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a journal of small victories

Dan Hefferan

5am club day 2

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Ok. it’s 7:46 am after my second shot at joining the 5am club.

This morning felt a lot better. Likely because my diet yesterday was considerably more dialed in than it was on the day before. I didn’t wake up in a total grog. I still feel like it’s taking a bit to get into the routine.

Although, I got to the cafe early this morning, and it’s very refreshing to watch the sunrise over the city skyline.

The core of the 5am club is the first hour split into three different twenty minute sections:

  1. Move- Exercise and breathe heavy. Sweat!
  2. Reflect- journal, reflect on gratitude, meditate.
  3. Grow – do something that helps you move forward: read a book, review your goals.

Move: I have yet to convince myself to get a workout done in the morning. at 5am I just am not all that motivated to sweat. But I have been doing the Wim Hof breathing method which is definitely something that gets my body moving and active right away.

Reflect: I’m mostly journaling and planning my days here. Being sure to list out some things I’m grateful for.

Grow: Currently I’m reading 10 pages of a book, and also spending a few moments reading over a list of my current goals.

Yesterday I was in a daze after the Power Hour finished up, I didn’t really know what to do with my time between 6am and 8:30, today I just decided to get to the coffee shop sooner, and I spent some time organizing my finances, as it it had been some time since I had done some budgeting / bookkeeping. I have a little time to work on my coffee business before getting into client work with Dauntless.

Excited to keep going, yet I know I need to get into bed sooner than I did the last two days, or I’m going to start needing naps to get through my day.

Onward.

5am club challenge. Day one

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I have always loved day one of a challenge.

I finished reading the 5am club last week and i have immodestly started reading it again.

The book is by Robin Sharma and weaves a story of two people learning about a morning routine to help them channel their inner greatness. I know for me that there’s a lot that I’ve done right in the last 5-6 years, but also a lot that I’ve left on the table. Maybe there’s something here for me.

There’s a 66 day challenge that Robin has put together that walks you thru your first 66 days of joining the 5am club. And this morning, my alarm started waking me up shortly before 5 and wow was it a challenge.

I woke up groggy.

I nearly went back to bed 3 times. But I did it.

Two foreseeable challenges:

  1. Getting to bed on time. – waking up early isn’t the hardest thing for me, but with how busy my schedule tends to get, i relish those moments in the evening where I can relax and unwind. A 5am wake up call alongside my body’s need for a full 7.5 hours of sleep means that i need to be heading towards bed at 9pm, and oof that sounds early.
  2. What do i do with my time? The core teaching of the 5am club is a routine for your first hour of the day, however that leaves me finished and onto my day at 6am, where my current work doesn’t start until 8. Even this morning I’ve found myself a little aimless, but that’s likely due to the shock of being up so early.

I’ll be popping onto this website as often as possible over the next 66 days to update progress. I know that there’s a greatness inside of me, and I intend to start taking that seriously.

Side Hustles

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Side Hustles are, quite simply, things that you are doing to make money outside of your day job.

They are one of the simplest ways to take action towards more income every month to accelerate your goals, and they can take so many different forms. I have friends that run photography businesses as a side hustle, some that build picture frames, some that do something within the gig economy, and some that have joined an MLM company.

What might be a good side hustle for you?

This entirely depends a lot on your skills and what your personality is. What works for me might not work the same way for you, but you might have gifts and talents that far surpass me in certain fields. But one of our goals at To Build Fire is to deliberately try out a bunch of popular side hustle strategies, as well as a number of creative ideas, so that we can share the pros and cons of each side hustle according out our experience.

To start figuring out what side hustle might be a good fit for you, I want to challenge you to ask yourself the following question:

If you had to come up with $1000 extra in the next month, what things would you do?

I did this exercise at some point in early 2020 and i was able to come up some very interesting answers, and some of them were simple shifts I could do, and some were very involved processes. I’ll write a blog sometime soon about the things that I came up with during that exercise.

If you spend time with this question, I’d LOVE to hear your answers. Feel free to email us at tobuildfire@gmail.com

Two Families of Side Hustles.

One of the things I’d like to distinguish between different side hustles is whether or not you’re getting paid directly for each hour you’re working, or whether or not you’re building something that can provide a relatively passive income stream over time.

One family is not necessarily better than the other, THERE’S NO WRONG ANSWER HERE. There’s something unbelievably sexy about the idea of passive income, but chances are that by the time you’ve established a passive income stream, you likely could have made thousands by just providing an hourly service for someone.

Dollars per Hour.

This family of side hustles is pretty straightforward: what is something you can do for a set amount of time and be paid for that time. Examples of this inclue

  • Driving for Uber or Shipt, grocery or meal delivery, or whatever else exists out there in the gig economy.
  • Freelance work: Photography, Copy Writing,
  • Building something and selling it. (pottery, furniture, candles)
  • Flipping items on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace
  • Dave Ramsey’s Famous Delivering Pizzas, or any other part time job you’re doing on the side.

