The Formula for a Healthier, Wealthier Marriage

We're talking fundamentally about the allocation of resources. So your life portfolio, you have units of energy, time, and attention to invest. And we're just saying, be methodical. Be methodical, be very clear on what you're getting in return for all of those, and look, the end result isn't that every day is perfectly planned out and we've got -- You don't wanna become a robot. That's not the point. But the reality that most people are going about their days without spending enough time being intentional about it, and that's why the focus is to become more intentional. We're all intentional to some degree, but there's always more. Welcome to The Informed Investor, the podcast that brings you research and insights to help separate the news from the noise. Welcome, everybody, to "The Informed Investor." Today, we are talking money, marriage, and a whole bunch of other things. The show is brought to you by Dimensional Fund Advisors, a trillion-dollar global asset manager bringing financial science to investing. I'm Mark Gochnour, and today, we have two very special guests, actually, a married couple. So it's a great pleasure I get to introduce you to Ali Campbell, Marc Campbell, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It was really good to be here. It's so good to have you here. So great to be here. And I have to mention for the audience, I'm sure they've obviously noticed, this is not coming from our Austin, Texas location, it's our Santa Monica, California office, and hence the beautiful background, which you guys live, what, 10 minutes away from here? Exactly. 15 minute walk. So you get this every day. So lucky you. Lucky you. But anyways, great to have you in the office here today for this show. And today, we're gonna focus on "In This Together." That's the theme of the offering that you guys have, and you work with quite a few couples around the money, around their marriage, and again, the other things that we'll get into here that's important for that journey. So today's focus is around married people, perhaps somebody with long-term relationships, but before we get into it, I'd love to hear your backgrounds. Ali, I'm gonna start with you, tell us a little bit about your background, how you got here today. Oh, goody. Okay, well, my background, I'm gonna give the very short version, because somehow my background is very, very long. So I'll start with when I met Marc, we met at UCLA Anderson in Business School, and we connected immediately, because I think we both really cared about something very unusual for a couple of business school students, which was the human experience. So I won't say anything more about that for now. From there, I pursued a career in marketing and product management, until I realized that that really wasn't my path in life, and then I went and got a Master's degree in Spiritual Psychology, and became a coach, and have been coaching for the past, I don't know, 11 or 12 years, and recently got certified as an Enneagram practitioner and also as a financial therapist. All right, I'm gonna come back to you on the Enneagram practitioner in a moment here. Marc, let's get your background. Sure, so boy, it actually involves a stop at Dimensional, but we'll build up to that. So ... He's taking the longer version. Yeah, I'm going the longer route. So psychology major, undergrad, and then I went and worked at JP Morgan in New York City in their private investments group, working with private clients, and that was a really great experience, and then as I do from time to time, I seek additional things to do, so I started doing standup and improv comedy in New York City, and had a really great time, and that was all before coming to LA for business school, where Ali and I met at UCLA. After business school, a number of jobs, ranging from -- Starting a comedy theater. Yeah, we did. Yeah, here in Santa Monica. Started a comedy theater here in Santa Monica, yes, but I did realize that I would much rather be sort of in the business side, being sort of funny than trying to compete with all the other comedians, so don't ask me to be funny. And shortly after actually opening the comedy theater, I started at Dimensional, and had a wonderful time here working with all sorts of financial advisors across the country, and from there, decided, "I wanna be a financial advisor myself", and that's what I did, and I've been doing that ever since, along with this practice that my wife and I have built, which is really exciting. Well, and I always like to say too, you're still in the family. Yes. Meaning, we still work very closely together, which is great for us here at Dimensional, and we've loved it the years knowing and working together with both of you. Real quick. So who started this relationship? Who hit on who first at business school? Oh, that's a story too, of course. It was Ali. No, no, no. You have to understand, the odds are against all the guys. At business school, at the time, there was a much higher percentage of men than women, and the odds were stacked against, and I just was persistent. But the thing is with me, I sort of had what I would refer to as the "No move move", I have no moves, so I would