Focus on the highest value
I’ve been struggling a bit with the direction in which I want to take this blog. Do I want to take a more entrepreneurial route with my postings, writing about trying to start my own business (sort of what I’m doing here on this blog) and other ways to increase income? Do I want to blog about ways to reduce costs, figuring out novel ways to reduce spending and debt without reducing quality of life? Do I want to discuss investing with my readers, trying to figure out less obvious ways to allow the power of compound interest to do most of the dirty work for us? Maybe I should be considering more of the happy side of my little equation, going into detail about how to stop letting money rule our lives and our actions. Of course, I’ve been reading a ton of personal finance blogs to see if I can find a model I like that I can also put my own unique slant on.
On other personal finance blogs, I see reviews of financial books – these are books about how to buy stuff cheaper, get out of debt, refinance your house, and other things like that. I own a few of them, but I noticed that after the first couple of them, I wasn’t getting a lot more out of them. The more recent books might take a slightly different tone, present their message a slightly different way, but they didn’t actually teach me something different. However, I read a lot of books on business. Some of them talk about things like fixing meetings so they aren’t so boring; some of them are about figuring out what kind of business a person should go into. Like the financial books, they all seem to cover the same basic topics, and they all provide the same basic direction. But I’ve noticed that each one teaches me a slightly different lesson about the same topic. Unlike the financial books, which seem to all be fairly factual, the business books have to deal more with the slight irrationality of individuals, usually giving you the best tips on how to deal with someone very similar to the author.
The funny thing about these business books is that they invariably teach most of the lessons of the finance books as well, if you are thinking about it that way. One of the lessons I see reiterated over and over again in these books is that as a business owner (or leader of men, or whatever) you should focus on the tasks that add the most value to your organization, and outsource the others to someone else. Isn’t that basically the same thing as figuring out where you’re wasting the most money each month and then cutting it down? Think about it, if you were to cut down your largest expense (or take a big chunk out of your largest debt, or whatever), and focus only on that until it bleeds, aren’t you doing yourself a bigger favor than if you skip lunch?
Over the next few weeks at least, my goal is going to be finding novel ways to tackle the ‘big one’ and get it under control. Maybe that doesn’t quite answer my overarching questions about the direction I will finally end up taking the site, but it at least gives me a direction for the short term – and that’s enough for now.
What have I been reading?
I’ve had a few people ask me what I’ve been reading to get my inspiration for some of these posts. While a lot of this stuff is dribbling out of my brain, there are several sites I’ve been checking out on a daily basis.
- Free Money Finance – FMF is talking about how money doesn’t bring happiness, but having ‘enough’ does.
- The Simple Dollar – Trent is talking about how we tend to notice things that support our own beliefs, and ignore things that contradict them. This concept is huge because it impacts how receptive we are to learning.
- Get Rich Slowly – J.D. reviews a personal finance book that talks about salary negotiation – why don’t more people do this regularly?
- I Will Teach You To Be Rich – Ramit is talking about why people are resistant to starting their own business. Granted, I’m not much of an entrepreneur (maybe this blog will change that), but I really enjoy his take on this.
- The Clever Dude – CD talks about failure, success, and how the only true failure is the failure to learn from your mistakes. I like his take on how to gain something out of an experience that didn’t work out.
- The Non Billable Hour – Matt is one of my favorite bloggers, and a generally good guy. I really enjoy his rules posts, like this one about rules of networking, because they can almost always be applied more broadly than just the original focus of the post.
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So, you want to know what's up with the brackets in the name? "Curly brackets (also called braces, or "squiggly brackets") are sometimes used in prose to indicate a series of equal choices" and "Square brackets are mainly used to enclose explanatory or missing material usually added by someone other than the original author, especially in quoted text." So basically, if you really want to be wealthy in life, you have to figure out how to get happy. Since that whole spiel would make a crappy name for a blog, I decided to do something a bit creative with some brackets.
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