Gość: Kango
IP: 129.230.236.*
04.10.07, 22:51
Just for fun I recently asked Erin, “Now that the kids are in summer
school, don’t you think it’s about time you went out and got
yourself a job? I hate seeing you wallow in unemployment for so
long.”
She smiled and said, “Wow. I have been unemployed a really long
time. That’s weird… I like it!”
Neither of us have had jobs since the ’90s (my only job was in
1992), so we’ve been self-employed for quite a while. In our
household it’s a running joke for one of us to say to the
other, “Maybe you should get a job, derelict!”
It’s like the scene in The Three Stooges where Moe tells Curly to
get a job, and Curly backs away, saying, “No, please… not that!
Anything but that!”
It’s funny that when people reach a certain age, such as after
graduating college, they assume it’s time to go out and get a job.
But like many things the masses do, just because everyone does it
doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. In fact, if you’re reasonably
intelligent, getting a job is one of the worst things you can do to
support yourself. There are far better ways to make a living than
selling yourself into indentured servitude.
Here are some reasons you should do everything in your power to
avoid getting a job:
1. Income for dummies.
Getting a job and trading your time for money may seem like a good
idea. There’s only one problem with it. It’s stupid! It’s the
stupidest way you can possibly generate income! This is truly
income for dummies.
Why is getting a job so dumb? Because you only get paid when you’re
working. Don’t you see a problem with that, or have you been so
thoroughly brainwashed into thinking it’s reasonable and intelligent
to only earn income when you’re working? Have you never considered
that it might be better to be paid even when you’re not working?
Who taught you that you could only earn income while working? Some
other brainwashed employee perhaps?
Don’t you think your life would be much easier if you got paid while
you were eating, sleeping, and playing with the kids too? Why not
get paid 24/7? Get paid whether you work or not. Don’t your plants
grow even when you aren’t tending to them? Why not your bank
account?
Who cares how many hours you work? Only a handful of people on this
entire planet care how much time you spend at the office. Most of
us won’t even notice whether you work 6 hours a week or 60. But if
you have something of value to provide that matters to us, a number
of us will be happy to pull out our wallets and pay you for it. We
don’t care about your time — we only care enough to pay for the
value we receive. Do you really care how long it took me to write
this article? Would you pay me twice as much if it took me 6 hours
vs. only 3?
Non-dummies often start out on the traditional income for dummies
path. So don’t feel bad if you’re just now realizing you’ve been
suckered. Non-dummies eventually realize that trading time for
money is indeed extremely dumb and that there must be a better way.
And of course there is a better way. The key is to de-couple your
value from your time.
Smart people build systems that generate income 24/7, especially
passive income. This can include starting a business, building a
web site, becoming an investor, or generating royalty income from
creative work. The system delivers the ongoing value to people and
generates income from it, and once it’s in motion, it runs
continuously whether you tend to it or not. From that moment on,
the bulk of your time can be invested in increasing your income (by
refining your system or spawning new ones) instead of merely
maintaining your income.
This web site is an example of such a system. At the time of this
writing, it generates about $9000 a month in income for me (update:
$40,000 a month as of 10/31/06), and it isn’t my only income stream
either. I write each article just once (fixed time investment), and
people can extract value from them year after year. The web server
delivers the value, and other systems (most of which I didn’t even
build and don’t even understand) collect income and deposit it
automatically into my bank account. It’s not perfectly passive, but
I love writing and would do it for free anyway. But of course it
cost me a lot of money to launch this business, right? Um, yeah, $9
is an awful lot these days (to register the domain name).
Everything after that was profit.
Sure it takes some upfront time and effort to design and implement
your own income-generating systems. But you don’t have to reinvent
the wheel — feel free to use existing systems like ad networks and
affiliate programs. Once you get going, you won’t have to work so
many hours to support yourself. Wouldn’t it be nice to be out
having dinner with your spouse, knowing that while you’re eating,
you’re earning money? If you want to keep working long hours
because you enjoy it, go right ahead. If you want to sit around
doing nothing, feel free. As long as your system continues
delivering value to others, you’ll keep getting paid whether you’re
working or not.
Your local bookstore is filled with books containing workable
systems others have already designed, tested, and debugged. Nobody
is born knowing how to start a business or generate investment
income, but you can easily learn it. How long it takes you to
figure it out is irrelevant because the time is going to pass
anyway. You might as well emerge at some future point as the owner
of income-generating systems as opposed to a lifelong wage slave.
This isn’t all or nothing. If your system only generates a few
hundred dollars a month, that’s a significant step in the right
direction.
2. Limited experience.
You might think it’s important to get a job to gain experience. But
that’s like saying you should play golf to get experience playing
golf. You gain experience from living, regardless of whether you
have a job or not. A job only gives you experience at that job, but
you gain ”experience” doing just about anything, so that’s no real
benefit at all. Sit around doing nothing for a couple years, and
you can call yourself an experienced meditator, philosopher, or
politician.
The problem with getting experience from a job is that you usually
just repeat the same limited experience over and over. You learn a
lot in the beginning and then stagnate. This forces you to miss
other experiences that would be much more valuable. And if your
limited skill set ever becomes obsolete, then your experience won’t
be worth squat. In fact, ask yourself what the experience you’re
gaining right now will be worth in 20-30 years. Will your job even
exist then?
Consider this. Which experience would you rather gain? The
knowledge of how to do a specific job really well — one that you can
only monetize by trading your time for money – or the knowledge of
how to enjoy financial abundance for the rest of your life without
ever needing a job again? Now I don’t know about you, but I’d
rather have the latter experience. That seems a lot more useful in
the real world, wouldn’t you say?
3. Lifelong domestication.
Getting a job is like enrolling in a human domestication program.
You learn how to be a good pet.
Look around you. Really look. What do you see? Are these the
surroundings of a free human being? Or are you living in a cage for
unconscious animals? Have