just kind of hang around, and eventually she started paying attention to me. And from there, everything started to move in the right direction. Pull marketing. I love it. I met my wife, Betsy, at work too. I was at Deloitte and dated a client. And so she said no a couple times, and again, the persistence pays off after a while. All right. Let's go back to the Enneagram. I know I don't pronounce that properly. Enneagram. Enneagram. Enneagram. Edamami. Yes, that works. I love edemami. Tell us about that. Give us a little bit of background on what that is in case the audience isn't familiar with it. All right. Well, the Enneagram is a personality typing system that is growing immensely in popularity right now, because it helps us understand why we do what we do. It shows us the motivations that drive our thinking, acting, and behavioral patterns, and what's really great about it, and this is the part that a lot of people don't pay attention to, but is the part that is most important is that it also gives us a map for our personal growth. So based on your personality type, there are very specific avenues that you can take to become more present, and more whole, and more effective in your life, and better balanced, and just a more evolved person. Well, and it's great for any relationship, family. Absolutely. Spouses, coworkers, everything. It is. And I was gonna say too, sometimes in the past, I've been skeptical about things like that, right? Are we getting too deep or is it scientifically-based? More and more companies, Google, Nike, they use this assessment to really help bring out people's clarity of their own strengths and opportunities, and given that, I've opted in, as well. And what we see is that when you give people a framework to start understanding themselves better, they love it and they light up. And this isn't about anything other than giving people more clarity about who they are and how they operate. It's a shortcut. It's a shortcut. And I think it gives you awareness for other people too on what drives them or how they're wired -- Very much. Which makes it, I think, easier to understand where people are coming from sometimes. Yeah. And communicate, and have compassion, and understanding, and patience. Yeah, it just gives really great perspective. I'll say that my personal experience with the Enneagram, so it's basically nine different core personality types, I'm the number nine, which is basically boils down to the fact that when you wind me up and let me go, I'm seeking harmony in whatever situation I'm in. You put me in a room and I'm trying to equilibriate -- Did I just make up -- Equilibriate the -- Not inebriate. Not inebriate, no, that comes after the equilibrium. And so what I started to realize is that I have spent a lot of my life over-indexing on trying to create harmony. And so you can imagine, it makes me a good friend, I like to make people feel comfortable, and sometimes in life, we have to get outside of that, and be uncomfortable, and make other people uncomfortable. So that was really, really useful to me as one example. The other thing, you start to realize that each type has their own version of that. And you start to understand relationships and other people through the lens of, "You know what? We've all got a way that our brain works and we have our certain predilections, and accepting that other people are the way that they are is really freeing." Yeah, absolutely. All right, we're gonna get into this. I'm excited to get Ali's perspective as a coach, as well, and deep dive-into some of these things here. But one thing we like to do on the show is read some headlines. So I've got a couple of headlines related to some of this that we're gonna get into, and then I'm gonna come to you guys and just get a reaction to these. All right? Excellent. Let's go. Two headlines here. Hot seat. First one, "Millennials are Wealthier Than Ever, But They're Still Anxious About Money." Second one, "Why Some Wealthy Clients are Focused on 'Enough' Rather Than 'More'?" Wow. All right. Do you have a reaction to either one of those? Marc, I'll start with you. With the first one, I would say that yes, millennials are still anxious, even though they have more money than past generations. Why? Well, anxiety is not a function of one's money, it's really a function of one's framing of how safe they are and whether or not they feel like they're on a track to the type of wellbeing that they want, right? So in our world with the added complexity, and data overload, and any number of other things that have challenged the human species in terms of the amount of change and the rate of change, of course we're gonna be anxious. I think all generations are probably anxious regardless of the amount of money they have. So I would just decouple money as the ultimate sell for anxiety. All right, Ali? Gosh, I don't know if I have that much to add. I mean, life is getting very expensive at a very rapid rate. So I think that in itself is anxiety-inducing, and I think there's, I mean, life has always been uncertain, we've only had an illusion of control, but it feels like right now, we know that life is uncertain. There's no confusion about that, so I think that would play