Expensive Shit Thats Worth Every Penny
The Amplified Impact Podcast
August 27th, 2023
Last week, I sent out a tweet that caught fire in a way I never expected.
The tweet sparked two distinct reactions.
The majority embraced the message, seeing the value it offered.
However, there was also a group who couldn’t quite grasp the essence of my words.
It’s on me as maybe I could have expressed it better.
The tweet in question is…”Expensive shit that’s worth every single penny.”
Now, let me clarify. The items I listed intentionally carry hefty price tags.
They’re not for everyone at every stage of life. It’s taken me time as well to afford some of these luxuries.
But, let me tell you, this list is for those who value their time above all else.
They aren’t essentials…but they’re tools that can help you level up your lifestyle, making room for more meaningful experiences and freeing your mind from mundane tasks.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Start layering these [things] in over time and I think you will notice qualitative improvement in the output of your life, if that’s what you want.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
This post caused an absolute shitstorm. And I’m still kind of trying to I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. Last week I made a I made a tweet that went super, super viral. Did not expect it to. It wasn’t a it wasn’t it was not one of those posts that I put a lot of thought into. It wasn’t something it wasn’t like my magnum opus or anything like that. And sometimes that’s how these things go. When it comes to going viral is it’s almost never the thing that you think is going to be.
Anthony Vicino:
But for whatever reason, this one really hit a tone with people and it attracted two types of individuals. One who the vast majority, thankfully, were like, yes, this is awesome. This brought me a lot of value. And people understood the intent behind the message. And then there was the other group of people who very much did not appreciate the post and could not quite understand the message that was trying to be purveyed. And that’s on me. I should have done better. But I want to share that post with you because I think there’s a lot of value in how we think about spending our money.
Anthony Vicino:
That’s specifically what this is. The name of the post was expensive shit that’s worth every single penny. Now, the things that I listed on this post were intentionally expensive. They were things that cost a lot of money. And depending on where you are in your journey, you might not be able to afford them. In fact, it’s only been in recent years that I’ve been able to afford a lot of these things. So I understand that. I’m not saying that this is for everybody.
Anthony Vicino:
I’m saying that this is maybe something to aspire to and maybe scratch that, this isn’t even necessarily something to aspire to. If you’re trying to live your life in a particular way, then sure, these are things to aspire to. But the caveat here is this is for people who view the value of their time as being the most precious thing, and they want to maximize that, whereas a lot of people, they want to maximize for other things, like comfort or convenience. And I totally understand that. But this is not for those people. This is for people who are trying to squeeze as much juice out of themselves as possible. Not saying like hustle porn culture type of like, I’ve got to be the best and get every ounce of potential out of myself. It’s not that.
Anthony Vicino:
It’s just saying I want to free up my time so I can spend my time where I want with who I want, when I want to on the things that I want to. And these things I found to be very, very helpful on that path. And so the list includes a personal assistant. So this is the list of expensive shit that’s worth every single penny. A personal assistant, which I get that’s probably the most expensive one on this list, and yet it’s also the one that has the potentially the highest ROI. For myself, it wasn’t until very, very recently, in the last few years, that I got a Personal assistant. And what I found was that they’re not as expensive as you think, especially because a lot of the things that you rely on a Personal Assistant for, you could outsource to a VA somebody working internationally. My assistant is in the Philippines, and so you don’t need to have them present living in your building or in your office every single day for them to be very helpful and take a lot of the things off.
Anthony Vicino:
Of your plate that are not good high uses of your time and that frees you up to then spend your time on the things that are very high value. And I’m not saying that you’re only spending your time on the things that make you money. I’m saying maybe they’re freeing up your time so you can spend it more with your kids or your family or going on trips and pursuing the things that fill you with joy in life. But I found that a Personal Assistant can be a very powerful tool, and it’s more affordable than I think a lot of people realize. For myself for myself, I don’t want to talk about that side of things. But I think for most people, you could probably do with a part time Personal Assistant, and you could be paying, I don’t know, anywhere, depending on if they wanted them local versus you’re working internationally, you could be paying anywhere between, like, ten and 25, $30 an hour, depending depending, right? That’s not that bad for a lot of people, especially if your hourly wage is, say, $50 an hour and you can afford to pay somebody 15. That leaves a whole lot of delta for you to keep working and spend that time better. So Personal Assistant is number one expensive thing that’s worth every single penny.
