I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, focused on launching a writing and advisory business around personal finance for GenXers. I’m blogging here daily to track my progress. In the Friday Flash, I share an insight I achieved over the past week.
After I finished my year-long reinvention blogging project, I started a 100-day blogging project intended to focus on just one of my many interests. It didn’t really work for me, except that focusing on personal finance for GenXers still feels like the thing I want to do. I didn’t blog every day in the 100-day project because it was tiresome to blog only about financial topics. So instead, I’m mothballing that, and I’m going to instead blog about my progress rather than blogging topically, as I commit to building a financial content and advisory business.
why 1000 days?
So much career advice these days exhorts you to experiment your way into a new career. But career reinventions require commitment and development of mastery. You can’t do that with little experiments and tentative commitments. You can’t do that in short periods of time.
My first reinvention project was a year long. That was enough time to pick something to focus on (personal finance for Gen X), but it wasn’t enough time to actually get a business off the ground.
I chose 1,000 days based on Greg Isenberg’s Advice to my 21-year-old self, which was also the source for my thinking that an experiment-only paradigm to career reinvention is doomed to fail. Here’s Isenberg’s item 19:
nobody mentions that the biggest predictor of founder success is having enough personal runway to survive 1000 days of zero income. money buys you iteration cycles.
the importance of developing mastery
Another piece of advice Isenberg offered was this:
13. we’re told to “find our passion,” but passion isn’t found, it’s developed. the most passionate people i know didn’t start that way; they just stayed with something long enough to get good at it.
Achieving mastery in a field is one of the best ways to both find a passion for it and to succeed in it. Mastery is the best goal, some say: “the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it.”
My prior career reinvention, where I went from stay-at-home mom and online writer to a full-time data scientist at a technology company, played out over many years. It included earning a PhD in Research Methods & Statistics at the University of Denver. One of my main goals for pursuing the PhD was to become an expert in some field. I had tired of my dilettantism and dabbling.
Now I hunger for new mastery, not just in the personal finance area, but also in all the business functions I need to learn to earn money with my own business: marketing and sales, publicity, business development, podcasting, making videos, and more.
the weekly routine
One thing I really enjoyed about my reinvention project blogging was having a weekly routine for posts. I’m going to go back to something similar, eliminating the ones that didn’t thrill me and adding new ones. Here’s the tentative plan:
- Sunday Planning – Looking forward to the week ahead. Identifying the most important priorities. Determining topics for any articles and videos I plan to create and publish.
- Monday Marcom – Writing about marketing and communications and what I’m doing each week to move forward with reaching out to my target audience.
- Tuesday Book Club – I loved doing this post each week for the reinvention project, so going to start doing it again.
- Wednesday Web Presence – A day to write about how I’m improving my web presence, whether that’s here or my YouTube channel or my Substack newsletter.
- Thursday Thinker – Another favorite from The Reinvention Project, where I share a quote or idea from someone, from a book, or an online article, or a Tweet.
- Friday Flash – In which I share a flash of insight I achieved or something important I did in the past week.
- Saturday Sales – This is a day to think about actually making money from my business. What can I sell and how?
onwards
Today is day one. One thousand days from today will be March 2, 2028. In March of 2028, I’ll be about to turn 60 years old. The timing seems perfect. Let’s go!