Hey there fellow Apprentices,
Thank you for supporting the Mastery In Your 20s project and enabling me to invest 5+ hours per week into creating (hopefully) valuable pieces for you to read each week. There are now 393 of you who decide to read each week and 7 of you who decide to support on a paid basis.
However you choose to get involved - with your time or your money or both, I appreciate it. Your attention is your most precious asset. Deciding to spend it with me today is something I will never take lightly.
Now for Diary number 2. After some great feedback from a few of you we’re gonna stick with the same format this time round. If you want to see other parts of the journey, let me know. I’m always open to new ideas.
The table of contents:
The 3 Lessons I’ve Learnt 📈
How Much I’ve Earnt 💰
What A Week Looks Like ⏳
What I’ve Been Reading 📚
What’s Coming Up Next 🚀
August has been all about keeping the plates spinning. Turning the opportunities of the Summer sun into great memories with friends, in-person meetings with clients and time outside triathlon training. All while maintaining focus on the business goals and moving the needle forwards.
In this there’s been a satisfaction in finding an ease with the competing priorities of life that is challenging enough to be fulfilling. But, beneath it all I can definitely feel an underlying level of stress starting to brew that will need to be tackled with some actual time off in September.
For now though, let’s recap 5th August - 2nd September:
The 3 Lessons I’ve Learnt 📈
It’s been another 4 weeks since the last Diary.
A lot has happened in that time - new clients, weekends away and speaking events. I’ve been drawn across the full range of activities I enjoy, teaching individuals of all stages in every form of communication. It’s been a lot of fun.
Along the way, here’s what I’ve learnt:
#1: It’s about the relationships you make
I love to obsess over doing new things.
My number one value is “bravery”, which means I like to live at the edge of my comfort zone, taking on difficult challenges until they become comfortable. And once they do, I set the bar higher again, fearing the complacency of stagnation if I stand still for too long.
This works. It pushes me to travel China as an 18 year old, live in Denmark for 6 months as a 19 year old and start three businesses before the age of 24. Each time my new normal is raised to an entirely new level, where what scared me yesterday is now what I do daily today.
But, along the way I’ve realised something pretty important. That you can keep growing all you like and pushing yourself to new heights, but what really matters is the people you meet along the way. Intentionally holding onto them as you decide to set sail for the next adventure is a beautiful part of life.
However, with the sheer number of those you meet along the way, staying in one another’s life can be an impossible task. Especially when you’re both busy people who have other life priorities you need to spend time on.
This is what led me to creating a standard approach for my friendships. Without any formal acknowledgement, my friends and I don’t talk to one another for 3-6 months at a time. There’s no daily snapchat streak or weekly coffee. We get in touch around twice a year and organise an in-person catch-up to update each other on everything that’s changed.
And the the last 4 weeks have been a reminder of why this works for me. I’ve met up with co-founders from my first start-up back in 2017, friends from my school when I was 11 and housemates from my third year at uni. Each time we picked up where we left off and spent a quality evening together, connecting on a meaningful level about what really matters. For me, this is the essence of a healthy friendship that is manageable alongside the rest of your life.
The lesson: Being friends doesn’t mean speaking everyday. You’re allowed to define the intensity of your relationships.
#2: You can redefine who you are
Our labels are our limitations.
We’re great at describing ourselves. We use single words to convey a wealth of meaning about who we are and how we spend our time. It’s often necessary to do this. Especially when we introduce ourselves to new people and want to avoid giving them our entire life backstory.
For the last 8 years, I have described myself as a “Runner” conveying how I’d run over 130km every week and race every other weekend. Although this was a big part of who I was, it wasn’t the entirety of who I wanted to become.
I had broader sporting goals on my bucket list. From completing an Ironman to climbing Everest, there was a desire to transcend the sport of running that wouldn’t fit nicely into the box of “being a runner”.
Back in August last year when I chose to take on an Ironman in 2022, I was stepping into unknown territory as a “Runner” who now had to learn how to swim and cycle too. To embrace this new identity I took to redefining myself as an “Endurance Athlete” who loves ridiculous physical challenges.
This little shift in the story I told myself and others gave me the self-belief to realise that I could take on a triathlon. I was good enough for the training. All I’d need was consistency, commitment and confidence.
It was this attitude that kept me going after I cycled off a Mallorcan cliff back in May, deferring the original Ironman race until 2023 and the needing to navigate the recovery process that followed.
12 months after initially starting the training, I finally completed my first triathlon on 28th August, coming 2nd in my age group and 18th out of 320 people overall. In one morning, I’d fulfilled the new label I’d ascribed to myself a year earlier, transcending the sport of running and becoming an endurance athlete. Now onto the Ironman 70.3 on the 18th September.
The lesson: Taking on a new challenge means knowing it’s possible. Redefine who you are before you’ve proven it to yourself.
#3: What is obvious to you is genius to someone else
Teaching others is hard.
Re-learning how it felt to be in the shoes of those we’re explaining to is tough. Too often we’re unconsciously competent, unsure why we succeeded, taking the mental models that are second nature to us for granted.
We’ll either doubt our own experience or use concepts too challenging for our students to understand. We’re plagued by inadequacy and mastery in the same single stroke.
To overcome this, I’ve learnt this month that creating for a single person is the way around both feelings. Picturing the one reader, listener or consumer enables you to focus on a very achievable goal of helping just one person, while also being specific about who you’re teaching and who you aren’t.
In the last 4 weeks, I’ve had to do this twice. In the first instance, I hosted a livestream on how to go from a “Freelancer to Agency Owner”, starting the presentation by clarifying that I was speaking to those working solo or with a small team of 5. In the second, I delivered in-person workshop on “Landing Your 1st Inbound Client from LinkedIn” targeted at the undergraduate creative student wanting to get paid for their freelancing.
By getting very specific with who I was helping and how I was helping them, it meant I knew which acronyms, concepts and language to use. It made the content 10x more relatable to the person listening.
But, it also meant going back to basics on what I already knew. Visualising the situation of the one person I was teaching and empathising with them. Only from that context could I create content for and engage with a livestream of over 80 concurrent members and a workshop of 25 students.
The lesson: Empathise with your one target learner. Don’t teach them everything you know. Focus on the basics that they can apply today.
How Much I’ve Earnt 💰
In August, I launched the paid subscriptions of Mastery In Your 20s, finished a major coaching project and brought in a few more clients. This is reflected as being the second best month so far on the graph below with an increasingly diversified revenue stream.
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