Q4 Experiments

We have passed the halfway mark for September, which means that the fourth quarter of 2024 is nearly upon us.

Yes, I think of the year in quarters. That’s a manageable amount of time for me to plan for, then later evaluate to tweak course as necessary. It’s enough time to do something, but not so much time that you feel like you have room to procrastinate.

It’s time for me to set up my experiments for the last 3 months of the year. Normal people would probably call them “goals” or “projects.” I prefer to call them “experiments” because the only thing I know about the outcome going in is that I will learn something.

I gave up on New Years resolutions many years ago in favor of New Years mottos or mantras. The point of the mantra is to take a certain conscious perspective and turn it into an unconscious habit.In the past, they have included “embrace the adventure,” “feel the fear and do it anyway,” and “now is a good time even if it’s not the perfect time.” In the spirit of that last one, I am going to get a head start on my next motto.

The mantra of Q4 will be “lead with compassion.” This works in two different ways: “lead with” can mean “start with,” and that should be the place you start from when dealing with others, the world at large, and yourself. Compassion is also one of the traits that makes a good leader into a great leader.

One of the things that I have learned the hard way is that I can’t do everything, and I certainly can’t do everything all at once. As a person with many interests and great curiosity, not to mention ambition, this feels deeply unfair.

Unfortunately, that’s just how reality works. And I have crashed and burnt out enough to know that fighting reality on this point is a terrible idea, especially if you want to actually accomplish anything. You might be able to do 50 things, but you’ll never do them as well as you would have done the 5 most important things alone. (If this line of thought is something you’re interested in, you might want to read Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. If you use this link to purchase the book, I may make a small commission. Or you could go to the library. That works too.)

I am going to break my experiments down into categories and then later break each one down into tasks. For the sake of this post, we’re going to stick to the categories and descriptions.

Professional Experiments:

Figure out how to offer value worth paying for in my online ventures. It stands to reason that both companies and individuals are far more likely to pay you something if you are providing them some kind of value, whether that’s entertaining content or traffic that drives their ad revenue. I have a number of different online content channels I am exploring, but I need to figure out what’s most promising and make it the very best it can be so that it is worth something to someone somewhere. The least I can do is put my heart into my projects (such as this blog) to make them the best they can be.

The next steps is figuring out how to turn that value into money. This is the magic trick I have never quite mastered. I do see how my lack of focus in the past has been one major factor holding me back, so I am hoping that limiting my efforts to fewer things and doing them better will help me pull a rabbit made of dollars out of this hat.

I am going to keep up with some of the online gigs I have been working as well, but they aren’t enough and I have this pesky disability keeping me out of the on-site workforce (for unpleasantly personal reasons). We’re getting down to the wire here on the financial side.

Learning Experiments:

This is one of my perilous areas. I want to learn everything. I am, however, going to narrow it down to a couple of things that might be helpful in the future:

Complete the Intuit Academy Bookkeeping and Tax Level 1 courses. (Not an affiliate or anything. Just free skills.)

Learn Mexican Spanish. As much as I have been enjoying learning Swedish this year, it’s time to knock the rust off my Spanish. Why Mexican Spanish in particular? I am entertaining notions of traveling to Mexico and I feel like it would be useful to know regardless.

I will post tomorrow about my personal experiments. It is way past my bedtime now, so I will sign off until then. Good night, dear readers!