Time is a non-renewable and finite resource for everyone. No one knows how much of if you have but as of now, it is capped at 78.7 years on average. Yet we readily trade this very personal and very valuable resource for money. We must in order to pay our bills.
When you look at how much life you must trade for a certain big ticket item, things gets interesting. What? That new and very large LCD TV will take 40 hours of my life to buy? You pause a bit but might just go ahead with it anyway.
The trick is to look at it even further away. How much LIFE is it going to take. The hours spent at work is not just 40 hours a week at face value. You must add commute time, time it took to eat during those days and time it takes to recuperate because you cannot really enjoy anything else you do on a weekday work night.
So you trade a portion of your life for some money. Some argue that you can always get more money but you cannot get more life. It's true but your ability to get more money depends largely on your entrepreneurship skills. So you cannot just ditch your job and just run off playing.
If you stop work today, will you be able to support yourself? If not then we better work on that as I am now. You see, when you trade Value for money you can potentially get a return that will greatly exceed $1000/hour for the time you spend created that value. I personally got paid roughly that much for 3 hours of my time making a successful online video.
Of course, creating something of value does not automatically land you in the presidential suite. You need to sell it. You need to use a platform that will allow it to scale. SCALING to me is one of those magic terms. Scale meant to multiply and so you create something that is can multiply in profit.
Perhaps you want to bake cookies but that is a profit on a per unit basis. You have to make each one which limits your ability to sell a million of them. Rather, building the machine that bakes the cookies non-stop really is like building a money printing press. That or hiring people to do that work.
So when you look at various jobs that trades your TIME for MONEY, stay away from it. You will get paid yes, but it will not scale. This leave you to work the rest of your life. Uber for example is a trade time for money endeavor. You HAVE to drive in order to receive fares. If you stop driving, you will not earn any fares. If you take a vacation, you will not earn fares. If you retire, you will not earn any fares. If you SLEEP, you will not earn any fares.
The main point I want to get across in this post is to avoid the trade your TIME for MONEY traps. Resale businesses also earns a pretty good amount but it also is a trade time for money endeavor. You must spend time making the sale as well as spending time shipping it if it is an online thing.
For those that totally understand what I am talking about, you'll recognize that if you just simply avoid the time for money traps, you can concentrate on efforts that scales. This will save you years if not 10+ years of chasing after wealth in endeavors that have a cap on your per hour wages.
So what could these value creation endeavors be? On an abstract level, it's creating something of value to others. When you make something useful and something someone needs, they will pay a good amount for it. If it is easily replica-able like a digital product be it Written, Audio, Video, then it can be scaled very easily.
So just remember, strive to get paid for value and not on a salary or a per hour basis. With that, you may start out earning pennies but a scale-able profit can earn millions.
No comments:
Post a Comment