Creating a budget for long-term success
When I first started this newsletter I told you that I would be honest and to openly share what I am thinking about. Well, one thought at the moment for me is about how we can all sustain ‘success’ into the longer term. Now, I am by no means ‘successful’, but I believe that there are actions we can take to positively impact our lives.
One thought: Implementing ‘Joe Tax’ 💰
Firstly, I have to thank my friend and accountability buddy Tyla Grant for the term ‘Joe Tax’. Let me provide you with some context:
I think the people I meet are going to change my life.
Regardless of where you are in your career, focusing on relationships is a very good idea. When I consider my circle today, I tried to be very intentional with reaching out to people I thought were interesting, people who were ahead of me, and people who I knew I could learn from.
I’ve found, personally, that people are very open to helping and sharing how they do things, if we just ask. Our ‘circles’ are no longer limited by proximity, meaning we do not have to count our friends as only the people we live near who are a stone’s throw away.
Thanks to the internet and social media, we can have friends from all over the world. And as I venture into being self-employed, I have a 50/50 split of clients here in the UK and the US. This is crazy to me. The international clients would have never ever met me, and vice versa, without social media and essentially, content marketing.
And so to bring this full circle, I’ve realized recently that it really is the people that we meet and surround ourselves with who will change our lives. However, when we get busy, we do not consciously make time to meet more people, or better yet, to deepen our relationships.
What is ‘Joe Tax’?'
As you may know, for about a year now I’ve been creating content on LinkedIn sharing my interests and thoughts.
It’s probably single-handedly been the best thing I’ve ever done.
I highly encourage you all to put yourself out there if it’s something that you would like to do. The small effort of showing up every day does indeed compound and I’m beginning to see the fruits of the seeds I planted.
I don’t want this to stop.
I started showing up on LinkedIn to learn and I will continue to try and be proactive with reaching out to people, trying to meet them, asking questions, and trying to improve myself.
But since I’ve been swamped the last few months trying to navigate the course of being self-employed, admittedly, many other elements of my life have come to a halt.
I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of hours hunched over my laptop from 7am to 10pm with very little breaks and because of Covid, little in-person interaction. I’ve told myself this was a prolonged ‘sprint’, but as you can expect, I came near to burn-out and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
As I’ve always been interested in business and entrepreneurship, I’ve often heard about delegation and outsourcing. But to be honest with you, I have always felt imposter syndrome over these topics, because I’ve never known how I want a ‘business’ to look.
Do I want to be a freelancer?
Do I want to be an agency?
Do I want to work in a small team?
I’m still figuring this out. But where this email can be meaningful to YOU is how we can implement a personal tax on ourselves.
Joe Tax is a set percentage of my income budgeted for planting seeds for the future. Right now, this takes the form of creating content.
I want to increase all of my content production, including YouTube, to continue to put myself out there and to continue making long-term moves. I don’t want to get so ‘busy’ that I stop this. I have to make time for it.
It feels odd to budget for something with no visible ROI, but I believe we need to have blind faith sometimes. We need to be more intentional with how we build relationships and how we put ourselves out there. If we can do this, I believe we can all write our own scripts.
What do you think?
Joe
Content tip of the week 🚀
Get ahead of yo self. Try your absolute best to plan content ahead which can be done fairly easily by having a system for your content creation. You want to get to the point where you can take one weekend and produce enough output for the next month. Of course, this varies with written content to videos but this is achievable.
Resource of the week 🕹️
This week I took some time to explore Figma, the collaborative design tool! I’ve been a big lover of Canva for a few years now and I do love how simple Canva is with its ready-made templates. Figma is that next step up for when you want custom designs to stay on brand.
I have no background in design whatsoever and couldn’t even figure out how to start! But thankfully with some amazing help from Sana Tabassum (check out her awesome Instagram) I started to feel a little more at ease. If you know anybody talented with design, you could get some help to make templates in Figma which you can then just edit and tweak to produce content. I think I’ll be using a mix of Canva and Figma going forward, particularly when I eventually start to post on Instagram.
This Week’s YouTube Video - Subscribe here! 🎥
It’s tough out there…
I’m Joe, a content marketer passionate about personal development and psychology. Every Sunday, I write an email newsletter with 1 thought, 1 content tip, and 1 article I’d recommend. Usually, I go over-board and provide a little more 😁