Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You know, it's funny, think about that mental drawer you have, the one where you stash all the things you truly want to do, but you're just waiting for the quote, unquote, perfect time.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, the classic someday drawer. We all have one, right?
[00:00:13] Speaker A: And I want you, the listener, to really imagine what's sitting in your someday drawer right now.
Because today we are doing a deep dive into the someday trap, and we're looking at a deeply unsettling pattern where it almost always takes a literal brush with death for us to finally pull those dreams out of the drawer.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: It's honestly a phenomenal paradox when you look at human behavior. I mean, we meticulously plan our finances, our grocery lists, our daily commutes, but our actual life's purpose, we just sort of leave it sitting there, assuming we have infinite time.
[00:00:45] Speaker A: Yeah, we really do. And to figure out how to bypass that trap, we are pulling from some amazing source material. Today we're looking at a YouTube interview transcript from Bradley Charbonneau's channel, and he's sitting down with an author named Kimberly.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: A fantastic interview. So much to unpack there.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Totally. Because our mission today is to extract the ultimate roadmap for making a massive life pivot. But you know, we aren't just going to look at the fuzzy inspirational highlights,
[00:01:10] Speaker B: right, because inspiration fades. We need the mechanics.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Exactly. We are getting into the psychology of taking the leap, the sheer danger of waiting for tragedy to strike and this brilliant, highly tangible accountability system that Kimberly engineered.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: What makes this deep dive so valuable for you? Listening is the contrast, really. You've got Bradley, who reacted to grief with this immediate, explosive life pivot. And then you have Kimberly, who. Well, she processed everything through a deeply pragmatic, risk averse lens.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Which makes sense when you look at her background. I mean, to understand her pivot, you have to realize she worked in corporate America, specifically as an accountant in banking for 33 years.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: 33 years, that is. I mean, that's not just a job. That is an entire cognitive operating system.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Right. I was thinking about this. It's like she was wearing a comfortable pair of golden handcuffs. Safe, sensible, but totally restricting.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: And in banking accounting, your entire professional mandate is to identify risk, calculate it and neutralize it.
You are structurally rewiring your brain over three decades to view uncertainty as a literal threat to your survival.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: So making a sudden romantic leap into the unknown, not really her baseline.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Not at all. The corporate banking environment punishes reckless deviation. It rewards predictability.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: But you know, about 10 years before she actually quit, she started Craving something different. She was this avid reader, loved fiction. But she noticed a gap.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: A very specific gap.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: Yeah, she couldn't find books featuring midlife protagon, dealing with the steps she was experiencing. It was all younger characters. So highly pragmatic solution, she just decided to write them herself.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Notice what she does here, though? She doesn't blow up her life.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: No, not at all.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Right. She uses her creative side to study writing, but she keeps her fortress of stability intact. She starts writing one to two books a year while still working her full time banking job.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: And she even talks to her mom about it. Her mom was apparently super practical too. She supported the writing, said Kimberly needed a creative outlet. But she gave her that classic advice. Keep your day job.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: Keep your day job. I mean, it's well meaning, but think about what that does psychologically.
[00:03:20] Speaker A: It builds a wall. Right?
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Exactly. It reinforces the barricade. It tells your brain, hey, the creative stuff is just a hobby. The bank is reality.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: But then, and this is the catalyst for the whole transition in 2017, that barricade gets shattered. Her mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Yeah, the abstract concept of someday just instantly evaporated for her.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: She had this manuscript already written and edited, just sitting there. But with the diagnosis, she suddenly had a devastating immovable deadline. She bypassed traditional publishing entirely because, you know, that takes forever.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: Yeah, traditional publishing moves at a glacial pace.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Right. So she rushed to self publish her first book, Whispering Pines, in September of 2017, purely so her mother could physically hold a copy before she passed away in December.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: And she pulled it off. The transcript highlights how her mom was able to hold it, share signed copies with friends. It's an incredibly profound moment to experience your daughter's accomplishment like that.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: It is beautiful. It really is. But honestly, this is where I started to get a little baffled by her story.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: How so?
[00:04:25] Speaker A: While she rushes to publish the book, she literally stares her mother's mortality in the face. She realizes time is fleeting, and then she doesn't quit her job.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: Ah, right, she goes back to the bank.
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Yeah, she goes right back to the accounting department for several more years.
I mean, if holding that physical book was so profound, why didn't she just walk in on Monday, hand in her keys and say, I'm a full time author now?
[00:04:49] Speaker B: It feels contradictory, doesn't it? Like you'd expect a brush with mortality to instantly trigger this dramatic movie style exit.
[00:04:56] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. The Jerry Maguire moment.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Right, but you're assuming that facing death universally causes reckless abandon. We have to look at this through the lens of cognitive Entrenchment.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: Okay, unpack that a bit.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: So she had 33 years of brain wiring demanding risk mitigation.
