Stop Trading Time For Money

One of the most important concepts I’ve ever learned in my life, is the concept of residual income. It's an easy concept to grasp in theory, but in reality many people have a hard time divorcing the idea of linear time for linear money. It's why most people express outrage and say that Floyd Maywhether got paid hundreds of millions of dollars for 12 minutes of boxing, when that’s simply not true. Since most people work a finite amount of time for a set amount of money, they have a hard time grasping that the wealthiest people in the world work outside of that system.

Think about it like this: Invest your time, like you do your money. A financial investment is simply someone taking their money, and buying a future income stream. You’re saying “I’m going to take X dollars, turn it from cash into another asset, and that asset will pay me income. And if it’s a good asset, I can divest and get even more cash than I had before”. (Hopefully that wasn’t confusing).

So let’s think about time in that same sense. You want to invest your time, not trade it. You want to think of your time as an asset. You’re taking your time and you’re “buying” a future income stream with it. And if your time was invested wisely, then in the end you can turn it into an additional lump sum cash payment.

The idea is to work once, and get paid over and over and over again.

In my own life, I took a year and a half of my life and I invested it into my business. Now I get income from it. I make a salary that's not tied to the amount of time I work here. Additionally, at the end of the year, I’m going to get a dividend check; once again, not tied to the amount of time I work here. And one day we hope to sell the company for a lot of money, and that cash we receive… will not be tied to the amount of time that I work here.

A second example - this blog. Maybe one day the traffic gets high enough that I can sell ad space. I will receive a check from advertisers that will not be tied to the amount of time I sit writing a blog post. Maybe I decide to do affiliate marketing through my blog. Once again, the affiliate income I make will not be a trade for my time. It will be an income stream I make from investing my time.

Start thinking about what value you can create, what can be seen as an INVESTMENT of time, and not an exchange of it.