What's Your One Thing?

What I figured out at 2:30am with muffins and guava jam..

Gratuitous ocean image from Tayrona National Park - Colombia 🇨🇴

What’s your one thing?

I’ve asked this before, many times, so if you’ve been with me for a while you may have heard me ask you already. But that doesn’t matter. You need to hear it again. Especially if you’re older, a bit slower (yep comes to us all) and your brain can only focus on one thing at a time!

Remember the days - especially ladies - when we could do a hundred things at once?

Gosh, I could make a shopping list, plan my daughters after school activities for the week, discuss the business with my husband, and listen to the convo happening on the next table all in one go!

I don’t know about you, but age (and likely the menopause) put paid to that rather fab skill. 🙄

Anyway, at roughly 2.30am on Sunday morning while eating muffins with guava jam (don’t ask), I had a breakthrough!

I was awake wrestling with a challenge that’s been on my mind for weeks (even months).

How to grow The 50+ Nomad while also promoting and focusing on This Big World (the travel challenge cards), while also nomadding, exploring the world and living my best life!

I’ve been spreading myself too thin, which means everything has been moving slower (Substack growth, card sales growth etc) and I haven’t really been doing anything super well.

But while writing a post about the one thing every online business needs, (which comes out on Friday), I told the story of how I built my first business years ago, including the slow grind, the email list, the audience I built, and the effect having a trusted audience has on sales & products.

And at 2:30am on Sunday morning, mid muffin and slurp of tea, it hit me!

The answer to a question I should have asked myself months ago. The same simple question Gary Keller asks in his book The One Thing.

“What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

And the answer for me became blindingly obvious.

To stop focusing on ‘building two brands’ and instead focus on one overarching goal.

“To build the most engaged audience of freedom-seeking, adventure loving, life embracing, people over 50 that I possibly can.”

It’s the same strategy that took me from zero to seven figures between 2010 and 2016, and it'll work just as well today as it did then. (If not better, in todays noisy, AI driven world.)

That’s it. That’s my one thing.

Everything else - the books, the cards, the courses, the subscriptions, future products I haven’t even dreamed up yet - all of it flows from there.

Without an audience that knows me and trusts me, none of the rest works. With one, all of it does.

Which means every post I write, every note I share, every podcast, every live, every video, every social post, all have the same underlying job from now on.

Bring more of the right people into the room.

So I ask you, what’s your one thing?

What’s the one thing you could do that would make everything else easier or unnecessary?

My guess is that for most of you building a location independent income, it’ll be a similar version of mine. Build the audience first, and the rest follows. But the specific shape of what that actually means is yours.

On Friday I’ll be publishing the longer post that triggered all this, and it’ll go into more details of how to go about building a trusted audience, including the order of operations, the things that compound, and the mistakes that cost people (including me) years, so look out for that one.

For now, though, I’m heading off for a random Monday BBQ on the beach, (because why not), and to dream up some more content for my one thing.

Have a great Monday.

📍 Encinitas, San Diego