HS 210 – Becoming a Leader with Gregg Murset

Gregg Murset is the Founder & CEO of MyJobChart.com. He joins the show to discuss another economic crisis out there that isn’t being addressed. Murset discusses where young adults go wrong when dealing with finances and how they can learn about the fundamentals of leadership through MyJobChart.com. Murset then shares some qualities for young adults to become leaders in the workforce and how a young worker can respectfully challenge authority.

The conversation finishes with commentary on how parents and educators can prepare young adults as leaders.

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Visit My Job Chart at www.MyJobChart.com.

Narrator: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary for you to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival Show is your family’s insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you’ll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

Jason Hartman: Welcome to today’s show. This is Jason Hartman, your host. And as you may or may not know, every 10th show we kind of do a special tradition here that originated with my Creating Wealth show where we do a topic that is actually off topic on purpose, something just to do with general life and more successful living and that’s exactly what we’re going to do today with our special guest. Again, 10th show is off topic and it is very much intentional just for personal enrichment and I hope you enjoy today’s show. And we will be back with our guest in just a moment.

Start of Interview with Gregg Murset

Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Gregg Murset to the show. He is the founder and CEO of MyJobChart.com. This is a real innovative product, or service I should say, to help teach work ethic at a young age and leadership skills. Greg, welcome, how are you?

Gregg Murset: I’m doing great, Jason. Thanks for having me on.

Jason Hartman: Good. It’s good to talk to you and you’re coming to us today from beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona right near me, fantastic. Let’s talk a little bit about leadership. And, first of all, is it lacking and why is it important? What do you mean by it if you can define it? And then let’s talk about how to develop it.

Gregg Murset: I think leadership, in and of itself, is lacking. I think you can look at it on lots of different levels. I think leadership’s lacking sometimes in the country with our elected leaders. I think there’s leadership lacking in the home. Across the board, it seems like nobody really wants to take charge and everybody wants to be along for the ride.

So, leadership is one of those things that needs to be developed, that needs to be focused on and it’s a really super important characteristic, especially in kids that needs to be nurtured as they grow.

Jason Hartman: I wrote an article several years ago about the concept, Greg, of being a host rather than a guest in life. So many people, they act like they’re a guest. They want to be entertained, they want to have stuff done for them, but very few people act like a host. And I think that would be sort of analgous to what you said about leadership. People want to be along for the ride.

Gregg Murset: Yeah, isn’t it amazing? People just want to sit there and flip through Facebook and be entertained and watch funny things and it’s almost like people want to just live a movie star lifestyle without doing anything. And it’s really a problem. I mean, there’s such a lack of not only leadership but work ethic. I mean, the day of just busting it out and working hard seems to be something that is just lacking and people don’t want to go for it anymore. And so they want to be entertained, watch Facebook and be with YouTube all of these different things, entertained 24/7 and not really put any effort into it. And it’s a big problem.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, I agree. But, in one respect, you can’t really blame people for being that way because it’s just permeated our culture, the media and the entertainment culture. It’s really ridiculous. You mentioned Facebook. Some people post memes of course on Facebook and you see them in your news feed and one that I was looking at recently had a black and white picture of how kids used to entertain themselves and it had kids playing jacks, the old game jacks, and playing baseball with a stick that they found, not even a bat, and things like this, versus today you got a bunch of kids sitting around looking at their cell phone screens.

Gregg Murset: You’re absolutely right. The average kid by the time they’re age 18 will have spent 20,000 hours in front of a video game. I mean, that is a big problem, Houston. That is a problem. I don’t care how much thumb coordination is a skill these days, but that just in and of itself is telling that we need to change this. I mean, we’ve got to kind of go back to the old school a little bit and teach kids that they can’t just sit around and do nothing. That’s a big problem.

Jason Hartman: I guess, Greg, what they’re going to do is if you want to instill these ideas, they’re going to constantly ask themselves what’s in it for them, why make the effort, why bother. Why knock yourself out as the old phrase goes. What is it for them? Is it all long distance or everybody’s looking for instant gratification nowadays? Is there anything we can show people that they get right away?

Gregg Murset: I think a lot of it comes back to a parent. I think a parent needs to be able to teach their child delayed gratification. And it’s not that everything in your whole life has to be delayed. There’s nothing wrong with working real hard and getting something fast. There’s nothing the matter with that. But delayed gratification is one of those virtues that you really have to work on. And kids struggle with it these days because they have everything kind of at their fingertips literally. And so you just have to try to teach them in a way that’s meaningful to them why it is good to delay that. And it’s tough and parents are struggling with that. And that’s why we really have kind of created My Job Chart is because it teaches you gotta set a goal and you gotta work towards that goal. And it might take a little time but if you do that and you reach the goal, that builds you. That builds you as a person. It builds your character.

