Massachusetts Joins the Degree Free Movement and Eliminates Degree Requirements (DF#136)

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:00]:
The degree requirements discourage people that are qualified to do the job because they have that mentality of everybody in our comments that are saying, all the job requirements say that they need it, so I must need it. And if you're listening to this podcast, you you know that that's BS. You know that companies don't hire people that look like their job descriptions. Aloha, everybody, and we are back. Welcome back to another episode of degree free. I am really excited for today's episode because we have another state that got rid of degree requirements. And then I wanted to follow-up on last week's episode as well. Before I get there, few housekeeping things.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:43]:
1, If you have any questions for me, for Hannah that you want answered on the podcast, go to ask.degreefree.coforward/ question. That's question, singular, not questions, and ask any of your questions there, and then we will answer it live here on the podcast. Also, just a peek behind the curtain real quick. I have been sick for the past few weeks, and it's not gonna be anything to you because the last week's episode sounded totally normal. I actually recorded that maybe 2 weeks ago or so. I've been sick this entire time. I am recording this on 2/9 or February 9th, and this is supposed to come out on Wednesday. Anyway, February 14th.

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:29]:
Oh, it's Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day. So, normally, we run a little bit of backlog, but I wasn't able to do that because I was sick, and it was pretty bad. I am still sick, and I'm still recovering from it. And I have a little bit of a cough. So through the magic of editing, we are gonna do our best to try to get all of that out, and hopefully, you don't hear any of it. But just give us a little bit of leeway this week because I'm going to have to stop a lot. It's not gonna affect your listening experience or your watching experience very often, but I just wanted to let you guys know.

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:03]:
So just to let you guys know what's on the docket today, I'm gonna go over the state that got rid of the degree requirements, I'm gonna read the executive order that the governor signed into law. I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, obviously. And then the the 2nd segment of this episode is going to be me clarifying a little bit about last week's episode. Like I said, we normally do these a few weeks out or at least a couple of weeks out because things get in the way. Things like me being sick or just work getting in the way of actually creating the content. But this is the 1st time in a long time where I am creating a podcast the week before. So I was actually able to get some feedback and incorporate that into this episode.

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:49]:
The 2nd segment is going to be me talking and clarifying a little bit of what we talked about last week in last week's episode. And if you haven't listened to that episode, I think that that was one of the best episodes that I've ever done. I definitely suggest you pause this right now, and then you go listen to that episode first. So pause this right now if you haven't listened to this, and then go listen to that one because that's where we're gonna be talking about at the end of the episode, and I definitely think it's gonna be worth you sticking around to the end for that. Here we go. Let's start off with the next state that got rid of or reduced degree requirements for their jobs. And that is going to be the state of Massachusetts or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I don't know.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:31]:
I'm reading the executive order right here. This is executive order number 627 signed by her excellency. That's really nice. You could call me, I don't know, your. Is that a female thing? I don't know. We'll work on it. I will workshop it. Let me know.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:49]:
YouTube comments, Spotify. Let me know what you wanna refer to me as. Mora T. Healy. This was signed in January 25th 2024. And I'm not going to read the entire thing here, but I am going to read a little bit of it, and I highlighted portions of it. I actually had to go to the primary source, I think that's what it's called, and the actual executive order. Because I was reading all of these other news articles that covered it, and they were saying, like, 90% of state jobs in Massachusetts are getting rid of the degree requirements.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:31]:
I have no idea how they got that number. Maybe the governor Healy said that. Maybe she said that. I'm not sure. Maybe it was in a press conference. I didn't watch any of that. I am just reading the executive order. And And I actually kinda like the fact that we're just reading the executive order together because we're inferring it from the primary source.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:51]:
I'm gonna get a few of this. Bear with me. Executive order number 627, instituting skills based hiring practices. Whereas Massachusetts in the midst of a transition to a skills based economy in which demand for skilled employee talent is at an all time high, and employers are seeking to broaden and strengthen their talent pipelines by prioritizing individual skills over traditional credentials like degrees. Whereas, to fill jobs and recruit the skilled workforce they need, employers must open opportunities to nontraditional candidates, find and develop untapped talent, acknowledge the importance of practical work experience and eliminate unnecessary degree requirements that discourage qualified applicants. Okay. So there's a lot to unpack there. I'm gonna go over that 2nd paragraph.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:48]:
1, I hate that they say, like, nontraditional candidates. As you and I both know here, the vast majority, 2 thirds of the workforce in the United States doesn't have a degree. And so, really, what is the traditional path? If there is going to be a traditional path, it would actually be not getting a degree. That would actually be the traditional path. I don't understand how college once again, marketing. This is just tradition. This is what you do, but, like, only a third of the population does it. So how is that tradition? I I don't understand.

