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The Future of Work
The Digital Economy
April 14, 2024
The world doesn’t need more monkeys chained to the cubicle - working repetitive, often redundant tasks for the same pay check at the end of every 30 days.
Living the same day over and over.
No colour, no novelty, no excitement, no risk.
What motivates someone to stay in that same job?
He knows he hates it. He finds no joy in his work, his co-workers are just as drab and lifeless as him, counting out the hours until 5pm.
He knows he shouldn't drink as much or spend nearly as much on frivolous purchases on the weekend and yet why does he do it?
What about you?
If you understand that living for the weekend is an unsustainable strategy for the long run, do you have a long term plan to get out of this cycle?
What you have to understand is that what you do to get to the weekend is precisely what makes you want to waste it.
If your life lacks the colour, novelty and ambition during the week, isn't it completely rational to try and squeeze as much of it as you can on the weekend?
If you're living with the belief that the gaping hole for fulfilment, to do work that genuinely bring you joy, is fun and monetarily rewarding at the same time is a fantasy, a trick invented by snake oil salesmen on the internet to sell you courses, isn't it completely rational to think that the lifeless dead end future in front of you is the only option?
If you're anything like me, this doesn't sit right with you.
People measure ambition in dollars, always forget to measure it in belief and imagination.
If you can at least picture the truly-free life, with abundance of time and money with location independence and you understand that at least one person on the planet is living that life, that tells you that it's possible.
That tells you that settling for anything else is sin.
Have you seen that video of the bear who gets released from his cage into the wild and yet still walks in the same circle as if the cage was still there?
That's how a lot of people who haven't worked on their own projects in a long time (or forever) tend to operate when faced with an empty page, blank screen or $0 MRR.
Even after having all the time in the world available to them to take things slow and work out creative solutions on the path to escaping their monotonous routine, they try to run it like a project at work.
Making grand plans instead of putting out a minimum viable product and then iterating along the way.
Investing a bunch out of pocket instead of selling the product before building it out so you take no monetary risk out of it.
I think that’s enough of an anti-vision to point for you.
Let me show you how to escape this cycle.
1. The necessity of a side-project
You need to break the belief that you are going to create a billion dollar unicorn startup.
Even if you do, chances are - it will start out as a side-project.
Something that you dedicate an hour-a-day and $0 to instead of trying to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and quit your job immediately to put your “million dollar idea” to action.
So how do you come up with the perfect project to start out with?
You look to your own interests.
If all you watch on YouTube are calisthenics videos and have made good progress in your calisthenics journey then that is a genuine passion of yours and you need to convert that passion into a stream of income to continue your journey to actualization (that’s for another letter though).
The first step towards doing that is to build your distribution.
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2. Build your distribution
Build your distribution, then sell anything you want
The greatest form of leverage in the modern day after money - a large audience.
You need to attract people who are exactly like you but a few steps behind in their calisthenics journey (sticking with the metaphor for now but you can swap it for your own thing), teach them everything they need to know to get to your point.
You do this by posting on X, LinkedIn, Youtube or any other social media platform.
You then funnel them to a blog or newsletter since you don’t want to rely on ever-changing algorithms.
In doing so, you’ll create trust with a small group of people.
You can then leverage this trust (also known as domain authority) to earn money.
A section of your audience would be happy to pay you to fast-track their progress or just to work personally with you.
Don’t believe me?
If I told you that I could help you create and monetize a newsletter which earns hundreds of dollars within 2 months, wouldn’t you pay for that knowledge?
Isn’t that a great deal for everybody involved?
Your audience and products will work the same way.
You need to break the belief that people won’t pay for your stuff.
3. Sell whatever you want
Once you build out your distribution using shared interests and domain knowledge, you can then sell them products which genuinely help them get the results that you’ve achieved.
Realise the beauty of this.
You achieve certain results in your own life by following your natural curiosity and genuine passions.
You educate others on the steps needed to achieve the same results, in doing so, you build trust with a group of people who have the same interests.
You get paid to fast-track people’s progress and the people paying you achieve the required results in record time.
Through this whole cycle, you actualize your fulfilment in this specific interest and are now free to pursue other interests…
Are you starting to understand why this is the most natural business model in the world and how there can be no saturation in this space?
Remember, through this cycle, your audience is already built and they’ll be interested to see what you pursue next.
Thus, this cycle gets easier and easier the further you go along.
Once you build an audience, you can sell them anything you want.
There’s a lot more to this game but there’s only so much I can fit into one letter, I will be elaborating more on this moving forward!