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:

• Building a cash machine
• Despairing at modern "art"
• Enjoying a more efficient way of learning

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!

⚙️ The two machines you need for financial freedom

Most people believe that working harder is the key to wealth.

But I’ve spent a lot of time around people who’ve achieved true financial freedom, and noticed that they have two powerful machines working for them.

Here's what they are and how you can build yours…

1: Your cash machine

This pays for your lifestyle, and also feeds the second machine – which we’ll come to later.

You hear all the time that your cash machine should be a business. And yes, this is ideal, because then the machine itself is valuable.

If you’ve created a machine where you put in 1 and get out 2, someone will always buy that machine from you in exchange for a big lump sum.

But let’s be real: creating a business isn’t for everyone. That’s OK though: a job or a consulting gig can be a cash machine too.

The trick here is to treat it like one: figure out how you can get the largest possible output (pay from your employer) for the smallest amount of input (hours and effort).

[The short version of how to do this is learning new skills and applying them effectively (value creation), plus negotiation and job-hopping (value capture). The long version will have to wait until another time.]

Anyway. You now have a cash machine of some form. But are you free to spend your days doing whatever takes your fancy when you wake up in the morning?

No. For that, you also need the second machine: a compounding machine.

2: Your compounding machine

This also works by taking in 1 and spitting out 2. But you feed this machine with money from your cash machine, rather than your own effort and skills.

Day-to-day, it can seem like the machine is malfunctioning.

Sometimes it throws an error and loses chunks of your money. Even when it’s working, mostly nothing seems to be happening.

But if you keep the machine plugged in in the corner for long enough, eventually it’ll beep and flash up a number – and you’ll realise that it’s taken your money and turned it into a lot more money.

Eventually, the output of your compounding machine is enough for you to live off. If you want to, you can unplug (or sell) your cash machine.

And here’s the wonderful thing: now you can spend your days doing whatever you feel like doing. Because the compounding machine doesn’t need any intervention from you.

In fact, it works better when you leave it alone.

But here’s the unavoidable truth: you need both machines.

A cash machine on its own isn’t enough. It’ll pay for your lifestyle, but you’ll always – to some extent – need to be on hand to shovel more time, ideas and commitment in.

A compounding machine on its own isn’t enough either – because without a cash machine, there’s nothing to feed it. 

It’s a wonderful machine, but it’s slowwwww. Without enough input and enough time for it to churn away, the output won’t be enough to make any difference to your life.

Do you currently have a cash machine, a compounding machine, or both? Let me know which you're most focused on building.

Achievement unlocked! My friend Georgie sent me a photo of someone reading my book on the tube.

☀️ Barcelona is great and I kinda want to live there permanently

We've just got back from spending a few weeks in Barcelona as a family over the Easter holidays.

Highlights:

• The Sagrada Familia is totally worth a visit. As it bloody well should be after all this time.
• The MACBA Museum is notable for a level of modern art weirdness that makes the Tate Modern look like a Constable retrospective. Guys, a twig on a turntable is not art. Squeezing oranges in a tent is not art. You will not change my mind.
• In common with the rest of Spain, it's ridiculously child-friendly. Literally every building has ramps and lifts. And everyone seems delighted by your children even when they're objectively being profoundly irritating.

We explored in the mornings, and In the afternoons we had a nanny (the ultimate travel hack) so we could both work.

In my case, it was working on my next book. Until this trip I'd been trying to write a bit every week alongside everything else, and was getting nowhere.

So before we left I cleared the decks. Got ahead on all my regular content, took critical calls and meetings only, and carved out major chunks of time. And now the first draft is DONE!

Turns out mono-tasking works. Who knew?

Barcelona: Not at all crap.

🦾 How I use AI to avoid reading books

I know it's tedious how much everyone bangs on about AI – but using it to generate summaries and tease out key ideas has seriously increased the amount of information I can absorb.

Here's how I use it:

For books:

• For any sufficiently famous book, ChatGPT or Claude will know plenty about it (but won't have access to the full text)
• I ask something like "What are the main takeaways from the book 'X'?" or "What does book 'X' say about 'Y'?"
• Then I ask follow-up questions and press it for more details. Often, I introduce something from my life that I want help with and ask what the book would suggest

Clearly, this works for self-improvement type books better than biographies or anything else. But it works so well.

As an example, I wanted to know about a particular parenting method. Rather than reading the book I asked ChatGPT for a summary, how to get started with it step-by-step (specifically giving the age of my child in case that was relevant), where people often go wrong when implementing it, and so on. Time taken: five minutes versus hours.

For podcasts:

• You need to start with a transcript. Often the show will make it available, otherwise you can grab it from YouTube if the episode is on there. If all else fails, download the MP3 and chuck it into something like Otter.ai
• Paste in the transcript (Claude.ai is better for large files if it's long)
• Ask it to give you a numbered list with the main points covered
• You can then say "give me more detailed notes on [number]". Push it for specific quotes and examples used

In both cases, there's a lot to be said for reading/listening to the original: you'll miss nuances if you don't, and you'll undoubtedly process it on a deeper level.

But if you're busy and it's a choice between having the information or not, I know what I'd choose.

🔗 Odds and ends

• My wife and I are the last people in the world to start watching Taskmaster: helpfully, there are playlists of all past series on YouTube. We started with Series 12 due to our love for Victoria Coren-Mitchell – and it's just so lovely.

• I'm a Dad in London. So when I found out there was a free newsletter called Dads In London that tells you about five child-friendly events taking place in the coming weekend, I signed up. (They don't check, so if you're a Mum in London you can sneak in too.)

• We've been researching lots of potential trips, and here's what I've discovered: almost all travel channels on YouTube are so bad. The sole exception is ON World Travel: a couple who are funny and endearing enough that I've watched plenty of their videos about places I have no intention of going.

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

Cheers!

Rob

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