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:

• Visiting Vienna
• Sharing our business goals
• Getting tough love from ChatGPT

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!

🇦🇹 Oh, Vienna

London is a pretty great place to live. While it's fun to fantasise, I find it hard to imagine permanently living anywhere else.

Many places have beaches and better weather, but might get a bit boring. Others are chaotic and exciting, but possibly a bit too much so.

But we've just got back from Vienna, and I've got to say: if we were forced to live abroad for some weird reason, it would be high on the list.

It's famously beautiful, of course. It's safe, without being sterile. Everything just works. It's international, it's full of greenery, there's loads to do, and you can get good coffee. I didn't expect to be anywhere near as impressed as I was.

We also (thanks to a reader recommendation) took a day trip by boat to Bratislava, which was odd but cool. The old town is so ludicrously picturesque and perfect it felt like a movie set – but it's also so small that within 5 minutes of walking you come out the other side and get dumped unceremoniously into the real world.

Next up: Malaga for Christmas, then on to planning next year's trips.

Tough breakfast decisions in Slovakia: hmm, coffee or 10 shots?

🏔️ What we're optimising for

A few readers have mentioned that I rarely mention my "day job" in this newsletter, and they'd like to hear more about it.

I tend not to mention it because this newsletter is my outlet for taking a break and writing about my other interests. But it is misleading, because I spend the vast majority of my time on content creation and strategic involvement in Property Hub.

So: a little about what we're up to.

A big change we've made this year is implementing the principles of the book The Great Game Of Business. In short, the gist is to embrace open-book management: share information so the whole team is clear on what game you're playing and how to "win".

One of its big ideas is picking a single, measurable goal for each year, then making all decisions in terms of whether they move you towards this goal.

It sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly hard to do – and fully embracing it has been more powerful than I expected.

This year, our goal was a certain profit figure (which we'll hit). As profit was the goal, we had to keep an eye on costs as well as income. All spending decisions came under scrutiny, and we found ways to get results while keeping the business lean. This was the right decision for this year, and has left us in a strong position.

But for next year, we've chosen the goal of a certain revenue figure. The rationale is that the business has high margins, yet also high fixed costs. Therefore if we focus on revenue and generate an incremental (say) million pounds as a result, most of this drops down to the bottom line. In theory, this will result in a higher profit than if we restrained spending and stifled growth.

This is all hard to explain concisely, but hopefully you get the general idea.

Already, the new goal is being reflected in the plans we're making for next year: ramping up marketing spend, growing our sales team, and so on.

There's a lesson in this that applies to any business, and to life in general: you need to be clear what you're optimising for.

Life is about trade-offs: growth or comfort, freedom or security, passion or profit. You can end up with a healthy balance, but you can only truly optimise for one thing – so it's powerful to make all your decisions with that in mind.

Irrelevant half-marathon photo because I forgot to include it last month

🤔 Is it worth being a "proper" author?

Back in 2022, when I first caught the attention of “proper” publishers, I had a tough choice to make.

I could keep self-publishing and retain the bulk of the revenue, making decent money. Or I could go with a publisher and… who knows? Maybe they’d help me reach a huge global audience, or maybe I'd end up selling the same number of copies but make less money after they took their cut.

I decided to go with Penguin. Now, with my second “proper” book coming out in a few months, I’ve been reflecting on whether I made the right choice.

With the caveat that we tend to justify our choices as the “right” ones regardless… I think I did.

Again, it comes down to: what are you optimising for?

I don’t yet know if it was a poor financial decision (though I assume it was), but I wasn’t optimising for money. If I’m totally honest, I was optimising for ego.

Hearing that someone’s seen my book in an airport feels good. Being taken seriously by other authors I admire (and becoming friends with some of them) feels good too. Saying I’m published by Penguin changes how people view me— but more importantly, it's changed how I view myself.

No, it’s not ideal to rely on external validation for self-worth. But it’s true: I feel happier and more confident having been "chosen" by a big-name publisher and seeing my book in WH Smith than I would with a bit more money in the bank.

I'm not sure what the moral of this story is. Maybe it's that we're all weird and irrational. Maybe it's that it minimises regret if you know what really drives you, even if it's not what should. Or maybe there isn't one.

🔗 Odds and ends

• I love reading other personal newsletters, and wish all my friends had one. Shout out to my friend Marcus, whose newsletter perfectly balances life updates with general insights that are interesting even if you don't know him.

• Normally I totally ignore the news. But because there's been a lot of speculation about the new UK government's first budget and it's highly relevant to our content, I've needed to keep up with politics and read news websites much more than usual. And wow... it's made me feel so much more negative and cynical. It's possible that everything has become much worse recently, but it's also highly likely that reading the news always makes you feel bad about everything and I just wasn't paying attention before. I'll be retreating back to my bubble now.

• A fun ChatGPT prompt that was shared in a group chat recently: "What do you know about me that I might not know about myself based on our previous interactions?” The person who shared it said that the result would give you an ego boost. This was not the case for me – it was brutal! But given how hard it is to get honest feedback from friends, I'm excited about the possibility of using AI to identify my own blind spots.

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, LinkedIn or Instagram.