Newsletter Sent out today:

I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to take a moment to talk to you about the benefits of having a life strategy plan. We all have goals and dreams that we want to achieve, but often we find ourselves overwhelmed or lost in the process. That’s where a life strategy plan comes in.

Having a life strategy plan can help you create a roadmap for your life. It can help you identify your goals and the steps you need to take to achieve them. It can also help you prioritize your time and focus on what’s really important to you. Here are some benefits of having a life strategy plan:

1. Clear Goals: A life strategy plan can help you identify your goals and create a clear plan of action to achieve them. This can help you stay focused and motivated.

2. Prioritization: With a life strategy plan, you can prioritize your time and focus on the things that matter most to you. This can help you avoid wasting time on things that are not important.

3. Flexibility: A life strategy plan is not set in stone. It can be adjusted and modified as your life changes. It can help you stay flexible and adapt to new circumstances.

4. Accountability: Having a life strategy plan can help you stay accountable to yourself. It can help you track your progress and make adjustments as needed.

5. Reduced Stress: With a clear plan in place, you can reduce stress and anxiety about the future. A life strategy plan can help you feel more in control and confident about your future.

I highly recommend creating a life strategy plan. It can help you achieve your goals, stay focused, and live a more fulfilling life. If you need any help or guidance in creating your plan, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

Best regards,

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Daily Journal interpretation by ChatGPT:

The article is about the importance of having a life strategy plan to maximize time for a meaningful future. The author stresses the need to focus on what is important in life, such as spending time with family and creating memories, rather than chasing something that is not part of one's life strategy. The author shares a template for their own life strategy plan, which includes a SWOT analysis, core values, 40-year vision, five-year vision, and a mission statement. The article emphasizes the importance of identifying one's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, as well as the need to align one's actions with core values and create a roadmap towards a meaningful future.

Daily Journal Transcript

hello. Hello. I hope you guys are doing fantastic.

So, it is march 7, 2023. Hard to believe how fast time flies. For my journal entry today, I wanted to walk you through my life strategy plan.

At the end of the day, all I know is I get 24 hours tomorrow, tomorrow until I don't. And so the only thing that is important to me is what I get to do with those 24 hours. Do I get to be around my kids or am I working 80 hours a week? Do I get to travel and have fun and go to soccer games and dance recitals? Or am I out gallivanting around trying to build some business? Whatever I end up doing, it's my time.

And so a life strategy plan is how I look at maximizing my time for me. Because when I'm 75 years old, I'm not going to care about the business meetings. I'm not going to care about the sales calls.

I'm not going to care about all the little things that happen throughout life. I'm going to care about my kids. I'm going to care about what we did together, the memories we made, and how our life works for each other and with each other.

So that's why I believe having a life strategy plan is one of the most important things you can do when it comes to being successful, because the most expensive taxi ever pay is a tax on your time chasing something that's not part of your life strategy. So, I have this excel template built and customized for my life strategy plan. Let me share my screen, and I thought I would walk you through it and show you how I look at my life over time.

So you can see I updated it today. So, march 7, 2023. Picture of my family.

I love them. So it starts with a SWOT analysis. So right now, strength very low liabilities.

I've got time, freedom. I'm outgoing. I'm a great leader.

Some of our weaknesses I am hard headed and I am stubborn. I also make a really crappy manager. I'm not great at holding people accountable and holding feet to the fire.

I'm constantly focused on the big picture. I'm far too optimistic, and I make decisions way too fast. So those are some of my weaknesses.

The biggest opportunity on my plate right now is project tools. I love working with project tools. We've got a lot that we're putting together and building to really take the company to the next level, which is exciting.

And then threats is one running out of money and losing the relationship with project tools or going through a divorce and then some of the leadership building blocks we as a family have positivity and perseverance. Emily is compassionate and caring. Scarlet's helpful and kind.

Tristan's caring and loving. And norah is focused and determined. So that is the stephens family update in one quick column.

Next, we go to our core values. The core values are what drive people. So these are my core values.

Number one, you got to love on people. We're all in this together. Number two, have fun.

Number three, be candid. Get the truth out there. Number four is trust, then verify.

Number five is do what's right. And number six is work smarter. At the end of the day, time is all we have, so we need to use that as effectively as possible.

So then it gets into my 40 year vision. This is my 40 years vision of what I, Justin Stephens, does with his time, because that's the only thing I can control, the only thing that matters to me. So I broke it down into spiritual, family, net worth, marriage, impact, self care, charity, and growth.

So in 40 years, this is one sentence. So spiritually, I want to be the lighthouse that shows others what it means to believe in something more than themselves. I just want to be an example.

I don't want to have to tell people I'm a Christian. I want the way I treat people to make them understand. This is compassion.

This is what a Christian acts like. So I go through over 40 years. The only thing that matters is creating life experiences together and being together as a family to create everlasting memories.

So then the primary functions as a spiritually, how do I want to show up in 40 years as a family? What do we want to be doing with my net worth, marriage? The impact. So impact is what I call career. At the end of the day, we all get to decide what impact we leave on the world based on how we fund our lives throughout our existence self care, charity, and then growth.

And then my pledge to society is my pledge to America. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. And then my mission and prime directive is I want to create a legacy of people who chase their dreams, no matter what dream that is, that will be passed down from generation to generation.

So I want to teach my kids how I'm chasing my dreams. I want to teach them to chase their own dreams so they can go out and learn and grow. So it goes from the 40 year vision down to a five year vision.

