Start by pretending
Howdy folks, I’ve had my metal detector out this week searching all over the internet for precious metals, you can find my haul below.
Start by pretending
Everything clicked in my freelance business when I realised all I had to do to get better clients was act like the freelancer who deserved better clients.
Through pretending to be that freelancer, I eventually became them.
If you truly want something, the path to getting it is simple.
Find someone doing what you want to do and model their behaviour. Pretend to be a professional and with enough time you’ll become one.
Start now. Don’t wait for inspiration, act in anticipation of it.
As Steven Pressfield said in Turning Pro “The sure sign of an amateur is he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow.”
1. How Much Lifestyle Creep is Okay? [The Definitive Guide]: When more money comes in, more money goes out. Improving your lifestyle as you earn more money is frowned upon in the personal finance world, but what's the point in earning more if you can't use it anytime soon?
Nick Maggiulli does a good job of breaking down how much you should save and how much you should spend on inflating your lifestyle when you earn more.
2. Ai Made this Vlog: If you're concerned about Ai this vlog from Casey Neistat should help you feel better. This whole vlog was scripted by AI and it sucks. AI might be able to replace a lot of things but there will always be room for personality.
3. Taking advantage of tax free money: This is a great breakdown of how you can utilise the Stocks & Shares ISA (in the UK) to accumulate £1.7 million in tax-free cash. It's nice to find UK specific finance advice because typically I find myself reading US resources then trying to translate that to the UK.
4. Make images infinitely scalable: This image vectorising tool is incredible. It allows you to take normal images and transform them into vectors. The benefit of this is that vectors can be easily edited and are infinitely scalable.
This thread does a great job of showing how you can use this with midjourney to implement on the web.
5. Why don’t you hire an assistant?: In this post Austin Kleon shares the interesting reason he hasn't hired an assistant to help him. Ultimately it comes down to not over optimising creative work, because if you do you'll eventually come to resent it.
6. A healthy amount of inferiority:
"A healthy feeling of inferiority is not something that comes from comparing oneself to others, but from one’s comparison with one’s ideal self." — The courage to be disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
7. Building an entire web app without knowing how to code: It's insane that we live in a world where you can now build web apps without knowing how to code. All you have to do is feed in the right prompts. I feel like this makes learning to code even more valuable because even average coders can become 10x developers armed with Ai.
8. Improving your craft:
The uncomfortable part of trying to improve your craft is that it forces you to confront the fact that your best is not that good yet.
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Have a fantastic week!
- Stephen