In my Money Makers interview series, I interview notable professionals and entrepreneurs. Generally, my interviewees have created a successful business or are leaders in their field. In this article I interviewed Clint, the creator of the Grow with Clint Twitter account and The Pursuit of Learning podcast. After doing this interview, I found that I had a lot in common with him, and I’m positive we can all learn from his experiences. Without further ado, let’s get into the interview!
For my readers who may not be familiar with you, would you please introduce yourself? Who are you? What do you do?
Thanks for giving me this opportunity, it’s appreciated.
I am a husband and father to two young boys who are 13 and 10 as of this writing.
My wife and I started dating in 1995 when I had just turned 17 and she was about to, which was the start of Grade 12 for us. We were married in 2004 and had our first son in 2008 and second in 2011.
Together, we have built a reasonably sized real estate portfolio that provides us with passive net worth growth on a yearly basis and we have a reasonable equity portfolio is well.
By day, I am a chief financial officer for a real estate development company and in the evenings I do a few things, which include: the Pursuit of Learning Podcast (Apple Podcasts: The Pursuit of Learning), a Fantasy series I am writing with my sister and I write about personal, professional and financial growth on my website (clint-robert-murphy.com) and Twitter (@grow_with_Clint).
Is there anything you want people to know about what you do for a living? For example, what sets you apart from others in that industry?
What sets me apart in my career as an accountant is that I don’t like to be put into boxes.
For many, I am clearly not an accountant and part of that is because I have always focused on growing:
- Mentally
- Spiritually
- Physically
- Emotionally
Learning is something that is very important to me and has driven me in most of my life, which results in being a leader that behaves differently with my team than your average leader.
It has allowed me to hire, train and retain some amazing colleagues that make going to my day job a wonderful experience. Day in. Day out.
It also means that I don’t constrain myself to my day job. Whether it’s reading 40+ books per year, writing my own fantasy novels or launching a podcast about personal, professional and financial growth, I am never still.
I also write about financial independence and early retirement, as my wife and I have a goal to retire or more aptly pivot before we are 50.
How did you get your start? Knowing what you know now, would you have done anything differently?
I got my start the prototypical way for people in my profession: accounting degree to accounting designation to articling at a Big 4 firm to moving to industry to climbing the ladder.
If I had to do it differently, I would have done a number of things.
- Capped my spending sooner
- Started my side hustles sooner
- Understood investing earlier than I did
- Begin investing in real estate much earlier
Effectively, what you learn over time is how you could have had compounding working for you through life. What people write about compounding is accurate. It can be the single most important factor in your life and it is not just about finances.
Likely, I also would have gone into business for myself. It is much more satisfying building your wealth than it is building the wealth of other people.
Is there anyone who has really inspired you – authors, coworkers, or managers?
Most people I have met in my life have inspired me in some capacity.
If I had to list the top three books that I would recommend to any young person, it would be:
- Resilience by Eric Greitens
- Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy by Dr. Burns
- Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy was life changing for me. It taught me how to control my mind versus letting my mind control me. That was a game changer. Now, I can create my destiny. My future.
Seven Habits teaches you some fundamental key things in life, including how to start with the end in mind and work backwards in small chunks to achieve big things easily.
Resilience is a book heavy on Stoic concepts and is beautifully written. It is a book I wish I had found much earlier in life as I had to stumble my way into living how it recommends we live.
Some additional major inspirations are Ray Dalio and his Principles, which I read as a PDF 10+ years ago. It helped me form my foundational belief for how we can achieve anything in life:
- Know what you want
- Understand what it takes
- Do the work. Day in. Day out
Lastly, the Tim Ferriss Podcast has been big for me. I have listened to most episodes and experienced a lot of growth from it. It was also foundational in determining how I wanted to launch my podcast, The Pursuit of Learning.
What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced so far, both in your field and in personal finance?
The biggest challenges I have faced are related to mental health.
In 2004 things started to come off the rails for me.
I quit a reasonably lucrative job and my wife and I moved to Bermuda as a savings grace.
When we did, we had to sell our house in Vancouver and by the time we came back the price was 2x…I thought we would never recover.
Fortunately, while we were in Bermuda, I was diagnosed with ADHD and Depression. The ADHD I have never medicated, because I believe it gives me certain super powers creatively and energetically and I don’t want to dampen those.
The depression, I had to get under control, which led to medications and therapy. Fortunately, we were able to manage it (not eliminate it) and it hasn’t had materially negative impacts on my life since.
When I was ~ 34, we mutually agreed that I would leave my Company. With no job prospects and an upcoming mortgage closing, I was petrified.
Fortunately, that’s when I read Feeling Good, mentioned above, and was able to improve my thought processes. Effectively, I minimized my Monkey Mind and began to control my thoughts. At this stage, I dove deep into:
- Stoicism
- Buddhism
- Meditation
- Mindfulness
- HRV training
- Shadow work
- Cognitive behavior therapy
The key was to ensure that I was in charge of my mind. Nothing has had a greater personally, professionally or financially.
With much clearer decision making ability, I was able to land my dream job and work my way up to CFO and our financial investments became much better.
What is your favorite thing about running your podcast?
As you can tell from above, I LOVE to learn. It’s my greatest strength and my number one passion.
Throughout life, I have focused on continuous learning and development and younger colleagues and past colleagues have always asked me to share that knowledge.
When covid hit and the lockdowns went into effect, I started to ask myself a few questions:
- How can I improve my learning?
- How can I share that learning with others?
From those questions, the Pursuit of Learning Podcast was born.
