Breathe
By Sofía Macías
Do you have a dream, a project or a financial goal but you see them as unattainable or don't know how to start? I want to share with you that what helped me the most to encourage me to make the Little Capitalist Pig blog, which later became the gateway to make the book series that has reached more than 700 thousand people, was to have an example.
What do you mean, an example? I was doing a story for a magazine about blogging and how blogs catapulted some people's careers or businesses. It was literally called "My Blog is My Agent."
Suddenly, while interviewing Plaqueta, the very famous Tamara de Anda, -a hilarious blogger, chronicler and writer- , it occurred to me that if people my age were not reading traditional media such as the economic newspaper where I worked, or even changed the news when the finance section came out, maybe doing a personal finance blog could be an option so that people my age would not end up bankrupt, in debt with credit cards and, of course, without a penny for their investments, goals and retirement.
Plaqueta wrote about her anecdotes in high school and college, situations with her friends and even weird dreams she had, and the most interesting thing is that writing in a diary or almost became a place where she developed her voice.
I started doing posts with tips that didn't fit in the interview I wrote for the newspaper, "balconizing my friends", sharing experiments I did with my own money or initiatives such as a "time bank" to exchange help.
I listened to Plaqueta with the most important tip he gave me in the interview: that blogging - and I think any online media - was about generating community. Not about chattering and chattering, getting up on a lectern and having the floor all the time, but about sharing your ideas, listening to others', commenting, and having a conversation.
And what do you think? Many of the best tips, phrases, lessons learned, cases and themes of Small Capitalist Pig came from listening to readers.
Having examples - like in my case the Plaqueta blog - helps us to see what is possible, to have new ideas and even to generate shortcuts when we want to achieve something.
That's why I think they are so powerful and why we should actively seek them out, especially when we don't have much of an idea of what we want to do. But that's also why when we have a good story, a good project, a tactic or an achievement we have to share it so that it can be an example for what someone else can build!
In the Small Capitalist Pig courses we have "outstanding challengers" and every month we mention the achievements they share with us and what they did to achieve them: if someone managed to raise their first month's emergency fund, pay off a debt, open their first investment in cetes or in a stock ETF or buy a house. And as a cascade, the more they see them, the more students follow them because they have an example of what is possible.
Since the beginning of the Little Capitalist Pig blog, 15 years have passed (waltz music please) and what started as a hobby I did in my free time at work or weekends became first a Finance book, then an Investment book, agendas, adaptations for Spain and Italy, a community of 8 thousand students, an application (my PCC Goals), children's books, etc.
And all for an innocent example and for encouraging me to write my first blogger entry, with illustrations made in paint by my brother and a lot of fingers.
But no way! If you don't start with something even small and that when you look back you even feel a little embarrassed or laugh, you can't improve it.
Suddenly I came across another example: In 2018 we were thinking of making a "video" to celebrate the 10 years of the blog, I just saw the documentary of the entrepreneurship coach Dan Sullivan, I told my friend Edgardo about it and he said why don't you make a documentary?
Another example, guilty of a new adventure. And in this adventure I ended up joining Paula López Flores, who has run the Pequeño Cerdo Capitalista channel since its inception and we embarked on making a documentary that does talk about the details of this story - some that even I did not know - of the readers, but above all opens the conversation on the issues of money, which we need so much in this country where only 43.7% of the population saves, according to the National Survey of Financial Inclusion 2021 conducted by INEGI.
The documentary of the history of Pequeño Cerdo Capitalista and those of some of its readers will be released today, Wednesday, November 8, and my greatest ambition with it is to be an example for you: to encourage you to go for those projects that today seem very big, far away, impossible or that you don't even know how to start, and of course, to inspire you to learn about money so that it becomes a tool to get much further and much faster to where you want to go.
I'd love for you to be part of the digital premiere this November 8 at 6:30 pm. All you need to do is click on this link.
Remember that we should not limit our dreams to our possibilities, but the other way around.
AbrazOINK
Sofía Macías is a specialist in financial education and author of the Little Capitalist Pig saga (Personal Finance for Hippies, Yuppies and Bohemians; Investments and Agenda of Financial Challenges), published in Mexico, Spain and Italy.
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