11 | I Want to Share a Secret

Nov 15, 2020

Hey guys,

I’ve recently been promoted to Director. So, I’ve started to think what this really means and represents in my life.

On one side, it’s a professional achievement I’ve been working for. Some people call it luck or overnight success. I prefer to call it my “10-year overnight success”.

On the other hand, it doesn’t change my personal life. In this context, I’ve been asking myself 3 questions every morning:

What am I happy about in my life today?
What am I proud of?
What is that I want to do with my life?

I need to be honest and confess that I didn’t have answers all the time. However, the goal was to practice self-reflection and get the right mindset to start my day. I believe these questions are powerful reminders of what’s going on with me. If I don’t have answers for too many days in a row, this is an alarm and I need to change something.

This is part of a “call to earth” system because ultimately having the right mindset is key to build habits and to move to action.

Life is not just work and I’ve been designing a system to make that happen for a while.

Striking the right balance is the question. Perhaps a lifetime journey.

Have a great week and enjoy the content below!

Alejandro

🎥 This Week's Video

📝 This Week's Blog Post

We’ve hardly been able to rest, and yesterday Apple held one more event. The “One More Thing” one. It was another virtual conference completely pre-recorded at Apple Park. This was the arrival of the first Mac with Apple Silicon chips.

💸 Financial Freedom

In previous issues we talked about alternative investments such as gold, luxury watches, fine wine and champagne. We also tackled traditional investments such as bonds, stocks, funds and real estate.

Today let’s explain in simple terms what we hear every day in the financial news: Bull and Bear. Both describe the temperature of capital markets. But what do these words really mean?

Bull Market. Think about the animal chasing an enemy with those scary horns, coming very fast. Sounds quite aggressive. Well, in the financial market this means that stock prices are going up (like those horns!) because the investors trust and have high expectations. For example: Matt works at a bank and he’s currently super busy because the bull market is in full swing.

Bear Market. Another animal. In this case standing up facing the enemy to move downwards as a natural rest position. In the financial market this means that stock prices are going down (like the bear’s paws!) and investors don’t have expectations. The market doesn’t look good. For example: Joe is worried about a potential bear market and he doesn’t believe the market will remain good.

Investors can be “bullish” or “bearish”. These are the ways they describe their market sentiment.

The majority of investors tend to be bullish given the positive returns of the stock market over long horizons.

So next time you see a move of at least 20% up or down, you’ll be talking about a bull or bear market.

🛠️ Work Smarter (Not Harder!)

One of the things I always ask when speaking to clients is feedback.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. - Naguib Mahfouz

Asking the right questions minimise your time in meetings. You can get the most important things very quickly and use the rest of the time to work on something else.

These days I have more than 20 meetings per day. Imagine allocating 30 minutes (at least) to each is 10 hours, just in meetings. What do I do? I try to convert many of those meetings into 10-15 minutes where I can. Of course, sometimes these are scheduled presentations or very important mandatory meetings. But no one can have 20 critical meetings per day.

Whenever I can before I kick off the day, I use the Pareto principle. This is basically an 80-20 rule saying that 80% of the outputs come from 20% of the inputs.

In this case, I try to focus in the 20% important meetings of the day because these will drive 80% of my results.

🧳 Lifestyle Design

What is the one thing you always wanted to do in life? For fun, for a living or perhaps both. Self-reflection is a powerful tool to make better decisions.

I’ve always wanted to travel. Since a very young age I enjoyed everything related to being somewhere else. I caught the travel “bug”. I’m afraid there’s no vaccine for it. Why?

I’m always thinking of my next trip. Even during the pandemic, I used the moments when the Government allowed to travel.
I love experiences and have a long “to-do” list of places I want to go. Already scheduled 3 long-haul trips for 2021.
I collect passports, stamps and check them once in a while because they give me some flashbacks of great memories.
I have a flag of every country I’ve ever been (60+). That’s the only thing I really buy for me when I travel. A small little patch which costs less than £3 (or $4)! I’m the happiest person when I get it.
I get excited about new gear. Every trip I think of a camera/phone that I should take to capture some amazing moments, a pair of boots if I go hiking or anything that might be good to use in the next place.
Less is more. The more I travel, the more light I want to travel. Packing/unpacking is like having a cup of coffee at this point. That simple.
Travel is the best teacher. Needless to say, that some of my greatest lessons happened when I travelled.
Nothing is far. I’ve travelled more than 24 hours to Australia and New Zealand. I’ve been doing an annual trip to Argentina (14 hours) for more than a decade. Several times to Asia (10+ hours). And plenty of 2-3-hour trips in Europe. Those are the moments where I become more productive. Distance is not an issue, it’s an advantage!

So again… What did you always dream of? And what are you doing to make it happen?