells it.
00:30:32
Speaker
And I think we've actually lost this a little bit from the farm days. When most people were farmers, it would be a farmer and a farmer's wife. And you had to have both to make a farm work when neither one was more important. And so it seems like we've kind of hit from the 1930s until now, we've kind of gone into this. Oh, life's easy and we can do all things and everyone can do everything.
00:30:54
Speaker
well, sort of, there's some things, you know, like there's some, like when it comes to having children, like I just can't have a child, child, sorry. So I was like, my, I kind of had to, my wife's like, okay, are you going to do that? So then she wanted to have children. Like there's some things that make the specialization make so much sense on. And there's other things where it's like, no, I can do the dishes or she can do the dishes. So which one, how are we going to make it work? And how are we going to negotiate this?
00:31:19
Speaker
So I think it's really looking at your relationship. How do we want to specialize and what makes sense for us? Because you doing your podcast is different than my wife doing hers. And that's kind of what I like from the business perspective. There is no single business model that's effective. Google is different than Apple that is different than Walmart and all these companies are successful. And that's the same with families. Some families have, you know, both parents working, some parents they don't even have, they're working with their
00:31:46
Speaker
You know, they're working in their family, they're single parents, they live with their extended family. All these models can work if you understand it. And that's really what the goal of the book was, not to say, hey, there is a right way. It was to say, here is the general rules. Now you have the ability to figure out how to make it work given your circumstances. I love that. So would you say that it starts with assessing our own situations before we start taking a plan of action?
00:32:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think it comes down to really where do you want to go? Like if you look at a company, every company needs a strategy. Google's strategy is organized, or their mission is to organize the world's data, right? If you're looking at it like, I think it's super important that I, you know, you want to be a podcaster, that's, you feel like your mission
00:32:38
Speaker
If you're with a, uh, another person, a husband, then he's, and he's like, well, I need a farmer's wife. You're like, cool. We shouldn't get married. Like it's, it's really trying to figure out what is it that you think is important and what is your purpose in life? And then finding other people who align with it. Right. That's what I've seen to be most effective. And if you don't know what your purpose is, and then you get into a relationship and then you're like, well, this isn't working.
00:33:05
Speaker
Well, duh, because you never actually decided where you were going. He doesn't know where he's going. And then you're both just frustrated because no one's going wherever, or maybe you wanted to go in a different direction. He wanted to go somewhere else. So that's where the conflict is coming. It's from a lack of shared mission or purpose.
00:33:21
Speaker
That is such great advice and that brings a lot of good perspective and that's a good question to ask your partner before getting married. Is it you guys want to go in the same direction or how are you guys going to cooperate the family that's soon to be created?
00:33:40
Speaker
Yeah, because most of the conflict is really around a value system. You know, we have $50,000 in the bank. Should we go on a vacation or should we go invest in real estate?
00:33:52
Speaker
right, should we move like you're looking at doing? Like all of these things, it's based on your prioritization. If your prioritization was, oh, I wanna live close to my family, that's a different subset. If it's, I wanna live in a happier place with a better climate, that's a different thing. Or maybe you wanna get away from your family because it's not helpful. It's all of those dynamics and how you're prioritizing them. And it's the exact same in a business. Like you can look at companies like Google and Yahoo,
00:34:20
Speaker
At one point, Google was worth a million dollars, and Yahoo was worth $91 billion. And then you look at it where it's now, and Google's worth a trillion, and Yahoo got sold for, I mean, it was $30 billion, but it went down in value. And it's really just how they prioritized and what they thought they should do that caused the difference. And it's the same in families. Your prioritization is going to determine your success. And generationally, if you have children, your family's success.
00:34:49
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:34:51
Speaker
How can families begin balancing, embracing technology and maintaining strong in-person connections with each other? I love that we just talked about priorities. And I personally didn't get taught about priorities growing up. I didn't have real lessons on it. So I could see that it could vary depending on family dynamics. Let's say the priority of the family is dopamine loading with technology without regulation.
00:35:21
Speaker
How can we start encouraging this balance with our families, maybe like inspiring a lesson around priorities? Yeah, well, I think it's around us figuring out what our values are. It's hard to teach our children unless we know what our own values are. And so when I look at it, some of it's, you and your boyfriend, me and my wife, it's like, what are our values?
00:35:50
Speaker
And then this is not an easy exercise, by the way, trying to figure out your purpose and goals and they can change, but trying to figure that out and then trying to figure out your values.
