General

I just finished up a 21-day challenge of sorts.

It was simple. All I needed to do was log in the forum, read some content and write down some thoughts about it.

It’s another example of the small habits. I’m going right into a 30-day challenge for myself that’s a bit more extensive.

I’m going to leverage the habits I’ve been working on there to go deep writing financial copy specifically.

I’m going to spend each day practicing and writing content that could be used for clients. On spec. My goal is to get good.

In fact – I’m going to spend more of my morning today away from the computer hand writing some ads.

Until tomorrow.

I slacked a little from my plan last week.

It was worth it.

Sure I could use an excuse like work was hard. I was mentally exhausted when it game time to get to work.

But that wasn’t it at all.

I chose to spend the weekend hanging out with my family.

With the kids getting older and one essentially not living with us anymore… It was welcome even for my son to come back and stay the weekend.

So when Saturday rolled around and I had 5 more hours or work to knock out last week… I just chose to balance.

And even though I didn’t get as far as I wanted in my studies and my practice last week for writing copy… I still got a lot done.

I got a lot done before more than half of my study time is daily and before work. Time nobody tends to interrupt.

I currently put in about 13-14 hours a day of work and study during a weekday. Since I also try to get my sleep… it doesn’t leave much time to do other things.

Now when opportunities present themselves that aren’t normally there… you should take them.

This morning I’m going to tackle what I put on hold over the weekend and get back on track. I’ve got some road-time later this week so I can do some catching up then.

Now I’m off to study some advertorials. Until tomorrow.

Part of my morning routine is listening to an audiobook.

Recently I started “Thou Shall Prosper” and I’m rather shocked in many ways how much negativity towards business pervades our lives.

So much of it is below the surface. I’ve mentioned presuppositions in other posts and many times the negative context lies in those presuppositions.

A quick way of understanding what a presupposition is to think of “what is taken for granted” in a saying.

But sometimes it’s just blatant.

For instance – more films show business tycoons as the bad guy than the hero. I can’t often think of many that show the business person as the hero.

Lately I’ve started watching the Blacklist again. In this show one of the stars is Red. Now Red is on the good guys team – but he’s also on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list. He’s a criminal now working for the good guys.

That’s just one example. There are many more that just make the business person the bad guy and nothing more.

However, those are the more obvious examples.

Some of the more subtle examples is in the way we talk. Below the surface as I mentioned before.

Let’s look at an example from the book.

Companies often want to “give back” to the community. There are certain presuppositions that go into “giving back”.

There’s a phrase often associated with giving that is “give and take” so when we hear “giving back” it’s very natural to assume that something was “taken”.

So the presupposition for companies giving back to communities is that they’ve taken from communities. I would even go as far to say that in situations like this companies feel they’ve taken more than they’ve given. And so they feel the need to give back to the community.

Before I get too far down the rabbit hole here. I’m about at time for my morning.

What this presupposition seems to miss is that businesses have already given so much to a community.

Their services.

The jobs they have created.

The boost to local economy.

But too often business seems to get the bad wrap. As if wanting to be in business and start a business is somehow immoral.

It’s something that’s ingrained deep in our society and until we’re able to break the automatic programming in our thoughts and language – we are going to be struggling to be successful in business ourselves.

Alright. More tomorrow.

Yesterday I started reading “Technical Analysis for dummies” by Barbara Rockefeller.

Now technical analysis takes a different approach to investing than fundamental analysis. But I think it’s valuable to understand both sides of the coin.

I also think it’s important to understand they are both analysis and even if you want to be a technical trader, fundamentals matter. Is the opposite true? I think understanding what you see on the stock charts could be useful even if you don’t act on it.

But overall, it got me thinking a bit about strategy.

Now to be clear – I don’t know if this makes sense as I’m just learning.

But one lesson that comes up over and over again is diversify.

Yet, it seems in many ways there’s a lack of diversity in strategy.

If diversification helped, wouldn’t diversifying your investment strategies help as well? Now this may sound naive.

But stick with me a moment.

I’m not saying don’t have a strategy.

In “What Investors Really Want”, Meir Statman writes about having different mental accounts for money.

Wouldn’t it be possible to have different mental sub-accounts within a larger capital mental account? And couldn’t you then apply different strategies to those accounts?

I genuinely don’t know the answer to these questions.

But I suspect one response might be that it would take a lot of money or time to truly manage two separate strategies (much less more).

Time probably trumps money too. With time often being the limiting factor as a solo investor.

The market moves so quickly and any strategy is likely to have a fixed time cost to implement.

Dedicating yourself to more than one will likely take more time than you can give to a task before it become irrelevant.

That perhaps starts the search for tools to help speed up the different processes.

For now, back to work. Until tomorrow.

It appears we live in a culture that’s much less understanding than it was before. I suppose that feels rather silly because we pride ourselves on being more informed.

In many ways, that seems a poor trade-off.

So I’m tired this morning because. I strayed from my routine to watch the first Presidential debate last night. I didn’t really get anything from it except they were both extremely rude to each other.

This polarization of both sides in the recent years has earned us a situation like this.

I had a friend that once got reprimanded for interrupting during a Zoom call and had it used against them later in reviews.

Could you imagine the performance review each of these two leaders would have gotten last night?

I don’t envy the moderator to say the least.

Alright before I put my own foot in my mouth I’m going to call it a morning. I’ve got a lot of training to do today.

Until tomorrow.