When you face a terminal illness of a loved one, it induces what we call mortality salience. It's this terrifying spiking awareness of our own inevitable death.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: Right, the realization that the clock is ticking for you too.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Yes, but when that spikes, our instinct isn't always to jump out of a plane. For someone like Kimberly, the instinct is to secure the perimeter. Her analytical brain knew she had to change her life, but it demanded a calculated, meticulously planned exit.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Okay, so it's a staggered leap. She's not burning the boats on the shore. She's, I don't know, quietly building a really secure bridge.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: That's a great way to put it, the staggered leap. And this is vital for you listening, especially if you feel paralyzed by that whole Silicon Valley myth that you have to dramatically quit your job to prove you're committed.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: Right, the whole hustle culture thing.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: Exactly. The staggered leap is biologically and financially smarter if you're heavily entrenched in a structured life. She refused to destroy her financial stability just to prove a point.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: Which brings us to the timeline she actually set up. Because she didn't leave it open ended, she picked a hard deadline. Her 55th birthday.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: And that wasn't an arbitrary number.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: No, it wasn't. At her company, reaching 55 meant she could afford officially quote, unquote, retire based on her years of service rather than just quitting.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Which is a brilliant application of a temporal landmark.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: A temporal landmark?
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a concept from behavioral economics. We humans use significant dates like New Year's or a milestone birthday to cleanly separate our past self from our future self.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: Oh, I see. So she wasn't just resigning, she was crossing a psychological finish line.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Exactly. It gave her an exit with dignity and a sense of completion.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: But, you know, setting a target a few years out, that introduces a massive vulnerability. Right. Like it is dangerously easy to say, oh, I'll do it when I turn 55. And then you just coast.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: You mentally check out.
[00:07:05] Speaker A: Yeah, you check out. And that waiting period just becomes a wasted block of time.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: And this is where Kimberly transitions from just being a dreamer into a genuine behavioral architect. Because she recognized that exact vulnerability.
When she turned 54, she made a vow that her final year at the bank was. Would not be a wasted year.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: She needed a way to sustain her momentum.
And I have to say, her solution for this is arguably the most brilliant takeaway from the entire transcript.
[00:07:34] Speaker B: The confetti board.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: The confetti board. I love this so much. Okay, so picture a simple physical poster board. She put 52 little wooden clips on it, one for every week of her final year. And every week, she took a brightly colored three by three scrapbooking square and physically wrote down one thing she did to move forward.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: But the criteria for what earned a square is the crucial part. It wasn't just some soul crushing corporate to do list.
[00:07:59] Speaker A: Right. It wasn't like send 50 emails.
[00:08:02] Speaker B: No. To get a square on the board, she had to document something that helped her grow as an author, grow as a person, or, and this is key, something where she just had fun.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: It's basically a physical loading bar for downloading a new life. Like, you can literally watch it fill up. It's highly visual and impossible to ignore.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: And you're hitting on the exact neurological reason why it works. If you set a massive abstract goal, like change careers at 55, which sounds terrifying. It is terrifying. Your brain's amygdala, the fear center, perceives that massive change as a literal threat. It responds with anxiety paralysis. But the confetti board bypasses the amygdala
[00:08:41] Speaker A: entirely because it breaks it down into those tiny microdosed weekly wins.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: Exactly. Moving a physical wooden clip onto a vibrant square every week literally hacks your dopamine reward pathway. You get an immediate chemical payoff. So by week 40, you aren't staring at the scary unknown.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: You're staring at a wall that's just exploding with color.
[00:09:00] Speaker B: Right. It's undeniable visual proof to your brain that you are surviving the transition.
[00:09:05] Speaker A: And she didn't even stop there with the accountability. She knew her own weaknesses, admitted she'd chickened out on big changes in the past. So she recruited her best friend, told her the exact plan, the exact date, and basically mandated her friend to not let her back out.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Outsourcing her willpower. I love it.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: Yeah. And in her last 30 days, she posted daily inspirational quotes on Instagram to count it down.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: That's the modern equivalent of burning the boats.
By broadcasting it to her friend and her social network, she raised the social cost of failing to act.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: So if she wavered, the external system was there to hold the line. It's a beautifully constructed system, but.
And we have to transition into the second half of this interview here, there is a much darker reality underlying all of this.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: Yes, the actual catalyst, right, the confetti
[00:09:52] Speaker A: board, was this beautiful manufactured deadline. But both the host, Bradley, and Kimberly, realized their life changes were rooted in profound loss.
[00:10:00] Speaker B: We talked about Kimberly's trigger being her mother's terminal illness. Well, Bradley shares a very parallel, jarring story in the transcript.
His father passed away in 2015, and
[00:10:10] Speaker A: Bradley's reaction was the complete inverse of Kimberly's staggered leap.
By 2016, he was so terrified by his own mortality, he moved to Europe, closed down his company and became a writer. Just massive foundation shaking changes in a
[00:10:26] Speaker B: single year, all triggered by his father's death. And they both arrive at this chilling consensus during the interview.
We have this tragic human tendency to wait for a terrible event, a death, a medical diagnosis, a job loss, to finally pursue what we actually want.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: It's so sad. Bradley is brutally honest about it too. He notes he spent eight years whining about wanting to be a writer. Eight years.
