Your economic security does not lie in your job; it lies in your own power to produce—to think, to learn, to create, to adapt – Stephen Covey
Money is a virtual fuel that the modern world uses to facilitate most processes in The Game of Life. It’s supported by nothing other than our mutual agreement and trust that it holds value.
If we learn to understand and care for each other and prevent scarcity among the less privileged, we’ll be happy with or without money. But you should definitely understand money. Money is simply a tool and it’s most effective when used rationally rather than emotionally.
Money can’t buy happiness, love, or any really important thing in life. However, money and freedom are connected. Freedom is what gives space for everything beautiful in life to exist. As we mentioned before, if you are a car, money is the car service. You could not use it but it would limit many of your options.
Not having money for essentials, is a constant stress that no human should have to go through. Universal Basic Income is the buzzword but we have to admit: Greed is not good!
- Big corporations should stop receiving subsidies and tax breaks
- The financial industry creates mostly nothing and it should be taxed and reduced in size
- Something should be done about tax havens
Money is a trap word. It is a concept of quantity and our brains can’t really deal with this intuitively. Humans don’t have great intuition about time either. So the feel of how money accumulates over time is absent.
Mathematics is here to help and we have to find a way to bridge it back to the intuitive level. We need to understand the exponential function intuitively. You can watch the most important video you’ve ever seen for simple explanation and examples.
Maths and Game of Life knowledge alone won’t do it. You need to know what’s possible in your relationship with money and understand your Game of Self barriers.
Where does money come from?
The economy has two main things going on:
- Humans and systems create value
- Value may be converted into other value, converted into money or just lost.
The golden question is: Do you want to be structurally dependent (for your own security) or choose your own way (having freedom)?
The rest of the post we’ll talk about earning money by working. You need Freedom in order to maximize your chances for Money.
If everyone prioritizes money, will enough people want to be doctors, teachers or caretakers? Some will do it for the love of others. Both in terms of supplying enough doctors, teachers, caretakers and in an attempt to bring some much needed financial fairness to these largely underpaid jobs, we have the moral incentive to increase social mobility and the freedom of each person to have access to well paid work.
Be totally dependent and have a day job
The day job is structured like a dictatorship. You can’t vote the boss out or even debate on even grounds. Your only real freedom is to leave the job. It’s stable (you get a salary). Changes are incremental. Often the only way for career advancement is to become friends with the dictator (corporate politics). Sooner or later you get what you can from the dictator (job) and a new day job means a new country with another dictator.
Choose your level of dependency and work for yourself
This choice has many structural similarities to… living in a democracy. Everything is a mess. You have freedom to try a lot of things. Sometimes you make good choices (elect good leaders) and sometimes – not. You don’t know what the future will be like. If you can’t handle it, you go back to dictatorship. If you don’t long for the comfort zone of authoritarianism (living the simple life of being told what to do), democracy can work.
You get to learn and improve. Your choices (the democratically elected leaders) have ups and downs but are better over time. Because progress comes with change, not stability. It needs a mess. It needs freedom.
Not all dictatorships are all-bad and not all democracies are good. On a big time scale, dictatorships get worse in the end times of the dictator and democracies seem to slowly get better overall. This shows the advantage of messy concepts like Separation of powers.
And while today may be better with the stability of the salary than the mess of entrepreneurship, think about the diverse experience you need. Where are the freedom, the creativity and the hunter moves?
I run a company myself, where we try to give people as much freedom as possible (the legend Ricardo Semler goes far beyond). In general no support structure can teach you what the mess of real life can be. No job could have given me the same diverse experience at the same time.
Everywhere, but at the crappy job (dramatic take), experience is very important. However it’s wrong to measure experience in years. I would like to know how many different things you have experienced.
This is where task diversity comes in. In a typical workplace you do a few things but as your own boss you have to do all of it well.
Despite all this sound logic, most people who work at crappy or middle quality day jobs consistently refuse to make leaps to better jobs or leave the labor market altogether so they can have the freedom of working for themselves and invest in experience gathering. Why?
Here we’re entering straight into Game of Self territory:
- People are held back by inertia
- People specifically resist change from something known to something unknown
- People resist culturally unpopular changes
- People underestimate themselves and overestimate potential trouble
And all of this is fantastic… for you
There are billions of completely economically sound business ideas (ones that have more demand than supply) for new products and services.
Choosing an idea seems hard but think about it as testing with minimal resources while getting experience as added value, learning by doing.
