Hey friends,
I just finished "Happy Sexy Millionaire" by Steven Bartlett this week. And it got me thinking - when do we hit that sweet 'enough' spot? Bartlett talks about the moment of selling his multi-million business - and the buzz wasn't what he expected. So it got me thinking.
I've been trying to design my life. I create plans for everything - from my finances, business to my fitness. Each area of my life has its own set of intentions as I aim to add another stroke to the artwork of my life design. But the truth is, getting to that next step doesn't always give me that 'ta-da' moment I used to expect.
Goals give us a roadmap, sure, but they're not the endgame. If I ask my nephews, they'd probably say their big goal is to get an Xbox or to win the next school footie match. Fast forward ten years, and they'll be talking about cars, relations or what uni they hope to get into. Life changes over time.
So when I first packed my bags to be a digital nomad, £500 a month was dream goal. Because to me, at that time - it meant freedom in Asia. But once I got there, the goalpost shifted. It then became - £1000 for Bali living, £2000 for Euro adventures. The posts moved, grew, shrank and evolved over time. It's not bad - it's just part of the meandering path of life.
So here's my two cents on enoughness: enough is less about goals and more is it enough for today. Did I do my best with the time, energy and resources I had available to me. If you can find a way to be at peace in your current place in life while still keeping your dreams and ambitions. To me, that's the real sweet spot.
Will close of the weekly newsletter with some things that I've found interesting:
1. Genius Links
A great wee tool for forwarding links to people from different countries. As I'm trying to keep the referral content relevant for people all around the world. Genius links will forward different users to the correct web address so .com .co.uk .de. I was looking around at different options and thought I would go with this one as it is the most recommended. It's $5 / mo but I hope that starting with great links now will save me the headache down the road.
2. ChatGPT powered chatbots
ChatGPT is everywhere at the moment. One of the most practical use cases I've seen is creating an Ai chatbot. I like how users can interact instantly by chatting on your site with instant responses and that the Ai chatbots are trained on the actual data from your site. This saves me time, as I don't need to personally respond instantly to people landing on the site. It also costs less than hiring a customer service assistant. People can still get in contact with me through the chatbot but it saves the initial questions and I can focus on the in-depth calls. Super excited about having this set up. Will eventually offer this out to clients of metalabs.
3. SEO content writing with Ai
I'm starting our SEO content journey for metalabs blog. To do this we are using a combination of SurferSEO, Jasper and ChatGPT. Ai is a hot topic right now and I feel like people are still learning daily about the advancements. For me, I'm finding it super helpful with content writing. Being dyslexic I've always struggled with structuring sentences. This is where Ai shines for me. Now I get to bullet point my thoughts and ideas and Ai can string them together into coherent sentences. After this, my role is more of an editor as I adjust the writing and craft the tone of voice. For now, I'm writing my personal writing without the help of Ai. I'm hoping that my imperfect writing abilities make the content here more personal than anything else. Over time I'll see about training my own Ai content model with my tone of writing to see if it can match it. But for now, the writing here is my muddled dyslexic ramblings.
4. Critical CSS to combat FOUC
This is probably very niche information but since I'm in building and optimising the metalabs website it seems most of the information I have to share is around website performance - apologies in advance if this is a bit geeky. But lately, I've been learning about FOUC (Flash of Unstyled Content) in order to combat this I'm using the EWWW + SWIS plugins in combination with putting in Critical CSS for each page. Using this free website tool to generate the critical CSS and performances are up across the board. The support at EWWW has been super helpful while I've been figuring this out. There was a quote from their blog which I found particularly relevant in my search to optimise our website "Running speed tests (like GTmetrix, Google's PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest, Pingdom, etc.) on your site can be a good way to waste days of your life" - Time for me to be happy with what we've got and focus on marketing.
5. Happy Sexy Millionaire
I don't often watch Dragons Den but I'm seeing more Steven Bartlett across my social media channels - mostly on his Youtube channel The Diary of a CEO where he interviews various guests. When I saw his book Happy Sexy Millionaire on Audible I was excited and interested to learn a bit more about how he thinks and the ideas he shares. As a quick summary I think the ideas he shares - mainly the lies that we are taught in life. As Steven puts it "lied to me about how you attain fulfilment, love and success, why those things matter, and what those words actually mean." Although I've heard most of the ideas before it felt refreshing to hear them again. It was also a bit more relatable to me as he is also from the UK and a similar age. It's short, sweet and punches enough weight to make it an interesting read for any aspiring entrepreneurs.
That's it for this week folks! Thanks for reading have a great week ahead and I'll catch you next week.
Matt