00:36:01
Speaker
because there's a little bit on values where it's not balanced. I don't value relaxation that much, right? I think it's partially, it's useful, but I'd rather be productive. Like I'd rather have a full day. So it's much more, what do you value? And then how do you make those things work? You're gonna be out of balance with a whole bunch of other values.
Biological Influences on Decisions
00:36:22
Speaker
So living your life according to your purpose and,
00:36:27
Speaker
Fulfilling your values is what's going to be the core thing and that's really where you you need to work out What are those things and then driving towards them like you know? We've talked about you think that doing a podcast is important to you Now you're doing that if at some point in the future you're like well I think I should be doing something else if you keep doing your podcast
00:36:47
Speaker
Well, but it's, it's, it's there and it makes money. And then you'll start to see yourself like, well, you're not living your own values. You know, you're not living your own purpose. So I think a lot of parents either don't have a pair purpose or they don't have a set of values they've identified. And then for us as children, and I felt this way a little bit like.
00:37:06
Speaker
Is conflict okay? How do we handle it? Those type of things, we didn't really get taught. I actually teach my kids, I like conflict. I like to have, when we have meetings, so I mean, I have, I've outlined my family's values. We have five of them and we go through them and I repeat them every single, we have quarterly meetings and annual meetings where we talk about them and look back, are we living our values? That's so beautiful.
00:37:33
Speaker
I love that as a beautiful model. Like I can only imagine how much that's going to positively impact their leadership skills down the line because that's like a great fundamental baseline to actually talk about it and actually identify those values. I talk to a lot of people, a lot of my friends are entrepreneurs. So when we were first figuring out what we wanted to do, a lot of us realized that we don't even know what we want out of life. One, and two, we don't know what we value.
00:38:02
Speaker
And three, most of us found this out after a year of entrepreneurship, that it's all about service and how we do our service is our purpose. And the biggest lesson was that our purpose is our choice, that we ultimately decide our purpose, that it's not something random that we're born with, that we get a random vision and we're like, oh, I have to figure out that vision to know my purpose. Have you read the book The Alchemist?
00:38:30
Speaker
the alchemists. Yeah, I think I have. I've read alchemists and alchemy. So yeah, I've read the alchemists. So like, in the beginning, when I read that book, I was in high school. And when his treasure, spoiler alert, Franco's treasure was like, at home after he went through becoming rich, losing it all, getting beat up in the desert, almost dying, and then looking at the hill, seeing his hometown and realizing that's his treasure.
00:38:56
Speaker
That's what this reminds me of, that full circle that it's not that we had to discover this purpose, but the purpose was just us asking enough questions and spending enough time introspecting on what we value and then actually communicating with our group, like our family members. Hey, this is my values. What are your values? Because asking the right questions can change someone's entire life.
00:39:25
Speaker
Yeah, no, I totally agree. It's a lot about trying to figure out what your values are and where you're at. The one thing that I've seen that I think is a little bit, it can be sad, is that our brains, we're humans and our brains, we're kind of,
00:39:45
Speaker
We're in a body, but our body is changing without us telling it to. I did not say, yeah, it's time for me to go through puberty. I want to do that now. My body went through puberty. And so there's this part where you look at these things at different stages. I remember when my daughter was young, she's like, oh, I never want to kiss a boy. Oh, that'd be so horrible. I never want a boyfriend.
00:40:06
Speaker
And then she moves to the next stage. Oh, okay. Now I want to kiss. Okay. I never want to get married. And then you move to the next stage and you know, fast forward five years or something. And now she's married. And so you look at this thing of it's, it's often, we often want to pretend like we're these rational beings and all the, we control everything, but there's a side of what is our biology and how is that going to affect us? And you'll often see,
00:40:33
Speaker
some of the, some women who will prioritize so much, like, I never want to have kids. And then they, you fast forward, they get into their thirties or forties and they're like, well, now I do, but now oops. And so there's this part of, you know, all these other women who have come before you.
00:40:48
Speaker
Every single, you have all the women who came before you, they had children. So to assume that you're not going to have children is kind of a weird thing or that you're not going to want to. And it's same for men, right? All of the men that I come from, they all had children because I'm their offspring. And so it's kind of this understanding, where do I fit in this circle of life in this whole thing? And to assume like, no, I'm just going to mental my way out of this.
