If I told you one question could change the rest of your summer, would you believe me?
Honestly, I’m not sure I would. But it’s August 1st as I’m writing this, and if you’re Canadian like me, you know we’ve basically got one month of summer left. Where I am, it has been raining nonstop. Other parts of the country are dealing with fires. Hopefully the weather is treating you better.
Either way, I’m trying to make the most of the month I have left. Because I’ll be honest with you: July was not my favorite. There were good things in it, but personally and professionally, I got hit with some stuff that was just kind of sucky.
And this past week I realized something. I don’t need to fix all of it overnight. I just want August to feel different (hint: there’s funmaxxing involved).
So I’ve been sitting with that, and I accidentally stumbled into one question that has completely changed my mood, my energy, and the way I’m thinking about this entire month.
Below, I’m sharing that question, plus the three things I’m doing in August that I think are going to make it one of my favorite months of the year.
Table of Contents
I have one question I’m running everything through this month, and it’s this:
What is the most fun version of this?
That’s it. That’s the whole framework. Every decision I make this month, in my business and outside of it, is getting filtered through that question first.
Here’s where it came from, and three specific ways I’m actually using it.
Where this came from
My friend Alane from Write Pretty for Me shared a YouTube video to her stories about the idea of “funmaxxing.” The basic premise is that the more fun you have, the richer and hotter you get. I loved it immediately.
It also reminded me of something I heard years ago. I was in a group coaching program, and Kelly Adams was the mindset coach in it. One of her affirmations was some version of the more fun I’m having, the more money I make.
She probably said that a year ago. It hit me like a ton of bricks and it has not left me since.
Because why not? Why can’t we believe that fun is productive?
The video makes a decent case that fun actually does correlate to things that look more like traditional success. But honestly, I don’t need it to. Whether it leads to more money or not, I’m having the most fun month of my life either way.
And because I do love a little woo sprinkled in, I’m absolutely going to believe that the more fun I have, the more money I make. I hope you adopt that belief right along with me. I hope we all have an insanely profitable and fun August.
1. Learn something new. Try something new.
I talked about this in my summer marketing episode: fewer people are paying attention in the summer. Which makes it a genuinely great time to try something new and put yourself out there in a new way.
Try a new marketing format. Test a thing you’ve been curious about. There are fewer eyes on you, and that takes an enormous amount of pressure off.
Because that’s usually what’s stopping us. A marketing idea comes up that would actually be fun to try, and we don’t do it, because we don’t want to be a beginner again.
So this is your nudge. Don’t get in your own way. Go be a beginner.
And it doesn’t have to be about business at all.
I’m a forever nerd, so I love the idea of a personal curriculum and picking one thing to go deep on. But I don’t think it needs to be that serious. I think 2026 is the year of hobbies. Everyone I know is talking about it.
Watercolor. Sourdough. Whatever. Just try something new and let yourself be bad at it in a very no pressure kind of way.
Also: put down the damn phone.
I don’t know if this is one specific YouTuber or just the twelve videos I’ve watched about it, but it really is your phone. The amount of time you’re spending on screens is the reason you’re so busy and never get to the things you say are important to you.
Second thing. Your phone hands you so much dopamine that regular life starts to feel underwhelming by comparison.
I’m noodling on that one. But in the interest of the most fun month ever, I’m going to keep it light. You and I can talk about our screen addictions another day.
2. Make everyday things more fun
This is basically the question of the episode, applied to the boring stuff.
I had to drive my kiddo an hour and a bit out to their grandparents this weekend. They took him for the whole day and a sleepover, which is amazing. But it also meant I was in the car for almost three hours, there and back.
Normally I’d feel like I had to do something with that time. Throw on a podcast. Start an audiobook. Find some way to make three hours of driving not be a waste.
Today I blasted Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, and Olivia Rodrigo instead. I’d been meaning to listen to Olivia’s new album and hadn’t gotten to it. So I put it on, sang at the top of my lungs, and enjoyed it.
On the way there, I stopped for a drive-thru coffee and got Benjamin a little lemonade. I passed it back to him and said, “Here Ben, I got you a lemonade.”