Jason Hartman: I love what Zig Ziglar said about that, the late, great Zig Ziglar, he said “It’s not what we get by achieving our goals that counts. It’s who we become by trying.” And that’s exactly true. So, the ability to delay gratification in a culture that has instant gratification everywhere we look, it’s pretty tough to sell that.

Gregg Murset: It is. And at the end of the day, it’s a little boring. And it’s not the sexiest thing to talk about but it’s an important characteristic that you have to instill. And it’s tough for even adults to do that sometimes, right? We all want stuff and we want it now. You look at the days of paying off a mortgage, right, people don’t even think about that hardly anymore. You’re at 65 and 70 years old and you still have a mortgage cuz you don’t want to kind of stay at it and keep putting away money towards your mortgage to pay it off.

Jason Hartman: I mean, why do that when you can use your house as an ATM machine, take money out, get a tax incentive to do so, go on vacations, buy expensive gadgets and goodies, and when the market goes down the tubes again just default on your mortgage and let the bank take the hit and it’s really not the bank because it’s really just the government through the next TARP bailout.

Gregg Murset: Right. Isn’t that great?

Jason Hartman: It’s an absurd world in which we live. You can see why people don’t have good, traditional work ethic, good traditional values, because they’re not rewarded for it anymore, Greg. I mean, it’s sad. However, I do want to make a point, just since you brought it up, on paying off the mortgage, from an investor perspective, as long as it’s not from a consumeristic perspective, I think paying off your mortgage is a very bad deal. But that’s sort of an investment philosophy. And I get what you’re saying about saving, developing capital, capital formation. Working for a distant goal, I get the concept.

Gregg Murset: Absolutely, there are two sides to that coin. But you’re right on – this whole 2008-2009 bloodbath that we went through in the economy was, at the end of the day, irresponsibility. It was irresponsible on the banks, on the government, on people making decisions. All of that kind of boiled up to it’s just a bunch of irresponsibility.

Jason Hartman: And I think you’re being extremely generous there. I would call it a bunch of criminality.

Gregg Murset: I think I’d agree with you. It was out of control and I don’t know that it’s totally in control now.

Jason Hartman: It’s definitely not. I mean, Wall Street is the modern version of organized crime, the banksters, it’s just unbelievable. You can be a crook nowadays if you’re big enough because you have a lobbyist, a PR firm, and a huge law firm working for you to help you be a crook. It’s unbelievable, but that’s another subject.

Gregg Murset: That just reinforces the fact that we need to kind of go back to the basics here and get leadership to make decisions that are good for people and kind of go back to these fundamentals of work ethic and smart money decisions.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, no question. Well, what do you think the cause of money problems is for most people nowadays? If you look at someone who’s in their 20s, for example, you can probably bet that they’re struggling. The employment market’s pretty tough. Obamunism isn’t working very well in my opinion. We’re in this sort of fake recovery as I have long said.

Even these people in their 20s, they get a job and they’ve got a decent job – they’re still broke. I mean, of course they’re settled with ridiculous amounts of student loan debt. That’s a whole other scam that we don’t talk about.

Gregg Murset: That’s a whole other thing. At the end of the day, I think the reason why so many people are struggling is because they see on TV, they see on Instagram, they see on Facebook all these people living this fancy lifestyle and they all want to live this kind of Justin Bieber lifestyle and they don’t have the money to do it but they’re trying to do it. Even though they have the average of $45,000 in student loans, they have a BMW. It’s just bad decision making and it’s trying to live beyond your means. I feel like I’m a grandpa talking here but the bottom line is it’s living beyond your means, it’s spending more than you make. And that’s a big problem.

Jason Hartman: And what it boils down to, too, Greg, is the concept of spending money on the appearances of wealth rather than things that create actual wealth. So, people will sell their dreams for small desires. They want to be wealthy, they want to do all this stuff, but each little decision to be more consumeristic, to go out and lease that BMW they can’t afford, to buy all the fancy new clothes, really puts off their ability to create capital to do things like buy a rental property and grow a real investment portfolio. They’re faking it. They’re spending money on the appearances of wealth.

Gregg Murset: And it’s not a fake it ‘til you make it. It’s almost fake it but you might not make it because you’re faking it. And I think back to my grandfather. He owned several apartment complexes, he did very well in real estate. He was the millionaire next door.

Jason Hartman: Right. By the way, just explain what you’re talking about. Thomas Stanley’s book The Millionaire Next Door talked about how the average millionaire drives a 5 year old car or an 8 year old car – I can’t remember. But they don’t have all the new stuff.