into it. Let's get into it. So I referenced earlier "In This Together", and that's the offering you have working with couples and kind of tying back to the headlines, money is one of those elements, but there's several other elements as part of that, as well. So maybe walk us through the program, kind of the five domains that make that up, and how you guys think about that, and work with couples around those five. Sure. So what we've done is develop a very straightforward framework to try to help people understand how to think about their lives in a clear way, and really started from what's the shortest list of questions we could ask people over and over whenever we talk to them that nobody could complain about you asking them, and it's gonna give you the most valuable information. And it really came down to this. Let's break life down into five domains, money, career, health, relationships, and fun. And let's ask people, "On a scale of one to 10 right now, what is your satisfaction in each of those five domains?" Very simple question, something that very few people do, from there, you take a look at those scores, and people look at them, and you ask them, "Hey, is that working for you? If it is, great. If not, do you feel drawn to one of those areas that you might wanna bump that score up? If the answer is yes, we have got a great start on helping you move towards something that is really important to you." So that's the general approach, and then the other thing that we try to do is we really try to raise people's awareness to the fact that we feel like we're out in the world to advocate for living a more intentional life. And what does that mean? An intentional life really has two components. You have the vision of what you want for your life, where those satisfaction scores can kind of help you refine that, and then you've got the resources that are available to you to help you get there. And of course that's your money, but it's also your time and attention. So it's trying to teach people, "You've got your money, time and attention, and you've got what you want. How do you organize your resources in a way to start moving towards that which you want?" And we find, people just having a sense of agency that they know now more clearly what they want, and by the way, what happens is people become adults, and they get ground down by the responsibilities, they stop thinking about "What do I want?" So just to aliven them to the possibility of doing more of that is very powerful, and starting from that basic foundation of those five domains, we're able to drive a lot of really powerful conversations. One of those five was relationships. I assume that includes family? Yes, all relationships. Even relationship with yourself. Or your community. Yep. Okay. Were you gonna add something to that? Oh no, I was just gonna say in terms of the five, there could be any number of domains, but what we've found is that as long as you hit on those five, you kind of draw out the important pieces. So even if you wouldn't classically, like you said, relationships, it could have also just been family or friends, you could break it out any way, but generally, when you focus on those five, the important stuff for each person comes out. So Ali, you took Betsy, my wife and I through this about three years ago, and that's why I was excited you guys would come on the show and kind of walk the audience through that, because we thought it was really helpful for us. And you'll go back to the scoring part of it, where I think that the scoring was easy and quick, but it gives a starting point to have some conversations and compare and contrast both of ours, which when we got married, the pastor that married us, we did a couple of like pre-counseling sessions before the wedding. And he's like, "Okay." He goes, "There's two things in all of my counseling post-marriage over the years. There's two things that drive most marriages to be unhappy." And he's like, "The first one is money." And he goes, "You two are both CPAs, so I assume you're good on that one." Like yep, we're aligned financially. And that came out in the scoring. And he goes, "The second one is sex." So I think I'll leave that for maybe later. That's the after dark version. Yeah, so you don't talk about sex and relationship -- Adam Sandler version. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, going back to the money, so we were pretty aligned financially, and always have been. But what we learned from this was, and we both came from very frugal families, so it was always just sort of "Don't spend, save, don't spend, save." And this helped us think through that of making these, I guess, trade-offs of what are the things that are valuable to us and important to us. And so we said, "Okay, go back to relationships or family. We have aging parents, both of us." So we said, "Time to start spending money, and going to see our folks way more often, as they needed some help." Time to do, I think fun was one, and we worked really hard over the years on the career, but it's time to have some fun as a family, and do more of that. It's okay to spend on those kind of things, because those are the experiences that you always value. So anyway, that