00:41:13
Speaker
it just doesn't really work. So we need to, and there's a couple of books, one called The Female Brain, another called The Male Brain, where this woman talks about the changes that your brain goes through
00:41:23
Speaker
depending on your gender or your sex and how that affects how you think and what you think about. And it was really eye opening for me because I was like, Oh yeah, this is how men and then it was, here's what you're going to go through when you get older. Oh, okay. That's, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about these things. I didn't expect those things, but I see a lot of men doing that. So it's kind of like a user's manual of understanding don't get so intellectually
00:41:50
Speaker
I don't know what the term is, convinced that you are going to be so different. No, I'm never going to want to do this. I mean, there was a 24 year old girl that I, a nephew of mine was dating and she got so convinced that she didn't want to have kids. She went and sterilized herself. And I was like, maybe. So that's the type of stuff where I'm like, be careful when you're trying, you think that you know what you want because
00:42:17
Speaker
You're part of the human race. You're part of the animal kingdom. There's a lot of things that you should consider before taking drastic measures. I love that you brought that up because if we could just humble ourselves a little bit, we did come through amazing technological advancements. Like we make skyscrapers. We have holograms now. We're going to probably be levitating soon, but we are a part of the animal kingdom.
00:42:43
Speaker
And I'm like, well, I love that you brought that up because, you know, there's this whole trans movement, like trying to allow kids below the age of 18 and decide whether or not they can transition. I'm a part of the LGBT. I love you guys, all of you guys. But I have to say, when I was a little kid, I didn't understand how puberty and gender worked because I only grew up with one gender. I just knew boys look different.
00:43:06
Speaker
I thought I was a boy. One time my mom was watching house and I saw this girl and she wanted a transition. So I'm like, mom, this girl's turning into a boy. And she's like, yeah, when you're 18, you can choose if you want to be a boy or not. I just kept it short. But in my young mind, I thought, oh, when I hit puberty, I could choose to grow a male part or not. I didn't think it was like surgery.
00:43:34
Speaker
I live my life dressing like a boy acting like a boy thinking i was a boy until i actually hit puberty and then i got boobs and i was like. I'm not a boy and i had to accept that so it's like i get worried about how much you know because we're advancing and children are becoming more articulate like.
00:43:53
Speaker
Are we giving our kids too much responsibility, allowing them to make these life-changing decisions for themselves and including their access to the internet when we have things like chat GPT and OnlyFans, like so many things? Yeah, I think... Well, that's interesting. Yeah, I think it is very difficult
00:44:23
Speaker
I remember when I was young and I thought girls and guys were the same and frankly, you know,
00:44:29
Speaker
There's, they call it the infant puberty from zero to one. But beyond that, up until we really hit puberty, girls tend to be about as strong as guys. They tend to be verbally a little more advanced. And so when I was growing up, I was like, Oh yeah, we do this. And I'd sometimes fight with girls, you know, when you're seven or eight. And then there was a point when all of a sudden it was like, yeah, you can't fight with girls anymore. You're like, and then I, you know, I, I'm six, four.
00:44:58
Speaker
I was a 200 pound and it was just all of a sudden like, and I was really, you know, like just the testosterone hits and you're like, okay, we are not the same. And that's where I've, I've seen it where, I mean, I'm 45 right now. I'm, I could still compete on a lot of college teams in volleyball just because I'm a guy. Right. And so there's these things where you got to look at this, like, okay, how do we make these things work? And there's some definitely some very interesting stuff on,
00:45:28
Speaker
what is causing, you know, some of the LGB, all those different things. So I think there's some biology, there's some congenital stuff, a lot of stuff I've researched. I actually have a gay brother, my older brother. So I grew up in this and a lot of this, like, how does this work? And so I think it's about when they're young, kids are stupid. I was stupid. We're all stupid. We have these very incomplete views of the world.
00:45:54
Speaker
to assume, even when we get into our twenties, like you start to look at, you know, college kids and they're like, Hey, you know, the government should do all these things. And you're like, I don't think you understand, like wait until you're working. And then, then talk to me about taxes. Cause every single cut, every single person who gets into, you know, starts working, then they're like, wait, where's 20% of my paycheck? Oh yeah. It went to taxes. And they're like, what? But I don't make very much. Yep. Join the party.
00:46:22
Speaker
Right? So there's a point of kids are stupid. We have a very incomplete part. Sometimes we're over protected, but we have a very incomplete version of reality. And a job of parents is to continue to help us understand that, help us understand the biology, help us understand the social constructs, those type of things that we have to go through. I mean, I didn't love school. I don't know if you did, but school to me sucked.
00:46:50
Speaker
But there's a lot of those places to me where it's like your job as a parent is to help lead the kids through those years. I kind of think at this point, 18 almost seems too young to be an adult because kids still seem to be pretty stupid. They're not really contributing in society where they're like, oh, Frigg, now I understand paying taxes and now I understand all the laws and how they're going to affect me. So I do think it's very important to understand your biology and don't let kids make...
