Notion dashboards. Second brain apps. Inbox zero. None of it matters if you miss one thing.
Rest.
Without a good night’s sleep, your fancy productivity system fails. You drag your feet, drink coffee, and fight the urge to nap anywhere.
To work like the top 1% of high-performers, work hard but rest harder. Schedule rest like you schedule your most important meetings. Non-negotiable.
I’ve never liked being asked for money on the street.
When someone asks me for money, I ask why they don’t sell something instead.
But I realized I was doing the same thing: holding up a digital sign next to a rusty can in the internet streets. That hit hard.
Instead of asking for coffee, I now invite readers to join Friday Links, where I share 4 curated resources about programming and promote my books and courses.
I get it! When we’re starting, we don’t want to sound salesy, so we go with a “support me” as a call-to-action. We think we shouldn’t monetize creativity, as if artists or writers should starve.
After binge-reading Tim Denning, a digital writer with billions of views, I learned to ditch the “Buy Me a Coffee” link and offer something of value, like a newsletter. Turns out, that’s the strategy millionaire creators swear byr. And now, I do too.
He turned a half-joking Tweet into a community of over 7,000 creators.
His name is Daniel Vassallo. He was a Software Engineer with a cushy job at Amazon. But one day, after being tired of daily meetings and the lack of freedom, he decided to start a solo business.
His journey went from building software to freelancing, selling info products, and eventually running the Small Bets community.
After binge-watching some of his interviews on YouTube, like this one with the Refactoring podcast, here are 4 lessons I’ve learned:
You don’t need a company or investors to begin.
Start with a low-hanging fruit, a small project that makes you a few hundred or thousand bucks to build momentum.
For Daniel’s first project, he tried to imitate the processes from his last coding job. Coming up with a yearly goal, splitting it into milestones, and working in sprints. That only made him burn through almost all of his savings.
Don’t replicate your last full-time job. Find an easy project first.
You don’t need VC funding, but you need to think like an investor.
An investor places bets on lots of startups. They know some of them will fail, but the one that succeeds will pay off all other investments.
Think of your projects the same way. Don’t put all your effort into one basket. And like an investor, don’t get too attached to a particular project. They’re your cattle, not your pets.
Run a portfolio of small bets so income doesn’t have to come from a single place.
You don’t need a mission, vision, or values to start an online business.
Your only goal might be to never return to a 9-5. That’s Daniel’s goal. That could be yours and mine too.
The goal of starting a business is to have the freedom to work under your own terms.
For Daniel, that means having no rigid schedule or routine, but working on the tasks with the biggest ROI every day. Or simply scrolling through Twitter/X looking for project inspiration.
As a solopreneur or creator, you’re an investor, but of your own time.
In 2018, I wrote a blog post for the first time.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I only wanted to get better at coding. And after years of trial and error and taking my writing seriously, I’ve developed my own writing mantras. Here they are:
#1. If it can help one person, you’re safe to hit post. Write about anything, as long as it’s helpful for at least one person. You don’t need to write to the masses. Just to one person. And that one person could be your past self.
#2. Give something and give it fast. Writing online is different from fiction writing. In a novella, you can describe every detail of the room where your scene is happening. But online, readers decide in milliseconds if they’ll keep reading or move on. Nail your headlines and opening lines.
#3. Write as if nobody is reading, and keep writing because you don’t know who’s reading. Writing can be lonely, especially at the beginning. The cure? Write for your younger self. Write the tweets, posts, or books you would have liked to read two years ago.
#4. Don’t wait to become an expert to write. Write to become one. If you wait to become an expert, it will take you 10 years or more to write your first piece. Instead, share what you’re learning. Show your work. The best way to learn is to teach, and the best way to teach is to write.
#5. An intention makes you start but a system keeps you showing up. It’s easy to start. Just drop a bunch of words into a text box and hit “Post.” The hard part? Doing it for years. For that, find a system to capture ideas and turn them into content, and one piece into many.
In the end, it isn’t just intention. It’s the right attitude, a system, and the habit that keeps you writing.
Hey there.
Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week:
#1. Five years ago, we only needed “Software Engineer” as a title on LinkedIn to be flooded with “life-changing” opportunities. People jumped in for the money. Tech was booming. But that bubble popped. We’re living in a software engineering squeeze (5min).
#2. The most boring part of software projects? It’s when we’re just closing JIRA tickets instead of solving real problems. It’s when we’re in Ticket-Driven Development (4min).
#3. As a coder, you don’t have to know every single acronym, framework, or tool. It’s fine to say I don’t know (3min). But I’ve learned to rephrame it as “I don’t know…yet”
#4. Maybe this is a good excuse to buy augmented reality glasses to use them as ad-blockers (3min).
And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about a recovery guide for AI-dependent coders (5min) and the best 3 pieces of advice I’ve received (2min).
(Bzzz…Radio voice) This email was brought to you by… Check my Gumroad store to access free and premium books and courses to level up your coding skills and grow your software engineering career.
See you next time,
Cesar
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