What You Need to Knowledge Up

Time to start!

Let’s go from zero to one. You can’t run until you take your first step.

Every week I provide you with a short curated list of ways to increase your knowledge around topics like:

→ marketing
→ writing
→ personal finance
→ side hustles
→ habits & productivity

Fleeting Thoughts on Leadership

Author and habit-enthusiast James Clear recently shared in his fantastic 3-2-1 weekly newsletter a very brief guide to leadership.

It’s 4 lines, and 4 sentences: brief, indeed. Although compelling in its brevity, I wanted to share my thoughts.

A brief guide to leadership from James Clear, with my expanded thoughts:

• Always know the answer to, “What are we optimizing for?”
  Should you always be optimizing? Absolutely—in business and in life. The business case is simple: leaders provide value to their organizations by optimizing functions to get the most out of time and money spent. Your personal life should be optimized for things you value most. So a small tweak: “What am I optimizing my life for?” is a quick gut check to ensure the things you are doing are getting you towards your personal goals.

• Recruit. Recruit. Recruit.
  The first thing that comes to mind here is Tim Ferriss’ popular 4-Day Work Week. He says that everything you do as a business leader needs to be automated, delegated, or eliminated. Recruiting effectively will help you automate the right things, delegate the time-consuming things, and eliminate the unnecessary things. ABR: Always Be Recruiting.

• Never ask someone to do something you aren’t willing to do yourself.
  The key here is “willing to do”. Leaders aren’t always specialists. Nor can they specialize in everything necessary to build a profitable business. But they need to be willing to tackle what’s needed to keep the business moving. When asking someone to tackle a task or project, put yourself in their shoes, be humble, and provide support.

• Give away the credit. Take the blame.
  Jocko Willink’s motto of Extreme Ownership comes to mind. Leaders need to be willing to have the finger pointed at them. Always. For everything. And just as importantly, they need to be the ones deflecting credit and generously giving it away to the rest of their team. Leadership is not about you. It’s not about your ego. It’s about moving your business and your team forward in an effort of continuous improvement every day.

TIME TO START

January is two thirds over, so start moving. You promised yourself this was going to be the year you…
→ started writing
→ started a business
→ started excelling

So let’s get started with these resources below!

📚 Write your first book
Have you ever considered writing a non-fiction book? Lots of #moneytwitter is all about the ebook, but this is not what we’re talking about. Either way, it’s time to divorce your imposter syndrome and start writing—and let Scribe Book School show you how for FREE.

🏢 Start a Business
You’re eager, motivated, and naïve—the perfect emotional cocktail to start a business! But like so many, you don’t have any business ideas. Check out this list of 52 business ideas you can start for under $1,000 from Starter Story.

💰 Start a Side Hustle
Everyone and their grandma is selling with affiliate links on Amazon, but this strategy requires arguably less time with more potential: selling Blank Books with Amazon KDP. Create your own blank books like journals, logs, sketchbooks with Income Cure’s Prints That Profit course. All you do is create a simple cover, upload it to KDP, optimize some keywords, and watch the sales roll in.

✅ Start Getting Customers
It doesn’t matter how many opens your emails are getting if nobody’s clicking that CTA. Check out (and swipe) Copyblogger’s list of 20 CTA examples that they claim will “create instant leads”.

🙌 Start Being Great
I really love what Steph Smith (@stephsmithio) has done with this site “Make Yourself Great Again.” It’s full of tools she’s personally built for productivity and personal improvement. Check it out 👉 https://begreat.me/tools

That’s it from me this week. See you back here next week. Thanks for reading until the end. You might be the only one. Which means you are truly special.

One question for you: what’s your biggest obstacle in achieving success right now?