The five year vision is what is the stepping stone between today and the 40 year vision of where we're going. So for us, it's digging out of debt. The last four years I've been an entrepreneur, I have focused on putting myself out there and building businesses and learning and growing.

And I have invested a whole lot into that. And it's created quite the backlog of debt that I have the blessing of digging out of, not everybody gets the opportunities that I've had and gets to learn the way I've learned. So that's why my five year vision is getting out of debt.

Let's get back to a baseline. I look at my entrepreneurial journey as education, college education and business ownership. So what does that mean? What does that mean for you? What does that mean for me? Right? So then again, we've got our eight core functions.

This is what's going to help us get here. So for spiritual, I want to learn to meditate. I do not idle well.

I want to buy a house for my family. I like to go on trips, do stuff, buy an airbnb, pay off all our credit card debt and leave money alone in our holding company marriage. Monthly weekends with no kids, overnight date nights, biannually weekend getaways and weekly date nights.

If you aren't dating your spouse, you're going to fall apart. Impact. The next five years I want to run for the Idaho House of Representatives and start making changes to our tax system that would benefit all of us.

Thinking trips. I want to go on volunteer missions, establish. I want to set my kids up with their own system.

Just like I'm building my system here. So then America's holding company ownership. I've got current financial outlook.

I use Mint.com to track a lot of this. And these are my real numbers.

I believe transparency, you should lead with transparency. So this is my real life. Net worth right now is probably negative $25,000.

Not great. But guess what? I still got a lot of time left. You can watch that number change when you like and subscribe to my content.

I'm going to take people behind the scenes on how I'm building my life for others. So then it works down to your annual goal. What are your annual goal? And this is where financials really start to play a part in it.

You need to know where money is coming from, how you're providing for your family and everything else that goes along with it. So that's why I've got financial goals. I'm not going to go over my financials in depth, but you can look through the numbers and see where we sit if you so desire.

So this year's, top priorities, I narrow it from five eight down to five because not everything is a top priority. So number one is impact. And so this is developing and implementing a long term strategy with Jerry for project tools.

And also I want to figure out how to sell America's Holding Company without discussing the ownership structure because that's been the hardest thing for people to wrap their mind around. Then family, self care, marriage and growth. So these are the categories that I'm focused on this year.

And then in quarter one. So then more financial personal metrics. The last column is quarterly quarter one.

So my first quarter commitment. This is strategic plan development and implementing accounting system. An accounting system.

Family is spring break trip. And you'll see in about two weeks we're going to Donnelly, which is just a little ways away from where we are now, and we're going to take three days to celebrate as a family. And what are we celebrating? Life happens and we get to live it.

So you might as well enjoy it. Self care. Work out one times a week.

Find weekly counseling. I'm doing good. I think I've found the counseling I've been going for a while now.

I am slacking on the selfcare. The workout one time a week. It's been hard for me to prioritize that.

Marriage. Weekend without kids. Marriage counseling, date night out, and then weekly financial updates and growth.

I want to attend one live event, read a book, hire a CPA mentor, and hire an accountability coach, personal manager. I actually would like to talk about the CPA mentor, if any CPAs or EA financial experts pay attention to my content. What I want to do is I want to do the bookkeeping live and live stream it for America's Holding Company.

I want to run it as a completely open source company where anyone can see what's going on behind the screen. So I'm looking for mentor, someone to come alongside me and do that, do the live accounting for America's Holding Company. So if you know anybody who's extroverted their whiz at accounting, whiz with bookkeeping and want to be a part of something and they're willing to grow with it, I'm looking for a partner.

And then the last thing we do is our celebrations. And it's important to remember you are celebrating being alive. That's it.

You don't need to accomplish something to celebrate. So our first quarter celebration is our spring break trip. And we're going to go have a lot of fun.

Second quarter, third quarter, fourth quarter. We haven't decided yet. Talked about going to Vegas for our anniversary, but that's not till December, so we don't have to worry about that.

So you can see this is my dashboard for how I live my life. It's one page. I don't look at it every day.

I update it quarterly. And I use my 40 year vision. I use this column right here to help me decide what decisions need made and how to make them.

I do that because at the end of the day, we only have time, and how you show up only matters to you. So if you want to build something successful, you need to have a plan and strategy for how you're going to invest your time into that something to make it successful. So this is my strategy.

This is my plan. You can actually download if you want this template. Go to justindcstephens.com

and go to the free tax strategy works. What was that? Free tax strategy course. So put in your name and email.

So once you log in, it's free. You can go to right here, membership and then life strategy template download. So you can download this entire template, customize it, make it your own.

Because at the end of the day, your time is yours. If you don't have a plan for how you're going to invest it, chances are you won't accomplish what you wanted to because you didn't know what you wanted to accomplish. So I'd encourage you to think about I make decisions for 75 year old Justin.

That's it. Who do I want to be in the future? And I make decisions based on that. I hope this is helpful for you guys.

And if you have any thoughts or questions, or if you want to dive into this heck, if you'd like to sit down and talk through my strategy and pick my brain, I'm open to everything. We're all in this together. So reach out, let us know.

Let me know, and let's go from there. If you've enjoyed this, don't forget to, like, subscribe comment. Follow along on this journey.

I do these daily journal entries, daily, at least that's the goal. And my goal is to take you behind the scenes. Like I mentioned, the next five years, I plan on running for that Idaho House of Representatives.

That's where tax laws are changed. If you want to see behind the scenes on someone getting started, transitioning into politics, getting elected and trying to change the tax code, could be entertaining, could be fun. So I would encourage you to join me.

And with that said, I hope you guys have a great March 7, and we'll talk to you all soon. Bye.