Ryan Maruyama [00:06:19]:
Eliminate unnecessary degree requirements that discourage qualified applicants. I I don't even have it highlighted here, but I was reading some TikTok comments about some of the recent clips from this podcast that Hannah and I have posted. And one of them was about, like, marketing and the fact that you don't need a degree to be in marketing. Like, it's just literally not required. There's no job there. It's, like, legally required for you to have a marketing degree to do this job. Like, it literally doesn't exist. What's interesting about that how many people push back and say, no.

Ryan Maruyama [00:06:54]:
It is required. Because practically and in practice, all the job requirements say that you need a degree. You need a marketing degree, or at least you need some sort of college degree. I'm using marketing just because that's on the top of my head because I was reading the TikTok comments right before this. But this is really just any job and any industry. Eliminate unnecessary degree requirements that discourage qualified applicants. I want to hone in on that last part. Discourage qualified applicants.

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:25]:
Because all in the comments of that video and in the comments of this video too, once we clip this up, people are gonna say, yeah. You need a degree because it says degree required, degree required, degree required. They are explicitly saying it here that the degree requirements discourage people that are qualified to do the job because they have that mentality of everybody in our comments that are saying, all the job requirements say that they need it, so I must need it. And if you're listening to this podcast, you know that that's BS. Hey there. I hope that you're loving today's conversation. At degree free, we wanna help as many people as we can thrive and succeed without needing a college degree. Having these guests on that share their experiences so that you can learn from their stories and their mistakes is one of the ways that we do that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:18]:
Genuinely, I'm just grateful that these guests take the time to come on and share their wisdom. And if you're getting value out of this conversation or you've listened to 2, 3, or 4 plus episodes, I have one quick ask. Please take a moment right now to review this podcast on whatever platform you're tuning in on. With your review, you're not just supporting us, but you're amplifying the voices of every guest we bring on and, ultimately, helping more people thrive degree free. Thank you for doing that right now and for being such an important part of degree free. You know that companies don't hire people that look like their job descriptions. I'm hoping and I think that it is heading more and more in that direction where they are starting to drop all of this unnecessary requirements because they are having this problem of discouraging people that can actually do the job. People are seeing like, hey.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:09]:
Wait a minute. This one line is keeping off so much talent from this job, and do I really need it? Obviously, you don't because massive companies are doing that. And then also all the state jobs are doing this as well. Whereas And I don't know why they use whereas. I don't know if anybody's a lawyer or anything like that. If anybody drafts this type of thing, if you could just let me know. That'd be cool. YouTube comments, Spotify.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:34]:
Why every single paragraph starts with whereas? And I'm sure I could Google it, but I'm not gonna do that. Whereas research has shown that skills are more predictive of successful job performance than educational credentials and that employers who hire based on skills are able to create better equipped, longer tenured, and more resilient workforces. We have been saying this for years. So literally years, Hannah and I have been saying it privately for, like, 8 years now, and we have been saying it publicly for, like, two and a half years now. This is exactly what the entire governments are starting to realize. Employers who hire based on skills are able to create better equipped, longer tenured, and more resilient workforces. What I wanted to hone in on for you is that second one, longer tenure. This doesn't really matter for you, except when we are trying to go into the job search process and in the career change process, whenever we're trying to get a promotion, whenever trying to negotiate, whenever we're trying to sell ourselves for any reason, we really want to understand who is on the other side of the table.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:53]:
And this could be for your 1st job. Like, I remember for me, when I was my 1st job and you go back to last week's episode, and I I talked all about it. I was a dishwasher. And in that interview for a dishwasher, I thought, okay. Well, I can't talk about any experience that I have being a dishwasher, I can't do that. But I knew from talking to people that were in the restaurant industry, they're like dishwashers, what they really care about is you just, like, showing up to work. It's like the job itself isn't very difficult or at least it doesn't require a lot of brain cycles. It really just requires you to do the work.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:35]:
That's what I leaned on. And I was just like, I know that I'm 16 years old, but I will come to work. You can train me to do anything. And they're like, yeah. Sure. You're hired. The longer tenured is so important for you to understand. It's so important for your child to understand because it is incredibly expensive to train and hire new employers.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:56]:
By some estimates, you aren't even productive as an employee until 6 months after you've been hired. So think about that. You get hired today. It's not till 6 months later that you actually start contributing in a positive way towards that company. They've been taking a loss on you and in your productivity. They've been paying you without you matching your productivity and pay for 6 months before they're able to recoup any of that. And I forget what survey that was or what study that was. I actually had to put together a pitch deck a while back.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:31]:
Oh, I remember that I put that in there. If I can find it, I'll link it in the show notes. Degreefree.c04/podcast, but I'm not sure that I will be able to find it. But then also thinking about how long does it take them to fill job roles. Some job roles take a month. Some job roles take 2 months, some job roles take 3 months. I think the average was, like, 6 weeks or something like that. Once again, this is all from memory.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:56]:
