Tim Brady

At it again. It’s currently 5:25am on Tuesday, September 29th.

I’ve been talking a lot about weekly daily goals lately. Yesterday was another super productive day for me.

At this point, I finish in roughly two days what I took a full week before. I’m extremely happy with the progress.

What does that tell me? I was wasting a LOT of time.

So going through the whole weekly daily goals process actually makes it so that I take that wasted time and spend it doing something I enjoy.

Lately this has been hanging out with my wife and son. He’s moved out essentially but had some free time to come hang out lately.

So let’s cover what I’m going to focus on today.

Well I start with my daily forum check-in, action and post for a 21 day challenge. I’ve completed day 16 today.

Then I jump onto the blog and start the post for the day.

After this, I tackle my daily goals. Today I am going to finish up a video on research strategies. This one will be a re-watch with notes because it’s related specifically to financial copywriting research.

Additionally, I received an into video to a 30 day workshop that I joined that starts this week.

That will take about 10 hours of my normal study time each week. Working on that during lunches to offset the additional load.

I forgot about it as so much has changed in my work-life since I actually signed up. But it’s also financial specific, so I’m going to adjust my learning schedule to accommodate.

And finally, my current week of Rapid Learner unlocked. Since this is the course I’m going through to train my to learn better and more efficiently, it’s going to take some priority. (That’s where I heard about the whole weekly daily goals that are helping me so much.)

It’s early Monday morning on September 28th. Around 5:45 at this point. I’ve been up and at it for about forty-five minutes and this point and am finally getting to sit down to the blog.

So what does my Monday look like after a day of complete disconnect from work?

What I wrote down even before my blog post was my plan.

This week is going to be a deep dive into research. I tackle this with a two pronged approach.

The first is researching ideas and headlines. They’re tied very closely together. But how do you come up with ideas that can sell?

I read a lot of financial writing lately. So my aim throughout this week is to really work on my process for coming up with ideas.

But what if there are just gifted people out there that can pull them out of thin air?

I’m sure there are. But for every one of those, I believe there’s a process I can implement to get to my own solid ideas.

Later in the week I’m going to shift to the second type of research that I think is equally valuable for learning to write copy. It’s breaking down promotions.

I’ve written about this a bit before in my Swipe Surgeon article. But the last part of this week is going to be some dedicated practice towards it. Rather than my normal rate, I want to push myself to do 2 or 3 in only part of the week.

Why would I do this?

Partly because money loves speed. And pushing myself to do higher quality in less time is a skill that I want to build.

And here’s a hint – the skill is more likely a process… So I’ll be paying close attention to the steps and process of the breakdowns to try and refine it.

All of that will happen on top of my daily check-in with my forum buddies and my own writing here on the blog. Add to that a book I’d like to finish this week and one thing is clear.

It’s time to get to work. Until tomorrow.

“Then I’m going to be rich!”

That’s usually how the convo of the week ended with a friend of mine.

The convo itself almost always detailed some elaborate plan, which often defied logic and reason… and timeframes that were borderline comical.

But that didn’t stop him from coming up with ideas.

The problem with all the plans is that there was never enough execution.

I do believe you can do big things in sometimes comical timeframes. But things like that take the same levels of work behind them to make them happen.

I often tried to try and pull a next step… or even a realistic first step out of him when we had the conversations. But to date, nothings stuck.

So I found myself wondering why. And I now thing it has to do with payoffs.

Just think about it…

When he’s describing these elaborate plans to me, they sound exciting to him. In his mind, he’s experiencing some of the glory of doing the thing… just by talking about the thing.

That’s not my idea. It’s actually backed by research.

As a goal setter myself, I need to take this to heart.

So certain daily mottos might run along the lines of “Shut up and Work”. While it may seem crude if you think about saying that to someone else… saying it to yourself is just called motivation.

So are the plans all wasted? No. But you should be writing it down.

I’ve started using a blend of fixed-time and weekly-daily goals planning method to get through my week.

I was able to get more done in the 20 hours this week than I had in weeks before.

And I didn’t have to talk about it.

The weekly-daily goals keep me from trying to plan too far ahead. Because things change too quickly to know all the variables ahead of time. Do what you can. Write it down.

And. Get. To. Work.

Until tomorrow.

The market indicators have slipped from greed to neutral over this past week.

It’s starting to feel as if the volatility in the market to getting to be too much for some.

This is another reason why I have been looking more into dividends as a longer term growth strategy. When the goal is to buy and hold, dips can actually benefit your portfolio in some ways.

I like to think of it like Buffett’s punch card approach. If you could only invest 12 times in your life, what would you do?

That’s not to say you should only invest twelve times. It’s to say you should do enough research so that if you did only invest twelve times you would be able to survive in the market.

Research is particularly important in a volatile market like the current one.

It’s made even more difficult because some potential trends in a stock aren’t as closely tied to the company financials as they may have been in the past.

The ease of investing made available by investment apps. They even call it the “Robinhood effect”.

Research itself has (at least) two fronts that need to be taken into account. The first is the company financials. The second is your investment strategy.

I’ve been studying more of the strategy lately so I can better assess the companies that fit.

I’m trying to keep my focus narrow but deep at the moment. Strong focus on dividend stocks that can pay me over the long run.

I’ll start working to articulate more of these fundamentals in the future – as much to better my own understanding as anything.

Until tomorrow.

I recently finished a book by Marc Lichtenfeld called “Get Rich with Dividends”. It came as part of my membership in his Oxford Club Income Letter.

I don’t know much about investing. But it’s something I’ve been keen to learn recently.

Admittedly, I originally joined that letter because I wanted to learn a bit more about REIT investing. The promo at the time was focused on a specific REIT.

REIT is Real Estate Investing Trust.

It’s really opened my mind up to the different possibilities of investing. To date my strategy has just been to dump money into my 401k and get my company match.

But when COVID had the company halt the match, it was a wake-up call. I need to really own this part of my life.

Nobody cares as much as I do about my financial future… and my ability to care for and provide for my family financially.

And nobody is going to do this for me.

There are quite a few financial life changes that need to happen for me to provide for them the way I want to.

Yet the market has been chaotic lately.

I feel in times like these, it’s important to educate yourself on the fundamentals. By doing this you can make your own decisions instead of just parroting the most recent talking head.

So for me this means learning some more about different investing strategies. Then slowly and carefully putting my money where my mouth is.

This research and education is also helpful as I’m trying to learn to write in the financial publishing space as well.

So I’m going to start with dividends. After reading the book, I find the idea of dividend stocks extremely interesting. Also, since they tend to be more conservative it’s my hope that there’s less chance for me to burn myself early on.

Starting here can provide me a chance to learn to do research on companies and start getting comfortable phoning them and speaking with investor relations and the like.

I’m still up in the air on whether I’ll continue posting all that info here or spin off a different site from my freelancing site.

For now, I’m just continuing to build the habit of writing daily.

Until tomorrow.