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The Really Rich Journal

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Are you sitting in a lurch, with your pen barely making contact with a fancy Moleskine notebook, that should, at some point, contain your next big idea? Ready, aim, aim! The perpetual planner. I'll read the book about it first! Then, watch a YouTube video...just to be safe. Oh, my job? It's fine, I guess. The perfectionist - uncomfortable with rolling out your product, your service, your chocolate peanut butter cupcake recipe, until it's just right?

We're all doing it in one way or another.

Can you feel the pressure? There's only so long you can hold back the floodgates of your potential. You're sticking bubblegum into a crack in the Hoover Dam. If it doesn't come out in the right way, it's going to come out in the wrong way. That's called growing old and bitter.

Okay, tough guy, what does this all mean?

Newsflash: you're going to get it wrong the first time anyway.

You're going to build the wrong product, invest in the wrong company, bet on the wrong horse, DM the wrong, attractive person who will key your Porsche. The world is very, very, real and very, very, different from the textbook version. You need to put in reps and face the feedback. It's not going to be pretty. This is authentic learning or wisdom.

Getting it perfectly right the first time would be a curse because you wouldn't learn anything! You'd be a child star unsure of how the hell you got there in the first place.

Many thinkers (wiser than me) don't consider knowledge memorized or picked up from any other place other than "the field" actual knowledge. It's regurgitated junk that you don't actually understand. You just think you do. It's just something that you hope makes you look good in front of the boys in the tennis club locker room.

What if I told you that you don't have a choice? You have the do the thing you've been procrastinating on. Yes, that one. Because that thing you're dragging your heels on will push value through the entire plumbing of the universe. Even I'm going to benefit from it without knowing. I'm feeling a sense of relief knowing that you're even considering doing it.

Everyone's laughing until they're not. My life is a series of humiliations that ended up working out eventually. The black eyes keep me humble. My enemies are doing something redundant in an overly air-conditioned office slowly becoming surgically attached to their Aerons.

Dear reader, let it rip.

Let it blow up. Let it humiliate you. It's never going to be ready. The words will never come out quite right. It's never going to meet your standards. Even I still break the things that replaced the things that didn't work in the first place.

And then, suddenly, when you're not looking, you're going to change the world.

This week, I’m taking meetings from Miami, FL

Global Markets: Painville

In one of the more dramatic pump fakes in recent market memory following the CPI print, we're still going lower in S&Ps and the pain for many investors is very real, including yours truly.

Doves (those that emphasize low unemployment over low inflation) should abandon all hope.

I'd like to take a moment to calmly suggest reassessing the quality of whatever you're holding. That doesn't mean sell everything and run into the street in your underwear. If you're holding great companies (or indexes of great companies) that you never really planned on selling in the first place (OK, Warren), then sit tight. You don't have a choice, your investment horizon will outlast this bear market firework finale. You shouldn't be leveraged now and you shouldn't be hoping things turn around soon in case they don't.

Now, if you're still holding Universe 1.0 garbage, like portfolios of NFTs (the SEC is probing Yuga Labs behind Bored Ape!), alt coins, and questionable Web3 tech without a market, then you should realize the market multiple of these will likely never come back to what they were earlier this year for a very, very long time. That was another world fueled by extremely cheap cash and one-direction sentiment.

Now, let's see what Musk does with Twitter.

Also, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, but wish you did, you can always book a call.

Holdings: WTI Crude, emerging EVs (ouch), consumer staples (like, PG)

*Not advice

Mindset: Sell it, then build it

There are so many things that I've tried to sell that I never had to bother building.

Hold the phone, you tried to sell something you didn't build yet?

Yes. Why would I waste time building something nobody wants?

Huh?

Let me expose a little, dark secret in the startup and entrepreneurship community.

It never starts with a perfect vision. No, you and your roommate, Bobby, probably aren't the next Steve Jobs.

It starts with a hunch, tested cheaply, and iterated upon.

If it doesn't work, which it probably won't, you can tweak it and see if that works. Remember my call to action at the beginning of the Journal? Just get started and figure it out later. I use LeadPages to spin up quick landing pages with my concept and run some traffic through it. This is called testing your hypothesis. If nothing works you can scrap it and try something completely different.

Here's how it works:

1. Have a thesis for what you're trying to accomplish: My colleagues all like sports, so if I create a hockey-themed party and sell tickets 80% of them will attend

2. Contact the rink and find a free date, get costs, don't put down a deposit

3. Create a free Eventbrite page for a hockey event 2 months out that you haven't planned anything for or spent any money on

4. Email everyone

5. See how many tickets are sold in the first week per email views (get your conversion rate)

6. Hold the event or cancel it by forecasting if you'll cover the cost of the event with ticket sales (it helps to have more data here, your office is likely a small sample size)

7. Figure out how to actually throw the event only after forecasting ticket sales

8. Throw event

9. Calculate actual costs to see if it's profitable in "the field" (not in theory)

10. Sell event to another office

11. Reinvest proceeds

12. Sell to another office

13. Reinvest proceeds

14. Sell event to all offices

15. Buy Porsche

If that didn't work, you could try: My colleagues all like sports, so if I create a basketball-themed party and sell tickets 80% of them will attend

Pro tip: Replace "sports" and "themed party" with anything you can imagine, iterate, and eventually you can't help but become really rich.

Want to run an idea by me? You can always book a call.

🤝 How I can help you:

1. The Entrepreneur’s Field Guide (Book) - learn the rules for entrepreneurship and how to blaze your own path.

2. The Guided Journey (Course) - I’ll be your personal guide on your path to success in my comprehensive digital lecture course

3. The Really Rich Podcast (Free) - a weekly deep dive into business, finance, and wealth mindset.

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