Each and every Friday — I outline a few of the articles and/or books that I have read over the last week or two that are worth taking a look at.
Money Unmasked: Unlearn, Unlock, and Take Back Control of Your Finances and Life By Garrett Gunderson
THE WORLD HAS CHANGED.
THE ANTIQUATED CONCEPTS of money, savings, and retirement are no longer valid. Tired advice―such as diversify; set it and forget it; and invest early, often, and always―has been tried, and it has failed. Rather than scrimping and saving or grinding and hustling while you wait for “someday” to come, you need a radically different and reliable approach to creating an exciting and compelling future without compromise.
In Money Unmasked, Garrett Gunderson unveils the truth about making, keeping, and growing your money while enjoying life along the way. By tapping into your Money Persona, you see beyond the constraints of scarcity to accelerate results, reduce risk, have more energy, and start making better financial decisions. Rather than trade time for money, or speculate and take risks, you will learn how to plug financial leaks, tap into hidden capital, and leverage the Cycle of Creation to profit up front and generate immediate cash flow.
If you are ready to fully understand money, create wealth, and live a life you don’t want to retire from, it’s time for Money Unmasked.
Go here to get a copy of this great book: https://a.co/d/dgTjIch
Marcus Aurelius: Action by Action
The prevalent self-help advice in the context of comparisons is, well, “Don’t compare yourself to others”. And while well-intentioned, I don’t think this strategy is possible & sustainable — as I’ll explain next. The right approach, instead of trying to not compare, is to learn how to compare — such that, your mental health is not negatively impacted, but rather benefitted from the mental habits of comparisons.
“Don’t compare yourself to others” is B.S. Instead, try to tame your instinct to compare.
Studies show that social media comparisons can negatively impact one’s well-being. No surprise there. In response to the issue, the common self-help advice is “Don’t compare yourself to others.” But cognitively speaking, that isn’t possible.
Comparative thinking is not just an unwanted, useless tendency of our brains. It lies at the core of our social cognition. A study titled “Brain Mechanisms of Social Comparison and Their Influence on the Reward System” says —
Countless social psychological experiments have shown that comparative thinking plays a ubiquitous role in person’s perception and social cognition as a whole.
A “ubiquitous” role. That means it’s present everywhere. Even the most basic human judgments are comparative by nature, even if they may not appear so. For instance, when you say you’re “tall”, you’re actually making a comparison. You’re saying something like “I’m taller than the average for my age and gender.”
Go here to finish reading this post: https://medium.com/personal-growth/marcus-aurelius-the-action-test-e1b202b15a64
The Ski Slope Strategy: How I Made $100,000 Per Month (With A 5-Person Content Team)
This strategy is not ideal for all businesses.
It is designed for aggressive content marketers who want consistent AND scalable traffic.
Backlinks, SEO, organic traffic… they are all important factors to focus on for long term growth.
But nothing beats a content system with compounding traffic, that delivers consistent customers day after day.
Ask any content marketer or SEO how to get bulk organic traffic to your website, and they’ll tell you this:
- Find link-worthy content (content that’s already generated a lot of links.)
- Make something even better (longer, more up-to-date, better designed.)
- Do link building to get it to rank on the first page of Google (email site owners that have already linked to similar content.)
That’s an old strategy from 2013.
The competition for content is so fierce now, you could link build for months and never see results. And even if you do get it to work, you have no clear strategy for how to get that traffic to convert into sales.
We Used The Ski Slope Strategy To Drive 1.7 Million Free Clicks, 133,435 Leads And 1,070 New Recurring Revenue Customers In 12 Months
For the last year I’ve worked with one of the leading SaaS companies. 12 months after executing “The Ski Slope Strategy”, we drove 1,942,129 traffic to the blog. 1,718,798 of that was free traffic.
Go here to finish reading: https://contentmavericks.com/ski-slope-strategy/
Creating a Slower Holiday Season
We’re in the midst of the holiday season, and with that can come a lot of abundance:
- Busier schedules, holiday parties, travel
- More eating, more drinking, more excess
- More shopping, more spending, more financial stress
It’s a beautiful season, but it can be a lot!
In this article, I’m going to share some thoughts on creating a slower holiday season.
Imagine a season of reflection and slowing down. A season of connecting with others but also finding solitude. A season of festivities but also quiet. A season where you increase your resilience instead of burning out.
That’s what we’re looking at here!
Slowing Down the Excess
Often the holidays are a season of eating more, drinking more, shopping and spending more. People tend to gain weight during the holiday season, and gain debt as well.
This kind of excess has a big toll on our systems — it adds to our already high stress load. Getting really full from holiday gatherings, drinking too much — it adds to our exhaustion.
What if it didn’t have to be this way?
Consider the following possibilities:
- Cut back on junk food when you’re not at a family gathering. On a day-to-day basis, what if you cut back on sugar, things made with flour, and fried foods? Focus on whole foods, like fruits, veggies, beans, whole grains. This creates a more resilient body, so that we can afford to splurge a bit when we come together to celebrate. Eat that extra slice of pie at the party, because you haven’t been overdoing it the rest of the month.
- Cut back on alcohol as well. I don’t think alcohol is evil, but we definitely don’t need to drink every day. What if you eliminated alcohol on most days, just having a drink or two when you got together with loved ones? Your body would be more resilient.
- Cut back on shopping. I love gift giving, but the excess consumerism is not healthy for the budget, and all the shopping is stressful. What if you talked to your family and agreed to give experience gifts (a picnic date, a cycling date, a reading date, a hike in the mountains) or consumable gifts (homemade chocolate chip cookies, etc.)? You’d spend less, contribute less to the huge waste created in the season, and not add to people’s clutter.
- Exercise moderately, and reduce stress. It will add to your resilience if you exercise most days, but don’t go all out. If you’re overdoing the exercise, you’ll be adding to your stress. So go slow with the exercise, but don’t neglect it, because it reduces stress overall. Similarly, remove things from your calendar and task list, and do what you need to do to take care of yourself and breathe.
These ideas all add up to less excess and less stress. They add to your overall resilience.
Go here to finish reading: https://zenhabits.net/slower-holiday/
Hope you enjoy these articles and books. Have a great rest of your Friday an amazing weekend!