how to actually build your Q2 financial plan
1 season, 1 priority, 13 weeks
Hey Close Friend,
If you read Issue 87, you’ll know that the ambition trap a lot of us fall into is a direction problem. Absolutely none of us can say we don’t put effort in.
So this week we’re doing the actual, specific work: identifying your season, finding the one priority that lives inside it, and building the plan that makes Q2 the quarter you actually look back on and feel proud of. The 1-1-13 method.
Work through this as you read, and don’t forget to use the contents table that appears on the left hand side of the browser as you work through this issue.
𝜗ৎ In this issue:
The One Thing
Why you’re probably in one season, not two
Finding your one priority inside your season
If you’re in Earn
If you’re in Keep
If you’re in Grow
Making this something you will actually do
The one thing
Before we get into it, I want to introduce a concept that changed how I think about progress entirely, and it comes from a book called The ONE Thing by Gary Keller.
The central idea is that extraordinary results come from narrowing your focus to the single most important thing, and giving it everything before you give anything else anything at all. Keller calls it the focusing question:
What’s the one thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?
It sounds simple, but it’s also one of the hardest things to do — especially if you’re the kind of person who is ambitious about everything simultaneously, which, if you’re reading this, you probably are.
The reason it’s hard is that it’s modern life and modern financial advice, that constantly pulls you in multiple directions at once. Save more. Invest now. Earn more. Pay off debt. Build an emergency fund. Start a side hustle. Contribute to your pension. All of it is technically correct advice. None of it tells you what to do first, which means most people try to do all of it at a mediocre level rather than one thing exceptionally well.
This is exactly why I built the Earn, Keep, Grow framework the way I did, as a seasonal lens that tells you where your one thing lives right now. The seasons exist to give the focusing question a financial answer.
So before you set a single Q2 goal, the work is finding that answer.