Why am I doing this?
I feel like this is something that I should address.
It is something that has been brought up time and time again.
And to be totally honest, something I’ve never clearly articulated.
Okay, so, why do I do this?
Why am I writing a newsletter? Why did I write a book? Why do I take time out of my life to do these every week?
To answer the first question, Not For Hire was started for a few reasons.
One of my core beliefs is that in order for someone to have complete ownership of their life and own their freedom they have to be self-employed. Until then they do not have ownership of their life.
Okay, now that we have the name explained, what is the point of writing these lessons out? This answer is a bit more complex.
On one hand, I believe that by writing out your thoughts you are able to understand your thought processes better. When you write what you are feeling and thinking it allows you to disconnect from your emotions and thoughts and analyze them from a 3rd person's view. You are able to better identify where you were either irrational or illogical.
On the other hand, I wanted to create this to be able to pass down my learnings to my children, grandchildren, and beyond. I want Not For Hire to serve as a living embodiment of me. The goal of my website, Gp.wtf, is to track every facet of my life. From the books I read, the workouts I do, the number of calories I eat, how much I sleep, and so on. The daily tracker looks at how all those inputs affect the outputs of how happy, focused, and sharp I felt. In 100 years from now when my great-great-grandson/daughter asks what I was like, I’d love for them to be able to look at Not For Hire and Gp.wtf and understand the person that I was. To cap this off, this isn’t something that I intend on doing for a few months and moving on from. Ideally, I would do these blog posts and such for the rest of my life. This is the beginning of my life’s work.
It feels weird to look at something with an 80-90 year time horizon.
The logic behind the book is pretty similar. For those that do not know I packaged up my favorite blog posts into a book, 30 Lessons From an Unorthodox 23 Year Old.
This is the beginning of a series that, in theory, will last my entire life. 52 lessons from a 24 year old, 52 lessons from a 25 year old, you get the idea. Ideally, when I am 100 years old, I’ll have an entire bookcase dedicated to the years of my life.
Have a great Monday.
What we are reading this week: 22 immutable laws of marketing.
I heard about this book a few years back and decided to give it a go. It was written in the ’90s, so some of the examples it uses are a bit outdated (xerox, kodak, etc), but overall I am enjoying it so far. There are a few lessons that ring very true just from my experience with Quokka Brew, such as, “The Law of the Category: If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.” Quokka Brew is not the first canned coffee, however, we are the first Jitterless Coffee.
Quote of the week:
“Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power”
Seneca