So think about 6 weeks to hire somebody and then 6 months for them to be productive. That's the better part of a year before they are seeing a positive ROI on all the effort that it takes for you. So they want to know that you are going to get trained and that you are going to stay for a long time. This is extremely useful for 2 sets of people. This is extremely useful for the career changers and the job seekers that are in bartending or some retail, some marketing, and they're trying to get into some completely unrelated thing. Like, maybe you're trying to go to marketing, and then you're going to retail or something like that, maybe you're going to retail and trying to go to marketing. This is super important for you to understand because there's gonna be a lot of training that you're gonna have to go through. They know that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:13:46]:
And when they hire you, they don't want you to just up and leave. And the 2nd set of people that this is going to be helpful to is going to be young people, high schoolers and older, a little bit older, that are going after their 1st jobs, who are not trained in whatever it is that they do. For both of these people, if you can convince the person that you're interviewing with that you are going to stay for a long time, they are much more likely to hire you because they're like, well, that's just half the battle. That's literally half the battle is just keeping and retaining top talent. Keeping and retaining talent, I'll say, is half the battle. And then obviously, they would hope that your top talent as well. This is awesome. They are moving to skills based.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:35]:
I'm gonna move down a little bit in the document here. So this is great. This is skills based hiring at Massachusetts is starting. I'm gonna move a little bit further down the document here and read a few more paragraphs. This is from section 1, all executive department offices and agencies are directed to utilize skills based employment practices in their efforts to attract, recruit, hire, retain, and develop the careers of talented employees. In making hiring decisions, hiring managers must consider the full set of competencies that candidates bring to the job beyond traditional education. Hiring managers are directed to align job requirements and position prerequisites with the skills needed to accomplish a position's job duties. 2nd paragraph real quick.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:27]:
I'm almost done. Job classifications issued or updated after the date of this executive order, which is January 25, 2024, shall not specify a minimum level of education as an entrance requirement unless the human resources division determines that a particular level of education is necessary to perform the job after completing a job analysis. Job postings issued or updated after the date of this executive order may include preferred education requirements in excess of minimum entrance requirements only with approval of the agency's cabinet secretary and the human resources division. That was a long 2 paragraphs there. Why did I read those ones? I read those ones because as you can see, they still put in, like, a qualifier. They still put in, like, hey. We don't have to listen to this if we don't want to, and it's very vague of which jobs they're going to keep the requirements for. According to all of the news outlets that covered this, like Fox Business and some other business outlets.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:42]:
They were saying 90% of jobs. But like I said, I don't know where they got that number because that's that number is nowhere in this executive order. If you saw that, can you just let me know, or you can tag me in, like, a photo or a press conference they did or something like that? And I'll read it again, requirements in excess of minimum entrance requirements only with approval of the agency's cabinet secretary and the human resources division. The reason why this is important is this is highlighting the importance of training and actual job analysis and job duties and responsibilities analysis from the HR departments of other companies, but then obviously of the state of Massachusetts as well. If those people are still biased and they're like, yeah. This still requires a degree, then nothing really changes because this is in here. Going forward, I think that corporate training in this setting is going to really, really take off. I've talked to human resource managers and human resource vice president, executive vice president, senior vice president, and all of those titles.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:49]:
Some of these companies are creating task forces within their companies to actually analyze these job roles and come up with whether or not the degree is required or not. I've seen the output of some of these things, and I disagree with a few of them. But, you know, what do I know? I'm just a dude with a mic. I think that there is a place where why can't you just get rid of all of the degree requirements if none of them are legally required? What does the degree tell you? Because I know personally, I have an economics degree. Like, economics degree from this school, from that school, from this program, from that program, they're not necessarily all created equal. And then even if they are created equal, the way you do in each one of them and then the amount of materially retain from each one of them is all subjective. It's all dependent on who you are. So my thing is just unless it's legally required for something like CPA hours or something like that, or right now in most states, you have to have a law degree to sit for the bar and then the pass the bar.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:59]:
So unless it's legally required, why would you require it at all? And why wouldn't you go 100% to skills based hiring? Like I said, if it's legally required, that's something that's different, but why wouldn't you just do the entire thing that's skilled based hiring? I don't know. This is really just a question for you to think about. Section 3, the human resources division shall develop and implement a training course on skills based hiring, which executive department hiring managers shall be required to attend at appropriate intervals. Like I said, this is going to be very important going forward because it's not like they're overturning all of their staff, and it's not like they're overturning all of their apartments and all of their hiring managers. You're gonna have to reeducate the people that are hiring or educate the people that are hiring to be like, hey. All of the bias that you have towards this or not towards this, good or bad, you're gonna have to at least be aware of it. And I've talked about this before on this podcast, but the CEO of ZipRecruiter, Ian Siegel, he wrote a book. It's like get hired now or something like that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:01]:
The 1st chapter of that book, he starts at bias. That's crazy. Like, why didn't you start at resumes, or why didn't you start at understanding your goals, and what you wanna do and things like that. But he started at bias because bias is such an integral part of the hiring process. You can't help it. Everybody's biased. And this goes to, I try to fight bias this whole podcast and under my entire business, degree free, is all about trying to fight bias in the hiring system and in the work system to try to get people to understand the degree free people are just as good as college graduates. It doesn't matter.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:39]:
