#9: Selling your time for (more) money, Anything You Want, Balaji on crypto

Andrew -

It's not glamorous, but the truth is most of us are just selling our time for money to stay alive.

Selling your time for (more) money

The typical person has 90,000 hours in a lifetime to generate wealth.

The most common way to do that is through a job, which is any arrangement that lets you sell your time for money.

At a higher level, we are just transmutating our life energy into money. It's the only form of alchemy that works – turning blood into gold.

What's the best way to increase our time-to-money conversion rate?

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers

Derek Sivers founded CD Baby, an online seller of independent music, in 1998 to help fellow musicians sell their music. He sold the business for $22 million in 2008, then began traveling the world and blogging on creativity and entrepreneurship.

In Anything You Want, Mr. Sivers offers 40 bite-sized chunks of entrepreneurial wisdom to help you build a business you’ll love. It might not be the type of advice you need to build the next billion-dollar startup, but that’s the point – business does not need to just be about dollars; it can be a creative endeavor in the pursuit of happiness.

Key Takeaways

  1. Focus on the customer and having fun, not the money.
  2. Don’t be a boring business – put the human touch into what you do to make yourself memorable.
  3. Improve and innovate your products rather than focusing on marketing something that doesn’t work well.
  4. A business owner should: 1. Systematize the business so she can remove herself from it; and 2. Choose what she loves to do and delegate everything else (or she’ll lose interest in the business).
  5. Delegate, not abdicate. And trust, but verify.
  6. Once you’re busy and successful, whenever you’re considering a new idea or proposal, say “No” unless you feel like saying “Hell yeah!”

Intrigued? Read the full review and top highlights.

Worthwhile reads

Just one this week – a mind-blowing 3.5 hour podcast interview by Tim Ferriss of Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor, entrepreneur and (to me) all-round genius. They talk about everything from the future of cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin and Ethereum), the path to personal freedom and wealth, and the new world (US vs. China vs. India) we live in.

You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript.

"If code scripts machines, media scripts human beings." – Balaji