THIS is Why You Don’t Answer Your Phone

It's time to start using robots for your $10/hour tasks, so you can focus on your $1000/hour tasks.

This week's newsletter is all about allocation of time. It's cool to see how some of our Cashflow members are successfully adding multiple streams of income instead of making sure their biz Facebook page cover image is sized properly. If you want to start making decisions that MATTER and MAKE YOU MONEY, then start HERE...

Today in < 10 minutes we’re going to talk about:

• The Motto - How you should use my new motto to get more (worthwhile) sh*t done.
• The Kinda-Famous Life - Why you should optimize for wealth, not status.
• The Hard Tech Truth - Tech is stealing our humanity, it's the hard truth.

Easy to find, hard to reach.

That’s my 2022 motto.

I think it should be your motto too.

Is it weird if I get a tattoo that says… Please don’t call me, maybe? Asking for a friend.

If you haven’t been able to tell by my incessant tweeting, tik toking, YouTubing, and our viewership of 50 million people a month, I’m pretty easy to find. Yet, if you’ve been in our DM’s or emails… I’m very hard to reach.

I get 1,000+ DM’s across platforms a day, 100+ texts and about 1,000+ emails.

Can you imagine how little I’d get done if I responded to all of those?

My friend Jon likes to say texting with me is like sending smoke signals. You send it out and it comes back (maybe) at varying times in unrelated streams. I take a sick kind of pride in this comparison. Which actually took me YEARS to get comfortable with. I had to get a pep talk from Alex on being cool with saying no and not responding. Simple, not easy.

I was probably like so many of you, convinced that it was rude to not respond. That voicemails were meant for listening to, that emails needed a 24-hour response time, that DM’s asking for help meant they actually needed my help. Society perpetuates this hamster wheel. In fact, one very famous investor said he can tell if a company will be successful or not based on the speed of a CEO’s response to email. The faster the response the more likely to succeed.

I’m calling b*llshit. If email response is your highest leverage activity bud, you ain’t doing it right. I don’t care if you went to Stanford or not.

In fact I’d hazard to say if you are responding to everything that comes to you and not taking control of what is important, YOU WILL NEVER ACHIEVE ANYTHING BIG IN YOUR LIFE. You will be a slave to other people’s wants and desires. There is no worse fate.

Here are some hard truths for you…

IF you don’t go deep, you’ll never go far

Deep work is order, shallow work is chaos. Choose accordingly.

My phone is never off silent mode. Ever.

I never answer phone calls from numbers I don’t know.

I rarely answer phone calls at all unless I really want to talk to that person at that moment.

I don’t send or listen to voicemails. Ever.

I miss calls and meetings often if I’m in flow.

You want to know the craziest part. I have done this for 10+ years. I did this as an employee. I did this as an employee who was also a manager, and I did pretty damn well at both of those. Your motto is: Your timeline is not my timeline. Because the Pareto rule is true, 80% of your wins will come from 20% of your activity. Calendars should be followed but not as the only barometer.

Great outcomes take focus and in this world it is our most precious commodity. If you let other people interrupt it, you’ll never win. If you don’t believe me read aptly named Flow.

You actually do not have time to reply

The average person gets:

• 41 texts
• 100 emails
• 5 calls

Let’s say they all take 3 minutes to deal with. That’s 438 minutes or 7 hours a day.

Mine at 1,000+ DM’s across platforms a day, 100+ texts and about 1,000+ emails would take me 35 hours a day. I’m no mathematician but seems like that might not pencil out.

Unless you learn to funnel properly your input you’ll never have a great output. I have a policy of answering almost all of our public tweets and 50% of our comments but private DM’s go to my team and I never ever look in that yawning black abyss.

Your best work should be created once to share continuously

The secret is… whatever you get asked about constantly, create on. You’ll reclaim your life back and give people a better, more organized, articulate version of you. Oh, and you can charge for it.

You want to know why I started a course on buying a business? Because I was getting asked every single mfing day how to:

• buy a business
• how to do it with $0
• how to do it if you’re a dentist
• how to do it if your 23
• how to do it if you have millions
• how to do it if you’re a purple-haired unicorn with no money and only speak yiddish

Here’s the truth. You don’t need me to buy a business.

Because my best work on buying a business is not me answering you in the DMs, or in comments, or on twitter or via email. It’s in the course I spent months creating and update constantly.