Anthony Vicino:
Number two is a meal prep service or a chef. Now, this one got a lot of flak. People are like, you’re crazy if you think that that one can be very expensive. I was surprised. A few months ago, Jamie and I, we started researching meal prep services and personal chefs. Like, what would it cost to have somebody come do all the grocery shopping, come in and cook and create all the meals for us for the week? And I was blown away. It was actually a lot cheaper than I thought it would be. Not to say that it’s cheap by any means, but if you look at how much you spend on groceries or eating out per month, for a lot of people, that’s nearly $1,000 a month.
Anthony Vicino:
And you can get by with a meal prep service, that’s 600, 700, $800 a month, which is about what you would pay for groceries and eating out and so if you can just kind of change your approach to this. But the real value of the meal prep is that one, it makes it easier to eat healthy consistently, and two, it frees up all the time that you’d be wasting going grocery shopping or cleaning dishes or preparing the meals. And that, I think, is worth every single penny. Next is house cleaning. Now, we hired a cleaning service to come to our house twice a month. That’s a couple of $100 each time. Totally worth it because now I don’t have to worry about doing the deep clean every couple of weeks. I can just live between cleanings and then in the interim, we just do little spot cleanings.
Anthony Vicino:
And I find that to be very valuable because I don’t enjoy cleaning the house, neither does Jamie. And so why spend our time doing things that we don’t like when we can just spend a couple hundred dollars, have somebody come do it for us? We live in a nice clean home and I believe that a clean home. What do they say? A messy house, messy mind. And I find this one to be very, very valuable. And again, it’s all about maximizing for freedom of time and maximizing for freedom of thought. I think not having to take mental bandwidth and put it towards what am I going to eat or when am I going to clean, or like all these things. I think that’s very, very valuable. Next up is the personal trainer.
Anthony Vicino:
A personal trainer. I started working with one about a year ago. And it’s been very helpful for me because not because I don’t know what to do or I don’t have the ability to hold myself accountable, but just because it’s having that next layer of accountability and having it just a little bit easier to have my workout program to go into the gym and know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. So again, it frees up cognitive bandwidth. It’s stuff that I don’t have to think about, I don’t have to put any energy into it. I just take the workout, I go and I do it and then I report back. And so those two things, just cognitive bandwidth, freeing it up and then just that little layer of accountability, I find massively helpful in terms of getting me to pursue my goals with just that little bit more fervor. Personal Trainer and they’re not that expensive in the grand scheme of things, I think you could probably you don’t need them.
Anthony Vicino:
My personal trainer is not local to me. We have a phone call once a week. He puts together all my programming, he sends it over to me and I just go into the gym and I do it. And so you could do the same thing. That could be a couple of month that you pay somebody to do that. It’s not very much at all. The next two actually on this list of expensive shit that’s totally worth every penny. It got a lot of pushback.
Anthony Vicino:
People are really lit into me on these two. One is tailored clothing, and the other is a personal stylist. Now, the personal stylist is a funny one because this is not a recurring charge. I spent, like, $300 for a two hour consult with somebody one time for them just to help me understand my aesthetic and how I can work with my features and the styles that I like so that I can look good. I can feel confident in my skin without needing to spend billions of dollars of having somebody to put together my wardrobe. And so a lot of people push back on this. And what I find really interesting is the majority of people who push back on the idea of hiring somebody to help them with their wardrobe and their style, they fell into almost across the board. I would go and I’d look at each one of their profiles.
Anthony Vicino:
I’d look at their instagram across the board. The people who are like, oh, this guy doesn’t even know how to dress himself. Or if somebody else has to put together your style, then you have no style. I got those comments a lot. It’s crazy. When I go and I look at these people’s instagrams or I look at their accounts, these are people wearing like, they look like children, the way that they dress, and they don’t even realize it. And I think people don’t realize that based on how you dress is how people will treat you. So if you dress like a middle manager who works in a cubicle all day, that’s how people are going to treat you.
