I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Money does buy happiness… kinda
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Hey Reader, People who say money doesn't buy happiness… …have never seen the giant smile on the face of someone riding a jet ski. Of course, what they mean is that more money doesn't automatically mean more happiness—which is true. But the lack of money does real damage to people. Not just materially but emotionally. I know this firsthand. I spent a lot of my childhood experiencing what financial stress does to a family. My favorite place in our house growing up was the 4th step from the top of the staircase, just below where the railing turned into a solid wall. I could sit there completely invisible and hear everything happening in the living room. The conversations I overheard were often my parents fighting about money. They weren't usually big blowups but there was an ongoing tension that never fully went away. By the time I was 13, I had already decided that when I grew up, I would never let money do that to my family. We downplay the damage scarcity does once we're past it. Once money is no longer a source of daily stress, it's easy to forget what it felt like. You start nodding along when someone says money doesn't buy happiness, because you're no longer the person avoiding opening their mail. Wanting money isn't something to be ashamed of. Ramit Sethi has a concept he calls money stories. The narrative you carry about money shapes everything about how you pursue it. A lot of creators carry money stories that work against them. They want financial freedom and to build something that pays them well. But somewhere along the way they picked up the idea that admitting you want to build wealth is embarrassing. So they don't say it out loud. When someone else succeeds financially, the easiest thing to say is, "Oh, they're just doing it for the money," as if that's a character flaw worth criticizing. The thing is, when people do build wealth, what actually makes them happy rarely looks like what they imagined. Money spent on experiences with people you love is what actually matters. Morgan Housel's The Art of Spending Money looks at this from a research angle. What makes people genuinely happy when they spend isn't the second house or the nicer car. It's the vacation cabin filled with close friends, or the dinner where everyone flies in from across the country. That's the stuff that's actually worth building toward. Later this year, I'm releasing a book I've been working on for a number of years called The Ladders of Wealth. It maps out how creators and entrepreneurs build financial freedom in stages. One of the things that shaped the whole project was feeling like I wasn't supposed to want what I was building toward. A lot of people spend years chasing financial freedom while trying to convince themselves it's really about impact or creativity or flexibility. Because saying "I want to make real money" feels like too much to admit out loud. But honestly, it's a good goal. It's just that the story they're telling themselves about it is getting in the way of going after it. Naval Ravikant says it better than I can: Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible.
If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.
Contempt for wealth will make sure you never attract it. PODCASTBecome a Bestseller With This Book Launch FormulaTim Grahl has helped launch some of the biggest books in the world. In this episode, he makes the case that chasing bestseller lists is the wrong goal and explains what actually drives long-term book sales. He walks through how to build the kind of word-of-mouth that keeps a book selling for years, not just during launch week. We cover:
Watch or listen to episode » KIT APPKajabi Kit app: Sync your course business & automate follow-upsKit's new Kajabi app connects your Kajabi account to Kit so purchases, enrollments, and subscriber data sync automatically. Segment your audience and trigger automations based on exactly where each student is in their journey. Key Features:
Learn more about the Kajabi app » BOOK7 Powers: The Foundations of Business StrategyMost businesses eventually get competed away. Hamilton Helmer identifies seven specific conditions that create lasting competitive advantage and tells you when each needs to be established. This book is nerdy and sophisticated, but if you obsess over business fundamentals like I do I think you'll enjoy it. A few takeaways:
The book helps you figure out which advantages are available to you right now and whether your business can hold off competitors long-term. Have a great week! —Nathan |
Nathan Barry
I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Hey Reader, If I could solve only one thing in my business, that would have the biggest impact, what would that be? This is the question every great entrepreneur obsesses over. Rather than trying to do everything at once, you look for the bottleneck and focus on solving that. There’s a book called The Goal by an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a 1984 business novel that business systems nerds love. However if you’re not a business systems nerd you probably… won’t love it. It’s...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent money on something and immediately felt guilty afterward? Will Guidara spends his money foolishly on purpose. And he thinks you should too. He once bought an entire barrel of whiskey and put it in his basement. He also put a skee-ball machine in the office. Is he going to get a monetary return on either of these things? No. But that’s kind of the point. He calls it the 95/5 rule: Manage your money and time like a maniac 95% of the time (no expense is too...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent a whole day on something almost nobody saw? It's painful when the whole reason you worked hard was because you wanted to reach people. If you teach a workshop in person, you reach the 20 people in that room. But if you record that same workshop once, you can keep teaching for years on autopilot. This is the concept of leverage, and it's something I talk about in my upcoming book, The Ladders of Wealth (you can pre-order it now). A lot of people will look back...