1 Year, 2 Skills - Max Effort
124: Time allocation + effort = money.
Welcome reader! Q4 has been here for some time, and 2024 is ending soon. Meaning it’s the perfect time to prepare for the next year. Before going further, read and understand what it takes to improve your next year—this is a simple and effective way that works. What else could you do to improve your next year? Choose something you want to get better at and stick to it.
Reflecting: Counting Your Wins And Losses
Year In A Review: What does it require? It requires deep thinking, reflecting, and being honest with yourself. Reflect on what you did that brought you forward, and what moves you should have made differently. Two weeks should be enough to reflect and get the answers you are looking for. If you keep a journal or run a system to write things down. It is time to pick them up and go through it. A big part of your answer and preparation will come down to that. Learning from your mistakes is the best and most efficient way to learn. Reflecting on the previous year should always be done. It requires minimal effort but gives a lot in return. The overlooked part of reflecting? It gives you a sense of how fast time passes. Having a reality check—under no circumstances should things be taken for granted.
To each, there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour. - Winston Churchill
Hours Available: Time is the most precious resource, and everyone reading this understands that. This leads us to the hours in a year debate. Ask yourself: how many hours in the past year have you allocated to the things that will improve your life? The year has 8.760 hours when you allocate 8 hours to sleeping and 8 hours to your corporate career or any other main source of income you have. The final number? It comes down to around 2.920 hours. This is the most basic example that should be enough for readers to understand where we are going. If we exclude subjective factors. Most people don’t sleep as much as they should and spend too much time working for someone else. The average hour split we took 8-8-8 (work-free time-sleep) should balance the equation—removing any extremes. The equation becomes interesting when you think about spending those free hours and where your time is going. A typical Netflix shows series season runs between 6-7 hours. Ask yourself how many you have watched in a year. What about books? Remember that useless book recommended to you—that you knew you should have stopped reading after the first 50 pages? It probably took 12-14 hours to complete. Being a complete waste of time. The same principles could apply to anything you do daily that you know is not good for you and a waste of time. This doesn't mean you should go "monk mode" and stop with everything. It's to make you realize how fast time is passing. Knowing how much time has slipped away doesn’t make much sense until you start paying attention. It’s a hard pillow for most people to swallow.
10.000 Hours And You: Everyone has heard about the 10.000 hours rule. If you put effort into a craft or skill after 10.000 hours… You will achieve the level that only a few achieve. There is truth in that. If you work 40 hours per week on your skill—achieving 10.000 hours would take around 5 years. Not that hard to do. The other part of the story is that no one working for someone else only works on one skill—your time is split between different activities. This means that getting to 10.000 hours roughly takes over 10 years. 10.000 hour theory is perfect until you put it into practice. There is a big difference between focused work with a specific goal and work for the sake of working. The hours you put in are not the same. Neither are your skills developing at the same pace. Suppose you remove the hours from the success equation. How else would you track your skill level and the success that comes with it? Nothing funnier in WiFi money space than hearing: "The success is being measured by how much money you make". The reality is that it is often not. If that were true, there would not be so many examples where individuals with exceptional skills took years to achieve credibility and deserve recognition. Making less money than those brave enough to put themselves out there earlier—with worse skills. The hours being a trackable method of your progress is good enough. Universal and applies to everything—medium is one way to put it. Iterations over hours might make sense, but one could argue it’s even more subjective when compared.
Preparing For The Next Year: Easy part if you have done the reflecting right. 10.000 hours equation? It should not be too hard to understand. Will it be easy? It's never easy when it's worth it. The time equation above should signal how time is fragile or at least make you think about it. Combine that with mistakes you have made in the past year, and you should have a solid combination to move things forward. Understanding your mistakes means fewer chances of repeating them. Still unsure what the title means and where we are heading? Your next year should be all about focus. Picking 2 skills you want to improve. Spread between hours you have left in a day. Why are we emphasizing this? After 1.000-1.500 hours of work on a picked skill—there is no chance you won’t be able to make money off it. That equation is between 750-1.000 hours for more courageous. This doesn’t consider those chasing perfection. Perfection is often counterproductive when you look at it from a big scale. Leave perfection when you are in a position where you can afford it once it covers your opportunity cost. Why 2 skills? Listening to advice such as "go all-in" or focusing only on one thing and one thing only is often interpreted poorly. Not only is it interpreted poorly. It is terrible advice in general. Leaving you with no safety net or backup plan leads you into a lifestyle trap that results in burnout and unhappiness. Suppose you plan to play a long game and build the skills over time. That approach should be avoided at all costs. All it takes is 1 year of serious work focusing on 2 skills you are interested in.
Picking Skills and Monetizing Them