Gregg Murset: It was an 8 year old F-150 Ford pickup.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, right. That’s the most popular pickup in the world, the F-150, and it’s a modest vehicle and it’s old, it’s not new, and they’re not wasting their money on silly stuff. They’re spending their money on the things that actually create wealth. Steven Covey calls it production capacity, things that can do something for them.

Gregg Murset: That’s exactly right. And I think back to him and he had this Hawaiian shirt and he drove around in this minivan but he had millions and millions of dollars. So, that’s the thing. And kids, adolescents, 20s, 30s, everybody nowadays is trying to fake it and they’re leasing everything and they’re overextended on everything and it’s really inhibiting them from actually achieving real wealth and real security.

Jason Hartman: Well, Madison Avenue has done a great job at selling Americans things they don’t need and getting them debt they can’t afford, haven’t they?

Gregg Murset: Absolutely. It’s crazy.

Jason Hartman: It really is. What else do you want to touch on before you go? You want to talk a little bit more about the leadership side of the equation?

Gregg Murset: Yeah. And maybe this is just something that I think is just a problem in America as well is that it seems like some time ago everybody had to be winner and I don’t quite understand that. I mean, one of my kids ran in a track race last fall and he was not first place but he got a first place medal. And it was kind of confusing to him, like hey, I got a medal. And it was like oh yeah you did. And it’s just like why do we do that?

Jason Hartman: Because that’s the participation prize. You’re in first place, you’re a winner just because you showed up which I guess should get some reward. I think it was Woody Allen with the old saying 80% of success is just showing up. And there is something to be said for that. But come on, we need to get back to a meritocracy, don’t we?

Gregg Murset: Yeah. We can’t praise failure. And it’s not that we have to say, boy, you’re the worst runner out there. I mean, of course that’s not what I’m saying. But you think back and Michael Jordon was cut from his high school basketball team. Bill Gate’s first company was a big old flop. And then Steve Jobs is fired from Apple. I mean, that stuff happens and that’s okay and that’s how you create a leader. That’s how you become a leader is you’re running on the track, you fall down, you might not get first place but you dust yourself off and you go again. So, that’s real leadership. And you’re right – we need to get back to that stuff.

Jason Hartman: We sure do. Any tips for doing that?

Gregg Murset: I think it all goes back to getting back to the basics. I think it’s good decision making, I think it’s being fiscally responsible. I think it’s never giving up. I think it’s striving to lead out. And maybe if you’re in a class in college, if you’re in your first job, if you’re in whatever predicament you’re in, take a leadership role, try to drive something, get your passion behind it, and don’t give up.

Jason Hartman: Now, Greg, you founded a company, MyJobChart.com, that specializes in teaching these skills, these old-fashioned values if you will, to kids, right?

Gregg Murset: That’s right. I mean, I started that because I recognized I wanted those kinds of values instilled in my kids. And now we have over 600,000 members. And we have a new member joining every 2 minutes. So, these are things that are resonating with people because they recognize what we’ve been talking about. They recognize the train wreck that’s essentially our society in many respects, and the fact that we need to get this back on track.

And so it hasn’t been an easy thing to start this and kind of lead this revolution in this thought process, but just like we’ve just talked about, you can’t give up and you keep pushing and things happen. The next thing you know, there’s 600,000 people following and it’s a great thing.

Jason Hartman: Give us just one example of how this works – just the quick little elevator speech.

Gregg Murset: Sure. So, My Job Chart is a free online chore chart for kids ages 5 to 15. And parents assign chores to their kids, they earn points for doing the chores, and those points represent money. And then they can use that money to save in real savings accounts, share with charities or spend on things they need or want.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic, fantastic. And 600,000 members now, huh?

Gregg Murset: It’s that crazy? We’re on our way to a million people and beyond and it’s because parents are waking up and don’t want their kids to be laying on the couch and just wasting their life away. They want to empower them and they want them to become better.

Jason Hartman: I wish we had this the last generation – would have been a great tool. Well, where can they find that? It’s MyJobChart.com, right?

Gregg Murset: Got it, yep.

Jason Hartman: Alright, Greg. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. And leadership and good old-fashioned values, it’s great to hear about this stuff. Save, invest, that good old richest man in Babylon philosophy I think is a very good one and that’s essentially what we’re talking about today.

Gregg Murset: Thanks for having me on, Jason.

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Narrator: Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival Show, protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating Wealth Show which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today’s economy. Learn more at www.JasonHartman.com or search “Jason Hartman” on iTunes. This show is produced by The Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional. Information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed.

Transcribed by Ralph

The Holistic Survival Team
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