#45 Tax Season Tips 💰️ Tactics for Meaningful Talks 🧠 Taking FREE AI Courses 🤖

Good morning and welcome back!

The OTF Board recently decided, in a move inspired by OpenAI that wasn’t hasty or ill-conceived at all, that our newsletter is going in a totally different direction.

From now on, we will focus exclusively on baseball and will forever be known henceforth as “On The Fly Ball.”

**investors hate this decision**

Hmm, was this a bad idea?

**subscribers hate this decision**

Should we have gotten more feedback before going this route?

**employees sign petition, formalizing their hatred of this decision**

Can we just fire them all?

…

Great news, everyone!

We’ve decided to reverse course and apologize for the mistake.

Now back to our regularly-scheduled programming…

If you were too busy prepping for Turkey Day and missed the Sam Altman / OpenAI drama alluded to above, you can find that - as well as a bounty of productive gems - in last week’s edition found here. (The Open AI drama is located in the Major Moves section).

Remember: whether you’re new and want to catch up, or you simply want to revisit something from a past post, you can find all of our previous editions on our website.

The Leftovers Highlights this Week:

❌ 3 Tax Mistakes You Must Avoid

💡 8 Communication Mistakes Emotionally-Intelligent People Never Make

🎓 HS Diplomas For Sale in Louisiana?

➕ Much. More.

Experts’ Advice 🤝 

Who is Mark Manson?

• He has sold more than 20 million books across 75 languages. He is a world-renowned author most recognized for his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (over 16 million copies sold).

• He also writes The Breakthrough, which is a 5-minute read designed to help you achieve, you guessed it, breakthroughs. Over 1 million subscribers - including the OTF crew - read his newsletter.  

Who is Michael Girdley? 

• We see him as the CEO of a $100M/yr holding company that employs ~600 folks across 12 different businesses, but if you ask him, he’s simply “your internet uncle.” 😆

• He shares 30 years of lessons from building the $100M+ annual revenue company with surprising tactics, psychology, and plenty of dad jokes via his newsletter that you can find here.

Hustle Hub 📈 

• THEIR SUCCESS: Learn about the journeys of Elon Musk and Sam Altman as they shape the world of AI.

• YOUR SUCCESS: Watch this 11-minute video from MyOutDesk Founder and CEO Daniel Ramsey, who shares what books helped him to a $100M+ business empire.
  

• THEIR SUCCESS: Panera founder Ron Shaich shares his views on what makes a good entrepreneur here.

• YOUR SUCCESS: Amazon is offering FREE courses on generative AI. With where the world is headed, every entrepreneur and side-hustler (and pretty much everyone else) should take advantage.

Making Cents 💰️ 

What the heck are 3 tax mistakes not to make by the end of the year?

Short and Sweet:  

• Not contributing to a retirement plan

• Forgetting about 1099 income

• Reporting inaccurate charitable donations

Why It Matters: Because by January, tax season gets under way. And while we don’t want to worry about this stuff over the holidays, being prepared when the calendar turns is a great way to kick off the new year.

(If “tax season” immediately stressed you out, don’t worry - OTF will continue to do everything we can to help you make cents of it all.)

💡 Don’t Make These 3 Mistakes!

1. Not Contributing to a Retirement Plan: Did you know that if you do not contribute to an employer-sponsored retirement plan, contributions to a traditional IRA may be tax deductible?

2. Don’t Forget About 1099 Income: Reporting all sources of income can be hard sometimes. For example, you may have received a 10990NEC for freelance work you performed and simply forgot about it. So do your due diligence, because if you fail to report all your income, you will get a notice from the IRS with a balance due.

3. Reporting an Inaccurate Amount of Charitable Donations: When donating items to a charity, you typically can claim a deduction for the item’s value. Don’t exaggerate or misreport. And do your best to get a donation receipt, that way there’s evidence to back up your claim. Remember, overestimating your deduction could cause the IRS to disallow part of it. 

