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Welcome to Living a Limitless Life!
I help 9-5 workers start a profitable one-person business in 30 days without quitting their jobs so that they can make more money and impact 🚀
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You'll improve your life & biz in 10 minutes by:
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The Three Best 1% Business & Self-Improvement Tips I've Found This Week:
- Build leverage whenever you can.
- Don't be afraid to outgrow mentors.
- The two most valuable skills to build a business.
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A 4-Minute Read That Could Change Your Life.
- How To Build A $1,000 Per Month One-Person Business Alongside A 9–5 Job In 90 Days (Or Less)
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Michael's Weekly Book Club
- A Million Miles In A Thousand Years - Donald Miller
Today's Sponsor is... ME!
P.S - this course will go behind a paywall after March 2024. Get FREE lifetime access now
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The question I am asking myself this week❓
What story do you repeatedly tell yourself that could be false?
What would it mean if that story wasn't true? Would it liberate or scare you?
This week's quote that made me think 💬
"The saddest thing about life is you don't remember half of it. You don't even remember half of half of it."
- Donald Miller in A Million Miles In A Thousand Years
The Three Best 1% Business & Self-Improvement Tips I've Found This Week:
- Build leverage whenever you can - Get leverage early and then never let go of it. You don't need a lot to start. Just start accumulating a little bit every day. The easiest way to do this is to post content, build a personal brand, and grow an audience online. It's free and low-cost. Action: Post your first piece of content today.
- Don't be afraid to outgrow mentors - I've had a mentor ghost me once. It's one of the most bizarre experiences I've had. To this day, I still don't know what happened. But sometimes you outgrow people and they don't like it. Move on. I wasted months dwelling on why they stopped talking to me. Action: Don't waste energy on people who no longer support you.
- The two most valuable skills to starting a business - Selling or Building. A great product with poor positioning will do worse than a poor product with great positioning. Action: Learn the content skills to sell a product, and learn the coding to build product.
A 4-Minute Read That Could Change Your Life.
Read on: michaellim.co
Read time: 4 minutes
How To Build A $1,000 Per Month One-Person Business Alongside A 9–5 Job In 90 Days (Or Less)
How much would an extra $1,000 per month change your life?
Probably a lot. A recent CNBC article showed that most Americans could not afford a $1,000 emergency without going into debt.
An extra $1,000 per month is not ‘buy a Green Lambo’ type of money.
But that’s the point. It’s realistic. Most people have enough skills and knowledge to be able to make an extra $1,000 per month outside of their 9–5 job.
It won’t be easy, but I can show you how to do it.
1: Understand that you can
Here’s the biggest insight:
You’ve already got a one-person business.
Congrats. That was easy, wasn’t it?
You might be asking how? Well, you already sell your skills and knowledge to one customer: your employer.
And if you can sell to one employer, you can sell to many.
With the ability to freelance and find clients online, it’s never been easier to learn a skill once and sell it to many other employers.
I’m a great example.
I taught myself how to write online in my old 9–5 job when I was 24.
I read books, posted stuff online, and built a personal brand on LinkedIn.
I started to freelance for other clients while I had my job. And then I had enough of my 9–5 job and quit to go all-in. Once I validated I could sell to others, I felt confident enough to back myself.
I don’t advocate going all-in (anymore), but the point is there.
I’m back in a 9–5 job now, after I sold my business and while I build another one-person business on the side. I’m currently making $6.5k per month to get to $15k per month this year. So I am practicing what I preach.
And I’m documenting everything I do to help others get there too.
It sounds cliche, but if you believe it, you can achieve it.
Your 9–5 job is your greatest competitive advantage
Your job gives you:
- Financial security.
- Structure, routine, and stability.
- Ability to show up, meet deadlines, and manage others.
So don’t quit. That would be throwing away your competitive advantage.
If you hate your job, get another you like. I sound like a hypocrite because I quit my 9–5. But if I could go back, I probably wouldn’t do that again. I would get a good job, and build on the side.
Why is a 9–5 a competitive advantage?
Because most of the world works a 9–5 job (or has previously).
This makes you relatable. I can’t relate to a 23-year-old crypto bro who never worked a day in their life. But got rich off a few lucky coins. Their ‘business advice’ is meaningless.
Everything in the online world is relatability and trust.
People buy from others like them. With similar experiences. Who understand their problems or lived through them themselves. Don’t throw that away.
Don’t leave your 9–5, leverage it.
Combine your 9–5 with your 5–9
What do you enjoy doing outside of your job?
Combine your technical skills, with your hobbies. It might sound odd at first, but that’s how you can become unique. Every skill you add roughly doubles your odds of success.
I’ve got a personal example.
One of my friends works as a physiotherapist. He wanted to get into making content. He wanted to try making YouTube shorts about quizzes.
I don’t know why. But he asked for my opinion.
I asked him why don’t make content about what you do in your 9–5 job and golf since he plays every week.
“You could be the golf physiotherapist and create content about common injuries that golfers will experience and exercises to prevent them.”
See what I mean?
Combine your 9–5 with what you do from 5–9 or on the weekend.
But whatever you choose to add, complement them with learning:
- Marketing
- Content creation
- Social media
- Copywriting
- Sales
Learn these skills alongside your interests, you’ll never go broke.