So, obviously, I'm biased on that side. And in the same vein, go back and listen to the episode that I was talking about with Linda Lee. One, that's a really good episode if you're looking for a job or your kid is looking for a job to go back and listen to. It gives you a look at what the recruiter sees from her point of view. But, also, I asked her about, you know, degree free people and people that have gaps on their resumes. And, normally, those people are people that get shunned out, even her, she's like, those are my people. And that right there is also bias. We have to be aware of that as hiring managers.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:17]:
Doesn't matter if the HR department gets rid of the degree requirements if the hiring managers are still biased. The education process and the reeducation process is really integral whenever you are trying to bring these programs into your companies and into your state. That's why I wanted to leave it for the Massachusetts choose its executive order number 627, instituting skills based hiring practices. It's just February where this happened late January. In our predictions episode. I'm pretty sure Hannah said that she expects, like, 20 different states this year to do the exact same thing. So we're not really on track because I think 20 is more like 2 a month, but this is 1. And it is at least directionally correct.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:01]:
I mean, where do we need to get out of the 1st month of the year and another state fell? Once again, I'll say it again. If you are listening to this, you are early. Moving on to the second thing that I wanted to talk about this week, which is a follow on to last week's episode. So once again, if you haven't listened to episode 135 yet, last week's episode, pause this right now, and go back and listen to that episode, and then come back when you're done. 1st, thank you to all of the feedback that I've received, it is the most feedback that I've ever gotten on an episode. So thanks for that. A couple of people that I wanted to shout out, Elvan, you didn't say your name in the email, so I'm not sure what else. So I'm just gonna say your name, and I think that's innocuous enough.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:41]:
I'm not doxing you or anything like that. And then, Lisa, you know who you are. Thank you so much for the comments, and thank you so much for letting me know your different ideas. What I wanted to clarify from that episode that the episode wasn't just about money. I spent the entire episode telling you about my goal to retire early and using the examples of talking about rowing really hard in a rowboat instead of being on a jet ski or on a steamboat, any type of other boat. And he said, any type of thing that propels you without you actually doing anything. I talked about that, but it wasn't really about money. It's really about anything.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:28]:
And just to clarify the money stuff, it is important, and it's the foundation of what we talk about here, but it wasn't necessarily about retiring early or becoming financially independent. That was just the examples that I was using. The episode was really about sometimes no matter how hard you work, your hard work doesn't and won't help you reach your goals. And knowing that, now you have to be objective about what your goals are, and, ultimately, are the actions you're doing now the most effective things you can be doing to reach that goal? There are a few things here, and I'm just gonna make it really simple. And if we wanted to do a deep dive on all of this stuff, once again, please let me know. Ask dotdegreefree.c04/ question. You can ask me your question. You can email us, contact at degreefree.c0.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:15]:
Go to the website, degreefree.c0, and then just scroll down to the footer, and the contact, form is there as well. But to make this really simple and because we don't have that much time left, the 3 things when you're normally trying to get to any goal that you're gonna have to do is define the goal, figure out the actions, and reach that goal. That's pretty much it. Super simple. What I was talking about was refining your goal. So not just defining it, but making sure that your goal is hyper specific to what you wanna do. Because as I touched on last week, the specificity of your goal is what is going to drive all of your actions. So refine your goal, then refine your actions, and then you reach your goal.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:02]:
So that's what I wanted to talk about. To take it away from money and retiring early because that's not necessarily what the episode was about. So I have a few different examples that I wanna talk about. The first one that I wanna talk about that's not money. Let's take language learning. Specifically, I'm gonna talk about Japanese because I know a little bit about it. And at one point in my life, I was conversational in it. It's true what they say.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:29]:
If you don't use it, you lose it. But, anyway, I'm going to talk about learning Japanese. Let's say you have the goal of learning Japanese. Perfect. What are the actions that you take to learn that? Right. So have a goal, define your actions, reach your goal. Well, let's say that you go into the university system or it doesn't have to be university system. I'm just using, like, a classroom setting, and this could even be going into a school.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:00]:
Let's just say that you're going into, like, I'm not saying you're going to college, but let's say you're going to, like, a college class to learn Japanese, like Japanese 101, or you take it from a private person that does Japanese 101 style learning. What are you gonna learn in Japanese 101? The thing about Japanese is that there are a bunch of things that you have to learn to learn Japanese. And I'm using that air quotes for those that aren't on YouTube. You have to learn how to speak it, and then you have to learn how to write it and read it. So speaking is a entirely different thing because it's not like English or Spanish where they use a similar set of the alphabet. It's a syllabary. If you're trying to read and write, you also have to learn how to read and write. You have to learn hiragana, katakana, kanji.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:46]:
There's 3 different alphabets, we'll call it, in Japanese, and you're gonna have to learn all of that to actually learn Japanese and then reach your goal. To reach your goal, if you did that, you took Japanese one zero one, Japanese one zero two, Japanese two zero one, Japanese two zero two. And once again, I'm not saying that you're doing this in college. I'm just saying, maybe you go to a private tutor, and they do all of this for you, and you do all of it with them. Even if you were studying, like, 247, it would still take you months months, if not years, to learn all of that. I I know I did it. Instead of doing that, and maybe you wanna do that, and maybe you want to learn it fully, completely. Okay.