And it took his dad dying to force him into motion.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: Kimberly echoes that urgency. She points out she has 13 or 14 books published now, largely because she's 59. She doesn't want to be grinding out novels at 80. They both hear the clock ticking.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: They really do. But, you know, there's a point in the transcript here where I actually push back a bit on what Kimberly says.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: Which part?
[00:11:07] Speaker A: They're discussing how to help people make the leap without needing a tragedy. And Kimberly suggests that being quote, unquote, curious is a good way to start. Like, curiosity might lead you down a new path.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Ah, right.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: But Bradley counters her immediately. And I am totally with Bradley here. He points out that curiosity feels incredibly passive. What they actually did was take intense, active action born out of fear.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:32] Speaker A: So I have to ask you, do we actually need fear to motivate us? Is curiosity just too weak?
[00:11:39] Speaker B: That is a brilliant tension to highlight. Honestly. Curiosity is a luxury of the comfortable.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: Ooh, that's a good way to put it.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: Right. Curiosity assumes you have all the time in the world to leisurely poke around an idea. But fear, specifically the fear of running out of time, that is a universal solvent.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: It dissolves the delays.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Exactly. Because humans suffer from optimism bias, we are wired to assume tragedies happen to other people, not us. It tricks us into believing we have an infinite supply of tomorrows.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: But when tragedy strikes, the illusion shatters.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: It's a phenomenon called temporal discounting. We usually undervalue rewards that are far in the future.
But with tragedy, the future collapses into the present.
[00:12:19] Speaker A: It grabs you by the shoulders and screams that the future is right now.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: Yes. And the real challenge for you listening is how do you internalize that urgency without needing a devastating wake up call? Because waiting is the most dangerous plan of all.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Because the tragedy might happen to you and then you have no time left. You take the entire contents of your someday drawer straight to the grave.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: Brutal, but absolutely true. Waiting is not a strategy. It's a surrender.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: So, okay, let's pivot and look at the reality of not surrendering. You face your mortality. You build the confetti board, you cash in your chips at 55.
What does it actually look like on the other side? Because, you know, culture pushes this highly romanticized script of following your passion.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: Oh, the narrative that the universe will immediately reward you with massive financial wealth just because you're doing what you love.
[00:13:07] Speaker A: Exactly. But Kimberly gives us a huge dose of reality. She's a full time author now, but she is radically transparent. She does not make anywhere near her old banking salary.
[00:13:18] Speaker B: Wait, not even close.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Not even close. But she planned, saved and invested for 33 years so she could afford the lifestyle change.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: And that is where her risk mitigation background actually saved her dream. She didn't leap blindly into financial ruin.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: She built a Runway, which protects the art. At one point, Bradley brings up a past discussion with another author, Roland Denzel. They talked about the crushing pressure of being a full time author. If you rely on your art to pay the rent, it can completely strip the joy away.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: It absolutely can. If you turn your passion into your sole survival mechanism, you introduce scarcity and desperation into the creative process.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: It's like killing the golden goose by forcing it to lay rent money.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: That's a perfect analogy. Kimberly actively avoided that trap because of her financial pragmatism. She doesn't carry the crippling pressure of needing her books to replace a corporate executive salary.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: She preserved the joy and the payoff is huge.
She says she is a heck of a lot happier. Her three kids, her two grandkids, they see that she is a completely different person now. The stress is just washed off, which
[00:14:24] Speaker B: is a complete redefinition of success. True success here isn't matching a corporate spreadsheet. It's the emotional roi, the return on
[00:14:33] Speaker A: investment of her happiness, and the legacy she's leaving. She's proving to her family that it is never too late to find work you love.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: She rewrote her own ending.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: She really did. So as we wrap up this deep dive into Kimberly Dyd's journey, let's distill the core takeaways. First, you have to recognize the shock of mortality. But don't let tragedy be the only thing that jolts you awake.
[00:14:54] Speaker B: Right. And second, build the visual accountability. Create that 52 week confetti board to engineer, urgency and gamify the transition and
[00:15:02] Speaker A: finally have the courage to redefine success away from just money and toward deep personal fulfillment. Because the safety of Someday is a complete illusion. Time is ticking.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: Whether it's writing a book, changing careers, or starting a hobby, waiting for permission is a trap.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: It is. Which brings me to a final thought I want to leave you with today. We've talked a lot about planning to leap away from a job.
But what if the handcuffs keeping you locked in place aren't actually your salary or your employer? What if they are your own rigid definition of who you are?
[00:15:33] Speaker B: Oh wow, that's deep, right?
[00:15:36] Speaker A: Like if you stripped away your professional job title day, would you even know who is left underneath to make the leap?
So if you knew a major life disruption was coming in exactly one year, what project would you immediately pull out of your someday drawer? And what 52 week confetti board could you put on your wall tomorrow to figure out who you actually are when you aren't on the clock? Because the longer you wait to find out, the less time you'll have to enjoy the person you become.
