The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-to-5

by Taylor Pearson

The famous dictum, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 59 minutes asking the right questions,” recognizes that defining the system and its limit often makes the solution obvious:

n

“Give me a lever long enough…and I shall move the world.” Addressing the limit is like having a longer lever. Instead of just pushing harder, we’re figuring out where to push to create the greatest impact.

How to Make Decisions like a Billionaire

“A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind loving diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.” Charles T. Munger Frequently overshadowed by Warren Buffett, his partner in the $300 billion Berkshire Hathaway holding company, Charlie Munger is a quiet, reclusive figure. Rarely making public appearances, the unostentatious billionaire spends most of his time as Buffett does: reading, thinking, and managing Berkshire Hathaway from his home in Southern California. Buffett and Munger have, over the course of their careers, amassed a multi-billion dollar empire with a brilliant-in-its-simplicity investment strategy: value investing.

In Buffett’s words: “Diversification is protection against ignorance.

stoics

metaphorically

loss aversion: when directly compared to each other, losses loom larger than gains.

sashes

We make a lot of our life decisions under the belief that we are living in Mediocristan. But we are not. Many people have doubled (or lost all of) their net worth in a single moment: a company goes public or announces bankruptcy. A stock quintuples or crashes.

As technology and globalization continue to advance, the Middle Class is dying.

trough.

Now you can source on Alibaba, a Chinese site where factories list all the products they manufacture. They have their own websites, so you can choose from thousands of options and find the one or two factories that have a track record doing projects similar to what you’re looking for.

Ten years ago, companies that sold products in the U.S. would never announce who their suppliers were overseas for fear that competitors would use them. That’s starting to break down. Most suppliers are listed on the internet on sites like Alibaba.com and are easy to find.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

nuanced.

But as entrepreneurship becomes more popular, there are more examples and scripts to follow. Two have emerged as the most prominent:

Stair Step

Long Tail

The first step in the Stair Step Method, as Rob explains it, is launching a product that sells for a one-time fee and has a single marketing channel:

SEO (search engine optimization),

Step two is launching enough of those one-time products that you’re able to buy your time back.

Now you’re at step three. Instead of working nights and weekends like you had been, you’ve got 40–60 hours a week to put in on your business, giving you a platform to launch bigger products, and projects from. That could be a SaaS business, bigger eCommerce business, or a membership site. Rob got started as an entrepreneur

parlayed

democratization

<SPECIAL USAGE> make (something) accessible to everyone: mass production has not democratized fashion.

Now you can dip your toes in the water and gradually wade into entrepreneurship.

stalled

The most important takeaways, however, are the principles of the method. Start with a relatively ambitious but discrete opportunity, and use that to build out your skillset and relationships for the next project.

you find someone that is doing what you would like to be doing in five to ten years and cut them a deal: “I’ll come work for you for relatively cheap and I’ll create results

in exchange I get to train at altitude.

get to see the inside of how your business works: how you launch products, what the industry looks like, and who I need to know.” Instead of playing with your own money (like what you would need from con...

One common mistake early entrepreneurs make is that they think they need a business idea. That’s rarely the case: you don’t need a business idea—you need relationships. As

Usury—money

The extra fish, the profit, gives you the option to do something else.

Jobs not only limit the upside of intrinsic value by tying money to time—they also give up control. We have no leverage beyond trading more time, which is our most valuable and only truly limited asset. We lose control to react to market forces outside the scope of the job.

Most self-funded startups, entrepreneurs, and businesses I work with and talk with are disappointed by 20% annual growth in the business, while most people with jobs I know are grateful to get their 3% annual cost of

The

point is that it’s possible to grow at these rates. In a job, it’s not.

Check out this quote.

The worst case scenario is you’ve acquired a valuable new skillset to put on your resume.

“There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.”

Instead of choosing from a set of available options, we can create our own. It’s the triumph of design over choice. Instead of ordering from the menu, we are more empowered than any prior generation to become the cooks.

The biggest problem we’re dealing with today is the underutilization of individuals. The most talented and ambitious young people, when they feel under-utilized in the jobs, shrink to fit their position.

Finding meaning in your work isn’t just fulfilling. It’s a profitable business strategy.

If you look at someone five years ahead of you professionally, like looking down the hallway at an office, is that someone whose life you want? When you perform the look-down-the-hallway test to see what the people in their company five years ahead of you are doing, are you excited about that future?

We are optimistic, but unwilling to

define for ourselves what that optimism looks like.

But what if, instead of answering the email or reading those articles, you spent an hour every day working on that project you’ve been thinking about? Writing a book; launching a product on the side to begin stair stepping;

more control over your reality, more freedom, more money, and more meaning that anyone alive a century ago could have imagined. The blank screen, the blinking cursor. Write, young man, write.

The second rule of career planning: Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities.

which direction you want to move,