was really helpful for us to go through that, it was fun to reflect on it three years later, 'cause I think you typed up the comments as you were sort of interviewing us. Yep. It was fun to read the comments, and how some areas we've done pretty well, some probably could do a little bit more on. But great exercise to go through, because it really does elevate, I guess align the relationship I think on some of these things that are really important, you just never thought, you didn't know they were important. So anyway, that's sort of my opening to this conversation, and Ali, anything you wanna expand on, whether it was related to us, or just how you work with other couples on sort of finding the importance around some of these different domains? Well, I think expand is the right word, because it expands and elevates our perspective, so that we can begin to see our lives from a more holistic point of view, because I think we can really get a lot of tunnel vision in just the day-to-day grind of life, and sometimes we have to step back, and look at the big picture to see and really think about, "Where are we headed? Where do we wanna head?" Because as we all know, everybody sitting at this table, life gets faster and faster and faster all the time, and if we don't stop every now and then to take stock of where we are, and where we wanna be, it will pass us by, and we'll get to a place where we're like, "Wow, I never did the things that I wanted to do, because I never even stopped to think what that is, and not just do, but also who I wanna be along the way." That's almost more important is like how you are experiencing each moment. It's interesting because it sounds cliched almost, like, "Life will pass you by, what do you wanna do?" All of those things. But I have come in the past few years to really, really respect the power and the role of habits in our lives, and that's yeah, brushing your teeth kind of habits, but it's also just these mental habits, these tracks that we've built for ourselves to run on, and what I find, especially as people get to your age, No, but if you think of it in our early adulthood, we're building an infrastructure for the way that we approach life to create safety, and be able to take care of our loved ones. And guess what? We run on that infrastructure for a long time. At some point, the magnitude of the risk that we might not be able to take care of people decreases, but we're still in the same mental habit. So it's almost like this raising awareness to these underlying patterns that you can shift, "Oh, now I can start to have the habit of I've got these resources, what's important to me, how do I use them?" And that's a fundamentally different habit than the habit of growing resources. And a lot of people have a really hard time letting go of that habit that they've rehearsed for decades, it's all about, "Get money, hold onto it", or whatever habits they have, it's about making money and spending it right away. Whatever it is, that level of change is hard, and it's gotta be motivated by getting to a deeper level of what the person really wants, what is important to them. And then when we talk about habits, there's also the compounding effect of habits, which is fun to talk about within a financial context, it also applies just to our lives. If you keep engaging in a negative habit, there is a negative, compounding, ever-expanding ramification of continuing to do something that you actually don't wanna do and doesn't serve you, and similarly, if you change that habit, or take on a new habit that is more productive, and more aligned with who you are today, who you want to be, there's a compounding effect to that, as well. Can you expand on that a little bit? 'Cause it's a really powerful comment about the power of compounding. Obviously, we talk a lot about it with money, and some people refer to it as "The 8th wonder of the world", the value of compounding over time. And even David Booth, our Chairman and Founder here at Dimensional, talks about this idea of life compounding, as well, so I'd love to get your -- I don't know if there's an example or something you can just make a little tangible for the audience on something that can compound, and I liked how you said, and potentially a negative way too. It can go both ways. Yeah, you got to reverse the negative and add the positive. Yeah, so any example of something -- Well there's -- You can allude to? I think the math says, for example, if you improve your life by 1% every day, and of course that's hard to say, 'cause what does it mean to improve your life by 1%, but mathematically, if you do that, I think it's by the end of the first year, you will be 37% better, whatever that means. A more visual example is if you think about a ship traveling in a certain direction, and if you shift by one degree, you wind up in a completely different location. Yeah, and I'll get to your experience that you had with Ali, she asks simple questions, right? A simple question could be, "What is your satisfaction level in your relationships? Where does that ship end up if that question is never contemplated, versus if it's contemplated every six months for 50 years?" You're going to end up in a different