Howdy Reader! Cashing out on online poker helped me to start a bit earlier last night. Still have more things to fix, but one at a time. 🤣 The GAS Method. A few weeks ago I teased The GAS Method. But today I'll reveal what it stands for. If I can get this down for myself, I know it will take a lot of stress out of my content creation. I can just feel it. Gauge the work. I want to maintain consistency in what I produce. I've failed at this too many times, and it's knocked the wind out each...
1 day ago • 1 min read
Howdy Reader! I picked up online poker at the start of the pandemic. I had played (free) Zynga Poker on Facebook, and thought that I was good enough at that to profit in online cash games. What I didn’t know at the time was that people play a lot differently if there’s real money on the line. It doesn’t matter that the “real money” was only a $0.25 buy-in to a six-person knockout tournament. So I learned on weekly freeroll tournaments and micro-stakes. Five years I played, sometimes several...
3 days ago • 2 min read
Howdy Reader! I don't understand scammers. Last night I had to block and report someone on Instagram who was impersonating another creator I know. I asked a question that only the real person would know, and they didn't answer it. So I blocked them and reported them. This wasn't the first time I'd done this. Some time ago, I did the same thing to another person. Except he had at least three profiles with different misspellings of another creator. It took me longer to catch on that he wasn't...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Howdy Reader! I picked up online poker during the start of the pandemic. The stakes are very small: $0.25 buy-ins to 6-player tournaments with a life-altering top prize of $0.90. So though it financially was not a big risk, it took a lot of time. Playing for a half-hour to make under a dollar potentially is a lousy per-hour rate. So, as much as I enjoy this side hustle -- which actually is profitable! -- the payoff isn't there. I don't see myself getting that much better at it that I can go...
5 days ago • 1 min read
Howdy Reader! One of my recent reads is Greg McKeown's Essentialism. Its subtitle is "The Disciplined Pursuit of Less." I've had too many things going on for too long. And it's cost me. Less spent on services I just canceled or downgraded some of my online tools to the tune of $42/month. More will follow when I get a cancellation window. But for now, that's $42/month I don't need to bring in to break even. Fewer concepts I had been calling this newsletter Solid Cash Tips. I've dropped the...
7 days ago • 1 min read
Howdy Reader! Had a chat with a good friend from my mastermind group last night. With the mastermind meetings we've had to keep them under an hour with the free Google Meed tier. However, tonight I realized after our conversation that we had talked over an hour, and we didn't get kicked off. I asked my friend if he got the paid tier. Nope! I found out that you can talk over an hour if it's just two people. Find a buddy and talk shop for a good long time! Let's grow together! ~ John When...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Howdy Reader! I didn't always have a system for capturing thoughts in a single place. Recently I've gotten a lot better about not just writing anything anywhere. I have a small number of places I write things down. But what about collecting stuff I wrote earlier? I have some older notebooks that I hadn't gotten around to processing. I started to at some point, but stopped, and it wasn't clear how far I'd gotten. I'd highlighted, put sticky tabs, notes, all kinds of stuff ... ... but had I...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Howdy Reader! My Instagram account is connected to my Threads account, so I've had a few people initiate contact with me on Instagram by direct messaging (DMing) me. This for me is a bit like cold-calling. One guy sent me a DM right after I liked one of his posts, and wanted to send me a free guide. I told him in as many words, "We're not there yet." Another guy handled it better Someone else did much the same thing, but somehow he handled it better. Likely, he simply took a bit more time...
10 days ago • 1 min read
Howdy Reader! I get a notification each week about my phone usage. TikTok was near the top each week. That's not necessarily a bad thing as a content creator. In my case, though, it was. I don't create on TikTok at the moment. So I was just consuming content there. I'd fire up TikTok after dinner, and at night. To the tune of 8 hours a week. My Habit Switch Instead of doing TikTok when I got home, I'd pull up Threads. I'm actively posting there. Scrolling on Threads is productive at some...
11 days ago • 1 min read