You don’t even have to create! Value can be extracted from the inefficiencies of the system. The most common form is reselling (trade).
And if you just once have success, you’ve seen it happen, and now you believe it’s possible and have the skills and confidence needed to find another winning configuration.
You can always trust demand and supply because the demand for the economic results of risky/hunter moves is high and so the supply is low. This is where not only the experience is but also, literally, the money.
Many Game of Life problems look like this: X looks easy, let’s do it… oops no it’s not and I just learned how bad my understanding is. Hit a wall but got valuable experience.
Many Game of Self problems look like this: X is objectively easy but it doesn’t feel this way, it feels hard. I see a wall and I don’t try X …
So when wondering whether to try X, if you do and it doesn’t work, you still get the experience.
The whole “making money is hard” bullshit is a powerful cultural theme. It was very true for our grandparents, mostly true for our parents and is very much integrated into our education system. People are stuck in sheep mode.
I vividly remember how 14 years ago I found an obvious free lunch in my industry and how my life changed. An entirely Game of Self leap. I had undeniable proof that the rest of the world did not find all the free lunches. I refocused my work to search for free lunches. Once you believe that anything is possible, things get easier.
I regard all goals, related to money (and most goals in general) as a stupid unnatural concept. We didn’t evolve for specific goals.
Goals are a luxury of the modern world and detach us from our natural tenaciousness for more, the beauty of the unexpected, the power of flow, and the fact that potential is almost limitless.
It’s ok to want just one universal thing – progress. No details, no pressure, no success, no failure. Just a life of growing younger.
Every time you have a strong emotion, consider using it to start the process you want to start anyway. Emotions are your chance for an instant win in The Game of Self.
The hardest part is the start of the change. Then it will continue by itself…
What to do once you have complete freedom and have to create value and turn it into money?
- Earn as many big chunks of easy/fun money as possible
- Aim to have enough money so you don’t have to care about expenses like rent and food
- Invest in yourself and your life/work
You want something profitable and fun. You don’t care if it’s easy or hard, hard is challenging. This is common human logic in The Game of Self.
But The Game of Life’s cold logic disagrees profoundly with “hard is good”.
- If an activity is hard it will take time to test and master, so you won’t have the chance to try many activities over time.
- If an activity is hard, it draws people, who are searching for a challenge – such activities are in high supply.
It better be easy to do what you do so you can test many things in a short time and avoid overcrowded challenges.
How do we manage motivation when it’s too easy?
- You artificially make it harder. If you earn enough money on a 4-hour workday, try to make them 2.
- You tie the activity to core positive emotions. Help people in need with the money and knowledge you gain. Hire people you care about to work together with you.
It better be hard for potential competition to understand in depth what you’re doing.
When you focus on easy to try activities, you can try a lot of them and this is the actual way you can find a profitable niche. And it’s profitable because it’s hard to understand (for the others) and you’ll already in it, trying. Now you have all the time in the world to understand it and improve and scale. While earning!
A good hint is to do something that uses an underlying foundation that not all people understand. Like The Internet and websites. And then dive into niches of niches even further to find the golden one.
You want to have fun. This is the easiest part. The key is to not plan it beforehand and not try to predict whether an activity will be fun or not.
Just test every possible variation of the easy-to-try and hard-to-understand niche you’ve found, so you can also have the most fun.
The economy changes and constantly opens and shuts doors. So when you find a good niche, don’t hesitate. When you’re profitable but scaling options are no longer visible, search for another niche to add to your activities. It will likely be on the same foundation, so half your work is already done.
One of your main milestones is to stop caring about everyday life expenses. This frees your mind for earning money and makes you rationally bolder. This is where the big improvements are.
Your life is a constant process of improving. However, if there is no free way and it takes spending, spend! Money idle in the bank is useless except for emergency use.
Saving for retirement while being less than 35 is an utterly stupid concept and an ultimate Sheep move. If you invest wisely in yourself and your skills in this super dynamic world, you’ll have more than enough funds when you retire.
Money is easier to find than meaning so if you’re stuck, it’s an ok first step. You can find your way to fun and meaning when you already earn money and most important of all, have found freedom.
While systemic changes would be welcome one day, for now we can just share as we earn. It also brings happiness.
We can be fighting rising inequality together, every single day. The only guaranteed way to do so is to attract wealth by diving head first in our dynamic world… and then share.