00:47:20
Speaker
Like this poor girl who's now sterilized at 24. And you're like, I guess you're an adult, but you may regret that in the next six to 10 years. And for guys, you know, if, if I was dating a girl and she's like, oh, I'm sterilized, I'd be like, okay, maybe I'm not going to, that's actually why my nephew ended up breaking up with her. He's like, she just doesn't want any kids and I want kids.
00:47:45
Speaker
If anything, it's hard to imagine. I don't want to criticize anybody's frame of thought, but to me as a woman, if I don't child-bear, it would be harder to imagine being in a committed relationship because it's like, okay, soul-tied forever? Well, yeah, and that's one thing that children usually do. When you have children, now you have a shared investment.
00:48:13
Speaker
Now you have both of you are investing. My wife and I have had plenty of fights, plenty of disagreements, plenty of those type of things. But we come back to we're both in this together because we're both are dedicated to the family and to our kids. So I do think for I've seen this with a lot of the LGBT, if they don't have kids,
00:48:33
Speaker
or if the kids are coming from one side or the other, a lot of times they just don't stay together because there's not this biological pole that's keeping them together. And I think it's the same for straight couples that aren't having children. If they don't have children together, quite often it's like, well, what are we married for? And then you see it get divorced. And then you're like, well, we were just two adults on a journey and you were my companion. And now I'm going and finding a more attractive one or a wealthier one.
Building Strong Family Structures
00:49:00
Speaker
So it's kind of a sad dynamic but i think that's how it kind of works out. Yeah and you're building a legacy you build your you guys are two heroes for your kids like.
00:49:12
Speaker
parents are the biggest things in our lives. And as I watch my sister and I watch my sister-in-law have their children and their bonds with them, I could see how it's, like you said, this is a biological clock. Back in the day when I was in college, I was like,
00:49:31
Speaker
Oh, why would anyone want kids and you can't drink every day? Well, you know, that gets old after 10 years. So, yeah, I also wanted to ask that I love that you have these quarterly meetings, your family and after people after a matrix mentor members are hearing this, they're probably wondering, how can I start these quarterly meetings and how can I introduce the conversation of values to my family?
00:49:56
Speaker
without feeling a little choked up because it might be out of their practice. So how can they bring these lessons home? Well, so I talk about it in the book, like here's the general concept of the family flywheel so you can actually be wealthier in all ways. So the book has some of those resources on my website, thefamilyflywheel.com. I have some book resources that'll help you, I have forms that you can fill out on what is your purpose?
00:50:23
Speaker
And it's not like, I know exactly what it is. It's just like, what's your purpose right now? What is your culture? What structures do you have? What rituals do you have? What's important to you? It helps you walk through your business model. And then it also helps you go through your resources. What are my financial resources to accomplish those things? What are my social resources? I love social resources because there's so many people in your life, most likely that want to help you do good things, if you just ask. And so you have probably access to
00:50:53
Speaker
I don't know, millions of dollars of resources if you just ask them. So it helps you identify your financial, social, and your human resources. So those are the ones that I have. I have a blog. I also do some, I have on my, on YouTube, or not YouTube, on Facebook and LinkedIn. I also have my
00:51:12
Speaker
things that Aaron K Shelley. So those are the main resources I have. You can also email me at erin at the family flywheel.com. And I'd love to respond to those. I'm just in the mode of families are the pillars of our society. And as they break down, I mean, I've listened to one guy in LA.
00:51:31
Speaker
who had interviewing all these homeless people and he said, they're all homeless. Okay, we fix the home, we give them a home. Then they all have a drug problem. Okay, we give them, we get them on rehab. Okay, now they don't have drugs. Now they have mental health issues. They have all these mental health issues. Why do they have those? It's because of their families. And I'm like, how do you stop all of these mental anguish, suffering issues that we're having in society? It's by having families that are functional and productive.
00:51:58
Speaker
Thank you so much for being a vegan for this knowledge and being somebody that speaks out for those who need this kind of encouragement and their dynamic. It was awesome having you on the Organic Matrix era. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. It's always fun. Very different questions than I've got from other people. So I appreciate it.
00:52:19
Speaker
Absolutely. I'm really happy to hear that. Thank you all for tuning in to this insightful episode with our special guest Aaron Shelley. We hope you've gained a deeper understanding of the impacts of technology on family dynamics and communication and how building values in a clear family structure can benefit the entirety of your relationships.
00:52:41
Speaker
If you'd like to explore this topic further and assess your own family business model, we highly recommend checking out Aaron's valuable resources. Just visit thefamilyflywheel.com for access for tools