Saturday Success Series: Volume 20
Making life & money work for you.
Welcome back to the Saturday Success Series email!
In this edition we’ll have:
Five to Focus On: A quote, stock, book, show & a beer.
Master Yourself: Why you repeat bad patterns
Master Your Money: Skip the budget, do this instead
And of course…
The Weekly Special: How to Use the OODA Loop
The goal here is maximum value, so let’s get to it.
Oh, by the way, if you’re feeling generous, please share this newsletter with a friend.
Five to Focus on:
In a noisy world, it’s hard to know what’s good out there. Let me help.
Quote to ponder: “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.” - Richard Branson
Stock to consider: BETZ (Roundhill Sports Betting & iGaming ETF)
Designed to offer investors exposure to sports betting and iGaming industries.
Disclaimer- this is not financial advice, I am not a financial advisor, and you should always do your own research.
Book to read: Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell.
This has the look of a boring textbook from high school. It is anything but. Thomas does a fantastic job of breaking down the world’s discrimination and disparities using hard evidence. ‘Facts over feelings’ is a mantra we all need to get more comfortable with.
Show to enjoy: The Girl from Plainville on Hulu.
A sick story of a girl who prodded her boyfriend to kill himself. You probably heard of it. It’s drawn quite the opinions from the crowds on where to draw the legal lines of words and actions. The show itself is both well acted and well done.
Beer to sip: Julius from Tree House.
A world class IPA from a craft beer world famous, powerhouse of a brewery. People wait in hours long lines for Tree House’s new releases, so it’s safe to say they are trustworthy when it comes to your beer needs. I love how they say it will never tire the palate…they ain’t lyin.
Master Yourself
I go to an AA meeting with my girlfriend on the occasional Saturday morning. I’m not an alcoholic but I enjoy the message(s) and it’s an open meeting.
Anyway, a guy said something really simple but profound recently:
Pain has a short memory.
That’s why we repeat our mistakes over and over again. Our shitty patterns continue because we forget how bad it felt last time. We convince ourselves this time will be better, more fun, less painful.
That’s why when the pain starts fading you need to have something in place to remind you how you behave, who you are. AA works for drinkers. But if you’re not a drinker, you need a plan, a community, to help you stay on track.
Stop repeating shit cycles- drinking, drugging, bad partners, etc.
Stop forgetting how bad it hurt.
Create healthy habits and routines. Create a new lifestyle. Work a program for your life.
Master Your Money
You hear a lot about budgets being a fundamental part of your money strategy.
But, budgets are hard. Mainly because you’re not really in control of what costs what.
So, I didn't build us a budget.
Instead, I created a cash flow sheet.
What comes in, what goes out, how much we invest.
A simple snapshot that gives us all the info we need to do better.
This way if I feel like we’re spending too much on car insurance- we can shop it. Food bill awful high? Let’s see how we can adjust it.
It’s a much more realistic way to live.
Weekly Special:
How to Use the OODA Loop
The OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) Loop is a four-step process for making effective decisions in high-stakes situations.
It involves collecting relevant information, recognizing potential biases, deciding, and acting, then repeating the process with new information.
The OODA Loop was developed by military strategist and United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd, so you know it’s legit.
If we don’t communicate with the outside world — to gain information for knowledge and understanding — we die out to become a non-discerning and uninteresting part of that world. — John Boyd
Step 1: Observe
Our minds become an open system rather than a closed one as we observe and take into account new information about our evolving world, and we are able to acquire the insight and understanding needed to shape new mental models.
Step 2: Orient
This is the focal point of the Loop. This is where your current mental models live and you need to constantly destruct (destructive deduction) them so you can create (creative induction) new ones.
Step 3: Decide
Here’s where you decide among the alternatives you came up with in Step 2. Boyd puts ‘hypothesis’ next to this step because essentially we’re simply moving forward with our best educated guess.
Step 4: Act
Boyd also puts ‘test’ in hypothesis next to act. Act is self-explanatory but test is what lets us know this is a learning system. We try out what we thought of and we see if it works.
We gotta get an image or picture in our head, which we call orientation. Then we have to make a decision as to what we’re going to do, and then implement the decision. . . . Then we look at the [resulting] action, plus our observation, and we drag in new data, new orientation, new decision, new action, ad infinitum. — John Boyd
I used this early on in my new (at the time) role of onboarding specialist at work.
We had created a welcome email that I Observed wasn’t getting the traction with new members that I had hoped for.
So, next, I Oriented- I destructed all ideas I had about what typically works in our industry and started coming up with creative ways of thinking about this problem. Your standard email may have the body and then a link, right? So I started to think of what else I could do that wasn’t so boring.
This seamlessly led into the Decide portion of the Loop. I came up with 3 different welcome email styles and then compared and contrasted them until I went with the one I felt most strongly about. It included a PDF attachment, a link to a training video series and then a short body of verbiage giving login info along with a request for a call.
Then it was time to Act. This new email generated a 23% better response rate, which was incredible.
But the Loop never really ends. This email has been tweaked a dozen times over the last 15 months. Some things added (demo links), then some removed (extra wording), all being figured out since we test continuously.
Thanks for reading and if you found this valuable, please share with someone who could use it, see you next Saturday!