Another Excuse Newsletter

Welcome back to the Another Excuse Newsletter. It isn’t just another excuse, but a reason to start that thing you’ve been putting off.

What to expect this week:
👓Perspective - You want to be the driver
🔨 Tool - Bezos Numbers
🍿Consume - 11 Reasons not to get famous
📖Concept - Habit Triggers

Latest Podcast Episode

Today’s guest is Eitan Stern!

Eitan is the founder of Legalese. Legalese is a creative legal practice which has redesigned legal services to suit creative, start-up, and tech-based businesses by making them accessible, affordable and understandable.

In the episode, we discuss:

• How Legalese started
• Challenging a traditional industry
• What to strive for
• Risk and how it develops
• The benefits of a network
• What makes a good entrepreneur
And so much more...

You can check out the episode here.

Perspective

You want to be the driver

Morgan Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money, has been on a bit of a media tour to promote his new book, Same as Ever.

This means he’s been on a few podcasts that I listen to, and one story that keeps popping up is the one when he was a valet.

Many amazing, fancy cars would pull up to be parked and Morgan realised that he didn't think about the driver once.

His only thought was, “I'd look really cool driving that far.”

But he soon made the connection. If he was thinking that everyone would think that he was cool for driving that car, but he didn't care about the driver, why would anyone care when he was driving the car?

This completely changed his perspective on motivation, incentives, and aspirations.

Do we want the car because we want to signal to everyone else, or are there other genuine reasons for it?

Because if our incentive is to impress, it doesn't even achieve that goal.

There are so many instances like this when we assume we're signaling success to others, but all they're doing is imagining themselves with that item.

Put yourself in other's shoes, what do you think of when you see something nice?

Do you think of the person and their success, or do you just think of yourself?

And if you haven’t read The Psychology of Money, I suggest you do. Life-changing book.

Tool

Bezos Numbers

Patrick Campbell coined the term Bezos numbers.

Bezos numbers are basically trends and he came up with the name because that’s how Amazon started.

Bezos noticed that the internet was growing at a rapid rate. He didn’t know how he was going to take advantage of this trend, all he knew was that he had to.

So Patrick has taken the same approach by trying to spot trends and then figuring out how he can take advantage of them.

He loves data and figuring out why this is a trend in the first place.

Lucky for us he made this document public.

The research is broken up into, Category, Trend, Direction, 5-Year Magnitude, Doubling Time, Context, Source, and Possible Causes.

It’s extremely informative not only to look at the trends Patrick is looking at, but to use as a framework to conduct your own research into particular trends.

Let me know if you found this helpful.

Take a look at the document here.

Consume (Read / Watch / Listen)

11 Reasons not to get famous

I thought I’d change it up and give you something to read.

It might be a bit long for some, but it definitely worth the read.

Tim Ferriss goes into the downsides of fame and why it isn’t it’s all cut out to be.

Even if you aren’t planning on becoming famous any time soon, it’s worth reading to put things into perspective and to better understand the lives of those we label famous.

He discusses many points like:

• how simply increasing your follower count can lead to hate messages and threats. Purely based on statistics and not due to your own fault.

• invasions of privacy

• understanding who your “friends” are

• Desperations messages and pleas for help

It’s interesting to read such a candid explanation of his experience and it shifted my perspective a bit.

If you’d like to read about all 11, you do so here.

Concept

Habit Triggers

Spencer Greenberg has conducted endless studies on habits to figure out what actually works and what doesn’t.

While conducting his research he came up with a HABIT acronym for the best ways to pick up new habits.

Here are the HABIT triggers:

Humans - having an accountability partner or simply involving another person in your habit pursuit can be very beneficial.

Activity - By doing the thing, even if it’s just starting it with no expectations can get you on that consistency flywheel.

Bearing - Your environment is important, if you leave distractions all over the place it makes it very difficult to stay on track.

Internal - you have to be motivated to pick up the habit. It has to be for you and you genuinely wanting to change and not because of other reasons, or else it’s very difficult to stay motivated.

Time of day - the time of day and tying into your existing routine is also very important. The easier it is to just pick up and stick with it, the better.

Other useful tools that helped adopt new habits were:

• best performing, leave notes to yourself
• mini habits - establishing is better than not doing it all
• supportive friend
• listing habit benefits

I hope this helps pick up those habits you’ve been struggling with.

Thanks for Reading

Now start something!

P.S. Feedback is welcome and needed! If you’d prefer to send me an email and not respond, you can do so here: [email protected]

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