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The Weekly Variable
Naming advice, finance advice, and business advice. We’ve got some work to do!
Topics for this week:
divs.cloud
Last week I was weighing the pros and cons of naming the consulting side of divs. Either I could be more direct with the website and branding by using the “consulting” Top-level domain, or leave some room for flexibility and creativity by using the “cloud” Top-level domain, and after some feedback, divs.cloud sounds like the winner.
It has a nice ring to it and it’s ready to cover Salesforce, AWS, Azure or whatever cloud thrown my way during consulting.
Plus, there’s always the option to pivot later.
I decided on the name, but unfortunately didn’t get to building a landing page for it yet. Expect divs.cloud to link to an actual web page next week!
The Dev Sync
We finally recorded episode 7 of The Dev Sync last week, but I am behind on editing.
I used AI to the do the initial cutting and camera switching but it had an issue properly rotating between camera feeds. It only used 2 of the 3 video sources for some reason and I haven’t had a chance to figure out why.
I’ll be investigating that this weekend and have it ready to upload on Monday though, and we may even record episode 8 this weekend to try to make up for a few missed uploads in the last month.
Until then, feel free to catch up on old episodes until the new ones drop next week.
Losing $8 Million
Whoever edited the thumbnail for this video did a great job.
Hard to not want to find out how someone lost $8 million dollars.
Lad Bible TV isn’t a channel I usually watch, but they hooked me with that one, and I’m glad they did.
Gary Stevenson tells his story of growing up with very little money and how it helped him adapt to a life of struggle. He expected everything to be a challenge so working his way into a prestigious university and then being recruited by one of the top banks in the world was just another obstacle in his way of doing what he needed to do.
I had no idea that some big banks host a card game as part of their recruiting events at different universities but it’s a great idea. They put candidates into difficult market situations to see how they handle them, and in Gary’s case, he could see how the game worked, realized it was rigged against him, and still fought to win it anyway, which ultimately lead him to being hired.
It’s a fascinating story, and his experience on the trading floor is just as interesting as he recounts being down $8 million on a trade he made for the bank and how that trade completely altered his perception of reality.
Growing up poor he couldn’t imagine having millions of dollars but years later he became completely detached from potentially losing more money in a week than most people will ever see in their lifetime.
Ultimately it made him see the huge economic imbalance of wealth and caused him to decide to quit even though the bank didn’t want him to quit since he was making them a lot of money.
If anything, this video felt too short. Well worth the 25 minutes to hear Gary recount his tale.
Don’t Be Sorry, Be Better
“Don’t be sorry, be better” is a great, harsh meme I often hear that’s both funny and true.
“Don’t make excuse, make improvements” is a more constructive way to phrase the idea, but still pretty direct.
Both of those phrases come to mind after watching this Alex Hormozi video titled Stop Trying to Get Rich. Get Better.
It’s a common theme from Alex, but it still remains true.
Do the boring work.
There’s probably something you’re avoiding in work, something you don’t want to do, so you come up with other things to do instead to avoid the problem.
Usually he’s referring to advertising. You don’t need more customers, you need a better product or experience. Advertising will just show more people that your thing isn’t good enough.
Rather than being sorry about something not working or not being good enough and trying to replace unsatisfied customers with new customers, focus on making that product or service better so that you can keep more customers.
The goal is to make something good enough that when people use it, they tell others about it.
It’s a simple concept in theory, but can be very difficult to actually do.
When it becomes difficult is when other easier ideas pop up and sound like the better option. But most of the time the best option is to keep working on making the same boring thing better.
Stop jumping to the new get rich quick idea, and focus on making one thing better.
I write this more for myself than anyone else, but hopefully you find it as a nice reminder too.
And you can hear Alex’s full reminder here:
The Goal is to Educate
Going to be honest, I didn’t know who Nicolas Cole was so when YouTube automatically queued up this conversation between him and Ali Abdaal, I almost changed to something else, but I’m glad that I didn’t.
The podcast started with the standard business advice that comes with a title of “$10k per month”, but after that, Nicolas offered some great perspectives on sales, creating content, offering content creation as a business, book publishing, and scaling and operating businesses.
The most important take away was his emphasis on educating. You should always try to educate, not sell. But by educating, it may offer the opportunity to sell.
It also reminds me of Daniel Priestly’s advice of “with or without you energy”.
Nicolas points out the same idea that people will notice if you seem too desperate for a sale and they may be turned off from working with you. If you’re just offering advice though, it naturally creates an opening for the lead to ask about using your service rather than trying to convince them they need your service.
It’s a long conversation, but I really enjoyed them riffing on how they both operate their businesses, and Nicolas’s advice to Ali on better ways to package content as a business, and how to improve Ali’s process for publishing news books in the future.
If you have any interest in writing professionally or content creation, there are some gems in this 2 hour talk that are worth hearing.
And that’s it for this week! Another newsletter all about business advice and doing the work, and maybe a little shameless self-promotion.
Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.
If you want to start a newsletter like this on beehiiv and support me in the process, here’s my referral link: https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=jay-peters. Otherwise, let me know what you think at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected], I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks for reading!