Perhaps few of us can really pull off living well abroad by remotely managing a lucrative out-sourced business. But there are tons of earth-shaking ideas put out here by this extraordinary young man. If nothing else, you will learn just how much of the conventional American dream life can be questioned and shaken down to the very roots. Simply astounding stuff.
Excerpts
If you’re sick of the standard menu of options and prepared to enter a world of infinite options, this book is for you.
The objective is to create freedom of time and place and use both however you want.
Gold is getting old. The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design (LD).
I will take it as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time. The vast majority of people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfillment, so that is not the goal here; to free time and automate income is.
… an entrepreneur in the purer sense as first coined by French economist J.B. Say in 1800 – one who shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher yield.
If you can free your time and your location, your money is automatically worth 3-10 times as much.
Options – the ability to choose – is real power.
This is hard for most to accept, but our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.
“Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and cons lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually”, just do it and correct course along the way.
Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses.
Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress – stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.
Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
Conquering Fear = Defining Fear.
Most who avoid quitting their jobs entertain the thought that their course will improve with time or increases in income.
Are you better off than you were on year ago, one month ago, or one week ago? If not, things will not improve by themselves.
What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measure by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear.
Don’t only evaluate the potential downside of action. It is equally important to measure the atrocious cost of inaction.
It’s lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieve great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most time- and energy-consuming. It is easier to raise $10,000,000 that is it $1,000,000. It is easier to pick up the on perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s.
The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is – here’s the clincher – boredom.
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
Remember – boredom is the enemy, not some abstract “failure”.
Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things.
To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.
Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.
1. Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
2. Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?
I went from chasing and appeasing 120 customers to simply receiving large orders from 8, with absolutely no pleading phone calls or e-mail haranguing. My monthly income increased from $30K to $60K in four weeks and my weekly hours immediately dropped from over 80 to approximately 15.
… lack of time is actually lack of priorities.
Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities.
Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.
Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.
More is not better, and stopping something is often 10 times better than finishing it.
People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.
Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that’s just the beginning.
… the most critical of NR skills: remote management and communication.
Being a member of the NR is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.
Preparing someone to replace you (even if it never happens) will produce an ultrarefined set of rules that will cut remaining fat and redundancy from your schedule. Lingering unimportant tasks will disappear as soon as someone else is being paid to do them.
If I can do it better than an assistant, why should I pay them at all? Because the goal is to free your time to focus on bigger and better things.
Golden Rule #1: Each delegated task must be both time-consuming and well-defined.
Just as the Model-T brought transportation to the masses, virtual assistants bring eccentric billionaire behavior within reach of each man, woman, and child.
… per-hour cost is not the ultimate determinant of cost. Look at per-task cost.
People can’t believe that most of the ultrasuccessful companies in the world do not manufacture their own products, answer their own phones, ship their own products, or service their own customers.
Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.
So first things first: cash flow and time. With these two currencies, all other things are possible. Without them, nothing is possible.
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.
Be a member of your target audience and don’t speculate what others need or will be willing to buy.
I have found that a price range of $50-200 per sale provides the most profit for the least customer service hassle. Price high and then justify.
Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate.
It is not necessary to be the best – just better than a small target number of your prospective customers.
Aim for a combination of formats that will lend itself to $50-200 pricing, such as a combination of two CDs (30-90 minutes each), a 40-page transcription of the CDs, and a 10-page quickstart guide.
It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
The guard is changing. Being bound to one place will be the new defining feature of middle class.
Question: What did you spend your last $400 on? It’s two or three weekends of nonsense and throwaway forget-the-workweek behavior in most U.S. cities.
How do these numbers compare to your current domestic monthly expenses, including rent, car insurance, utilities, weekend expenditures, partying, public transportation, gas, memberships, subscriptions, food, and all the rest? Add it all up and you may well realize, like I did, that traveling around the world and having the time of your life may save you serious money.
I know too well that it’s easier to live with ourselves if we cite an external reason for inaction.
Extended travel is the perfect excuse to reverse the damage of years of consuming as much as you can afford. It’s time to get rid of clutter disguised as necessities before you drag a five-piece Samsonite set around the world. That is hell on earth.
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.
Choose a starting point and then wander until you find your second home.
It is possible to take a mini-retirement in your own country, but the transformative effect is hampered if you are surrounded by people who carry the same socially reinforced baggage.
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.
I am 100% convinced that most big questions we feel compelled to face – handed down through centuries of over-thinking and mis-translation – use terms so undefined as to make attempting to answer them a complete waste of time. This isn’t depressing. It’s liberating.
Most questions without answers are just poorly worded.
If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
Find the cause or vehicle that interests you most and make no apologies.
There is no right answer to the question “What should I do with my life?” Forget “should” altogether.
Most endeavors are like learning to speak a foreign language: to be correct 95% of the time requires six months of concentrated effort, whereas to be correct 98% of the time requires 20-30 years. Focus on great for a few things and good enough for the rest.
Quotations
Jean Cocteau
You have comfort. You don’t have luxury. And don’t tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort.
Annie Dillard
A schedule defends from chaos and whim.
Albert Einstein
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
Anatole France
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
Viktor E. Frankl
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
Paul Fussel
Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.
Bill Gates
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
William Gibson
The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.
Robert Henri
To be free, to be happy and fruitful, can only be attained through sacrifice of many common but overestimated things.
Jules Henry
Human beings have the capacity to learn to want almost any conceivable material object. Given, then, the emergence of a modern industrial culture capable of producing almost anything, the time is ripe for opening the storehouse of infinite need! … It is the modern Pandora’s box, and its plagues are loose upon the world.
Steve Jobs
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
John F. Kennedy
Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.
Charles Kuralt
Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.
Anne Lamott
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.
Bruce Lee
One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.
Seneca
Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”
George Bernard Shaw
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
Herbert Simon
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Paul Theroux
It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot.
Henry David Thoreau
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Mark Twain
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
Mark Twain
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Oscar Wilde
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination
Oscar Wilde
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.
Colin Wilson
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
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