Building a lifestyle business
Edition #073
Hey friends, I hope you're having a great Sunday!
Nothing much to share this week as I've been focused on building out my new project Creator Story, I will (hopefully) have the MVP to share with you next week.
I've also spent some time figuring out my plan moving forward with content.
I'm at a stage where I want to put more into each piece of content, that way I'm able to make sure that every time I publish it's because I have something worth saying vs rushing to create something to hit a deadline.
Moving forward I'm aiming to publish 1 (higher quality) video every 2 weeks. This way I am able to put the time needed into researching, writing, filming and editing each video while balancing WiseStudio + other ventures!
As always if you've found any interesting things this week then send them my way.
Alrighty, let's get into the Filter!
One Lesson
Building a lifestyle business
Recently I've been fascinated by how others work.
For the longest time I thought I had to be an operator, someone who is always full steam ahead taking action, talking to people and getting sh*t done.
Partly because I felt like I had something to prove and partly because that had delivered the mild success I've seen in my career so far.
But every time I did this two things would happen:
- I'd come to resent what I'm working on
- I'd spend a lot of time working on the wrong things
Over the last few months I've come to realise that I had my approach all wrong. I was trying to force something that didn't align with who I am or the life I want to live.
When I map out my ideal day it involves a lot of reading, thinking, building and focused work done in solitude, the complete opposite of being an operator – someone who thrives on working with others and always taking action.
Once I started to accept I'm not an operator I could focus on figuring out how I work best and tailor my work around that.
It became obvious that I need a couple projects to work on that have synergy, that way I'm able to keep things fresh and always have a slightly different challenge to work on.
Each project needs to be something I can focus on intensely for a period then come back to in a few days or weeks time and repeat.
So I started ideating what that would look like and I realised, yet again that what I was envisioning was the Full Stack Creator business model.
A business where you focus on code (building products and tools) and media (writing, creating videos etc). This type of business enables you to work in sprints, as code and media have little to no marginal cost of production – meaning that the amount of effort put into creating them will not change whether it reaches 10 or 10,000 people.
This realisation brought me back to the idea that ultimately businesses are a vehicle for change.
They enable you to change your life and your customers lives.
If you run your own business you might as well optimise for the lifestyle you want to live.
Two Ideas
I.
External solutions for internal problems don't exist
II.
“You could try to pound your head against the wall and think of original ideas or you can cheat by reading them in books.” – Patrick Collison
Three Favourite Finds
Flow: The Psychology of Happiness: You've probably heard about the concept of getting into a 'flow' state and experienced the benefits when you occasionally slip into one.
Recently I've been reading the book that introduced the concept of flow and it's been great so far – the author focuses a lot on the psychology behind entering a flow state and how you can use that intense focus to improve your quality of life.
The Nature of the Beast: How Emotions Guide Us: I’m enjoying this book on the neuroscience behind states like aggression and how they tie to our emotions. If you’re interested in how emotions guide our lives then this is a great science backed read. It’s also a super accessible, easy read.
My experiment in collecting rejection: Rejection hurts but it’s necessary to move forward. This article shares a great challenge of trying to collect 100 rejections in a year to get over the fear.
But as the author shows, when you put yourself out there it’s actually quite hard to hit the 100 mark because so many people say yes
End note
The Sunday Filter relies on word of mouth to reach more people, if you’re enjoying the newsletter I’d really appreciate you sending it to a friend or sharing on Twitter.
Have a fantastic week!
- Stephen