profile

Hi! I'm Sam Matla

I share strategic and tactical insights to help you increase your work output, make better decisions, and get more done in less time.

Featured Post

The Purpose Fallacy, Cultivating Vitality & Energy, and more

Welcome back to the newsletter. In today’s issue: The Purpose Fallacy: Why thinking about your purpose doesn’t work Productivity is downstream of vitality and energy Ideas & content from others This issue is brought to you by The Digital Business Tactics Library and Sales Page Conversion Checklist. If you run an online creator/course/digital product business, check them out. Made by yours truly. Free resource: My Ultimate List of Books & Articles I put together a free Notion database of my...

Experimenting with a different format today. Let me know if you like it. Ideas I'm Thinking About Ways to increase luck surface area What is your potential for serendipity? What things can you do to make yourself luckier? You can move to a big city. Travel. Work out of a coworking space. Get to know your barista. Join a high-end gym, even if the price hurts a bit. Meet your neighbours. Go to conferences and events. You can send emails and DMs to people you want to meet. Most people psyche...

Happy Monday! Impostor syndrome is far more common than you think. As Mike Cannon-Brookes, billionaire CEO of Atlassian said… “Imposter syndrome doesn’t go away with any form of success.” We think that once we reach a certain level of success—whether it’s building a profitable business, becoming a millionaire, or getting promoted—impostor feelings will vanish. But instead we enter a new level of play, feeling ill-equipped. You are ill-equipped, but so is everyone else. And that’s unavoidable....

It’s been a crazy start to the year as I'm sure you've noticed. AI development. Bank failures. Geopolitical tensions. History is speeding up. Sharing some lessons from my personal quarterly review seems insignificant in light of this, but I hope they’ll be helpful to some of you. If you haven’t done a quarterly review yourself, check out this video on how I do mine. I also made a free Notion and Google Docs template you can use. My Q1 It was a great start to the year. I stepped back from my...

Back in the late 1720s, a young man by the name of Benjamin Franklin wrote out a plan. A plan that he called a “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.” He listed 13 virtues that he wanted to develop. His plan was to spend one week on each virtue so that he could master it, and then move on to the next one. Cycling through the entire list 4x per year. Today, we rarely discuss the importance of developing virtue. The focus is on hacks. Methodologies. Frameworks. Tricks....

Hey, Welcome to this week's newsletter. Quick heads-up that WorkSprint enrollment closes at the end of this month. You can enroll here. I'm capping it at 50 spots only, so it will be a tight-knit group. Early bird pricing at $99 until we hit 35 sign-ups (currently at 7 after just opening enrollment the other day). With that, let's dive in. Should you work on multiple projects simultaneously? Or tackle them one at a time? The temptation of the modern knowledge worker is to do the former—take...