October 2022 Reading List

In this fourth book of the Dalai Lama’s Cat series, His Holiness’s Cat (HHC) learns about where to find happiness. It’s not externally or from the physical self but from within. It can be achieved through meditation, a mind-training exercise.

My favourite quote is when discussing Tibetan Buddhism:

We have many wonderful practices, or mental tools, to use. Different practices for people with different temperaments. This is not a one-size-fits-all tradition.

This can be applied to so many different things in life.

The fifth (and currently last) book in The Dalai Lama’s Cat series and it again covers mind training as well as death. One of the new characters is an elderly painter at the local care home, who painted for joy when he was younger but stopped painting until recently. Whereby he refound that joy.

The value of life depends far less on its length than by what you do with it.

I picked up Obsessed from the library a few months ago when I started doing the Social Media for the Australian Sewing Guild. But I never read it. It went straight back to the library, but I did put it on my GoodReads To Read list. As I consider starting a business I thought it would be a useful read.

Author Emily Heyward works as a branding officer for Red Antler, a branding and marketing company. Some of the companies that she has worked with are included in the book as well as some that she hasn’t. The book gives you a new look at what branding is and how to use it in building a business.

A brand is what the business stands for and needs to be baked into the business from the start, not tacked on later down the track. People are smart these days, they know when you are selling to them, instead you need to connect with them. Understand their attitudes and behaviours. Make them feel something. Make them feel like they are part of a community. And ensure, as a business, that you continue to live up to your values.

I took away a lot of information from this book that I will return to over and over again.

Profit First was mentioned by Jess van Den, owner of Create & Thrive, in her YouTube video – How I Organise my Money as a Self-Employed Creative. Jess explained how she uses the teachings from The Barefoot Investor book by Scott Pape. But she suggested that beginner businesses or ones with sporadic sales use the Profit First system instead.

Profit First is a highly systemised process by which you set up multiple bank accounts. Seven in fact. Five at one bank institution, and two at another. These last two need to be hard to access, with the idea of making it really hard to touch that money. The ethos of all these bank accounts is that at a glance you know straight away how you sit financially.

Twice a month the business owner or bookkeeper transfers money between the different accounts using a particular percentage. With the first transfer being into a Profit account. While money is being shuffled between accounts there may be bills that you can’t afford to pay. So you know straight away that you need to put on your creative hat and work out how you are going to cut down on expenses.

There are a ton of free resources for this book (available to anyone, no book receipt needed) including a one-page PDF summary of how to use the system.

There is a directory of accounting businesses that use the Profit First methodology that you can work with – these are for worldwide and an Australian focused one:

www.profitfirstprofessionals.com
www.profitfirstaustralia.com.au

It is quite a technical book, and I must admit I did skip over sections. I see it as a resource book that you use while you set up your business financials and continue to grow as a business. I’m in the early, early days of setting up a business so there is no money coming in for me to handle. But as soon as that changes I will look at the process again.

As a side note, I did read this on my Kobo and there were a lot of diagrams that were too small to see. So I suggest getting a printed copy or using your desktop/tablet to digest the valuable information in this book.