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:19]:
Perfect. If you have a different goal, like, say, you're taking a trip to Japan in 3 months, and you want to be highly conversational at least when you are going to the market so that you can understand. You can ask them how much does this cost. And when they tell you how much it costs, you can understand what they're saying. So that's a much better goal. We've refined our goal. All you care about is being conversational for your trip to Japan. If you wanted to refine it even more, you can say, I am taking a photography nature photography trip to Japan.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:00]:
Okay. Perfect. So, really, you don't even need to be highly conversational in Japanese. You need to be highly conversational in nature and in photography, and then general things like eating at restaurants and shopping at the convenience store and and things like that. You've refined your goals now. And so because you've refined your goals, you can refine your actions. All of those 4 things, you know, nature, photography, shopping, getting around, things like that, you don't really need to know how to read and write for that. You can just learn how to speak the language.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:35]:
And then when you get to somewhere, then this is literally me. When I went to Tokyo. My hiragana and katakana at the time was really good. My kanji was pretty bad. I went to one of these smaller stations, subway stations, and I'm pretty sure it was in Tokyo. It might have been Osaka. This is the first time I looked up at the board, and they were just like it was all in kanji. And I was just like, I have no idea what's going on, and I have no idea where I'm going.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:59]:
I looked at it. I was like, I can stare at this all day. This this might as well be hieroglyphs to me. I stop, and I just ask somebody because I knew enough Japanese to get around. And so that's really what you need. So now that you know that, you really just have to learn phrases and vocabulary to learn Japanese to reach those 4 goals or in 3 goals, whatever it is that you have. So that's just one example of how last week's episode wasn't just about money wasn't just about retiring early, wasn't just about careers. You can use this in any portion of your life.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:35]:
So that's language learning. That's Japanese. Hopefully, you can take a little bit away from that. And if you if you can't, I have a couple more stories and a couple of more things that I wanted to talk about. I have followed Tim Ferriss for years. For those that don't know, Tim Ferriss, he's the author of the 4 hour work week, the 4 hour body, the 4 hour chef, tools of titans, whatever, whatever, whatever. And he is the host of the Tim Ferriss show, and it's one of the podcasts that I listen to. The reason why I do this podcast is because I listen to podcast to get out of where I was in life.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:09]:
And his podcast, while it wasn't the 1st podcast that I ever listened to, it was one of the first 10 that I listened to, and it is by far the longest podcast that I'm still listening to to this day. I don't listen to every episode, not even close. I used to, you know, maybe 8 years ago and 10 years ago, maybe. I used to listen to the podcast pretty much every single episode, but now I just pick and choose, and I don't really listen to them too often. Recently, I watched the Tim Ferriss Experiment. It's a TV show he did, like, 15 years ago, I think it was, or 10 years ago, where he is kind of like Morgan Spurlock, the 30 days, the guy that did that supersize me if for everybody that remembers that. And then I think he went to CNN. He did something for 30 days.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:57]:
So just like how he did the Super Size Me for 30 days. It's pretty much the exact same thing, except Tim Ferris was trying to learn something in 4 days. The whole point was trying to Pareto's law, which is find the 20% of activities to learn that get the 80% of the outcome. Specifically, I wanted to talk about the drumming episode that I watch, and I'll put the links to it in the show notes here. Degreefree.c0forward/podcast up for to the YouTube that so you can watch the episode. But even if you don't watch the episode, it doesn't matter. I'll explain to what happens here. So he goes to try to learn the drums.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:34]:
And at the end of the week, he has to play a song. I forget the band, the foreigners or something like that. It's a famous song. I knew the song when he was playing it, but I forget what it was. And he has to go and play with this band on stage. At the beginning of the episode, he says, I have to learn how to play the drums to play with this band in 4 days. And then he goes, and he meets Stewart Copeland. I think he's the founding member of the police, if I remember that correctly.

