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🚀 Living A Limitless Life Newsletter

Hey friend 👋,

Welcome to Living a Limitless Life!

Welcome to the 83 new legends who have joined the LALL newsletter since the last edition.

If you haven't subscribed, join 2,567 other brilliant people curious about Living A Limitless Life.

You'll improve your life & biz in 10 minutes by:

• The Three Best 1% Business & Self-Improvement Tips I've Found This Week:
  • Building wealth is a skill you can learn.
  • Nothing matters more in business than this
  • Start small, iterate quickly.
• A 4-Minute Read That Could Change Your Life.
  • The #1 Thing You Can Do To Grow Your One-Person Business In 2024
• Hacks To Improve Your Life (Steal Them):
  • The best bio-hack I've found this week - Mouthtape.
  • The best tech I've found this week - Desk Extender.
  • The best podcast I've listened to this week - Nathan Barry.
• Life Updates (And How They Can Help You):
  • I'm documenting my writing journey every day.
  • I've added more deliberate practice in my writing.
• Michael's Weekly Book Club
  • Same As Ever: Timeless Lessons On Risk, Opportunity, And Living A Good Life - Morgan Housel

Today's Sponsor is... ME!

Here's a FREE copy of my short e-book — 50 Short But Practical Life Lessons I’ve Learned From Reading 100+ Self-improvement Books 🔥 ​ Download it HERE

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The question I am asking myself this week❓

What looks unsustainable now but is a new trend that society hasn't accepted?

For me, that's the creator economy.

​Goldman Sachs predicts the creator economy will grow to half a trillion dollars.

That's right. Trillion. With a capital T.

This week's quote that made me think 💬

The Three Best 1% Business & Self-Improvement Tips I've Found This Week:

• Building wealth is a skill you can learn - You wouldn't expect to sit down at a piano for the first time and play like Mozart. Then why do you expect to be a millionaire without learning the skills to make (and manage) a million dollars? If you can't manage $1,000 you can't manage $100,000. Action: Invest time, money, and energy into modern wealth-building skills.

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• Nothing matters more in business than this - Paying customers. But yet I see friends who want to start a business waste time starting a website or getting business cards. That's all pointless. Action: Get your first customer ASAP. People will pay with their time before their money, so start delivering your service for free if you have to.

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• Start small, iterate quickly - Digital product creation. For the past few months, I've been writing a one-person workbook. Admittedly, I bit off more than I can chew. In the future, I'll be starting a lot smaller, launching quicker, and iterating as soon as I get feedback. Action: Whatever you're creating, start way smaller than you think. If you're product doesn't feel too basic, you haven't started small enough.

A 4-Minute Read That Could Change Your Life.

Read on: michaellim.co​

Read time: 4 minutes

The #1 Thing You Can Do To Grow Your One-Person Business In 2024

Give everything away for free.

Yep. I said it.

I’ve recently read 100m Leads by Alex Hormozi and I’ve been convinced by this approach.

Why?

Well, when someone in business makes WAY more money than you, you should probably listen.

Here’s how I’ve implemented the lessons from the book.

Map out your customer's problems from start to finish.

Every big problem is a series of small problems.

Map them out all of the small problems.

I am passionate about people starting their one-person business alongside their 9–5 jobs to achieve financial security, freedom, and autonomy.

So here’s the most common problems I see:

• Getting started.
• Getting established.
• Your first $1,000 month.
• Your first $5,000 month.
• Your first $10,000 month.
• Your first $20,000 month.

Each of my free lead magnets will be a complete solution to one of these narrow problems.

There are more steps, but these are the only problems I’ve solved for myself. I am uniquely placed to talk about them and all the f*ck-ups I made along the way.

I plan to make everything free.

How can I sustain this? I’ve got a 9–5 job that pays in the top 1% of my age income bracket.

This is why I don’t advocate people quitting their 9–5 jobs to go ‘all-in’. I would know because I did exactly that.

Do this instead: Leverage your 9–5 to build and create for free on the side.

Notice that each lead magnet solves one problem, but then creates another set of problems:

If you solve the problem of starting a one-person business, your next problem is establishing the one-person business. Then your next problem is making $1,000 per month. Then $5,000. Then $10,000. You get my point.

Solve problems. Provide lots of value. Do it for free.

But why free?

You want to build trust and goodwill.

You want to provide so much value upfront and for free that people feel guilty taking from you. When people start asking you how they can give you money, that’s when you start selling them.

Up until that point, everything is free.

But don’t give away garbage.

Give away something people would pay for.

Like I said, you have to create something so valuable, that people almost feel guilty for getting it for free.

Look at your competitor. Look at a product or service that they charge money for. Recreate it and give it away for free.

It’s a natural part of human psychology.

When people feel they have something so valuable, they want to reciprocate.

Don’t believe me?

I’ve got a free lead magnet that people pay for.

I never asked them to pay or tip me at all. But so far, I’ve made close to $500. That’s wild.

Okay, so there are no free lunches in life.

What you want to do in exchange for your free products is to capture your customer’s email address.

Here are the steps:

1. Host your products on Gumroad, and make your products available for digital download.
2. Through Zapier, automate your email sign-ups to be tagged with ‘Lead Magnet #1’, ‘Lead Magnet #2’, etc, on ConvertKit.
3. Start a ConvertKit newsletter that addresses the problems of your unique customer avatar and publish something weekly.

This prevents you from losing any leads.

Will you get people who want your free stuff and then unsubscribe?

Absolutely. This is a good thing.

It’ll naturally filter out people who are lurkers and probably would never buy from you anyway.

You’ll also get people who will never convert to buying customers but download your free stuff. But they will refer your stuff to others. They will share and like your content.

So, when do you start selling?

You’ve already started.

Congrats.

