The very worst thing you can do is trade time for money. And yet the vast majority of people do exactly that: in other words, they work jobs where they are paid by the hour.
What this means—in general—is that if they don’t work they don’t get paid.
OK, there is some flexibility here, particularly in a country like the UK where we still have pretty robust employment laws. Workers here – on a full-time contract – are meant to get sick pay when they are unable to work due to illness, and they can take several weeks’ paid holiday each year.
But fundamentally, even with these benefits, they are being paid for their time.
What’s so wrong with that? Simply that time is finite and money isn’t.
Put it this way. While your average corporate worker can take days off here and there, if he says to his employer ‘Hey, I’d love to go to Paris for three months to work on this idea for a novel I have’, then they will be given short shrift.
(‘Short shrift’ is a polite British euphemism for ‘being told to to f*ck off’!)
This means that your personal freedom is severely limited. Yes, you may receive a good salary, and you may be able to take vacations as and when your employer allows it, but you are not truly free.
You traded that freedom for your time, remember.
That said, there’s nothing wrong with getting a job when you start your career. We all need money, and we all need experience. And I myself have learned an incredible amount from working for corporate companies for over fifteen years.
But I also know that I was unhappy for much of that time. And at least a part of that happiness was due to my awareness that if I got fired tomorrow (which was always a possibility in the cutthroat world of business) then I would have nothing to show for all the hard work I’d put in over those years.
That’s why for me – as someone who values personal freedom above all else- it was essential that I found a way to work for myself where I spent my time building assets rather than pushing paper for someone else.
Today, now I earn a living through the personal brand that I am building online, nearly everything I do is in service of building up assets that will profit me not just today, but for years to come.
For example, every time I write an article for my website it helps to build up my brand—it’s simply another chance for new readers to find me. I don’t usually take down old articles, and even ones from years ago still get traffic to this day.
And given that most of my articles contain links to Amazon where people can go to buy my books if they wish, an article can continue to pay out for a very long time indeed.
It’s similar with my books. Every time I release a new book and it goes live on Amazon, that book can continue to earn me money for many years to come. For example, my first book, The 7 Laws of Seduction, continues to sell nearly five years after it was released.
Of course, what this means is that I’ve begun to build up a ‘passive’ income where my back catalogue of books sells and makes me money without me having to ‘re-do’ the original work I put in. And everything else I do online, like Tweeting or writing these emails, serves as ‘content marketing’.
This in turn frees up my time and allows me to travel. After all, once a book is written an it’s out then my work is done. The money comes in every month and I can concentrate on other things.
This is not to suggest that I enjoy a ‘four hour workweek’ where I’m sitting on the beach knocking back cold drinks and sleeping all day. On the contrary, I work very hard (every day). But that’s because I am still very much in the ‘building’ phase of my business. Also I enjoy it, and everything that I do feeds into the virtuous profit cycle I’ve described.
How much better such an arrangement is compared with my previous one, where the work I was putting in for my employer did not culminate in anything – rather, I would be paid for every hour I put in (plus a bonus sometimes). But as soon as stopped working for them none of the profits accruing from my actions would flow back to me.
The good news is that you can do exactly the same thing, too. But I hope my story has illustrated how trading your time for money is a bad idea . . . and how you can achieve more and have a better life when you put your time into building your own assets instead.
By the way, if you haven’t already then do sign up for my DAILY email here.
