I’m working hard, and it’s hard on me.

When I’m working from home, I’ve found it helps me get more productive to change out of my pajama pants, and into pants with pockets and a belt. I guess it really gets my ass in gear.

But I’ve had to work from bed many days in February, because I’m weak, and that’s strange for me.

For most of my adult life, I’ve been active and fit. I’m a hard worker, and I’m accustomed to working my way diligently through any problem. If there’s anything I want to achieve, I’m a Capricorn, so I just put my horns to the grindstone, flap my tail, and go.

Last year, I worked harder than I ever have in my life, to earn residency in New Zealand. And I broke something in my body.

It turns out, working sixty hours a week for nine months can really burn you out. I’ve been facing health issues that aren’t going away, no matter how hard I work on them with my natural healing remedies.

Fatigue has become my constant companion. I never understood what chronic fatigue could do to people, or how difficult it would be to live with it every day.

I’ve found myself facing a problem that hard work can not overcome. If anything, the harder I work, the worse it gets.

But I can’t just stop working, because I’m the sole provider for a family of five. If I don’t work, the household doesn’t have money for rent or bills or food.

I’m so used to working my way through my troubles, that I’m at a loss for how to solve this challenge. I am unable to take three months off to heal, and I can’t work as hard as my business needs me to work to stay afloat.

I’m stumped. But the good news is, my family is healthy, we live in a wonderful far-off corner of the world, and we are safe and secluded from any troubles that may disrupt the planet. I may have injured myself to get us here, but here we are, and we are safe.

My lady wife brings so many smiles into my world.

Hiking in New Zealand

These are photos from a cliffside hike near my house. Gentle walks are good healing for me, and the vistas are amazing.

Limited time with a monkey on my back. 

My kids are getting older, and I’m now saying goodbye to some of the familiar milestones. I’m teaching this little guy how to tie his shoes, and this is the last time I’ll teach my own kids this particular life hack. 

I’ve been a father to young children for more than a decade, and now that I’m exiting this stage of my life, I make sure to take extra time to cherish their childhoods while I can. Unlimited piggy back rides for the rest of the year!

Digital marketing accomplishments

I pay a lot of attention to how people use their websites, and I make note of what the best persona-driven brands are doing to keep their audience’s attention. I’m always asking myself (and writing about):

  • What are the best web designers doing on their homepage?
  • How do they optimize the first few moments of the website experience?
  • What is the clearest description of a brand and a persona?
  • What’s the one thing this website wants me to do?

Click below to read…

10 Great Homepage Above-The-Fold CTA Examples

I’ve been having lots of conversations with online course creators about a big new idea, and at first I was like, “No, that idea’s crazy, no way” and after talking to some smart people, they have all said, “wow, you’re really onto something, you need to talk to more people about this” so I do, and the more I uncover the more challenging this idea becomes.

I’m not ready to share this idea yet, but it could upend my entire business model (which is better than being vested in an upended industry in a few months or years).

Published This Month

If artists didn’t have to monetize their creativity, I bet most of us would be making different things.

Here is the best professional advice you can distill into a tweet

The Umbrella Academy launched on Netflix

What the Umbrella Academy gets so right is that the best superhero stories are not about superpowers – they are about complicated relationships between people with superpowers.

Episode 6, The Day that Wasn’t, is one of the best standalone pieces of cinematic storytelling I’ve ever seen.

By the way, nerds…

If you are a comics fan, then you should follow my new Twitter project, @ThanosGoogling.

XRP is listed on Coinbase

Purchasing XRP with USD used to be really difficult. I wrote a long tutorial on how to buy XRP with a credit card last year, detailing how to purchase LTC on Coinbase, and then send it to an exchange, and then trade it for BTC and then XRP.

XRP has been difficult to buy, and now it’s easy. Any American citizen can get a Coinbase account and purchase XRP with a credit card.

Why is this exciting? Because if Ripple (XRP) becomes the backbone for global financial institutions to transfer huge amounts of capital, then these little XRP tokens valued at $0.31 USD today could be worth $1k or more in a few years.

If you have the technical aptitude to understand Blockchain, and the business acumen to understand the payment gateway problem faced by major international banks transferring trillions of dollars per day, then I encourage you to learn about XRP. You may conclude that a few dollars on this moonshot is a very worthwhile bet.

If a bank can drastically cut the fees and the transfer time for a blockchain solution, they will.

But that solution has to be:
-Thoroughly vetted by the SEC
-Completely vested with plenty capital
-Platform agnostic
-Friendlier to large banks than to anarchists (the other half of the crypto enthusiast market)

XRP ticks all the boxes. Out of all the cryptocurrencies, this is the coin that banks love and crypto-anarchists hate. It is a centralized coin, meaning it does not disperse the power of capital to the winds, but keeps it in control of the major banks.

Some see this as a betrayal of the blockchain concept, but I see it as the safe and secure method that banks would require before they would trust all of their capital to a new technology.

Where the big banks go, there is going to be profit.

I think this is the future of global finance. The US dollar may not be the standard of global currency in as little as ten years – it may be XRP.

And if that’s the case, buying a little bit now could have a huge payoff later.

This could be a great opportunity – or, full disclosure, it could be a complete dud, and I might be wrong about all this. Opportunity knocks, but you have to open the door.

Metrics That Matter

Publishing these metrics is making me keep a close eye on them. Some of them, I’m embarrassed about, which is all the more reason to share my shame and get better next month.

  • Net Profit last month: $ -2116.77
  • Money saved last month: $ 250
  • Hours of exercise last month: 19.5
  • Average weekly hours worked last month: 35
  • Days completing the Power Playlist: 8 / 28
  • Days drinking raw cabbage juice: 19 / 28
  • Days journaling: 8 / 28
  • Hikes: 3

Goals for This Month

  • Close a new retainer client
  • 20 days of Power Playlist
  • 28 days of cabbage juice and liver
  • Scope outline of 100 Days to a Stellar Platform product
  • Outreach campaign for speaker prospecting

Summertime cicadas

I’ll end this monthly round-up with the sounds of cicadas.