He said, “Why do these tiny lemonades just keep appearing out of nowhere? This is so crazy.”
I think that’s the third one in a couple of weeks. And I just thought, oh, to be four. Why am I sitting in this car and lemonades are simply being handed to me? What a magical experience.
Here’s the actual point:
I made the most of that car ride. But I made it the most fun, not the most productive.
Because half the time the productive version doesn’t even work. I’ll throw on an audiobook and tune it out completely. I’ll put on a podcast episode and be like, okay, whatever, next. We can try to squeeze productivity out of every second of the day, but it mostly just doesn’t take.
That car ride genuinely energized me. And then it kept going. I got home to an empty house, which basically never happens to me outside of work hours. I went on a little walk. I ordered myself sushi and spinach dip for dinner.
For context, when I’m home alone for dinner I eat peanut butter toast. Every time. It’s my go-to because it’s easy and I never want to cook for myself. But it was Saturday, it was a long weekend, and I decided I was having a fancy girl dinner.
As cheesy as it is, I really do think the singing in the car kicked off the rest of the day. So I’m going to be doing more of that.
3. Make an August vision board
Call it a mood board if vision board isn’t your thing. I love this one because it’s so visual.
I usually make a vision board at the start of the year. Most people do. Not unique to me. But this year I’ve been making one every single month.
And I have to tell you, by March I was not convinced. Every month I’d look back and think, well, my month didn’t really look like that. This isn’t working for me.
Now I’m eight months in and I’ve completely changed my mind. It reminds me how I want my life to look, every single month. It’s become one of my favorite things. It’s the first of the month, let me make my vision board.
I especially loved making the August one, because this time it’s all fun.
Here’s my process, in case it’s useful. When I stumble on a quote I love, I save it to a Pinterest folder, and then at the start of the next month I sift through whatever I collected. I build the board in Canva and set it as my desktop background so I’m actually looking at it.
Usually it’s a mix of business things and life things. Girl on a walking pad, drink your water, hit your numbers. Same handful of elements every month, gently nagging me.
My August board is all life things.
The only remotely business item on it is the quote the more fun I have, the more money I make. I had ChatGPT generate a woman on a beach with those words written in the sky.
Beyond that it is deeply unserious. Girl eating ice cream. Boy mom summer. Sharing a milkshake. Sunshine, the beach, vibes. It is all vibes.
We’re a busy family of three. We’re naturally the people who are always out doing something on the weekend, checking out what’s new, or more often running the same routines we love. So I don’t need a vision board to remind me to go to the lake. We were always going to the lake.
But making the board got me so excited about it. I know we’re going to the lake. I know it’s going to be fun. I know we’ll be playing in the sand together. I know ice cream is happening at some point this month.
That’s the whole benefit. It made me excited for my own life. That’s reason enough to make one.
Focus on Funmaxxing and The Business Stuff Will Follow
I want to be clear that I’m not saying business doesn’t matter. I’m saying two things.
One, trust that if you’re having fun and funmaxxing, the business stuff follows.
Two, when you can’t opt out of the work, squeeze the fun into it.
I was in my analytics earlier today, because I actually did have work to do. July did not go well for me. That’s part of the reason I lined up the babysitting in the first place, because I needed uninterrupted time to catch up on things I just could not get to.
But while I’m zoning out staring at numbers, I can still ask the question. Can I put music on? Can I be vibing? Can I make myself a fancy little mocktail?
Turns out yes. And it’s so nice.
I couldn’t control the fact that August 1st landed on a Saturday and I had to work. I could control whether it was a good day. It was a fantastic day.
You don’t need a whole new system. You need one question, asked before you make the decision instead of after.
What’s the most fun version of this?
Ask it about your marketing. Ask it about your Tuesday. Ask it about the three hour drive you didn’t want to make.
I’m keeping this going for all of August. Come do it with me.
New here? I’m Kara. The business is The Kara Report, and we specialize in content marketing, mostly blogging for SEO, Pinterest, and turning podcast episodes into blogs. If you’re thinking about outsourcing any of that, all the ways to work with me are linked below.
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