272 | Pushing Through the Learning Curve

The early stages of the money journey often feel the most difficult because you’re learning a completely new way of doing things.

Many lawyers give up at that point, and it’s a mistake.

In this episode, let’s talk about the natural progression of learning and why it’s important to push through the learning curve to achieve your goals.

• • the definition of “learning curve”
  • the 4 stages of learning
  • common examples of how lawyers hit the learning curve in their personal finances
  • an example of a learning curve in my personal life

n/a

You’re listening to Personal Finance for Lawyers. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom, and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey, friend. Welcome back.

Today, we are talking about the learning curve.

We’re going to talk about the learning curve that a lot of my clients experience with learning how to manage their money, and we’ll also talk a little bit about a learning curve that I’m working through personally, right now.

First, though, what is a learning curve? A learning curve is a period where things feel difficult when you’re learning a new skill or you’re learning something new.

It comes up in all different contexts. So you probably encountered a learning curve when you first started practicing law or when you first picked up a new hobby or any other area where you are a beginner at something and you’re learning it for the first time – often you’ll encounter the learning curve.

And this is normal, right?

It comes up very often in many different contexts in life, including personal finance. It is often said that there are 4 stages of learning.

So the first stage is unconscious incompetence. That’s the stage where you just don’t know what you don’t know. Then you move into conscious incompetence, where you are very aware of the fact that you don’t know a lot of things. Then you get to conscious competence, where you know that you know a lot about this topic or this thing. And then, finally, you get to unconscious competence, where you don’t even realize the extent of what you know.

The learning curve often comes up in that conscious, incompetent stage where you start realizing what you don’t know. And it feels frustrating at times because you’re… when you first start out in a new venture it feels exciting. This is going to be great, all of that.

And then you get into it and you start hitting these roadblocks. You start seeing these areas that you don’t understand, that you didn’t realize that you would encounter, but this is not the point to give up. And that is where a lot of people make mistakes. It’s where they hit these roadblocks or they hit these areas that feel hard because they are learning something new. They don’t know how to do it and rather than pushing through and keep going, they’ll give up.

That is a mistake because you get better with more experience, with more practice.

So taking it back to practicing law, when you were first-year, first day, you didn’t know what was going on. I know I didn’t. They were saying all of these words, and it’s like, yes, I remember hearing something like this in law school, but in terms of actually putting it into practice, it felt foreign. Right?

But as you go along, you continue to do it, and then especially when you encounter other people who are new… like I remember for me that first year that we had summer associates after I had been there for a year, it was like “oh wow, I know some stuff,” because I was able to explain things to them that they didn’t understand at all that had become like second nature to me.

So you’ve got to push through that learning curve and keep going. And I think with respect to your profession, you’re probably not just going to give up, but sometimes with things like learning a new skill like personal finance, people want to give up when it gets hard.

So I said I would share a learning curve that I’m working through right now, and I’ve mentioned on the podcast before and on LinkedIn that I’m getting into real estate investing, and it has been interesting. I have hit all kinds of roadblocks in my journey from accessing our assets to be able to fund real estate investments to finding properties that would actually be good investments, that would produce cash flow and not just be money pits to finding a property that would actually be suitable if that makes sense.

So when I’m talking about finding properties that would be good investments, that is, in terms of analyzing the numbers on the properties, how much money we’re putting into it versus what the return would be.

But that last part is where I’m talking about going and visiting properties and they are not what I expect them to be from the pictures that we’ve seen and things like that.

I saw one property, and I kid you not, it was the cutest thing online. It was this cute little bungalow, and the pictures look great, and all of that. And we went to see it and it was in the middle of the hood, there was leaking in the roof. There was a literal puddle of water in the middle of the floor on one of the rooms. There was mold, like all of this stuff that was not in the pictures at all. Like it didn’t look like that at all.

And so these are the kinds of things that I have encountered so far in my real estate journey, and it has been interesting, but I am not going to give up. I’m going to keep pushing forward even though I’m hitting some of those roadblocks, even though I’m hitting the learning curve right, that conscious incompetence of realizing the extent of things that I don’t know.

I am going to keep pushing forward because I do want to invest in real estate.

I want you to keep pushing forward with respect to managing your money better. It might feel difficult to start tracking where you’re actually spending your money, being intentional about how you’re using your money so that you can stop spending more than you make and be able to direct money towards your goals.

It might be difficult to tell yourself no to things that you’ve been doing in service of this ultimate goal that you have. It might feel difficult to have money sitting in your account and not spend it. I know that might seem counterintuitive, but I see it happen a lot where if you’re not used to having a certain level of income in your account, when you start changing the way that you’re managing your money, and you start building up money in your accounts, sometimes you might spend that money because you’re not used to having that much.

But even when you encounter setbacks, even when you encounter those hard moments where it feels like this roadblock after roadblock popping up, that’s not allowing you to get to the goals that you have, keep going.

Because if you keep going and you keep trying and you keep putting these things into practice that you’re learning, you will eventually achieve your goal of managing your money better, of building X amount in your savings, of paying off your debt, of investing and building your net worth to whatever amount.

Keep going. Don’t let the learning curve, the difficulties that you may encounter at first stop you because you are bigger than this. And I say all the time, if you can practice law, you can absolutely manage your money. If I can practice law, I can absolutely figure out how to invest in real estate.

And one of the things that has been helpful for me in the real estate journey is having a trusted advisor that I can work with. I’m working with a realtor who I chose because he invests in real estate as well, so he knows what he’s doing. He’s done deals before. He can help me think through some of these issues.

For you, with your finances, you can find someone that you trust. You can listen to podcasts on the topic. There are all kinds of resources available out there to help you in your personal finance journey, but the main thing that I want you to get from this episode, if you get nothing else, is that yes, you’re going to encounter difficulties. You’re going to encounter that learning curve, those obstacles when you’re first starting out that make it feel hard to keep going, but keep going anyway. You can do it.

Alright. So that is it for this week’s episode.

I hope that it has been helpful for you. Please take a second and share it with a friend or two who could use this information who might be feeling a little bit discouraged in their own personal finance journey. Hopefully, this would be a little bit of encouragement for them. As always, I appreciate your support.

As we close out friend, I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life, and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently, week after week, you’ll continue to take steps to take back control of your time, build wealth, and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve.

Talk to you later.