Anthony Vicino:
If you dress like a child, wearing graphic T shirts that don’t fit, and khaki beige cargo shorts that are too big, people are going to treat you, and they’re not going to treat you serious. That’s just how it is. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but it is what it is. So I just found it really funny that a lot of the people who say they don’t need they know how to dress themselves, they have great style, are actually the people, I think, that have some of the worst style. So just interesting correlation. Maybe the Dunning Kruger effect in real time. Now, the tailored clothing, this one got a little bit of flak because people thought I was saying, like, go and spending tens of thousands of dollars on custom bespoke clothing. And that’s not what I’m talking about.
Anthony Vicino:
What I’m talking about is buying clothes off the rack. Not super expensive clothes, but nice clothes, maybe that are made of good materials and put together well. And then just taking those clothes to a tailor to have them tailored to you, to your specific body needs. And that’s not super expensive. Like for an article of clothing, on average, you’re going to spend maybe 20, $30 to bring in the sides, hem it a little bit, make sure that you don’t have the pants too long or the shoulders sit just right on your shirt, all those things. It’s like 20 $30 per article of clothing. Most guys only own 25 articles of clothing. So right there you’re talking about like 500, $600 for your wardrobe.
Anthony Vicino:
And the result is that your clothes are going to fit better, you’re going to feel better as a result, and you’re going to look damn good. And it’s just an easy way to elevate your style in a way that doesn’t cost a ton of money. But it is on this list of expensive shit. Because when I think about expensive shit, like how I talked about it here, is that these are things that you don’t need, but they sure are nice to have because they sure do help. So I’m not saying they’re like, get rid of all your basic necessities, but these are definitely helpful. The next thing on the list was an eight sleep mattress. This is something that Jamie and I bought about a year and a half ago. And it’s just a cooling mattress.
Anthony Vicino:
It’s a mattress that keeps you cool at night so that it regulates your body temperature. You don’t get hot and sweaty. And then it works with your circadian rhythm so that your body temperature stays cool throughout the night, and then it starts to wake you up in the morning. Honestly, it’s my favorite favorite thing I own. I sleep fantastically because of that thing. And it’s expensive. I’m not going to sugarcoat that one. It’s a couple of $1,000, but you could take it out on financing terms with a firm for 0% for like twelve months.
Anthony Vicino:
And so you end up making like $80 payments or something like that per month. That’s not too bad. But at the end of the day, when I look at the price of what’s the price of a good night’s sleep, I say there is no price that’s too high for me to pay. That a good night’s sleep is everything. When I sleep well, life changes for the better. The last one on this list is potentially the reason the whole thing went viral in the first place. I never knew people had such a strong love and hatred for Dyson vacuum cleaners. I put Dyson on here because Jamie and I, we bought a Dyson a couple of years ago.
Anthony Vicino:
We have two cats and a dog that they shed like you wouldn’t believe. And we bought a Cordless Dyson vacuum cleaner a couple of years ago that changed our life because now we can easily spot, clean and get the furballs. And it was a game changer for us. We love that vacuum. So I put it on here almost as like, kind of a throwaway joke, because I was like, a vacuum cleaner? Like expensive shit worth spending money on a vacuum cleaner. Turns out there are two camps of people. There are people who love their Dyson and there are people who freaking hate Dyson. Everybody, it seemed like, had a strong opinion on vacuum cleaners.
Anthony Vicino:
At the end of the day, I don’t care. I don’t care about the brand. This wasn’t really like a pitch for Dyson. This was just a pitch for having a good, easily accessible vacuum cleaner that you can spot clean with. I don’t know, there’s something about it that has just made our life really good, way better for such a small investment. And so I wanted to share it because it seemed like, I don’t know, it’s frivolous. And yet people went bonkers for that one. I don’t know why.
Anthony Vicino:
But as a result, this post got it just went super viral in a way that it’s my most viral tweet of all time. And part of me hates that reality, but it is what it is. So hopefully this brings you guys a little bit of value, maybe a new way to think about things that you’re spending money on. And again, this isn’t like, go out and buy these things tomorrow. Don’t get rid of the base needs or anything like that, but start layering these in over time and I think you will notice qualitative improvement in the output of your life, if that’s what you want. If it’s not, then don’t keep doing what you’re doing. So that’s going to do it for me, folks. I will see you back around these parts tomorrow.
Anthony Vicino:
Until then, stay hyper focused.
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