Entrepreneurial Happiness; How to Build and Abundant Business and a Fulfilling Life
As yesterday my new book ‘Entrepreneurial Happiness; How to Build and Abundant Business and a Fulfilling Life’ went on sale, it seems appropriate to have a theme of Entrepreneurial Happiness running through this week’s Friday Footnotes. If you want to buy your own copy, you can find it here. If you decide to buy a copy, send us proof of purchase and we’ll send you a free gift in the post too.
TED Talk That’s Inspired Me
Let’s kick off the theme with a TED talk on ‘What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness’. What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? If you think it's fame and money, you're not alone – but, according to psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, you're mistaken. As the director of a 75-year-old study on adult development, Waldinger has unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction. In this talk, he shares three important lessons learned from the study as well as some practical, old-as-the-hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life. You can watch it here.
App I’ve Found Useful
As I talk about in Entrepreneurial Happiness, time is our most valuable resource; if you aren’t convinced, ask someone that is sick.
Anything that can save me time has great value in my eyes, and this week Google Lens did that. When I rose for my morning bike ride I was greeted by a massive beetle on our landing. This large brown fuzzy insect with weird tentacles was happily going about its business, but was also happy to be transported atop my iPhone back to the great outdoors. After escorting it outside, my next thought was ‘do we have cockroaches in our house?’. What could have taken hours of identification however was solved in seconds with Google Lens. I uploaded the photo using the iPhone google App, and was immediately told that our intruder was in fact a Melolontha. Apparently the European Cockchafers also belong to this genus… good job I didn’t Google that I suspect! Anyway, once you have the Google App, click the symbol to try it.
Podcast I’ve Been Listening To:
If you have big goals, you might feel correspondingly big pressure, but there’s a way to think of your time that can free you up and get you focused. In their podcast entitled ‘Why Entrepreneurs Should Think In Terms Of Frameworks, Not Deadlines’, Dan Sullivan and Shannon Waller talk about the positive effects of adopting a 25-year framework. This single concept can have a massive difference on the way you think about the future. You can listen to it here.
Quote of the Week
“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
- Benjamin Franklin
Finance Theme I’ve Been Considering
Carrying on from the quote above, there is no better example of this than in your finances. One of the 13 principals of creating Entrepreneurial Happiness that I talk about in The Better Future Framework, the core system of the book is that it is vital that you plan. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.
It is vital that with regards to your finances, your business and your life you have a clear plan of where you want to get to, why that is important to you and how you are going to get there. If you create a clear plan, and continually re-evaluate it, you have got a much better chance of actually achieving it and creating a better life as a result. Having a financial plan and regularly reviewing it is what ensures you achieve the most important goals in your life from a finance perspective, but having a financial planner working closely with you can also ensure you achieve it in ways that are nothing to do with the money.
So ensure you have a plan, and the help and guidance of a professional to help you achieve it; it could just lead to a much better future!