Accepting Fiduciary Responsibility

george grombacher 0:02
I think and talk a lot about personal responsibility, responsibility. Who am I responsible for? What am I responsible to all of those things, there’s all kinds of different ways to think about and parse out responsibility. But one really important thing, theoretically speaking, is fiduciary responsibility. And I work in the financial world. And there’s been a lot of talk over the past five or so years about fiduciary responsibility when it comes to the folks who manage and give you advice about your money. And what that means is that they are a fiduciary is legally obligated obligated to act in your best interest. So make sense, you would want your financial advisor to be legally obligated to act in your best interest. Well, it turns out that there are a lot of folks out there who are fiduciary Aliy responsible for the work that they’re doing. Which means that they’re not just representing themselves, that they are either through elected some elected process, or some kind of an appointment. They are fiduciaries. And some of those folks are the board of directors of banking institutions. And for those of you not paying close attention, we’re having a lot of problems, again, with our banking institutions. And if you’re wondering, How in the world does this happen? It just wasn’t that long ago, that we were having similar kinds of problems and challenges with banks. And here we are, again. How was that possible? And who’s responsible for this? Well, if you are on the board of directors of a bank, you are a fiduciary, to the customers of the bank, people whose money the bank is responsible for managing, isn’t it wild? It’s crazy, that it’s a risk to a bank, if people go to get their money out. It’s kind of like You had one job. Your job was to protect my money as the depositor so that we drifted so far away from that, where I am no longer in a position to be able to get my money out of the bank. How are we holding these people responsible as fiduciaries for their lack of oversight for not doing their job not doing the one job that you had bank? Keep money safe? Wild, there’s other people to district attorneys. And I don’t know, you can fact check me or whatever. But a district attorney, in some form or fashion has responsibility to the people that represent them, people that are elected down to the district attorney. And what do we see all over the country? We have district attorneys who are choosing to prosecute some folks and absolutely not prosecute others. And subsequently, because of that, we have cities, many cities, many of our most wonderful cities across the country that are unlivable that are unsafe. And I think it’s maddening. Where’s the responsibility? What is going on here? Politicians? I don’t think we need to go too deeply into this because I’m confident that whatever side of the aisle you are on whatever planet you’re all in whatever country you’re in, or state or whatever. You look at our elected officials. You can’t help but wonder, whose interests are they representing? Are they representing my interests as a constituent? Are they representing my interest as a United States citizen and taxpayer? Are they representing somebody else’s interests? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like does not seem like they are. They are representing my interest. Seems like a lot of these folks. Specifically, the ones I’ve just named off, are motivated by personal gain. They’re motivated by greed. They’re motivated by ideology. They’re motivated by revenge. These folks are more activists than they are advocates. And there’s a big difference between those two things. They can activist only cares about winning, getting their way out. At all costs, an advocate is different than that. An advocate is somebody who supports a position and works to advance that, but ethically, and within the boundaries of society of, of the common good of the rule of law. These folks, these people who are are fiduciaries, we put our trust in, that we expect will represent us and our interests are not. I don’t believe that they are, I don’t think I don’t think that they care. They don’t care about the truth. They don’t care about right or wrong. They only care about getting in their way. And that is a massive problem. Instead of building they’re destroying. To what end that that part I’m I’m not sure of. And I’m not, not trying to be a conspiracy theorist of any kind, I am just pointing out problems as I see them. And pointing out incongruent behavior, pointing at debt, that these people are not honoring the commitments that they’ve made. I’m sure that every bank board of director member, everybody who’s on the Federal Reserve Board, every district attorney, every politician, there, they took some kind of an oath to serve us, people that elected us that are the people that elected them. And they’re falling short of that. And I think grossly, why, uh, you know what? I don’t have the answer to that. I just know what’s actually going on. And it’s a huge problem, massive problem. So what do we do, I’m not just interested in bitching and complaining about things, I am a solution oriented person, fancy myself a pragmatic guy. So I think we need to advocate for ourselves, we need to become our own fiduciaries. And believe that there are a handful of things that we can do start doing immediately or do more of, really immediately. These are things that I talk a lot about, but I think that they all bear repeating. I believe that our beliefs are who we are. So what I believe to be true about the world, but our values, values are the lens through which we see the world. And they’re the filter through which we take in and process information. So that is really who we are. It’s how we operate. It’s how we make decisions. It’s the criteria for deciding what we value, what is higher on our value hierarchy, how we’re going to allocate and spend our most important resources, time, tension, money, energy, all of these things, they’re very finite. So the way that they operate, and I allocate these resources, through my values, really does, at the end of the day, over a long period of time, that is who I am. Goals are what you want. And I spent a lot of time talking about goals. But that wasn’t always the case. I believe that when you think about goal setting, it truly is a human superpower, that I have the ability to visualize what I want my future to look like, then make plans for bringing that future to life and then executing on those plans. So getting really clear on what it is that you want. The only way to live, how you want is to know how you want to live, working towards that making plans executing on those plans. That’ll get you closer to what you want. So beliefs, who you are goals, what you want Habits. Habits are how you do things. It’s what you do. So when we’re super clear, what we believe, we’re super clear where we’re going. We line those up by our actions. We do those consistently, they become our habits. And then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy becomes a virtuous cycle of you getting what you want, standing for what is what is most important to you for what is true. What is right. If everybody did that, you know what would happen? Everything would almost immediately take care of itself. We’d hold the standard. That’s what this is about. It’s having standards, acting according to those standards, holding ourselves to those standards and holding other people to standards as well. We don’t have any right now.

So curious why things appear to be falling apart which in many parts of the world, or rather, our world, they completely are. It’s because of lack of standards and lack of holding ourselves and others accountable to our standards. And what is really correct. Finally, this is something I’ve been spending an immense amount of time on is how do you lead a purpose driven life? What is a purpose driven life? It’s it’s within your reach. It’s when it’s within my reach, not easy, not easy to get not guaranteed, but available to everyone. And I believe that there are four different things that we must do that must be present in order to get on the path to leading a purpose driven life. Number one, we need to have a belief, the belief that my life, my existence is absolutely precious. That I’m wildly fortunate to have been born, the person that I am, where I was born, the time all of these things, that my life is a gift, and that my abilities are a gift. So I must believe that I must, I must embrace expectation. I believe the world expects more of me than it does other people. Not only that, but I believe that the world needs more of me, than it does have other people. When you embrace that, the world expects more of you than it expects of other people, the world needs more of you than it needs of other people. If you’re a person who is living by a code by standards, who is working to make your life and the lives of your loved ones better. The world needs more of you, brother, sister, it’s no doubt in my mind. And then it’s knowing it’s knowing what matters. What matters in your life, what matters to your family, what matters to your community, what matters for your health, what matters for your financial livelihood, what matters for your personal development, what matters for your soul and your peace of mind? What matters. And then finally, taking action, and doing what needs to be done in service of what matters. So believing that your life is precious, you are important and worthy. And that nobody does it better than you do. Expecting, appreciating that the world expects more of you and needs more of you than it does from other people. Knowing what’s most important, knowing what matters, and then doing what matters. That’s how you advocate for yourself. That’s how you become your own fiduciary. I hope I hope that all those elected officials and all those people in positions of power, begin to act in my best interest. But I don’t know what they’re going to want to do now. So I can control what is within my control. I have absolute control over how I think about the situations in my life, how I feel about them, and how I react to them. Rest of it. I don’t have any influence over that I’m going to attend to the parts of our garden that I can reach and I hope that you will do the same. As always, do your part by doing your best

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