Home made root beer

Years ago friends of ours introduced us to home made root beer. It is a simple enough recipe, as long as you can find some dry ice, tastes amazing, and is a bit healthier (not healthy, but healthier) than most store bought root beers. We have recently revived the recipe and started to make it our own. We have made root beer more often than we probably should have. Church activity? Let's bring home made root beer. Having friends over, let's make home made root beer. We've gotten pretty adept at making root beer.

So now let me share our recipe with you. Get a 5 gallon igloo, fill it with 3 gallons of water. Add 4 lbs of sugar (an entire bag) and two little flasks of root beer extract. And the final step, get a big block of dry ice. The trick is to break the dry ice into chunks and put in about 1/3 of the dry ice in every 20 minutes. (Warning: make sure to use gloves to handle the dry ice). After an hour you have very taste (and bizarrely clear) root beer. 

We recently used a block of dry ice to keep some frozen treats cold at church activity. When we got home and started cleaning up, we realized that most of the dry ice block was still in tact. There was another carbonated drink I have been wanting to try, and now was the time to attempt it, a refreshing lemon-lime drink. I looked and we had 3 small lemons and 3 small limes. I followed the root beer recipe and replaced the root beer extract with the hand-squeezed (oi my hands are sore) lemons and limes. To my wife's surprise, it was delicious.

If I had tried this lemon-lime drink before perfecting root beer, it probably would not have gone quite as well. It was that I invested the time getting the root beer process down that allowed me to attempt another recipe successfully.

Whenever we start something new, we're not going to be good at it (that first batch of root beer, for instance). With continued practice and intentional focus on improvement, you can dramatically improve your results. 

Most people (definitely including myself in this) get started in something and get far enough along to be mediocre. Then they jump to the next exciting new start. I did this in so many areas (real estate investing, stock investing, various businesses). The two things that have been consistent for me, that I have taken the time to get good at, are coding and personal finances.

Once I had gotten good at my personal finance, I set on a journey to see if it could be reproduced. I started financial coaching and over a period of a few years, I determined that the process could be reproduced (of course there were several tweaks to the recipe over the years). I think I've got a pretty good process down for financial coaching. There is only one problem. I am very limited in how many people I can help coaching them one-on-one. 

That's where the course comes in. I am now looking to take my proverbial root beer recipe (financial coaching) and produce a similar result with a different flavor (financial course). There is a lot more to learn about the mechanics of doing a course, so I am under no illusion that I'll get it right the first time, but I plan on blending coaching with the course so I can tweak the course over the next few years until we can start reproducing results reliably through the course.

Do you tend to jump from one area to another, a jack of all trades? What are the areas that you are good at and can take those skills to the next level and then shift them from root beer to lemon-lime?