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December 16 - December 22, 2022
Getting a job for a person who lost his job due to outsourcing a year back. We did the job search, did the cover letters, did the resume tuning, and got the client a job in 30 days.
Here are a few common time-consumers in small businesses with online presences. Submitting articles to drive traffic to site and build mailing lists Participating in or moderating discussion forums and message boards Managing affiliate programs Creating content for and publishing newsletters and blog postings Background research components of new marketing initiatives or analysis of current marketing results
What would you do if you didn’t have to think about money?
It’s time to find your muse.
Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time. That’s it.22 I
Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market—define your customers—then find or develop a product for them.
It is said that if everyone is your customer, then no one is your customer.
The goal is come up with well-formed product ideas and spend nothing; in Step 3, we will create advertising for them and test responses from real customers before investing in manufacturing. There are several criteria that ensure the end product will fit into an automated architecture.
First, “expert” in the context of selling product means that you know more about the topic than the purchaser.
It is not necessary to be the best—just better than a small target number of your prospective customers.
Fewer than 5% of the 195,000 books published each year sell more than 5,000 copies.
The more options you offer the customer, the more indecision you create and the fewer orders you receive—it is a disservice all around. Furthermore, the more options you offer the customer, the more manufacturing and customer service burden you create for yourself.
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. —ROBERT FROST, American poet and winner of four Pulitzer Prizes
The new mantra is this: Work wherever and whenever you want, but get your work done.
If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time. —CHINESE PROVERB
Just because you are embarrassed to admit that you’re still living the consequences of bad decisions made 5, 10, or 20 years ago shouldn’t stop you from making good decisions now. If you let pride stop you, you will hate life 5, 10, and 20 years from now for the same reasons.
“But, you don’t understand my situation. It’s complicated!” But is it really? Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple—many are just emotionally difficult to act upon. The problem and the solution are usually obvious and simple. It’s not that you don’t know what to do. Of course you do. You are just terrified that you might end up worse off than you are now.
If there is any question of why you took a break or left your previous job, there is one answer that cannot be countered: “I had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do [exotic and envy-producing experience] and couldn’t turn it down. I figured that, with [20–40] years of work to go, what’s the rush?”
The person who has more options has more power. Don’t wait until you need options to search for them. Take a sneak peek at the future now and it will make both action and being assertive easier.
The Birth of Mini-Retirements and the Death of Vacations
Those three months turned into 15, and I started to ask myself, “Why not take the usual 20–30-year retirement and redistribute it throughout life instead of saving it all for the end?”
The alternative to binge travel—the mini-retirement—entails relocating to one place for one to six months before going home or moving to another locale. It is the anti-vacation in the most positive sense. Though it can be relaxing, the mini-retirement is not an escape from your life but a reexamination of it—the creation of a blank slate. Following elimination and automation, what would you be escaping from? Rather than seeking to see the world through photo ops between foreign-but-familiar hotels, we aim to experience it at a speed that lets it change us.
True freedom is much more than having enough income and time to do what you want. It is quite possible—actually the rule rather than the exception—to have financial and time freedom but still be caught in the throes of the rat race. One cannot be free from the stresses of a speed- and size-obsessed culture until you are free from the materialistic addictions, time-famine mind-set, and comparative impulses that created it in the first place.
Learn to slow down. Get lost intentionally. Observe how you judge both yourself and those around you. Chances are that it’s been a while. Take at least two months to disincorporate old habits and rediscover yourself without the reminder of a looming return flight.
The likelihood of problems is decreased further when travel is less airport and hotel-hopping among strangers and more relocation to a second home: a mini-retirement.
Robin is convinced, as are other NR parents, that people use children as an excuse to stay in their comfort zones. It’s an easy excuse not to do something adventurous. How to overcome the fear? Robin recommends two things:
Several families interviewed for this book recommended the oldest persuasive tool known to man: bribery. Each child is given some amount of virtual cash, 25–50 cents, for each hour of good behavior. The same amount is subtracted from their accounts for breaking the rules. All purchases for fun—whether souvenirs, ice cream, or otherwise—come out of their own individual accounts. No balance, no goodies. This often requires more self-control on the part of the parents than the children.
The overpacking impulse is hard to resist. The solution is to set what I call a “settling fund.” Rather than pack for all contingencies, I bring the absolute minimum and allocate $100–300 for purchasing things after I arrive and as I travel. I no longer take toiletries or more than a week’s worth of clothing. It’s a blast. Finding shaving cream or a dress shirt overseas can produce an adventure in and of itself.
have all mail forwarded to a friend, family member, or personal assistant,78 who will be paid $100–200 per month to e-mail you brief descriptions of all nonjunk mail each Monday.
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass. —ANNE LAMOTT, Bird by Bird
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another. —ANATOLE FRANCE, author of The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
Too much free time is no more than fertilizer for self-doubt and assorted mental tail-chasing. Subtracting the bad does not create the good. It leaves a vacuum. Decreasing income-driven work isn’t the end goal. Living more—and becoming more—is.
The smarter and more goal-oriented you are, the tougher these growing pains will be. Learning to replace the perception of time famine with appreciation of time abundance is like going from triple espressos to decaf.
People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, The Power of Myth
Before spending time on a stress-inducing question, big or otherwise, ensure that the answer is “yes” to the following two questions: 1. Have I decided on a single meaning for each term in this question? 2. Can an answer to this question be acted upon to improve things? “What is the meaning of life?” fails the first and thus the second. Questions about things beyond your sphere of influence like “What if the train is late tomorrow?” fail the second and should thus be ignored. These are not worthwhile questions. If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it. If you take just this point from
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To live is to learn. I see no other option. This is why I’ve felt compelled to quit or be fired from jobs within the first six months or so. The learning curve flattens out and I get bored.
Quite aside from the fact that it is impossible to understand a culture without understanding its language, acquiring a new language makes you aware of your own language: your own thoughts.
Gain a language and you gain a second lens through which to question and understand the world. Cursing at people when you go home is fun, too.
Answering e-mail that will not result in a sale or that can be answered by a FAQ or auto-responder For a good example of an auto-responder that directs people to the appropriate information and outsourcers, e-mail info@fourhourworkweek.com
Working where you live, sleep, or should relax Separate your environments—designate a single space for work and solely work—or you will never be able to escape it.
How many times do I have to say it? Focus on life outside of your bank accounts, as scary as that void can be in the initial stages. If you cannot find meaning in your life, it is your responsibility as a human being to create it, whether that is fulfilling dreams or finding work that gives you purpose and self-worth—ideally a combination of both.
Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time.
You don’t have to make money back the same way you lose it. If you lose $1,000 at the blackjack table, should you try and recoup it there? Of course not. I don’t want to deal with renters, even with a property management company. The solution: Leave the house alone, use it on occasion, and just create incoming revenue elsewhere that would cover the cost of the mortgage through consulting, publishing, etc.