Ryan Maruyama [00:32:02]:
And he gives him a few pointers. He gives him a few lessons. A few minutes into the episode, he starts asking Stuart if you should learn how to read music. And Stewart's like, do you know how to read music? And he's like, no. I don't know how to read music. And he's just like, well, usually look at Stuart's face, and he's like, well, that's a pretty huge task because they're just dots on a piece of paper. Tim was like, okay. Maybe 5 minutes later into the show, he is, like, trying to learn music a little bit and trying to learn to how to play drums visually with sheet music.

Ryan Maruyama [00:32:32]:
The episode goes on. What we come to find out, what we learn is that he had the goal of learning how to play the drums in a week. What we learn later is that, really, he refined his goal, and the goal is actually to learn to play the drums for 1 song. He's going to be on stage with these guys and playing the drums. So, really, he just has to learn that 1 song. When he refined his goal, he was able to refine his actions. He refined his goal of playing the drums for 1 song, then all he did, he stopped focusing on learning anything else except for learning how to play the drums for that 1 song. Learning the beat, and the drums for that 1 song.

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:18]:
He didn't even need to learn how to play the drums. Because he refined his goal, he refined his actions. Spoiler alert. He ended up doing it, and it actually worked out because he stopped focusing on the things that didn't matter. Even though he was working hard at figuring out, oh, I need to learn sheet music, and you were just, like, studying how to read music. And he's like, oh my god. Okay. How do I read music? What does this mean? What does this mean? And he was working really hard at it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:44]:
It didn't ultimately matter because all he had to do was learn the song, and you can just learn that in your head. You can learn that by feel, by your ear. And the same thing with the Japanese. Right? Like, it doesn't matter if you are studying hiragana, katakana, and kanji, which is the alphabet, the 3 alphabets that we talked about before, if you're not gonna really use it, if it doesn't matter, if you just need to go to Japan for your nature photography trip, Okay. Well, then you just need to learn how to do conversational Japanese about nature, about photography, and about general things about going on your trip. So that's really what last week's episode was about, which is about it doesn't matter how hard you work if you're working on the wrong things. And how do you know you're working on the wrong things? That's the hard part. Refining your goals, and then a lot of it is testing your actions.

