Selfish Content

Gary Vee's advice is to NOT create selfish content, which is an easy enough trap to fall into. And I'm going to do exactly that - create some selfish content. Temporarily anyway.

My plan, like any good software engineer's, is to iterate. I'll try different approaches and see what works. Then, I'll continue with what seems to work well. And maybe start over when needed.

This blog is one of many iterations. I've started a fitness blog before this one, and who knows, that could resurrect itself down the line. Fitness is something I value highly so this will more than likely not be the last time it's mentioned.

Recently though, my latest endeavors have been selfish, although I wasn't able to see the selfishness. I'm sure it won't be the last time I fail to recognize selfishness either. I was too focused on the goal of expediting my financial security - money. Building a business and/or multiple revenue streams to be free to pursue whatever I deem worthy. The American Dream.

It's funny how different things look when you're focused solely on making money. While I do appreciate efficiency, and that's always a factor in my decision making, when money was the goal, I found myself in analysis paralysis with every decision. What's the best way to optimize this outcome for profit. This mindset is one of the very reasons that drove me to resign from a full time position in the first place - the obsession of immediate financial performance. How quickly I had forgotten that lesson, and found myself continually re-evaluating the odds of financial success and chasing another shortcut.

I'm fortunate enough to have wonderful parents and it was talking to them that they helped me realize I was potentially heading down the wrong path - or at least not approaching self employment for the right reasons.

For that reason, this blog, and maybe some accompanying content, will be the new focus. Something a little more authentic, and hopefully, eventually useful! I still love tech and will be looking for reasons to develop, as well as ways to help people in that vein. But for now I'm reorganizing my original master plan and this writing will serve to help discover how to organize things.

This blog will be a somewhat selfish mental dump of the rambling monologues that often run through my mind, but hopefully, it can be something helpful, may be even slightly entertaining, for someone out there. If nothing else it can serve as documentation - another key piece of Gary Vee advice that has stuck with me: "Document vs Create".

Brief tangent: I love quotes and enjoy citing sources when I can (and yes, I consume too much YouTube, in case you hadn't caught onto that yet). So, get ready regular readers - there will be no shortage of quippy additions for many topics to come and links to other videos and articles to get completely distracted with and never return.

On that note, another quote that came to mind from this conversation of redirection was "Take your own advice" which I saw recently from Alex Hormozi. It's also something I think about frequently. I've been guilty recently of doling out advice to people without taking it myself so now is a good time to level-set and try to keep that advice in mind.

Recently I've been advising people that sometimes focusing on the goal may not be the answer. I've found a few instances lately, in work and in life, where focusing directly on the goal can actually make achieving that goal more difficult. In the corporate ladder-climbing game, sometimes focusing solely on the goal of a promotion can make getting promoted that much harder. Focusing on the goal can lead to skipping details, sacrificing too much to meet numbers, or switching perspective entirely to only seeing what's stopping you from accomplishing that goal. And now you can only see obstacles. Conversely, concentrating on quality work and being a good person often naturally leads to better outcomes overall. Obviously, there are always exceptions - bad environments, bad leaders, etc. - but by and large, focusing on quality work, and not just the goal, will lead to success.

A relevant parable from Simon Sinek, "Focus on the path, and not the trees."

As I warned, these posts will be a bit disorganized while I find a valuable flow. Thanks for sticking with me so far. If this was at all helpful, or if you have any other questions or feedback, let me know @jaypetersdotdev(opens in a new tab) or email [email protected] and I'll catch you next time!