place, simply by the fact that you've elevated the importance as a priority of asking that question, versus any number of other questions one could think about or scrolling on your phone, right? It is those little habits that add up, and when we talk about a more intentional life, it's simply recognizing that the ideas that we focus on, the people we spend time around, those are the things that we're trying to compound over time, and that will have a meaningful effect on us, not nearly or way more valuable than the idea of just sitting down, dreaming up some ideal scenario of "I wanna be a billionaire on a beach." That's not really the stuff that happiness, fulfillment, meaning, intentionality is made of. I think what's jumping out to me right now in this idea of habit is there's no silver bullet, right? Everything takes effort. Anything worth having takes effort, right? And so I think about a habit. So it might be, "Okay, I'm going to make sure we go as a family, have a dinner once a week." And you just got to have the discipline to schedule it. Or, "Instead of getting home and reading the newspaper, I'm going to spend 30 minutes talking to my spouse, or partner, or something." You're just doing it. And then you build the habit, and then it compounds, the value of relationship, and time, and those kind of things, time with family. That's what I'm hearing. Yes. That's what's jumping out to me from what you talked about. Absolutely, and in terms of specific client examples, they run the gamut. A lot of things tend to revolve around people that they wanna spend time with, and building habits around that. We also help people, again, on reversing that negative, one of the questions that we ask on this regular conversation that we have with people is something that you don't wanna be doing over the next six months. Equally as powerful to shock somebody into awareness of like, "Oh wait, I don't have to do everything that I'm doing?" Very powerful. Or rather, "This habit that I continually engage in is negatively impacting me." That's right. Like, "I need to stop picking up my phone first thing when I wake up in the morning, or I need to stop --" Well, let's not go too far. You've gotta be realistic. Yeah. And when you think about bringing it back to Dimensional and investing, even, we're talking fundamentally about the allocation of resources. So your life portfolio, you have units of energy, time, and attention to invest. And we're just saying, "Be methodical. Be methodical, be very clear on what you're getting in return for all of those", and look, the end result isn't that every day is perfectly planned out and we've got -- You don't wanna become a robot. That's not the point, but the reality that most people are going about their days without spending enough time being intentional about it, and that's why the focus is to become more intentional. We're all intentional to some degree, but there's always more. Yeah, and I think the conversations that we have are really about, well, going back to what I said before, taking stock of our life right now, but also just getting people to focus on something that they really want, because sometimes it doesn't even take that much effort, you just have to have an awareness that it's important to you and then just decide, "I'm going to start doing this." Sometimes you just need a little bit of a spark to just get going. I kid Ali about this sometimes. In my financial advisor role, when we're doing portfolios on it, I can present the most beautiful analysis, and even break it down into showing them the track that they're on, and how everything's gonna be great. From a financial planning perspective. From a financial planning perspective, okay? The feedback I get is like, "Cool, great." Ali literally convinced somebody, okay? Convinced somebody to go out and buy a really expensive purse, because they had plenty, but they weren't doing that. They had a scarcity mindset, and they weren't going about doing that, and gets this glowing thank you for that. And so it's just this funny juxtaposition. It's a little counterintuitive. As a financial advisor, you start to realize, the quality and value of these conversations at that level really turn the dial on getting people excited. Well, and to shed a little more light on what he's saying, we're really talking about intentionality, because this client, there was a purse that they really wanted, but they judged it as silly to spend a lot of excessive, and "Why should I spend money on a handbag?" But they were instead buying a bunch of inexpensive, cheap things that they didn't really care about, because they were trying to fill the void, but in the meantime, they were wasting more money on a bunch of small insignificant things that didn't really bring them joy, and so we realized, "No, well, in this case, maybe spend the money, bring yourself that happiness that you have worked really hard to be able to buy that, buy that for yourself. See what that feels like, if nothing else, you learned something for the future." Yeah. And fundamentally, there's no right or wrong answer to buy the purse or not, right? It's really what it represents, why you're doing it, and being comfortable. I mean, this is