Unlock Your Potential: How Defying Conventional Wisdom Leads to Unprecedented Success | With Paco de Leon

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 244

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, welcome. Thank you for giving the show a chance.

You're in the right place right now. If you're passionate about what you do, you want to earn more money and you want to do it without selling your soul. If that is you, you're in the right place. And if you're watching on YouTube, you already know this, but there's a sign behind me that says, it takes more than passion. I talk about this on the time on the show, but it's worth reminding people because I believe we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. As creatives, we are usually passion driven. We're passion led about what we do. But if we're trying to earn more, if we're trying to make this our living, it takes more than just passion. So I like to bring on guests on here who have taken that to heart. They've built their entire business around both passion and business. And I think our guest today is a wonderful example of doing just that. Our guest is Paco de Leon.

She is a author of the book, Finance for the People. She's the host of an iHeartRadio podcast called Weird Finance. She is a public speaker. She has a Ted Talk. She's the founder of a group of companies called The Hell Yeah Group. And she has taken her actual non-creative skills in finance and blended them with her creative skills and her passion. It's a really interesting business in one of the most uninteresting spaces.

And we'll dive into what all that means, but she's taken something that is just dominated by the most boring businesses possible on earth. And she has set herself up to be incredibly interesting. Something that's so interesting that she's been featured on New York Times, Forbes, Business Insider, NPR, Vice, Bloomberg, a bunch of other things, Good Morning America, because she's gone against the norm. She's used her creativity, her ingenuity and her business sense to create something that is really successful. And she's done a wonderful job of building her personal brand in a way that sets her apart from all the other people. So in our discussion today, Paco talks about how she sets herself apart from all the other businesses in her industry. She talks about how she gets clients, the unique ways that she's doing that. And she even talks about how she's accomplished all that she's accomplished so far in her life, even though she's lazy. So without further delay, here is my conversation with Paco de Leon.

Paco, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Paco de Leon (2:23)

Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Hood (2:25)

I've already mentioned a lot of the stuff in the intro, but you've got a pretty cool group of businesses, I guess just one business with a bunch of wings going on called The Hell Yeah Group, which is the best name of all time, and I'm gonna fit the word hell yeah into this interview as much as I possibly can.

And when I got the request for you to come on the show, it was a hell yes. If it's a hell yes when a guest is pitched to us, which is very rare, I have to have you on the show, so I'm glad you were able to make it today.

Paco de Leon (2:46)

Thank you, I'm flattered for the hell yes.

Brian Hood (2:48)

Yes, but I actually wanna start, what would you consider yourself an expert at? That's what I wanna know at before I even start anything here.

Paco de Leon (2:54)

I'm an expert at helping people with their personal finances. I have a finance degree, I study financial planning, I worked as a financial planner at a investment management firm.

So I have both the academic and the practical experience, and by now I've talked to like thousands of people and tried to understand what they're dealing with. And there's two pieces, right? There's the practical and then there's the psychological emotional piece. I love both of those worlds and to me making progress is like pedaling a bike, where you do have to make progress on the practical side and you do have to make progress on the like emotional psychological side. So that's why I love those two pieces. You can't have one without the other. Can't just dream your way into a better financial life, but oftentimes we don't know why we're holding ourselves back or why we don't act in our best interest. So I would say I'm an expert in that and I've gotten pretty damn good at business and I've been having a great time frankly along the way is I never thought I'd enjoy working for myself so much. I thought, boy, it's a lot of responsibility. I don't know if I'm the guy for that, but it turns out I'm totally the guy for that.