You don’t need me just because you have a lot of money, you can just join our mastermind and get hand held by me and the team on our weekly calls.

You don’t need me to get rich or invest

Lots of people ask me finance q’s in the DM or text me.

• How do I make my first million
• I have a million where do I put it
• I need an accountant
• I want to build a passive income portfolio

Truth is you don’t need me. We created a community, called Cashflow, where everyone can answer each other, and I can drop in one time a week to answer. Why? Because PREPARATION BEATS SPEED OF RESPONSE. I take all the questions we get and curate responses on my schedule.

Being Internet Kinda-Famous is Bizarre

I think you should optimize for being rich, not being famous. Says the lady all over the internet

But if one comes as the byproduct of another then weird stuff starts to happen to you. All of a sudden, your dad’s dentist’s daughter, who is a former stripper, wants to talk to you about buying a strip club (true story). Or your server wants you to review their business plan and due diligence documents (fun story). Anywho - it’s super flattering and candidly incredibly fun when it’s the light side BUT you’ll never create something that can help more humans if you spend one off time kind of, sort of, maybe, helping a few people off the cuff.

And then there are the full-on psychopaths.

If you ever go into the comments and DM’s at a certain point you’ll lose your mind. Joe Rogan mentions this all the time, Tim Ferriss no longer goes in there. So either you close them down, or we have a team that gets the real G’s to the right place and deletes everything else.

Your team shouldn’t always be reachable either

Fire them if they’re not doing their work but don’t expect them to be chained to a desk.

I am constantly trying to get our team to do one thing:

Push vs Pull

If people are having to email you checking in on where things are at and what you’re up to, you’re not doing it right. You’ve failed. Our team aspires (and often fails but gallantly) to update people proactively. I call it push vs pull.

Push means - Stop making me check where you are at with things and instead:

• Use a scorecard to track activity and outcomes
• Put your to-do lists in Notion or Asana and allow people to add tasks for you to view
• Send weekly updates via email in the same format each week
• Do a team call that is ideation and another that is execution

In other words the main reason people need to get a hold of you last minute is because

#1 You suck at pushing and need to get better

#2 They suck at pushing and need to get better

Other people’s last-minute easily averted disasters are largely due to their own disorganization.

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Had to ask myself: Hard Convo? Or Unfulfilled Life?

You can’t have both.

The hardest one for me now is, “Do you have 5 minutes for a catchup call?” The answer is actually, No, never. Unless we are best buds and I naturally talk to you with a high frequency I don’t have time. Most people don’t have time. How do I know? I scripted my perfect day:

• 5:45 am wakeup & snuggle hubs/doggo
• 6:00 am coffee on porch
• 6:30 am yoga
• 8:00 am start writing & deep work
• 12:00 pm eat lunch, do email and slack
• 1:00 pm check-in w/ team leads
• 2:00 pm film content, create, edit
• 5:00 pm walk dog
• 5:45 pm to do list and plan for tomorrow
• 6:30 start making dinner w/ hubs
• 7:00 pm dinner w/ family
• 8:30 pm read, spend family time
• 10:00pm bed

Where in there am I willing to give up on my goals, my family time, my health in order to do an inadvertent catchup? Where are you?

What do ya’ll say should we all just agree that these should all be considered violence (wink):

Asking for “catch-up” calls. Texting: “Plz call me.” Adding to group texts unsolicited.

Thanks, that’s gonna be a no for me.

If you’re overwhelmed, you don’t know your end game

This is where people say, “But I just get too many emails or calls and I could never not respond.” Hard truth: you actually just aren’t clear enough yet with your goals. When you know your goals you’ll be able to prioritize easily.

You need goals and anti-goals:

My goal right now is grow Contrarian Thinking my media company to hit 5 million followers across our ecosystem. If the call isn’t related to that, I won’t hit it. YET….

Anti-Goals

How terrible would it be if we hit 5 million followers but my marriage imploded, or I gained 50 pounds, or I went broke trying to get there. Goals and guardrails will save the future you want to create.

So ask yourself do you have a list of things you DO NOT want? I heard about these first from my friend Andrew Wilkinson. Here are mine.

No thank you to:

• Doing consulting calls or working for other people.
• Being an employee anywhere, I am bad at it and already did it.
• Speaking for free anywhere ever, maybe I’ll speak if it’s a cool group, paid and helps gain CT subscribers.
• Partnerships or doing deals together. I have all the partners I need.
• I don’t do affiliate deals or sell other people’s products.
• I also don’t do coffee meetings, pick my brain segments, 99.9% of dinners or outings on a school night. I realized I’m not good enough to get where I want to go without working and focusing A LOT.

Goals

I’m wildly, passionately, incredibly interested in spending more time doing:

• Really hot yoga classes with incredible teachers that resemble Gumby.
• Working with other creators and media company heads that I’m friends with like Sam Parr, Alex Hormozi, Alex Leiberman, Vanessa Van Edwards, Kim Kaupe, Vanessa Lau, Eric Siu etc etc ya’ll motivate me immensely.
• Building products that create financial freedom for every single human who wants to build and create a better world.
• Growing our media company by leaps and bounds.
• Paddle-boarding, volleyball, dog walks, French and Italian wine, fascinating conversations, books that transport me and workouts that hurt.

More of living, less of zooming.

Don’t Pick up the Call

This long list of hard truths and tough rants is all really to say… Don’t pick up your phone. Maybe silence your notifications. Go hard on doing the work that really matters because most things just do not. For those humans that don’t get that, let them gently go on into the night.

Life is too short to spend it on someone else’s agenda.

It’s the perfect length for building the life that you love.

Oh, and if you don’t respect your time, turns out, no one else will either.

Codie

IF you liked this… you may like Tinkering - weekly newsletter written like a story. Here’s a snippet:

Hard Truth:

The noise is deafening.

A thousand voices erase the wisdom of one.

A thousand sounds create a cacophony.

A thousand minds are not actually better than a few focused ones.

She sits, her phone and its images reflected in her glasses.

Popups, videos, tweets, calls, sounds all vying for that most precious of all things, attention. Do you know how people become fat? It does not happen in a day, a month, a year. It creeps up on you decision by decision com-pounded. But there is a secret we humans haven’t yet realized. There are things that feed you beyond food. The cholesterol and clogged arteries that riddle us have a mirror. Do you know where?

It's found in the crevasses of our mind, in the sluggishness of our thoughts, in our speed to anger and rage. It’s a funny thing about us humans, we were not meant for a land of plenty. We were meant to be scavengers who needed to see many things to protect a body without claws, speed or talons. But as we crawled our way to a world of abundance, we made a mistake.

A mistake that may cost us everything. A mistake of what we let feed our minds.

• 41.5 - The number of texts an average person gets in a day
• 121 - Emails a day.
• 2.54 - Hours our faces are glued to our phones.

The culprits of our age are not only Tobacco, Nestle, Coca Cola… they’re the technology that is slowly stealing our humanity.

A thousand voices makes no discernible sound.

Codie & The Contrarian Thinking Team

The 'Not So Boring' Section:

• Feel the Fury - If you've been following me for more than a millisecond, then you know I tweet like a madwomen. THIS tool makes it easier to manage.
• The Great Resignation Continues - This shouldn't come as a surprise, but even with labor shortages, the job market isn't favoring workers.​
• Let's Make a Deel - This software helps me manage operations, payroll, and contracts so that I can focus on my very important tasks and definitely not laying on the couch with my dog for a few hours.
• How the Rich Use Debt - This tweet went kinda viral on how the rich use debt to their advantage. Keep an eye on it....we'll be dropping some education soon.

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Disclaimer – This is the “Be an adult” section. Everything mentioned above isn’t advice, just a recount of what I did. That said: This article is presented for informational purposes only. The opinions stated here are not intended to recommend any investment or provide tax advice. Neither are they an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any current or future investment vehicle managed or sponsored by Codie Ventures, LLC or its affiliates. All material presented in this newsletter is not to be regarded as investment advice, but for general informational purposes only. Day trading and investing do involve risk, so caution must always be utilized. We cannot guarantee profits or freedom from loss. You assume the entire cost and risk. You are solely responsible for making your own investment decisions. We recommend consulting with a registered investment advisor, broker-dealer, and/or financial advisor. If you choose to invest with or without seeking advice from such an advisor or entity, then any consequences resulting from your investments are your sole responsibility. By reading/sharing this newsletter or consuming our content on our other channels, you are indicating your consent and agreement to our disclaimer.

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