Income Streams

This family of side hustles involves building an asset rather than just simply trading time for money. The hope here is to create income streams that can continually put money into your pocket!

  • House Hacking (renting rooms in your house) Justin and I have both experimented with this
  • Start a blog or affiliate marketing site.
  • Digital Downloads : Etsy has a giant marketplace of things for sale, and if you create useful digital products, they can lead to a relatively passive income source.
  • Online Courses — Do you have a skillset that you could package up and sell to people interested in learning?
  • Youtube — This is a dream of so many right? Talk into a camera and get paid by your millions of adoring fans.

It’s my plan to come back to this article and adjust each of these lists and include links to our own articles about our experiments with these ideas, so keep locked on this.

Goals for 2021: a why behind this project.

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Justin and I have been backpacking partners for two seasons now, we started with a short overnight in Northern Michigan in the summer of 2019 while I was getting my body ready for a trip to Yosemite National Park. One of my favorite things about our friendship is how we always have business ideas, we always have a project idea that’s simmering in the pot, and there’s always something to talk about.

One of the projects that’s been on my heart for years has been some sort of personal finance website with a focus on side hustles and building out other income streams to help guide a reader towards some form of Financial Independence.

Tadahhhh!

We’re here. Welcome to To Build Fire

It’s oddly cathartic to sit and type the first words that will be published to a new project. It feels both intimidating and exciting, but most importantly. this is action.

Action is what I want this project to really be centered around. How can we each make a promise to ourselves that TODAY, that RIGHT NOW, we are in the weakest financial position of our lives, and from here we’re moving forward. By following the basic financial common sense of ‘Spend less than you make, and then invest the difference’ we can steadily improve our financial position.

Action is what’s going to get us from where we are to where we want to be, but where do we want to be?

That’s the important next step!

Why am I on this path? Why do I want to achieve Financial Independence, why do I want to start intentionally side hustling? Well, how about I start with what my financial goals are for 2021.

Dan’s financial goals for 2021

Pay Off My Student Loans.

I want to get to the point where the only debt i’m carrying is my house. With my student loans gone, I would free up another 300-400 dollars a month that I can start funneling into investments or to a fund to pay off my house.

I also like to look at what eliminating a payment means in terms of my freedom.

I’ve been self employed since spring of 2017, and my barebones, probably living on ramen or something as awful, financial need is about 2000 a month, which equates to 500 a week, or 100 a workday.

If paying off my loans frees up 300 dollars a month, that’s the equivalent of me giving myself 36 more days of vacation a year. And our goal is to get to 365 days of vacation a year 🙂

Stop using credit cards as an excuse to not pay attention to my budget and to spend money like an @sshole.

After a trip to the Smokey Mountains this last fall, I stopped taking my finances seriously, and i’ve been unintentionally spending way too much on credit cards in the following four months. There’s some balances that I need to clean up, but the truth is that I need to establish the habit of keeping to a budget. That gets established as a permanent habit here in 2021.

A backpacking trip out west.

Justin texted me this morning asking if I wanted to join him out in Grand Teton at the end of august.

I said to count me in.

But. we need to pay for it, so lets get to work.

What about you?

Do you have any specific financial goals for 2021?

I’d love to hear about them, maybe we can find ways to work together towards a better financial picture.

And now for something similar, yet different

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Strangely enough, it’s been almost two years since I’ve published a blog post. Yet, i’ll admit sitting down to write feels natural, like it’s certainly been missing for a long time. Logging back into this website and playing around and making some changes this morning felt vaguely like coming home.

I’ve been freelancing, or whatever we can call my experiments with this self employed life for more than 3 and a half years. But I have yet to really thrive in this, and I think it’s because I’ve allowed myself to repeatedly get disconnected with what really matters to me in this industry.

Business is personal, and many of the business owners I’ve worked with over the last 3 years are some of the best people I’ve met, and I want to do whatever I can to help them reach the level of success that they desire.

Right now, my greatest skillset for that is within the digital marketing space, and that’s what I’m looking to start rebuilding this freelance business around:

  1. Websites focused around a larger sales funnel objective
  2. Digital Marketing Services.

I want to create ongoing relationships with my clients, not just be very involved with them for a few months only to become acquaintances after launch, I don’t really do relationships like that.

I want to help business owners take their businesses confidently into the web and social media spaces thru beautiful websites, strategically curated social media campaigns, and being mindful of search visibility.

Starting a business isn’t without risk. This might not work, I might find out that I don’t have the stuff to really create a business that can exist beyond me, that can really create change in clients, that can become known for creating stellar results.

It’s possible it doesn’t work, and I’m going to try anyway. The last few years of not having a reliable boss have been a learning experience, yet I haven’t thrived up until this point. Ultimately I’ve been content with playing safe and small, and
I believe I was put here for more, and I’m going to step up to that proverbial plate, and I’m going to take my swing.

It’s going to be a lot of work, it’s going to be a lot of long hours, it’s going to be a lot of weekend work, I’ll never catch up on every show that every friend says I need to watch. But it’s worth it.

Let’s get after it.