From the moment you release your digital product, you’re selling.

Not for an exchange of money, but for an exchange of trust and intimacy.

Each product, content, and newsletter is building goodwill and faith.

Eventually, you’ll have people ask to work with you.

The mantra of ‘give ideas away for free, sell the implementation’ becomes very effective.

If people aren’t asking to work with you. You have two problems:

1. You haven’t built enough trust and intimacy yet.
2. Your digital products aren’t any good.

The answer? Do more. Do better. Do new.

• Create more diverse products (webinars, Loom walkthroughs, etc).
• Create better products with feedback and data.
• Create new products that solve different problems.

Ask those who downloaded it what you could improve on and what other problems they have on their journey.

Keep doing this until you have inbound requests for people to work with you.

At this point, 80% of the ‘selling’ is done for you.

They already want to give you money.

Create a community

Everything is easier when you have an audience.

Distribution is taken care of for you.

Some people will want a more intimate connection.

So do this:

• Offer for them to join a Slack community (for free of course).
• Host a weekly group catch-up on Zoom.
• Respond to common challenges via a Loom video.
• Repurpose Loom videos into a podcast or YouTube video.

Watch your community and engagement skyrocket.

There’s nothing flashy about what I’m telling you.

You won’t be a millionaire overnight.

You won’t have millions of followers in a week.

Quick business is bad business. I plan to do this forever. I’ll never quit.

These steps are about building the foundation for your business.

So get building.

3 Hacks To Improve Your Life By 10% Or More (Steal Them):

• The best bio-hack I've found this week - Mouthtape. Mouthbreathing when sleeping is terrible for you. Our mouths are not adapted to process raw and unfiltered air for hours at a time. I've been using mouth tape since 2020, and my sleep has never been better. A great book that convinced me to try was Breathe by James Nestor.

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• The best tech I've found this week - Desk extender. I saw this on YouTube and was skeptical. But it's surprisingly useful. It keeps my elbows from slipping off the table and promotes alignment with my arm. It's a low-tech option for comfort considering I spend close to 10 hours most days at my computer.

• The best podcast I've listened to this week - Nathan Barry on Ali Abdaal's Deep Dive podcast. Nathan Barry is the founder of ConvertKit, the email newsletter platform that this newsletter is hosted on. But this isn't a paid sponsor. Nathan is a genuinely humble and thoughtful guy. Learn about how writing 1,000 words per day changed Nathan Barry's life.

Life Updates (And How They Can Help You):

• I'm documenting my writing journey every day - I've been recording B-Roll footage of myself and editing it into a Reel to post every day on Instagram. I found I needed a way to share my writing and also the things that I've learned. I'm committing to doing this every day until Christmas 2024. We will see how we go.

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• I've added more deliberate practice in my writing - One of the best ways to improve your writing is to copy out an entire sales letter by hand. You get a better feel for the writing and why it was so persuasive. So I printed off the six best sales letters and will be copying them by hand over the next few weeks. I'll report back whether my writing has improved.

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• I got my blood test results - What gets measured gets managed. You can lie to yourself. But your blood and test results don't lie. Overall, I'm in great health. My Vitamin D, Testosterone, and all major panels came back within range. This isn't medical advice at all, but it pays to keep taps on key indicators of health. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.

Michael's Weekly Book Club 📚

My Book of the Week was...

This is book #4 of the year:

Same As Ever: Timeless Lessons On Risk, Opportunity, And Living A Good Life - Morgan Housel

Morgan Housel is one of my favorite authors.

I devoured his previous book Psychology of Money and have re-read it multiple times. His writing is short. Punch. Concise. And relevant to the modern times. He doesn't fill up his books with more words than necessary.

This book is only 180(ish) pages long.

Rating: 9/10

You should read this if you're.... interested in what WON'T change in the future.

Key ideas from the book:

👉 Focus on incentives and nothing else - Incentives drive behavior. If someone's behavior is bizarre, look at what their incentives are. It will likely explain 80% of their thoughts and actions.

👉 Never stop running - Competitive advantages don't last forever. In business and life, evolution is uncompromising. You have to run just to stay in place. Evolution is ruthless and unforgiving. It doesn't teach by showing you what works but by destroying what doesn't.

👉 The best story wins - Stories are always more powerful than statistics. Stories beat the most rational idea. Great ideas explained poorly can go nowhere, while old or wrong ideas told compellingly can ignite a revolution.

Best quotes by Morgan Housel:

💬 "I don't think I've met, or know of, anyone with outsize success who gained as much happiness as an outsider might expect. That doesn't mean success can't bring pride or contentment or independence. But it's rarely what you thought it would be before achieving it."

💬 "Permanent information is harder to notice because it's buried in books rather than blasted in headlines. But its benefit is huge. It's not that permanent information never expires, letting you accumulate it. It also compounds over time, leveraging off what you've already learned."

💬 "There are three ways to be a professional writer: 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you'll get rich. 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you'll make a living. 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you'll go broke"

How to apply these ideas:

💡 Don't focus on what you think will change, focus on what won't change in 10 years. This is what will build enduring and sustainable businesses.

💡 Calculate risks you can't see. Lower expectations to improve happiness. Understand that evolution is a binding principle.

💡 Build your ability to tell great stories. It'll be the most valuable skill you ever learn, and something you can use no matter what you choose to do.

You can buy the book ​HERE​ (No, this isn't an affiliate link...yet).

Interesting graphs I found on the internet

I'll beat this drum until I die.

Writing is the MOST valuable skill you can learn.

Even more so with AI. There's an influx of low-quality AI writing.

Writing is the foundation of everything on the internet.

So learn how to write effectively.

I'll see you next week!

Michael ✌️

P.S - You can also find me here:

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113 Cherry St, Seattle, WA 92768
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