Leverage the internet or die trying
The best way to leverage the Internet?
Writing (or code).
If you’re reading this, writing is easy to do. Free to access. Repurposable. And the foundation of everything else.
Again, you’re already an online writer.
If you’ve ever sent an email, written a social media caption, or sent a DM, congrats. You’re an online writer.
Now you need to get better.
And like anything else, writing is a skill you can practice and learn.
Commit to writing 250 words per day minimum. You can do more, but you can never do less. 250 words is easy. It’s a couple of paragraphs at most.
Publish something daily or weekly (even if it sucks).
I’ve committed to publishing daily on Twitter and documenting my writing journey on Instagram. I’m not optimizing for quality just yet. I simply want to document. Create in public. And iterate as I go.
I’ve got people following my journey, even though my quality sucks.
Learn something, and then teach it online.
The greatest skill you can learn…
Reduce the time between ideation and action.
Most people get stuck on mental masturbation or analysis paralysis. They start with a lot of energy and enthusiasm, but don’t execute. Months go by and they haven’t executed anything they said they would.
I got a call from a friend who wants to start a business.
She told me she’ll get clients when she has her website and business cards ready.
I abruptly said ‘fuck all that, just get your first client’.
Anything but getting a paying customer is a waste of time. Nothing else matters but someone who will pay with their time or money.
She was taken aback by how direct I was.
But nothing else matters in business than getting someone to buy what you’re selling. You need that feedback immediately and validate your initial assumptions. Collect testimonials, content, and data to sell to more clients.
Get paying clients or die trying.
What you can do in the next 90 days
You’re only a couple of skills and 3 months of effort away from your dream life.
But 90% of people will keep saying ‘one day’, instead of ‘day one’.
So here’s the roadmap:
- Do it scared, do it with doubt. Feel whatever you want, but understand you can do it.
- Use your 9–5 job to leverage making money on the side.
- Combine your technical skills with your hobby.
- Leverage the internet.
- Learn to execute.
Simple, but not easy.
Michael's Weekly Book Club 📚
My Book of the Week was...
This is book #9 of the year.
A Million Miles In A Thousand Years - Donald Miller
As a writer, I'm obsessed with storytelling.
Stories are everything. They sell your ideas. They sell your products. They determine your quality of life. The story you tell yourself is the story you become. Whether real or fiction, if you believe your story strong enough it becomes your reality.
When I changed my life story, I changed my life.
At any time and at any age, you can decide to tell yourself a new story. You always have the power to rewrite your story. But many people inherit a story from childhood and never question it again.
And that's a tragedy.
Rating: 8.5 / 10
You should read this if you're.... a writer, marketer, or interested in personal branding.
Key ideas:
👉 Learning 1: We are always the authors of our own story - You have the power to write, rewrite, and edit your story. Anytime and anywhere. You can start writing another story. No one can rob you of that power. You're born with it. It's with you for your whole life, and no one can stop you from using it.
👉 Learning 2: An exciting story creates an exciting life - You won't create an exciting life sitting on the couch. An exciting life requires adventure, novel experiences, and challenges. So do things that make you feel uncomfortable. They make for great stories.
👉 Learning 3: No experience is lost - Everything you go through is a story. It's your mindset that prevents you from writing the story. Adversity, hardship, and transformations are the best stories humans can tell each other. They all require sacrifice and change. Nothing bad happens to a good storyteller.
Best quotes by Donald Miller
💬 "The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person's story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don't want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want a Roomba vacuum cleaner, we are living stupid stories. If it won't work in a story, it won't work in life"
💬 "You don't know a story is happening to you when you're in it. You slide into the flow of it like a current in the ocean; you look back at the beach and can't see your umbrella, and your hotel is a quarter mile behind you."
💬 "Perhaps one of the reasons I've avoided having a clear ambition is because the second you stand up and point toward a horizon, you realize how much there is to lose. It's always been this way."
How to apply these ideas:
💡 To improve your life, tell yourself a better story - You can change your life today by choosing to write a better story of your life. It is that simple. Reframe every regret or negative in your story as a catalyst for change.
💡 How you tell your story is just as important as what your story is - Framing is everything. One person's failure story is another person's catalyst story. One person's worst day of their life is another person's best day. How you choose to interpret events in the story of your life is a superpower.
💡 Your personal brand is your story at scale - Many people teach writing, business, and personal branding. But people resonate with my story more than others. And there are people out there who resonate with other people's stories more. Embrace your story as part of your personal brand.
You can buy the book HERE (No, this isn't an affiliate link...yet).
Writing Tip Of The Week:
I've written every day for FIVE years.
That's over 1,800 days. Why do I do it?
Because writing is:
- Fun.
- Refines my skills.
- Expands my network.
- Easy to do while I travel.
- Builds my personal brand.
- Cheapest form of therapy.
Write today, even if no one reads it.
What can I help you with?
Viral Headline Notion Swipe File
Unlock the Power of Viral Headlines: The 42 Article Headlines That Made Me Over $16,048 (USD) and 459,000+ Views on Medium.
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I'll see you next week!
Michael ✌️
P.S - You can also find me here: