How To Get What You Want Out Of Life (Be A Digital Nomad)
The Master Letter #15
Is this a normal day for you?
Traffic
4 coffees
Maxed Cortisol
Small talk
Busy work
Happy hour
Useless Meetings
Reacting to people’s problems
No nature walks
No gym
More traffic
Grumpy to gf after work.
I remember that misery, because it was my life only 4 years ago.
I used to have no autonomy or control over my work schedule. Random meetings all day, feeling like I was just listening to problems, people complain, and not making any impact.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Here is a normal day for me now.
Wake up at 6am
Meditate & stretch
Watch the sunrise on a walk
Drink coffee and write
Client meetings 9a-11a
Lift weights
Rock climb and lunch with my girlfriend
Client meetings 2p-4p
Read
Pickleball or Overwatch with friends
Walk and watch the sunset
Bed at 9pm
If you are interested in this life of making 6 figures+, having autonomy and freedom of doing the things you love every day, I wrote this guide for you.
Choose a high-income skill that you can study online or get a certification for
Tech is always a good option.
I chose cloud security and got the Comptia Security+
I have a close friend who chose coding and went to a bootcamp for 3 months and is started at 70k as a developer right out of the camp.
He isn’t consulting, but he could have.
It’s the same path essentially, except instead of writing code for one company, he would be working a company that has dozens of clients that he would solve specific problems for.
Find a skill you think you’d enjoy, pays well and you might be strong at.
Watch Youtube videos and read 3 books on it.
Find the certification or learning path for it.
Get a mentor.
Get an entry level job in that field & spend 1-2 years there
You have to learn the thing and get experience in the thing before you teach the thing.
Example, I started as IT help desk guy and learned as much as I could from mentors for a few years at the job in security, networking, systems etc.
I treated it like a buffet. Trying different things, learning, finding what I hated, finding my strengths etc.
The goal is to get something in that field, where you can learn from mentors, learn what you like, do projects, gain skills and experience for your resume.
Once you get the job, get as many projects under your belt as possible and network with as many higher up people as possible.
at my first IT job, I did projects for my mentors in anything cloud related.
Azure Active Directory, Intune, Crowdstrike etc and got a lot of experience.
I packaged it up in nice impact statements on my LinkedIn showcasing my impact.
This ultimately got me the consulting job.
Craft your Linkedin/Resume and apply for consulting jobs
Setup your linked in / resume nice and clean using the impact statements. Get a nice professional profile pic.
Here is an example of my current impact statements for a decade of work:
$63M+ Defender E5 licenses deployed from 2200+ hours of consulting with 112+ large enterprise clients.
$5M+ in Defender E5 licensing revenue from 10 Proof of Concept deliveries to large enterprise clients which includes 70%-win rate vs competitors.
10+ technical demos delivered to internal staff and partners with audiences of up to 150+.
Reduced ramping for new SMEs by 29% by creating new onboarding systems.
Lead and provided mentorship to 20+ engineers.
See a trend?
I have done thousands of tasks and activities over the last 12 years in tech, but I still have 5 bullets because those are the most impactful and showcase my value.
Short and sweet.
I’m not listing off 46 activities.
No one gives a shit what you did from 9am-5pm, they care about what IMPACT that had on the business overall.
You could sit around and check emails, sit on useless meetings, make small talk with George for 12 hours a day and have no real impact for months.
Contrarily, you could work 4 hours a day of highly focused work and gain massive impact.
Always keep that in mind. It’s not the hours worked, it’s the results.
Once you get a consulting job, here are some lessons I learned over the years that will put you in the top 1% of consultants.
Growth Mindset
Your field is going to be constantly growing, and so should you.
You have to constantly learn and improve yourself.
You have to learn to help others, and also leverage the work of others.
You need mentors who are more experienced, and mentees who you can teach the ways.
Crystal clear expectations
Honestly, clarity and direct communication earn massive respect.
Tell your client exactly what value you provide, what to expect, the time frame, when they will hear from you next, etc.
Do not bullshit around.
It's all about relationships
It doesn't matter how technical the consulting is, people are people.
People want to hear their names; they want to be heard and they want to feel relevant.
Shoot the shit. Be yourself.
Ask them questions in the first few minutes of the call.
Have fun with it.
You can't know everything
You must learn to admit when you don't have an answer.
You're human.
Your client will respect you for it.
Let them know you will research and follow up with them after the call.
No problemo.
Notes are everything
Create a 2nd brain in one note, notion etc.
that you can use while on the call.
Prep everything you need for the call so you have it right there and you are prepared.
Take notes of commonly asked questions.
You should get so good at reading for your notes that it sounds like it’s just memorized.
Get amazing at googling answers on the fly.
If you don’t know the answer, take the question down in your notes and follow up via email after the call.
Simplicity is brilliance
Using technical jargon is an ego-driven amateur strategy.
Humble masters simplify, insecure amateurs complicate.
Clients love complex concepts broken down into simple metaphors.
Make it so easy that a 7-year-old could understand.
That’s it folks.
Thanks for reading.
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