Ryan Maruyama [00:34:31]:
The last thing that I wanted to talk about, I did wanted to bring it back to, like, careers and kind of sort of money. I have a friend, and I've talked about him a lot here. He doesn't listen to this podcast, so it's fine. I'm never gonna say his name just in case he comes on this podcast. Him and I have been friends for a very long time. We went to high school together, and he always had the goal of getting out of high school, going to a name brand college, and then becoming an engineer. Those were always his goals. Fast forward 15 years.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:03]:
That's exactly what he did. I mean, He did it in like 10. And now he works at the largest company in what he does, the type of engineering that he does, he graduated, he moved away from Hawaii. He went to a name brand school. He paid a lot of money. He got into a lot of debt, and then he is now an engineer at one of the top places in his field. Now that he's at the top of his field, he was, like, looking around. He's like, is this really what I wanted? Maybe it is.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:34]:
Maybe it isn't. The reason why he wanted all of those things was that he wanted to make a lot of money while he makes good money now. I think he makes total compensation. I think he makes about $140,000 where his career goes, we've talked about this a lot, just by the nature of what I do. And, you know, he's one of my best friends. We've talked about this a lot of, say, hey. You know, like, you wanna make more money. Let's talk about it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:56]:
And he's like, well, the really the only way to make more money for him is to move into a people manager position. As far as in the actual engineering side, there really isn't much upward mobility, and the upward mobility would be also in a management capacity and not necessarily on the engineering side. So now he's thinking about, oh, I want to make a lot of money. I just thought that engineering was the way to get there. When you dig even deeper, talking about refining goals, is really he wants to have a lot of not money, but just a lot of net worth. Because 15 years later, that's how long we've been out of high school or so. He his net worth, even though he makes $150,000 total compensation, his net worth is still negative. Okay.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:41]:
He's making a lot of money, but what did it cost them? In the same vein, I had the goal that I had, which is retire at 40 at age 16, well, by prestige of roles, he's almost always or he has reached much higher prestigious role than me. But why is my net worth much higher than his? Why do I make more money than him? And it's because not that he didn't work hard. He obviously worked extremely hard. It's just we were in different vehicles. I also worked hard, but I worked hard on the right things. And this was an exercise that I actually did. I didn't do it with him, but I did it for my own sake. And I still did this when I was a firefighter, but I did have a business as well.

Ryan Maruyama [00:37:27]:
I did the math one day very conservatively. I did like, okay. Well, what if my earnings stay the same over my life? And I didn't go into debt to go to college. I had family help for the 1st couple of years. And then I I worked full time to the throughout the entire thing, but then I was able to pay it all at at the same time the tuition was due for the last couple of years. I did the math. Even if my income didn't go up to what it is now, he would have never caught me as far as net worth is concerned has everything to do with being in the right vehicle and working hard on the right things. A lot of it, to be honest, is the student debt that he took out.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:05]:
If you listen to the story, he's graduated high school, go to a name brand school, and, god, he went to a name brand school. And, you know, I'm sure that degree makes him feel good. I mean, it also cost him a lot of freaking money. 100 something $1,000, 150, $160,000, whatever it was. I think it was more than that with living expenses. Yeah. So that's what I wanted to talk about this week. That subject and this subject is something that's near and dear to my heart, and it's something that I know that you can use right now because I still use this stuff right now.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:34]:
And I use this for everything, cooking dinner or learning this, or whatever whatever it is, looking at it and be like, am I working on the right things? Is my goal refined enough? And then knowing that if I have the right goal, then that'll lead me to the right actions, and then the right actions will lead me to a quick result. Let me know what you guys think. Comment, review, send me an email. Ask dotdegreefree.c04/ question. Please put your questions there, and that's pretty much it. I am hoping we are gonna start having guests again. Just to let you know what's coming up in the upcoming weeks. Hannah's gonna be coming back very, very shortly.

Ryan Maruyama [00:39:10]:
And then I have a bunch of guests that are lined up. I've been so busy that I haven't been able to schedule them. And so guests are coming up, and it's going to be amazing. So definitely subscribe and follow along for that. Until next week, guys.