Throughout the world, the majority of people simply trade their time for money in a linear and transactional way; just with different dollar amounts attributed to each hour.
This does, however, mean their income is restricted to the amount of hours they work, and a further limiting factor is that there’s a ceiling to how much a person can charge for a unit of their time. Plus, there’s the consideration of having enough time to enjoy life rather than spend all of it working.
This article encourages you to think a little differently about earning money, and suggests a smarter way.
If we look at the career of a programmer, for example, typically, they can earn quite a lot of money each hour, yet they invest a large amount of time developing an app using a variety of CI/CD tools, meaning they come out with a decent compensation for their time at the end of a project, but, and it’s a big but… there’s no future return on all that effort and time they invested into the app or software.
They have limited themselves, in financial terms, as a result of swapping their time for a fixed amount of money.
Think of it this way, would you prefer to be paid $1,000 an hour for 100 hours work ($100,000) or would you prefer to work yourself silly and be paid zero for double the amount of work… but then share 50% of the profits of an app that uses a subscription model such as Spotify or Netflix to generate revenue long after you’ve finished working on the app?
There is of course the risk, of it not working, which is why most people would prefer to play it safe and continue trading units of time for units of money, but let’s say the app has a user base of just 10,000 people, who are all paying $10 per month – that’s $100,000 per month!
Furthermore, due to the scalable nature of apps, this 10,000 user base could quickly become 100,000 regular subscribers – meaning you would be making half of $1,000,000 per month!
This is the power of financial leverage, which is what happens when we stop trading our time for money and start leveraging systems and processes to generate money in an automated way.
Admittedly, it takes some effort, but just like building a house or writing a book, once it’s build or written you have an asset for life.
The “average person” has never been in a better position to become a millionaire – indeed, you could be a fifteen year old sat in your bedroom and come up with an app, or a new magazine that goes on to be successful and make you a heap of income in just a few years.
Essentially, the only way to make a serious amount of money is to break free from the paradigm of swapping an hour of time for an amount of money, as time is your most precious and depleting resource. After all, your time is probably worth a lot more than you are selling it for!
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