Howdy folks,

I’ve been thinking about money this week - specifically the role of luck that comes into play when making money. Here’s what we’ll get into this week.

1. Getting Lucky with Money

2. How Do You Design a Life?

By the end of this post, you’ll have a better idea of what luck has to do with making money and how you can actually create your own luck.

We’ll also get into how do you actually “Design Life” plus, I’ll leave a bonus freebie in here too that I think will be helpful for all of us Lifestyle Entrepreneurs.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

👨‍💻 Modern Entrepreneurship

Getting Lucky with Money

If you’ve built a business or in the process of building your own. You might have come across the phrase “you’re lucky”. It’s easy for people to look at someone else’s circumstances and pass it all off as some sort of luck.

I found this quote from Naval Ravikant. He’s the CEO and co-founder of AngelList. He's invested in more than 100 companies, including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and many others. Here’s what he says about luck & money.

Matt’s Lucky Money Journey

1. Blind Luck

I believe we all receive blind luck at different points in our lives. Even our supposed weaknesses can be looked at as hidden strengths & luck. Eg, I grew up in the UK - which is lucky to be from a 1st world country = blind luck.

But I also grew up in a relatively poor household (single non-working parent) growing up in a council estate. At first glance, this might seem like a disadvantage.

But the luck I chose to see in this situation is that it taught me how to stretch money, which later became incredibly helpful when bootstrapping businesses from $0.

Takeaway: Make your blind luck visible

2. Luck from Hustling

This is my favourite type of luck - why? It’s the most empowering because it’s within our control.

You can’t control where you grew up, your family circumstances, natural intelligence, or inherent talents.

But you can control the effort you put into something—your persistence, hard work, hustle, and movement.

In the modern world, anyone with access to the internet has the opportunity to create their own luck. The barrier to entry with starting a business used to be so high. Loans, needing physical stores, locations, products & employees.

There’s never been a better time in history that a person can radically transform their current life situation. Some will look at it as luck but in reality, we all have this opportunity to create it.

I experienced this 1st hand 7+ years ago when starting to build online businesses. Starting with just $4000 in savings (which took me 1 ½ years to save up). Every day was a hustle, working long hours, and living as cheap as I could in Southeast Asia.

I only mention this to emphasise this is not just nice ideas. They are real truths that can be applied to your life too.

Takeaway: Control your own lucky outcome

3. Luck from Preparation

This kind of luck is subtle yet powerful. It’s about positioning yourself to recognise opportunities.

I’ve felt this by meeting incredible people along the way. Many of them were ahead of the curve, building amazing businesses.

Just being around them, while being in a similar space, was my preparation. You have to put yourself in the right position to spot these opportunities when they arise.

It’s hard not to get into Amazon affiliates when you’ve been a person who made $40,000 in a day from it. But I wouldn’t have met this person if I had not been in Bali 7 years ago, in the coworking space, working at 11 pm.

Takeaway: Put yourself where luck is.

4. Luck from Your Unique Character

For me, this is a great goal to aspire towards. I see this as your personal brand. Where you share ideas, thoughts, and opinions openly and freely, and be truly happy with who you are.

This kind of luck comes when you attract opportunities because of who you’ve become. It’s about building a unique character and mindset that draws luck to you.

If you’ve ever gotten the “must be lucky for you” comment I hope this gives a new perspective on it. That yes there was luck, a lot of it. But it probably came from multiple places. Some you inherited, some you earned, some you attracted along the way.

Takeaway: Become a luck magnet

👨‍🎨 Life Design

How Do You Design a Life?

If there’s one thing I passionately believe in. Is that you can design life to make it the best it possibly can be.

The way I explain it is this. If you had to design a logo what would you have to do?

• what’s the name?

• what colours?

• what style?

• is it modern, or old?

• what font would you use?

• who is the target audience

I could go on but you get the point. Just to design a little logo a great designer would put a lot of thought into it (even to the tiniest pixel tweaks).

So my question for you is have you ever put that much attention to detail into the life that you’re currently living?

Well, at least for me I didn’t. I was just going along with life not really questioning just doing what I thought I should be doing.

This idea around designing life isn’t anything to do with beliefs or religious ideas. All it is just taking a minute to think about where you are now vs where you’d like to be.

Once you get clarity on that you can start building actionable steps towards that future version of yourself.

You can apply this way of thinking and designing. To your physical body, to your work, to making money, to your relationships.

Everyone’s life is unique and what they want to get out of it. Someone might love to surf every day and live off $500 per month. That would be their dream life. I say that is awesome for you.

Another might want to build a unicorn startup. One might just want to have a family, a dog and live quietly in the countryside.

What you want is ultimately your choice. What I’d like to put out there is to mindfully design your way to it.

One tip I always say is you have to start with a baseline. Where are you at vs where would you like to be?

To make this process even simpler I built an online self-assessment tool. It’s completely free & takes less than 10 min to do. You can do it for yourself here.

Here’s the idea in 3 steps

1. Do the quiz to learn your baseline, strengths & weaknesses.

2. Choose 1 of your weaknesses - focus on improving that area for 1 month. Example body

3. Build action steps for that 1 area. Example: walk 30min daily for 1 month. Measure + track your progress

At the end of the month, you can do another check-in to see how you’ve improved. Even if you’ve moved the needle by 1% it might now seem a lot at first but over the course of months & years it all adds up.

🎁 Members Freebie

If you’d like to squeeze the most out of life you got to know where your strengths & weaknesses are.

This week’s freebie is the Life Design Check-In Quiz

• 🖼️ See Your Full Life's Picture

• 🏆 Learn Your Strengths & Weaknesses

• 🎯 Discover Your 3 Focus Areas

I hope it helps you start designing a life filled with wealth, health & happiness.

🔥 Interesting Finds

Have you seen the AI videos that have been released? They are wild. Here are some examples in this X post.

If you’re interested in the latest tech & AI trends and want to learn how to use them to grow your business. I’ve recently launched another newsletter which I talk about just that. It’s called “The Meta” you can subscribe here.

Last week we went over xAI raising $6 Billion, Meta is using your public FB & IG images to build their AI as well as Mr Beast is getting into software. You can read more below.

📚 The Book Club

Here's what I've been reading or listening to lately alongside some little nuggets I've picked up through the week.

1. Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kegan

2. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

🎵 Music to Vibe too

Found this banger this week and had it on repeat - also added to 🔋 Energy | London Rave at 3am playlist. It’s awesome you want to get some deep work done or just have a bit of a dance in your room 👀

Come join the listening party with one of my curated Spotify playlists

• 🤘 Rock Out | Belfast in the 00s

• 🧊 Vibe | Bali Beach Bar at Sunset

• 🔋 Energy | London Rave at 3am

🏝️ Lifestyle Entrepreneur

We talked about improving our bodies which got me imaging a Lifestyle Entrepreneur gym.

And that is it for this week's newsletter folks

Wishing you a great week ahead as always

Let's catch up soon

Matt

Stay awesome

🫶

P.s

This week I got my 1st ad sponsor. Did you spot it? Never thought I’d ever have a sponsor for this newsletter. Anyway, I’ll always aim to keep any ad relevant to you. You have no obligation to click but these ads help keep content free - which I love and I hope you do too.

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