Effectively, I get to have a book club with the author of the book and the listener gets to follow along. That, to me, is pure joy and I leave every recording feeling absolutely electrified.
At the end of the day, what is the main thing you hope you achieve?
At 49, I plan to pivot my life to focusing on my Ikigai, which is a Japanese concept that can describe having a sense of purpose in life. It is often described as the intersection between:
- What you love
- What you are good at
- What the world needs
- What you can be paid for
For me, this intersection is learning and growth. It is the learning I have accumulated throughout my life and will continue to accumulate. I will share it through the Pursuit of Learning Podcast and, eventually: non-fiction books, courses and a learning community that focus on personal, professional and financial growth.
What’s the best piece of advice you received growing up? How did it shape you into the person you are today?
I would not necessarily say it was advice that shaped me.
What shaped me was a few things:
- Growing up lower middle class
- Being a younger brother
- Sports and reading
Growing up, we didn’t have much and couldn’t afford nice things, which created an inner drive to prove that I was just as good as people who grew up rich. Who grew up with nice things.
I also had an older brother who was a giant. My parents held him back in Grade 1, which meant for my entire school career I had a brother who was 13 months older than me and what felt like double my size as a classmate. In order to stand out, I had to push myself mentally and physically all the time to grow. To not get lost in his shadow.
Finally, to deal with my ADHD, my mom and dad did two things that didn’t involve medicating me. They had me play sports an insane amount. Multiple hours every single day to burn out my energy. Once it was burned out, they put books in my hand to get me absorbed into Fantasy worlds. While we didn’t have much money, my parents always ensured they could pay for the sports and books.
This paid off in making me a very competitive human being with a love of reading and learning who’s now written his first fantasy novel with my sister.
Everyone views success differently, what personal metric do you use to define your own success?
I don’t have a view of success actually.
At this stage in life, I’ve exceeded any expectations I ever could have had for myself growing up the way I grew up so success is not relevant.
What is relevant is the metrics that guide my desires and goals.
I have specific asset, net worth and passive cashflow goals I want to achieve, and I have specific physical goals I want to achieve.
The physical goals are based on weight, strength and long-distance running speeds.
The financial goals are based on allowing me to retire and live the same life I do today without a requirement to work, though I intend to work as hard or harder than I do today.
People tend to struggle with finding a good work-life balance, especially these days. How do you manage? In other words, what’s an average weekday like for you?
My work-life balance is strong right now, because I’ve been able to build a team over time that supports it.
There were periods of time where I would not see my sons for one month while they were awake. I would leave the house before they got up and be back when they were sleeping seven days per week.
These periods weren’t often, but they were sufficient that they damaged my relationship with my oldest son for a period of time. Sufficient that I said this cannot happen again and worked to change my lifestyle.
While it was not beneficial to my mental, physical or familial health, it ultimately paid off and will allow us to be in the right spot for the next 10+ years.
Unfortunately, with covid, I replaced normal life with a number of activities to fill up time during the isolation period and now that we are returning to normal, I find myself burnt out again.
To address this, I have started to drop certain activities and focus in on what truly matters:
- Health
- Family
- Career
- Podcast
If it outside those four areas, it has to be a NO for me now.
When you want something, you need to prioritize it to the exclusion of everything else.
What’s something you’re interested in – outside of work?
- Crypto
- Stoicism
- Buddhism
- Meditation
- Mens’ Work
- Shadow work
- Mental health
- Personal Growth
- Personal Finance
- Professional Growth
These are the key areas that get me jacked in life & the list will always grow with new things being added.
Effectively, I like to learn about anything that contributes to personal, professional and financial growth for me or others.
If you had to give advice to someone who has just joined the job market, what would it be?
Back to what we talked about above:
- Know what you want
- Understand what it takes
- Do the work. Day in. Day out
The other list of three that is important early in life to ensure you achieve your financial goals is:
- Earn more
- Spend less
- Invest the rest
People who are new in their career often tell me they want these five things:
- More pay
- Better title
- More varied work
- More challenging work
- An improved work-life balance
Unfortunately, it’s very hard to have all of those things. Actually, it’s almost impossible.
When you’re young, I would recommend burying yourself to get ahead in your career and to increase your earnings from your job as much as possible.
What most don’t realize is that our day job for the vast majority of people is going to be what contributes the most to our wealth over time.
Next, I would then consider how can I add to this income outside of my day job through side hustling if there is anything on the side you love that you can get paid for.
With spending, I would get to a level that I really enjoyed lifestyle wise and I would freeze at that level. Future salary increases or bonuses would go direct to investments.
Finally, unless I had an informational advantage, I would invest as early as I could as much as I could in simple passive ETF instruments that matched the overall broad market.
Once I developed an informational advantage, I would be willing to put some sizable investments into the area that I was convicted about and, if able, I would use leverage smartly to increase my returns.
For me, this has been real estate investing and you can read that story on Twitter. We have been fortunate to have made some smart investments in the right areas at the right times throughout our life that are putting us in a position to be able to retire early.
If any of your readers have any questions on anything I have written above, my DMs are always open.
I have made a lot of mistakes along the way and I would love to share with them how they can get to where I did without making those same errors, some of which were very costly!
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed learning about Clint and his views on life, personal finance, and self-improvement as much as I did! If you like what he had to say and want to see more, be sure to check him out on Twitter, @grow_with_Clint . Also, if you’re interested in learning more about his podcast, check out the details on his website. As always, if you have any thoughts you’d like to contribute, add a comment – and definitely feel free to reach out to him directly on Twitter!
