#60-3 month project complete!

Hans Chan -

What I’m Reading

As I was putting the finishing touches to my handwriting class, I couldn’t help but go through The Zanerian Manual which was first published in 1895! In what is known as the ‘golden era’ of handwriting. It teaches some traditional techniques and has samples of many types of scripts which are beautiful to look at. You can download a free pdf of it from the link.

Resource of the week

A big sigh of relief from me this week, my class: ‘Cursive Handwriting for Beginners’ is finally out! I started it in mid-Feb, which was only meant to take about a month but ended up being dragged out in the usual fashion.

I always believe that one of the best ways to do well at anything in life is to enjoy it. So if you can enjoy handwriting it can support pretty much any endeavour. Hope it brings you as much joy as it has for me!

The class is now available on Skillshare.

Quote

"Life is a series of tradeoffs, and greater results usually require greater tradeoffs.  The question is not, "Do you want to be great at this?"  The question is, "What are you willing to give up in order to be great at this?"

James Clear

  • 100% mortgages have made a comeback. While it may seem controversial to younger homebuyers and investors, it was very much commonplace pre-2008. In fact, there were 125% mortgages. This will no doubt be stimulating for property prices, but just how much so?
  • The base rate rises to 4.5%. This doesn’t particularly come as a surprise to many in the industry. In a conversation with my broker at the beginning of the year, she did express that she expected it to reach the 4.5% level. However, inflation has also remained higher than expected, so yet another rise is not off the table.
  • The AI space is wild at the moment with a new announcement coming out almost every week as companies try to establish themselves. At the Google I/O conference this week they announced that they will have AI integration across google workspace.
  • Google announces a next-generation universal AI translator tool, which has the ability to not only redub a video in a different language but make changes to lip movements to sync with that language!

Thoughts

Very relieved to have finished my most recent handwriting class. Now of course that raises to question of what next? Part of what I love about this process of being a creator is the flexibility to adapt based on feedback. But I’ve not always been this way, not having certainty of what was coming next used to make me uncomfortable.

One thing, for me, that has helped but is often not talked about much in hustle culture is risk/reward or stakes. If you reduce your risk while having a big potential reward, it reduces the pressure. So for example, starting a blog or a social media channel requires very little risk to get going. At the very start, I didn’t even mention I was doing it to anyone, I just picked up my phone and started filming. Even if it’s a small business, it wouldn’t make much sense to invest heavily in something that isn’t proven. If the stakes are small, the results are less important, the emphasis is now on the process and journey instead of the results. Internally, the whole frame of mind changes. We’ve gone from a survival mode, ‘How can I most reliably make money’ to ‘What seems most fun or interesting?’.

As they say, what we spend our days doing is what we spend our lives doing. So may as well be something we enjoy! Being very aware that having certainty comes with an opportunity cost of not going for those endeavours that can provide a bigger and more fulfilling reward. Also being realistic. So it's about finding the right balance as with most things in life.

In the immediate short term, I’ll be ramping back up TikTok content creation, I’ve not been giving that the attention it needs as of late. And back on the property search, the mortgage market seems to have stabilised and the supply of property is higher than at any point since 2019. So from next week, I’ll be writing more about the process of what my experience of the property market is in 2023 in search of the next acquisition. I know the rental market is very hot, I have estate agents calling me on a weekly basis asking if I have any properties available to let, but the question is whether it can pass these more stringent stress tests vs last year.

Stay tuned for more, have a good week!

Hans