just an example, right? This is a metaphor for all the conversations, and the work that we're able to do with people around helping them stop thinking in terms of more of a judging themselves place, and more in a -- More shoulding on themselves. Yeah, shoulding. Yes, shoulding on themselves. Shoulding? Yes, yes. You know, "I should do this, I should do that." We call it "shoulding on yourself." It sounded like something else. Yes. It's part of the fun, but again, people carry around so many of these ways of limiting their own experience, and it comes from a good place. It genuinely does. Or not. Or maybe it comes from the messages that we've been handed down that we actually don't agree with if we take time to step back and reflect on that. Yeah, yeah. One of the things too I enjoyed about that exercise, it was, "Hey, where do you rank now?" But it was also, "Where would you want this to be?" I thought that was really interesting, and that's where we had some interesting differences there that was fun to talk about on how we're thinking about that. So I though that was really productive exercise. Do you remember any of the differences? Yes. Great, okay, good. Yeah. Also in the after dark episode. Yeah. Well -- No, but it was, and you go back to, I think you get in this habit, for me, working really hard in your career, and Betsy did a lot with the kids, and all kinds of volunteers, so you just kind of go down your busy paths. And Betsy had that going, "Okay, that's a five", meaning, sorry, it was the number one thing, and "Can we make it a five, and bring all these other things above that, the relationships, the fun, health?", and that's another thing that was a takeaway for us is it's okay to spend money on your health. And that's become even much more of a thing the last couple years. So yeah, kind of just stuff like that, and I like what you said earlier too about there's no right answer, it's just trade-offs. But then let me ask you this, and this might be more up Ali's alley. No pun intended, yeah. If i had a dollar ... What if there isn't alignment, going back to a couple, and they're like, "I just, no, I don't see it that way." Yeah, we just end the meeting then. Yeah, you're like, yeah, this isn't gonna work. Well ... How do manage these conversations? That's when you bring in the peacemaker. Well, I firmly believe that all perspectives matter, and I think I try to bring that into the conversation to really help people see that there is no right or wrong, there's only kind of what's right for each individual, so I think there's a big role for just trying to understand the other person's perspective, and trying to come to a place of accepting it. I'm just chuckling. I bet there's people going, "No, this is the right answer." Yeah. In Ali's role too, and when I talk to people about conflicting points of view, I do think that the ability to shift the conversation from right or wrong to different perspective is really the way to go, it doesn't always work, to your point. Yeah, and also preferences, right? It's not right or wrong, it's just a preference. Yeah. And one thing that is a really powerful way to at least, let's say, calibrate to the magnitude of the level of disagreement or misalignment, this is something we started doing years ago. It's a simple thing. Just ask each person, "On a scale of one to 10, what's the magnitude of how important you think the way you think about it is?" And once you get that for both people, it's fascinating. I remember when our kids were young, you might have like a three-day ongoing dialogue about something that is upsetting, and then the reality is, it was a one for both of us, but we're just feeling misaligned, right? So it's like -- Difference of an opinion, but actually I don't really care that much. And it's also, if one person is an eight, and the other is a two, it's really easy for that two to yield, it's a nice way to be generous, to sort of step out of the way. Yeah, if we're both 10 out of 10, it's something else. But you're just, again, trying to help people understand how to manage through the reality that "Guess what? No married couple is going to agree on everything." For sure. For sure. Exclamation point. Yeah. Okay. Let's go back to then when should somebody start thinking through these domains and scoring them in this process? At what point in a relationship is ideal to start this? I think it's always ideal. I think there's no bad time to do it. It's similar to, "If I had a million dollars to invest, should I do it today or tomorrow?" It's today. It's always today. The reality is, this is a practice. This is a practice, just like meditation is a practice, right? Approaching life through the lens of "What do I want? What are my resources? Are they aligned with what I want?", and then mapping that, and figuring out where there's alignment and misalignment with the most important person in your life seems like a pretty good idea. It's just, you gotta start practicing, and it might be clunky at first, and it might be uncomfortable, that's cool, that's fine, whatever, but just keep at it. Yeah. How about dating? Absolutely. Somebody's dating, and probably healthy exercise to go through. Yeah, I mean, I would imagine in sort of a premarital counseling, I mean this kind of thing, because look, if nothing else, you should go into any relationship knowing that there will be disagreement, and almost forcing the situation, where you've gotta grapple with that with the other person. How do we handle this, right? You don't wanna be having a fantasy. 