Welcome!

This is an email I send to keep in touch with people and share a bit about what I'm doing and thinking about.

This month, I'm:

• Revealing a personal finance secret
• Discovering a superpower
• Talking, not typing

You're receiving this monthly email because you signed up for it at robdix.com, or you opted in after reading my book The Price Of Money, or I added you manually because we've spoken one-to-one.

If you don't enjoy it, feel free to unsubscribe at the bottom – I won't be notified and I'll never even know!

🧲 More more more

The benefit of writing about money is I get to ask a lot of entrepreneurs very personal questions about their finances without seeming nosey (or like a gold digger).

And you know what? After talking to people with up to nine figures in their bank balance (not including those after the decimal), one truth is universal:

Everyone wants more.

EVERYONE.

One example: I know a guy who makes YouTube videos. They're a stream of consciousness, have minimal editing... they take him about 3 hours per week.

And they're making him $20,000 in ad revenue alone, every single month.

So is he revelling in having cracked the code, and now spends the rest of his time with friends, family, reading, learning, relaxing... ?

Nope.

He's strategising how he can start collecting email addresses, build courses, introduce affiliates...

No-one is immune.

And it's pretty consistent: however much you have, you tell yourself you'll finally have "enough" once you have double what you do now.

From what I've seen, there doesn't seem to be any level where it stops. 

How do you break out of this?

Option 1: Redefine your pursuit of "more" so it's not just money. Seek more health, more friends, more knowledge...

Option 2: Accept that you'll always want more, but make sure you also enjoy the actions you're taking towards "more money" as an end in themselves

I think both can work. But Option 3 ("be satisfied and stop")? Yeah, that doesn't exist.

Playing Padel for the first time – so much fun

🦹‍♀️ Exploiting your superpower for fun and profit

Something not many people know about me: I wrote a secret "first book", called "Presentation Skills For Introverts".

(Actually, that's not true. The first book I ever wrote was a lazy list of facts about the London 2012 Olympics, but the less said about that the better.)

The book came about because even at a time in my life when I was massively socially anxious, I've always found it easy to give presentations.

(I had the idea to write it after repeatedly hearing the astonishment of guests at our wedding, after they saw me confidently strolling around the stage and cracking jokes when they'd never heard me put more than two words together before.)

This made it the perfect book for me to write, because it had 3 key ingredients:

1. What I'm sharing comes easily to me and I could demonstrate expertise (the book opened with the wedding anecdote)

2. It solves a high-value, painful problem (many people hate public speaking but know it can open up opportunities)

3. It's targeted at a distinct target group (introverts)

I was only writing it as a lark to figure out how self-publishing worked. But I easily could have created a business around it: up-selling to an online course, in-person coaching, a trademarked "method", etc etc.

I believe everyone has a "superpower" like this. For me, it was public speaking. For my wife, it's getting into deep conversations with strangers. For a friend it's doing crazy elaborate things with air miles.

(Clue: It's probably something you find super easy that you're frequently asked about, and you don't understand the big deal.)

Find yours ("presentation skills") and apply it to a clear target group ("for introverts"), and you've got a business on your hands.

If you look very carefully, you can see my book in the WH Smiths chart in most airports and train stations. This was one of my big motivations for signing with a "real" publisher, so very cool to see.

📚 How to save time reading books by not reading books

My favourite content consumption hack: Before reading a book, listen to a long-form interview with the author.

Taking on a book is a BIG commitment. Since having kids it’s barely an exaggeration to say I’ve written more books than I’ve read.

But most books contain a small number of key arguments or ideas. And I noticed that if you listen to a long-form interview with the author, they’ll tell them to you in about an hour – without the fluff.

(Important caveat: There are exceptions to every rule and my ideas can only be fully appreciated by buying my books at full price and absorbing every word.)

I’m not saying “never read books”. But by listening to an interview first:

1) You can see if they’re actually saying anything useful

2) You can find out if they communicate in a style you like

3) You can spend an hour understanding the core idea before deciding if you want to spend another 10-20 going into more depth

To find which podcasts an author has appeared on, I search on listennotes.com

🔗 Odds and ends

• If you're an iPhone user, you'll be aware of how bad its voice recognition is for dictating messages. However, I found a way of integrating Open AI's Whisper API (which is amazing) with Apple Shortcuts – so you can quickly dictate anything you like, then paste it into a messaging app or anywhere else. The setup is mid-level geeky, but you can find it here.

• While we're on AI (again), I can't recommend the Snipd podcast player highly enough. It basically breaks an episode into AI-detected chapters so you can skip around, and allows you to "snip" excerpts you want to be reminded of later by tapping your headphones. Ideal for locating the topics you actually care about within those three-hour Huberman/Ferriss conversations.

• Universally, the least popular part of this newsletter is my music recommendations – which only makes me all the more determined to keep them in. Chromeo are a Canadian electro-funk duo who I first saw something like 13 years ago, and are still frickin' great. This DJ set of theirs on The Lot Radio has been my writing soundtrack for the past week.

That’s it for now! Feel free to write back and let me know what you've been up to.

Cheers!

Rob

p.s. You can also follow me on Twitter or Instagram.