What I am changing after reading Mastery
While reading Mastery, I decided that I needed to make some changes to what I was working on.
First, I am going to stop pursuing online money making projects. I turned off Adsense, which will decrease my yearly income by $0.25. I will continue to let GreatDaneHosting.com run on autopilot and I will continue to ignore the dozen or so website ideas I have domains registered for.
Why? Now that I am done with school, I felt I had the free time to attempt some online money making ideas. Specifically, I was looking to try my hand at paid advertising, either promoting GreatDaneHosting or promoting other ebusinesses for a commission. There are several people who make a fortune doing this, and there are people I know who can make a living from their online business ideas.
Why not me too? I have read most of The Ultimate Sales Letter, and what I learned from this book is that it would be a LOT of work for me to put on a marketing hat. Why? Because I found the concepts in the book boring, and this is a really good book on the topic of writing promotional materials. I can see that the methods from the book would work well, and I can see how they can easily be applied online. What I cannot see is me enjoying one minute of the process. Mastery points out that the path is more important then the goal, since you spend most of your time on the path and very little time at the goal. For me and the online ventures that I have looked into, the means do not justify pursuing the end.
Poker is another one that I am nixing. I have always played poker with the intent of it being a profitable use of my time. Poker was never profitable enough to justify the time that I spent on it, and since I never played for the enjoyment of the game, I am done playing poker.
What I am not giving up is the idea of one day writing a poker bot. Coding the Wheel has a great series on building a poker bot. Why is building a poker bot more interesting then playing poker? The sub projects needed to build a poker bot are all very interesting to me. The problem is, the first sub project that needs to be accomplished is the interface between the poker client and the poker bot. This is all windows internal magic, and windows internal magic is probably the least interesting of the sub projects. So the poker bot is on hold until writing the interface becomes the most interesting developmental projects on my list.
I am trying to focus my attention on things I am getting the most out of, both with a long term and a short term view. My free time has been spent doing too much dabbling lately, and there are things I know I want to become an expert in, which will never happen unless they get more attention.
Now that I have eliminated some things, what am I going to do with all my free time? I still complain about having too much free time.
First, swimming and lifting will continue. I feel that I was already on the right path with both of these, and I have been since I moved to limiting myself to six workouts a week. When school first ended, I tried to play catchup. I was lifting six times a week trying to build back up to heavy weights quickly, spending 45 minutes on the exercise bike 3 to 5 times a week to build endurance, and swimming 3 times a week. This resulted in a shoulder injury, that took me out of lifting and swimming for a couple weeks, and then back strain that not only took me completely out of the water for a couple weeks, and ended lifting for a couple months, but prevented me from being sleep at night for days, and being uncomfortable 24 hours a day for a couple weeks. This is the result of being an “obsessive” when it came to exercise right after finishing school.
For the last four weeks I have been lifting 3 times a week and swimming 3 times a week. This seems to be a reasonable work load, although I need to incorporate a regular stretching program as well. I am getting into the water stiff frequently, and I slept funny last Monday resulting in a neck strain. Both problems should be alleviated by regular stretching or yoga.
Other than exercise, I have two other focuses. First, I have taken on a new role at work, in which I am not an expert in the technologies being used. There are two options to correct this, everything can be rewritten in technologies where I am already and expert, or I can become an expert in the technologies already in use. Obviously, the harder path is learning all new technologies, and pushing beyond learning to the point where I can be considered an expert.
Usually, when presented with an area that I lack basic knowledge at work, I would rush to come up to speed, achieve a basic understand of what I needed to know to get the job done, and move on. Now I want to take the next step, the more time consuming step, of learning the technologies thoroughly. This has a side benefit that I don’t feel the need to rush, cramming knowledge in the evenings and weekends for a week or two, when taking the slower route or learning and experimenting with the technologies over a few months would be better.
My second focus is investing. This isn’t a new focus, but I have a new tool that I plan to make use of. I now have a paper money account with think or swim. Think or swim specializes in options trading, they provide some basic education on the subject, but the best thing they provide is their desktop client. Their client not only allows you to paper trade stock and options in the market, it also allows you to trade historically and see how those trades would have worked out. Now this concept, known as backtesting, is not new. What is new, is providing it for options and providing it for free. Now their platform is not as powerful as Tradestation, but it is free, and it does provide enough features for me to start mastering options trading.
So I have 3 paths of mastery to follow, one for exercise, one for work and one for investing. I am following each path because I enjoy what it entails, not because I am racing forward to some goal. Certainly, goal setting will not be discarded, but goals will just be another thing to enjoy along the path.
Path, path, path. Are you tired of hearing path? I keep reusing the term because I think it is a the best way to describe it, not because I am going to be sitting quietly in loose robes burning incense and contemplating my belly button. But after reading what I have written, I would assume the author might be someone with a perfectly bald head and a wispy long bead and mustache that Bruce Lee would come to for guidance. Oh so close…
Zen Master QBrain