(The 🐐 of GOT - IYKYK…)

The Search Bar 📊 

*As of 10:30 AM on Monday 11/27

• MOST-SEARCHED BRAND(past 24 hrs): SKIMS - Kim Kardashian’s fashion brand released “the ultimate nipple bra,” and apparently it’s pretty popular: 3rd-most-popular Google search in the US at the time of this writing.

• MOST-DOWNLOADED PRODUCTIVITY APP (past week): CHATGPT - Not all that shocking, since it’s been at the top for a while now. What is shocking is what we recently learned about potential reasons for OpenAI’s (attempted) firing of Sam Altman.
  

• MOST RANDOM TRENDING SEARCHES (past 24 hrs): The ocean is pretty popular right now:

  • A massive secret ocean was found 400 miles below the Earth’s crust. #5 on Google Trends.

  • Witch bottles - meant to trap evil spirits - are washing up on Texas beaches. #11 on Google Trends.

Cool Communicator 💪 

🧠 Using Emotional Intelligence to Improve Communication:

CNBC recently shared an article discussing communication mistakes that emotionally-intelligent people never make when talking to others.

The full article is here. The TL;DR is below:

Emotionally intelligent people never…

1. …Focus Just on Themselves - instead of getting lost in what you have to say, make sure you acknowledge your listener(s).
   

2. …Force Their Opinions Onto Others - when in a debate situation, “allow the other person to feel in control” while you listen.
   

3. …Say “It’s not my responsibility” - never refuse to help with something just because it isn’t part of your job description.
   

4. …Waste Much Time on Negative People - focus your energies on positive people who celebrate and support one another instead.
   

5. …Succumb to Distractions When Others Are Speaking - by maintaining eye contact and attentive body language, you make the speaker feel important.
   

6. …Forget the Details - you can’t remember everything, but make sure you store a few for future use: names of spouses/children/pets, hobbies, favorite vacation spots, etc.
   

7. …Make Offensive Jokes - if there’s even the slightest chance someone might be offended, maybe don’t say it.
   

8. …Talk Too Much - in lieu of dominating the conversation, ask questions that get your counterpart going; this opens the door for “more meaningful conversation and resolution.”

Major Moves 🗞️ 

 🔥 NVIDIA:

Business is BOOMING!

It’s a great time to be involved in AI, chips, GPUs…basically anything the average human doesn’t understand. “Nvidia reported record revenue (we’re talking billions) for its third fiscal quarter…up 206% year-over-year and 34% sequentially.”

Is it too late to learn about how to make this stuff? Asking for a friend…

 👀 mozaic:

Payment splitting solutions are on the way…

For content creators specifically (though we see applications beyond this niche), splitting payments with different collaborators is an annoying process. Mozaic aims to change that “through its range of solutions including APIs and Chrome extensions.”

They just raised $20 million in a recent Series A round of funding.

 🏫 LOUISIANA:

Yes, we’re talking about the state…

This isn’t about a company, but it is about business. The question is whether or not it’s only about business. “Nearly 9,000 private schools in Louisiana don’t need state approval to grant degrees…students can get a high school diploma for $465.”

The article goes on to say that there’s no way to tell what students at these “schools” are learning, if they’re learning anything at all.

OTF Takeaway: We believe in the importance of education of any kind, so if kids are coming out of HS with requisite skills and knowledge, great; however, the article seems to imply that’s not happening. In that case, this isn’t a major move — it’s a major fail.

🤔 pebble mobility:

This sounds AMAZING.

In the past, we’ve featured a startup named Pebble, but that was a wanna-be Twitter competitor that seems to have gone belly-up. THIS Pebble - full name: Pebble Mobility - seems poised to do anything but, with the invention of a “self-propelled, self-powered, remote-controlled trailer” to bring camping into the 21st century.

The self-propelled version starts at $125,000, which seems like a lot if you view it as a vehicle. But if viewed as a vacation home, it’s a steal!

Food For Thought 💭 

You are now On The Fly and In The Know.