'Cause it takes practice, yeah. Years and years of practice before you have a system that kind of adequately handle misalignment in a way that works. Actually, that's a great word, a system or a process to have conversations that otherwise might be uncomfortable, just to make it more comfortable in having something that you may or may not disagree on. Yeah. And I think that also has come through with these meetings with clients, 'cause I think it's different when there's a coach or a guide there asking the questions, and so I think it really helps create a container or space for someone to answer what's true for them without feeling like they have to have the right answer for their spouse, or worry about what their spouse is thinking, because in a way they're having the conversation with me, and the spouse or the significant other gets to hear the answers, and without being tempted necessarily to jump in and correct them, it just makes for a more, a conversation where people are listening a little better. I'll say too, kind of a little add-on to the question of when we met each other. Ali's a little bit magical. That's what I've come to realize. Is she the unicorn? She's the unicorn. Doesn't do magic, that's different, she's magical. No, but -- Definitely don't. I think back, and this is representative of really what I think she's able to do with clients, and what I've learned how to be able to do, I think back to a moment, when we met in business school, it was stressful. I remember sharing with her, it was a particularly stressed out time. I was thinking about, "Whoa, what job am I gonna get?" All those kinds of things, and I was really having a hard time, and got on the phone with her, and this was early in our relationship. This was the very start of our relationship. This is what kicked it off. Yeah, and I just started talking about all the things that were bothering me, which is not something that I was prone to doing, and still at times need to be jostled back onto that track. But I did that, and then I said, "I was afraid to share this, because I thought you'd like me less." And her response changed my life. Her response was, "I like you more." And so that's what this is about, whether it's one-on-one, or as a couple, the ability to be vulnerable and share the real stuff without feeling worried that the pressure of the day is gonna overwhelm you, and just having a space to talk, and just navigate is really, really powerful. And this was before we knew anything about the Enneagram, and the fact that I'm a four, which makes this kind of thing my wheelhouse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What am I? I don't know, I have to do an assessment. Yeah, all you got to do is do -- I wanna be number one. What is that? I don't know if you do. If you are number one, you might not wanna be a number one. Yeah, yeah, no I like, it's intriguing. In part two of this, we are gonna, in the After Dark episode, we will also be hitting on your full Enneagram report. Yeah. Yeah. Well, a couple things jump out. One is I tend to go to this idea of balance among these things you just described, I think that's healthy for a couple, it sounds pretty healthy for a single person too to probably dive into some of this stuff, as well, get a little more clarity about their vision, and what they want in these different areas too. Yeah. Yeah, and why not just lay the foundation for building the habit as a single person of, "I'm thinking about this stuff and the person that I wanna be with, I want them to be thinking about it too. A lot of things that have jumped out to me have been around the balance, thinking about the trade-offs as we go through this, but maybe Ali, I'm gonna come to you with over all your different coaching you've done with couples. Does any one really jump out to you, you think the audience would be interested in hearing of where somebody kind of took this, thought about some of the scoring, had some conversations, and just some of the takeaways they made in the way they went going forward. Yeah. I think there's one couple that their story illustrates it pretty tangibly. When we first went over the five domains with them, they had pretty high scores across the board, except in career, where they had a five. Now, each time we meet with clients, we're really just taking a snapshot in time of where they are in that moment. So we don't wanna be alarmed by any scores necessarily, unless something comes up that we really need to respond to, but what ended up happening was over the course of meetings, that score did not move at all. And we thought, "Well, that's kind of a red flag. What's really going on there?" And even though he rated himself low, he would give excuses, "Well, I like my job, I'm making good money, I do something different every day", and he kept sort of trying to talk himself into being happier than he actually was, but