How many hustle or business ideas have you abandoned or mothballed?

Do you sometimes feel that no matter how many times you are inspired by a new idea, concept, project or opportunity, it never seems to work out the way you imagined? Most often, do you even know if it would have worked out, or did you give up before you got to the point where you find out? These grand designs of earning extra income inspire at the outset but do you end up disappointed?

There’s this glorious honeymoon phase during which you’re passionate about a project. You invest a lot of effort and a great deal of hope. Then, after some time, you start to run out of steam. Reality never seems to live up to your expectations (or hopes), there are unanticipated hurdles, unexpected complexity, unrealistic demands and unhelpful market conditions. You lose steam, begin to procrastinate. Eventually, you give up.

Soon, this project, like so many before it, is consigned to the graveyard of once-good ideas. A crowded place in your mind you prefer not to examine too closely because of all the wasted time and energy those failed ideas represent.

There are many reasons why these otherwise good projects so often fail. One of the most common is that while you’re dreaming it up, you fall into the imagination trap. A disconnect occurs between what you’re likely to achieve and how you picture it in your mind. The project gets better and better in your imagination, and reality can’t keep up. Once this happens, you become unconsciously reluctant to launch the project, because it’s psychologically painful to close that gap and let reality intrude on the dream. That could cause some serious cognitive dissonance. Better to keep the idea that it would be successful alive.

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Do you wish you could eliminate your debt, create some financial security and find the right approach to regain control of your finances?

The bad news is that wishing isn’t enough.

The good news is that if you’re reading this, you’ve already figured that out for yourself and you’re ready to move on to something more effective.

What you need is a plan.

A plan provides structure, objectives, step-by-step initiatives you can follow and milestones that you can use to keep yourself motivated.

Without a plan, what you have are a jumble of tips, hacks, tricks and ideas that, while each useful in it’s own small way, don’t add up to much without some kind of framework or plan to organise them.

I’m going to present a plan that you can follow to identify the steps you need to conver your costs, repay your debt, understand your finances and take control of your financial life.

A lot of the suggestions and tools that I and others provide is geared towards understanding your finances. It suggests measuring, monitoring, tracking, predicting and budgeting your money in various degrees of detail.

That’s a super-useful toolset for diagnosing a problem and designing a solution.

I would argue, however, that too much focus on budgeting, tracking and spend control can lead to a scarcity mindset. This will hold you back if you let it govern your goal-setting or decision-making.

I’ve fallen into this trap in the past, and I think it’s important that you be aware of it.

You’ve heard the story. John Doe makes $17,523 per month in seven minutes a day while holding down a full time job.

So some people exaggerate. We’ll call that artistic license. But if you want to dominate your finances, part of that equation is likely to involve finding  time to earn some extra cash.

John doesn’t earn his $17k in seven minutes, and Mary didn’t build a $101k business overnight (I made these examples up). Successful side hustlers – on average – dedicated many hours and much effort to the construction of their particular hustle.

So if we ditch the idea that it’s all quick wins and easy money, where do you find time for a side hustle?

There are two parts of the day that are opposites. The early morning and the late evening. They bring out different facets of our character, and if the person we are in the morning could confront the person we are in the evening, an interesting discussion would occur!

I’ve written about the conflict between these two people before.

But the morning person has a superpower – (s)he’s not easily distracted. If you can organize yourself, get up very early and get yourself to work before the rest of the world rises, you’re tapping into a superpower.

But how do you adjust a lifestyle to take advantage of this period of super-productive time when everything about your habits and your routines makes it so very difficult?

Imagine for a minute that you had a mirror through which you could communicate with an earlier version of yourself. What would you tell your younger self? Did they understand how their decisions would impact their life, which is now your life? Would you tell them how a little effort at their moment in time would go a long way to improving your situation in the present?

Now imagine this mirror can only allow you to speak to the person you were last night. Would you say, “Go to bed now, not at 2am, I’m too tired to work,” or “Just spend 20 minutes planning out your day tomorrow because it’s 11am and I still haven’t managed to get anything done!” Perhaps you’d say, “You really don’t need to see another episode of Game of Thrones.”

We are not the same person at different points in time. At our most constructive, we regret the lack of productivity, self-control and motivation we have at other times. How can our optimal self influence the behavior of our more child-like self to get more done in the time we have?

Hello world, as they say.

Have you ever felt trapped by the day-to-day grind of going to work to earn a wage?

All the time you tell yourself that as the meaningless promotions add up and the workload gets heavier, you’ll be able to free yourself from the system. The promotions come, the work gets harder, you earn a bit more each time, but somehow you’re never any closer to that freedom.

It’s not a rat race. In a rat race, there’s a winner. This is an imaginary race where you run faster and better your whole life without ever reaching a finish line, because there isn’t one. The only prize is that you get to keep running.

This is a website about achieving that freedom. I’ve taken from a lot of different disciplines and movements, from finance and economics to psychology and minimalism. Think of it as distilled common sense with a spritz of motivation. Use it as a toolkit to opt out of the race and reach financial freedom.

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