Saturday Success: guilt & regret, your any economy plan & 3 next level writing ideas
Making life & money work for you.
Welcome back to the Saturday Success Series email!
This week we have:
Master Yourself: Meet Guilt & Regret, your new best friends
Master Your Money: Your 5 part any economy plan
The Weekly Special: How to Write Better: 3 Next Level Ideas
The goal here is maximum value, so let’s get to it.
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Master Yourself
Ever been wrong before?
I have!
I used to think guilt and regret were useless emotions that served no purpose.
But I’ve recently rethought that.
There’s no reason to hate and shy away from our ‘negative’ feelings.
Your feelings are your friends- if you handle them right.
Here are my new thoughts on guilt and regret:
Guilt happens when you do something that doesn’t align with your values.
You made a mistake. You should learn from that.
Regret happens when you make the wrong decision and live with the consequences.
You messed up. You should learn from that.
The idea is to use your feelings to reflect on the message they’re sending.
Feelings are here to give us feedback. They’re trying to tell us something. And we can use that.
So, welcome guilt and regret as learning opportunities.
Sure, they suck. But it’s a chance to get better. May as well use the suck to build the great.
Master Your Money
Making money and building wealth is a 3 part game:
Earn it
Keep it
Grow it
And while it feels like the plan needs to change dramatically in times of recession vs. free flowing cash, it doesn’t.
Stick to the basics and adjust in small increments depending on the environment.
DO: Keep your emergency fund intact
Decide an amount you need in cash. We use 6 months of expenses as our goal post.
You can do 3 months or even 12 months.
If you already have your fund, keep it intact. If you don’t, it’s your job to build your emergency fund asap.
Get a second job or a roommate if you have to. Yes, I understand there’s economic difficulty in ways there never was for our parents.
Your brain may default into excuse mode but understand you can either make excuses or progress. Your choice.
DO: Build positive cash flow
This boils down to reducing expenses and focusing on building/nurturing new income streams.
Over the past 10 years I’ve built these income streams:
9–5 job
Writing
Affiliate marketing
Real estate
Dividends
And most recently a second flexible part time job for a startup. The average millionaire has 7 income streams. I just hit 6.
Was it hard? Yes, but not as hard as you’d think. The biggest component was showing up consistently.
And cutting costs comes down to shopping insurance, buying less house than you need, getting a roommate, buying used vs. new, etc.
DO: Buy assets regularly
Whether the market is up, down, sideways- diversify and keep buying.
I haven’t stopped buying stocks even when the market was dropping daily. I haven’t stopped investing in real estate even as the market has gone wild with interest rates.
People who are scared off of dropping markets tend to only buy when prices are high. Which means they miss the deals.
Yes, it’s psychologically difficult to buy when the roof is caving in. But, it’s how you make money long term.
DON’T: Overextend yourself
If you don’t have an emergency fund, don’t start investing big money.
If you don’t have a lot of incoming cash, stop spending so much.
Buy now, pay later? Nope.
People get themselves in a lot of trouble by overextending themselves.
They buy too much, too much car, too many new electronics, and on and on.
It’s the fastest way to end up broke and struggling.
DON’T: Overleverage into any one position
A lot of folks learned this the hard way in crypto this past year.
No, you shouldn’t put your life savings into a single coin or stock or rental property.
For some people, going all in works out great. But for every one of those stories there are a million you don’t hear because ‘survivor bias’ is real.
Weekly Special
How to Write Better
Writing is violent work.
Not physically violent (for the most part), so let me not be overly dramatic about it. But violent nonetheless.
And writing important stuff, frequently and well, is ridiculously tough. It requires a lot out of you.
Pretty much everything has already been said. By many people. In many ways. Humans aren’t really original. We’re social creatures. We parrot things we’ve already read and seen.
But still. There are unique ways to reframe common ideas.
So peel back your layers. Rough yourself up. Let us see under your skull and inside your ribcage.
My first idea On Writing: be willing to bleed for your work.
If writing great content were easy, everyone would be doing it. And not everyone is. Not even very many people are actually. Sure, a lot are writing, but not a lot of great stuff.
Look to everything for inspiration. Literally, everything.
And to inspire some real writing go have a unique (to you) experience. Start doing cool shit and then write about it. That’s one of the easiest ways to never run dry of ideas.
Get your heart broken. Get some big wins under your belt. Try talking to people you normally wouldn’t. Fail in major ways. Embarrass yourself. Then tell us all about it.
My second idea On Writing: do things, see things, deconstruct things and then write about it.
Treat writing like a job, not a hobby.
I don’t feel like writing every day, but I do it. I don’t always have anything to really say, but I keep writing it.
You’re not alone in your inability to write top notch stuff daily. But notice, you don’t always talk about quality stuff either, yet you speak every day. So write, every day.
It doesn’t need to be great every day but it needs to get done every day.
You want to write things that will mean something today and a year from today or 10 years from today. Timeless pieces are what you should be chasing.
I want to write things that I can show my nieces and nephews and my kids and their kids and be like, here, this shit is still relevant, learn from it.
My third idea On Writing: writing is not a passion, it’s a purpose.
‘On Writing’ Recap:
Be willing to bleed for your work
Deconstruct life and write about it
Purpose, not passion
Bottom line?
Consistency beats virality.
Don’t seek one hit wonders.
Build a timeless library.
Thanks for reading! If you found this valuable, please share with someone who could use it. See you next Saturday!
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