the numbers didn't lie. And so as we talked to them more, it came out that they were a young couple, they wanted to start having a family, he really actually had entrepreneurial aspirations, that was where his heart was leading, and so we kind of got to this point where we realized that he should take this seriously. And so his advisor ended up suggesting that he open up a separate account to start saving for, I don't know what you call it, entrepreneurship funds so that he could, and actually backing up, even his wife agreed that that was more important to them as a couple than buying a more expensive car, or a nice piece of furniture, going on an expensive vacation, because they realized for their family, and for their happiness as a family, they really wanted to be able to pursue this opportunity to do his own thing. And so that was the outcome that came directly out of scoring these satisfaction levels. Yeah. What an impact. And I mean, that's a big change for a family like that, potentially what happens if they start their own business and stuff, but it can be incredibly meaningful too. So great example. Thanks, and you guys, thanks for coming in here today. This has been a lot of fun. Hopefully everybody listening here, I think they got a lot out of that. But then also I want to give some resources to highlight some resources for the audience if it's something they wanna dive into deeper. Sometimes people are do-it-yourself type folks, and wanna get a better understanding of this. I'm gonna highlight some resources, I hope you don't mind. I'm gonna mention your book. You wrote a book, it's called "Redefining Success for a Happier, More Authentic and Fulfilling Life." So tell us a little bit about that, and how somebody in the audience can come and get some more information about some of the stuff we talked here today. Well, this is the ultimate DIY resource, so this is a book that I wrote that basically it came out of my own journey of trying to do all the things that I was supposed to do to become successful, and having done all those things, and looking successful on paper, but really feeling quite the opposite inside, and sort of going through my own transformation to redefine what success meant, and that sort of the seeds of what we've built here today, which is looking at success more holistically, instead of just looking at finances, or what career you're in, and what your title is, and so first, it's about redefining success for yourself in a way that's really true to you, and what you want, not the messages that were passed down to you, or the people around you, what they want, and then it also offers a lot of ideas, and lessons, and then tools, so I actually have an exercise for each of the lessons that I talk about so that people can work through questions on their own to try to basically live a more intentional life. I love it. So check out the book, on your guys' website too, which we'll put in the show notes, you have some resources for do-yourselfers, as well. And then Marc, I also wanted to highlight with you, this is something, "Life Alpha" is a program you take out for advisors, financial professionals, that they can build this into their practice, as well. So talk about that real quick. Yeah, and this is just based on, and first of all, it's called "Life Alpha" because Investment Alpha is the investment manager's ability to beat the market, again, through the dimensional lens, can they? Little evidence of it. Yeah, little evidence of that, but Life Alpha refers to the idea that we can outperform our own status quo. And what we do with Life Alpha is just simply help financial advisory firms apply some of these tools, resources, processes to their end clients, so that they can help them get closer to living a more intentional life for themselves, and it was all based on one key insight, which is simply, "Hey, if a financial advisor had the information that a coach had about a person, the financial advisor would be better off. If a coach had the information a financial advisor had, they'd be better off." It's kind of like, what? Peanut butter and chocolate, put them together, and it's a lot better. And once we saw that, we can't unsee that, and as the world gets more complicated, and AI speeds up the ability to really commoditize a lot of what traditional wealth management has done, Life Alpha isn't intended to help advisory firms bring more of an emotional intelligence component to the way that they're supporting their clients. All right guys, that was so much fun. So much fun. Ali, Marc, thanks for coming out. Go back out now, and enjoy the rest of this beautiful day here in Santa Monica. Awesome. Thank you so much. Great to have you. Really great. Thank you. Thanks, guys, so much. It's great to be here. And guys, thanks to all of you for watching "Informed Investor." In addition to Ali's book, I wanna highlight one other book. David Booth, who's our Chairman at Dimensional, and also our Founder wrote a book called "Stay Calm." Gives some great perspectives, some great guidance around investing, but also just about life in general, as well. So check out the book, "Stay Calm." Go have a fantastic rest of the day, everybody. Thanks for joining.