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You're here for tips on leveling up your career, but here's a bonus tip on leveling up your investments. Check out Public Public is an investing platform where you can invest in stocks, options, bonds, ETFs and crypto all in one place. Public is a modern brokerage and has brought innovation to aspects of investing that were dinosaur y. I'll give you an example. Public is one of the only brokerages to offer self directed investing in bonds Treasuries, which have historically been sold primarily through a government website. But with Public you can invest in Treasuries with just a few clicks right from your phone. And Public allows you to make fractional investments in bonds. So before fractional bonds on Public you had to buy government bonds starting with a $1,000 investment at a minimum. And if you wanted to invest in any more than that, you could only invest in $100 increments. Now you can buy bonds for as little as $100 and for any dollar amount on Public. That's just one example of how Public is making it easier to invest. But there are a ton more and you can explore them for yourself@public.com helpwanted to get started with your portfolio today, go to public.com helpwanted this is a paid endorsement for Public Investing. Full disclosure and conditions can be found in the podcast Description this is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor in chief of.
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Entrepreneur Magazine, and I'm money expert Nicole Lapin. On Tuesdays, Jason and I answer the helpline and help callers solve their work problems.
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And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.
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And it starts now.
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Are you starting something new this year? If so, congratulations. That is awesome. New job, new project, new relationship, whatever it is, great. But ask yourself something. What do you plan on ending this year? And have you congratulated yourself on that too? We often don't celebrate endings. We think of them as failures or mistakes, as if the end invalidated everything else. But endings can be many things. They're how we preserve time and energy. They're how we reach a healthy conclusion. They're how we prepare for something new. Today, I want to help you embrace endings. I'm going to give you three questions to ask yourself, and after you do, you might feel lighter and happier and freer by being done. And I'm going to start by telling you about something that I just ended. I truly loved it. Really. But saying goodbye was liberating, just as it could be for you. So here's what I just ended. A few weeks ago, I had gotten an exciting email. It is a new project of mine that had gotten approved. I've been talking about it a long time and it's going to require a lot of my energy and attention this year in 2025. I felt excited and then I felt terrified because I'm already too busy. How will I possibly do this new thing too? Then I remembered a conversation that I had this summer with Mary Beth Westmoreland, a VP of technology at Amazon. She told me that when her team starts a new project, they often eliminate an old project at the same time. And here's how she explained it to me.
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There's only so many hours in the day, so how are you going to spend it? It's the same basic question that we ask our teams is what's the most important things that we need to do that we need to spend time on the problems that we need to solve in order to make the biggest impact for our selling partners. And sometimes that means that we're going to have to stop doing things that are not going to make the most difference.
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So I was reflecting on what Mary Beth had told me and I'm sitting here thinking, this new project is so exciting. It's going to take up so much of my time. I have added something to my life, which means I also need to subtract something. But what? And then I asked myself three questions. And it starts with the question that Mary Beth asked, which is this question number one, what is not making the most difference? Difference. Remember, that's what she said. Sometimes we're going to have to stop doing things that are not making the most difference. So question number one for myself, what is not making the most difference? Pause to consider the language there. What is not making the most difference? I love that word. Because we are free to define difference ourselves. What is accelerating our goals? Is it improving our lives the most? Once we know what makes a difference in whatever arena we focus or care about, we can optimize for it. These days, for example, my goal, my big goal is to build a portfolio of projects that bring me joy, stretch me in the right ways, create financial stability for my family, and leave me time to enjoy non work life. That is what I say yes to. That is the reason that I'm making this podcast, because it fits into that mission for myself. With that in mind, I asked myself Mary Beth's question. What is what isn't making a difference? Towards that goal. And my answer came, well, pretty quickly, actually. It was a community that I had built on top of my newsletter. So if you happen to be a subscriber of my newsletter for a while, it's called One thing Better, you can subscribe. If you're not a subscriber at One Thing better, email an episode like this. The solo episodes on Help Wanted are actually drawn from my newsletter. Anyway, okay. So longtime readers of my newsletter might remember that about a year and change ago, I launched a community, which is to say, a community of people who read my newsletter, who wanted to pay to be part of an ongoing thing where there would be calls and people would be in touch with each other. Anyway, the initial launch was a total embarrassing flop. It was awful. But it eventually grew to 160 members and was so fun. Members became friends and some even started working together. But it was also a lot of work. I never really figured out how to meaningfully scale or monetize it. It brought me joy, but frankly, not enough to outweigh the downsides. So then I asked myself a second question. Question number two. What would happen if I shut it down? My first reaction was this. I thought, I can't shut it down because I'll disappoint too many people. We often react to endings that way by thinking about the negative. Who will we impact or disappoint? How will it feel to say farewell? That's not helpful. We must consider what happens a week, a month, or a year after we make the decision. Because an ending isn't just about one moment. It isn't just about whatever moment you announce it. And maybe people are disappointed and give you some feedback. It's not about that. It's about all the other moments afterwards. So I sat with it for a few days. I kept asking myself things like, if the community didn't exist right now, how would I feel? In truth, it felt good. I imagined all my newfound free time and energy and how I would spend it. So finally, I asked one more question. Question number three. What purpose did it serve? You know, everything we do serves some function in our lives. Everything we do taught us, trained us, or expanded us. Everything we do added joy or escape when we needed it the most or it pushed us in directions that we needed to go. So if you're thinking about ending something, it is worth asking, what purpose did that serve for me? Because once you know that, the next question can be, has that purpose already been served for me? The community that I'd built served many purposes. I learned a lot about community functions and how to moderate calls. I met great new people and had fun. All of this remains true. Even if the community ends, a purpose has been fulfilled. After this, I felt, well, I felt clarity over this decision. I knew what difference the community made in my life. I knew what would happen if I ended it, and I recognized what I already got for it. This all clicked into place for me while having lunch one day and honestly, I felt instant relief. So the next day I wrote my community a message to announce its ending. And now I ask you, what are you ready to end? Things will end for you this year or in the future, whether you want them to end or not. When you add things to your life, something will be subtracted. Your time and energy will be redistributed, diminishing other projects or relationships. This is life. This is natural. The only choice we really have is do we want to consciously and proactively subtract things or do we want to just let them wilt on their own? I speak from experience here when I say when you end something proactively, good things happen. After closing my community, for example, which happened not that long ago, a couple months ago, is when I made this decision. Members wrote me the nicest emails. One said, as a business owner and entrepreneur, you've shown me that it's okay to try something new and that it doesn't have to be forever. It's okay and even normal for that thing to evolve or not. And ending one thing doesn't mean the end of all things. That is correct and beautifully said. When we start something, that doesn't mean we have to do it forever. The only project you really need to keep going is yourself. Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason.
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Pfeiffer and me, Nicole Lapman. Our executive producer is Morgan Lavoie. If you want some help, email our helpline@helpwantedoneynewsnetwork.com for the chance to have some of your questions answered on the show and follow us on Instagram, Money News and Tik Tok Money News Network for exclusive content and to see our beautiful faces. Maybe a little dance?
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Oh, I didn't sign up for that.
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All right, well talk to you soon.