Back in Dublin, we took you to see the doctor.
“Annabel has a serious double-ear infection,” she said.
“She hasn’t been bothered by her ears.”
“Well. She’s just really tough then.”
Doc, you have no idea.
It’s not that you’re not sweet, AB. You are. On your brother’s birthday, we worried you’d feel left out when he got gifts and you didn’t.
We needn’t had worried.
Today, I’m going to teach you how to get 10+ remote role interviews in 30 days.
Job searching takes a toll. There’s the obvious financial cost. There’s also a deeper emotional cost:
Sometimes, you need a quick win, like interviewing for a role, to build momentum and confidence.
Unfortunately, landing an interview is part of a long process in the job funnel:
Today I’m sharing my favorite way to make big life decisions.
From:
There’s no “right way” to make these decisions. But I found this model simplifies the decision-making process and reduces anxiety.
No pro and con lists.
No sleepless nights.
By answering a simple question, you can remove complexity from similar life decisions.
In this post, you’ll learn 3 ways to build a portfolio that’ll make you recession proof.
The tech layoffs caught a lot of employees off guard.
The volume. The marquee names affected.
But how they happened is the most shocking.
In this post, I’ll show you the exact steps I’d use today to land a remote job, using LinkedIn.
In July 2022, remote jobs made up 16% of job postings on LinkedIn.
Yet attracted 53% of the applications.
Competition is fierce. You need a consistent way to stand out.
Most people think you do this with a word-perfect resume or crafting a beautiful, bespoke cover letter.
They’re wrong.
In the last decade, I’ve landed 5 remote jobs.
Here’s how you can do the same.
In this newsletter, you’ll learn how to create a recession proof career.
In the last 30 days, Google, HubSpot, PayPal, & more have seen layoffs (6%, 7%, and 7% reductions, respectively.)
(Source: Layoffs.fyi)
When you’re fortunate and layoffs don’t impact you, you still run through a gamut of emotions.
Relief. Empathy. Anger.
Then you go about your day. You try to do good work. To prove you drive impact in the company.
This is not enough.
The problem is our careers are more fragile than we think.
Today I’m going to show you how to get buy-in from your employer to move abroad and work remotely.
Moving your family and living abroad is an adventure.
But finding (and keeping) a job open to the idea is a key factor to make the move.
Today, I’m going to show you 5 steps to move your family abroad while working remotely.
These are the exact steps I took when moving my family to Ireland in 2021. And I’m executing them right now to move again.
An international move is a large endeavor. You need to solve for:
By knowing the exact steps (and the sequence) you’ll increase your odds of success.
I wish somebody would have told me babe / Some day, these will be the good old days
– Ke$ha
At the start of 2022, I said these were my 3 focus areas:
Building my audience, career, and relationships.
From the Q2 recap, my objectives and priorities for Q3 were: :
Below, I’ll dig into how things went this quarter.
How did your quarter go? I’d love to hear about it, feel free to let me know.
I achieved these 3 objectives.
The only “gray” area was publishing a weekly thread: I missed a week here or there, so give myself an 8 out of 10. Not perfect, but solid.
When looking at the outcomes these processes were supposed to drive, I fell short. Reality vs. expectation off by these percentages, respectively (list out). More on that below.
So how do I feel about this?
It’s critical to get the process in the right place. To win the audience building game, I need to be (1) consistent and (2) I need to survive. Accomplishing both while managing the vagaries of raising happy small children and an ambitious career is hard.
But the long-term goals I wrote about in What is Rich? continue to motivate me.
Your financial independence boils down to just a couple of numbers. Here are mine:
– $75,000/month
– $6,000,000 net worth
They’re stretch goals for sure, but definitely within reach.
There’s also an element of motivational competitiveness: When I look at other creators in the field, so many further down the path than myself, I don’t see anyone who makes me say: “this person is so much smarter, more hard-working than me, that I couldn’t do what they do.”
I feel like I can be the very best at what I choose to do.
And whether that’s true or not is actually irrelevant.
What matters is that ambition will at the very least make me extremely proficient. So deeper down the rabbit hole we go.
How do I feel about missing quarterly quant metrics?
To be honest, it sucks. It hurts the ego. It’s not fun to post these images of flat lines quarter after quarter. I’m working on shaking that mentality because attaching a feeling, good or bad to these short-term metrics isn’t productive.
They don’t take me out of the game (as they would a CEO of a public company that misses targets quarter after quarter).
These quarterly metrics are not meant to serve my ego. They’re designed to keep me honest. They’re meant to give me signals on what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to change for the next quarter.
(High) Consistent, sustainable output
Post 3x per week on social. Reduce the frequency of posts (move away from daily and trim back to 3x per week, but improve the quality).
1 newsletter & blog post every 2 weeks. Build reusable content atoms that can be remixed and reshuffled and used in various templates that scale up in components: tweets, newsletters, blog content, products, courses
(Med) Flip from Twitter > LinkedIn to LinkedIn > Twitter
Posts perform better on LinkedIn, get better feedback, and it’s easier to rework that into new content, feel like I’m able to write longer stuff there anyway. So I’ll focus on LinkedIn first, and adapt it for Twitter.
(Low) Find the right balance with engaging on social
Engaging regularly definitely helped with goals. I learned a lot, met cool people, and I liked it
But it came at a cost. I had notifications turned on, it was hard to do focused deep work
So I went the other way and stopped doing it altogether.
Now I’m ready to bring it back towards the middle.
As mentioned, quantitative goals were a miss in Q3. I didn’t give much thought to new goals for Q4, but do find tracking this good for my own visibility and posterity.
Twitter Followers
Blog traffic
This drop in organic traffic was most interesting. One of my popular posts, 10 Remote Jobs With No Experience Required dropped 50% in organic traffic after the latest Google algorithm update. Good reminder about the importance of channel diversity. *
Newsletter subscribers
Changed strategy mid-way through Q3 and started sending the newsletter again. Really enjoying this.
Career. Started a new role this quarter with a new company, Persefoni. I launched our freemium product, Persefoni Essentials, in my first 90 days. Really enjoying this work and its mission. It’s got its dysfunctions (as all companies do). Fortunately, they’re the dysfunctions I can live with.
Went deep into Deep Work this quarter. Starting to think deeply about problems and challenges again for the first time in a long time.
Relationships / Family. On a trip to Croatia, it dawned on me that long-term travel with family is easier than ever. I used to think that a year abroad, traveling to a different country each quarter would be out of reach as the family grew. But I’m more confident and optimistic than ever.
Training. Training is going well, the goal for 2023 is to get my purple belt. Considering competing in a BJJ tournament in Q1 2023, but not sure yet.
Sleep. Vastly improved with a “shutdown” routine. I track my sleep with HealthMate (from Withings) and it’s been motivating to watch my “sleep score” tick up month after month.
Today I’ll show you how to banish remote work anxiety. You’ll get more done at work. More importantly, you’ll feel like you’re able to actually switch off when you’re not working.
Working remotely for 9 years has been incredible for my career and life.
For most of that time, I’ve also dealt with low- to mid-level anxiety. Never to the point where it was debilitating, but more like this background noise I’m unable to switch off.
Because I can work anywhere, anytime, it felt like there was always something I could be doing.