Disclaimer: This was a draft I had composed before getting enlightened, never got to finish it.
When I was 18 and younger, It was the age fantasy for me. I used to spend most of my time playing videogames and real-live RPGs, as a way to escape reality and survive adolescence.
From when I was 18 till I was 25 was in the age of exploration. I had learned there were 200 countries out there and with my (Italian) passport I was able to visit most of them without a visa, so I did just that, traveled a much as I could, and had many (awkward) new experiences.
From when I was 25 until I was 29, it was the time for self-discovery. I wasn’t interested in traveling or having new experiences anymore, I wanted to know myself and understand why do I exist.
From 29 to 32, it was the time to find my place in this world, find a place to settle down, accept my disability (retinitis pigmentosa), and learn to live with it as comfortably as I could.
From 32 till 35 (now), I have been trying to figure out how money and the economy in our society works. Which was something I never had time for before because I was too busy learning the names of Pokemons, their masters, skills and weaknesses.
This post is about what I have learned working online for the last 3 years while living in Colombia and Ecuador. These lessons have all been learned very slowly and from very different sources, so I can’t really point at the source of any, sorry about that.
Lesson 1.
“If you work for someone else, you are just a cost to them. And costs by nature are meant to be kept down.”
Society is a series of social constructs designed to keep most of the population enslaved and working for the few on top. That’s is the very ugly truth no one will tell you. Instead, they will tell you “you need to get a job”. In 99% of the cases, salaries and wages never made anyone rich, but if you want to worry for the rest of your life about money and depend on external factors (a boss, a client, the government, the economy) to make ends meet, then getting a job would be the right thing to do.
Lesson 2.
“If you can’t cook, the chef owns the restaurant.”
Before you outsource anything you need to learn how to it perfectly yourself. This is in case you need to outsource your daily tasks, not a one-off job. Elon Musk doesn’t build the rockets himself, he hires smart people to do it for him and profits from them while still saving the world.
Lesson 3.
Diversify.
This should be lesson 1 but whatever. Income has to come from at least 10 different sources, otherwise if something like this Coronavirus happens again or whenever the tides change you’ll be in trouble. But of course, no one will teach you that because they just want you to “get a job” so that you can make money for those who are already filthy rich so that they can rape children in their private islands and then not killing themselves in prison cells.
Lesson 4.
Invest in assets that generate passive income.
As you get older, you realize TIME is the real currency of our world, whatever asset you have that steals your time must be done away with. If you’re younger than 30, a passive source of income could be some websites, or youtube channels and if you’re older it could be stock, dividends or bitcoin.
Most people when they’re old they wish they hadn’t worked so hard and that they had spent more time with their loved one and traveling, so passive income is the only smart way to go, as you will never get to travel and spend time with your loved ones if you’re too busy selling your time for money.
Lesson 5.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, it has to be done.
Most of us have that little voice inside of us telling us we’re not good enough and the things we do, are mediocre at best, and that’s when we even bother to do anything at all, most of the times we do nothing because we’re too scared of putting ourselves out there, making mistakes or taking criticism.
Perfectionism is the biggest enemy of productivity, the second one is alcohol. Your project or business will never be perfect, there will always be loose ends and things to improve, and it’s so easy to get caught up on the details and not getting stuff done just for fear of failure, when actually most of the times “done” is good enough, and the sole fact of finishing the task is what puts you ahead of 99% of people who got lost or tangled in the details. Life is what happens when you’re too busy making plans and a slow launch is better than no launch.
Lesson 6.
To succeed you need to have failed 100 times before.
Yes, luck is important for any business, but in order for luck to find you, you first need to put yourself in luck’s way as often as possible, you can’ win the lottery if you didn’t buy any tickets.
Lesson 7.
If you are born poor it’s not your mistake but if you die poor it’s your mistake.
Bill Gates said it, and that’s the only quote I can attribute to someone, the rest I don’t know how I learned them.
Anyway, I used to be a gamer and I clocked mover 100 hours in every Final Fantasy from 7 to 11, including the crystals tower defender, Dissidia, x2, that’s about 800 hours altogether, just for Final Fantasy games, then there was Monster Hunder, 2, 3 Freedom Unite, etc, probably about another 500 hours went there, other RPGS such as Legend of Dragoon, Koudelka, Breath Of Fire, Valkirye profile, Valkyrie chronicles, Suikoden, 1, 2, 3, 4, and many others I can’t remember.
Altogether I have logged over 2000 hours on RPGs alone, plus other 200o hours playing classic such as metal gear solid, 1,2,3,4, silent hill, 1,2,3,4 resident evil, 1,2,3,4 well you get the idea. That’s about 10.000 hours playing videogames, or a bit over a year of my life, and that’s without counting the 500 Dragon Ball episodes I watched and the other hundred or so anime shows which will probably be another year of my life wasted watching anime.
That’s years of my life wasted in front of a screen, and I realize now if I had dedicated just 1/20th of that time to learning how money works I would be very very rich now. And that brings us to our next lesson. Can money buy happiness?
Lesson 8.
Money CAN buy happiness.
Yes, it totally can, in the sense that it will relieve you of the stress not having money will cause, which is usually quite big.
Most problems people have can be easily solved with money. There is one caveat though it is that in order to be able to enjoy that money, you need to have a certain degree of self-awareness and mindfulness, otherwise, you’ll end up with more problems than before because the worries you had before because of not having the money you’ll replace them by new worries related to the new wealth you have acquired
Those include, how to take care of your money and protect it from others and from external circumstances that could lead to you losing it, how society perceives you for having money, how to deal with your relationships or avoid gold diggers; or you’ll find ways to get tangled in the little details such as how to invest it
Lesson 9.
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.
Lesson 10.
Work smart, not hard.
Lesson 11.
If you can’t make money without money, chances are you won’t be able to make money with money either.
Lesson 12.
Ideas a dime a dozen.
Lesson 13.
The world is not a nice place.
As I’m writing this, there are people being chopped up in little pieces in Mexico because of some gang wars. In Brazil, someone is being stabbed to death for $0,5o cents. Muslims are being tortured in a Chinese prison before their organs are sold to an Israelian millionaire. Billions of animals are slaughter and an American president is grabbing women by their private parts.
The online world is not much better, every day hundreds of websites are hacked by Russians and Eastern Europeans. Teenagers in Nigerian internet cafes are creating new scams every day to trick people. I myself got scammed by a company called rypeapp ran by a guy called Sean Kim, was teaching online lessons for them for a while and never got paid. I made the big mistake of trusting someone and paying them in bitcoin only to have them delete their profile and disappear the next day, I face chargebacks from stealth Paypal accounts who bough digital items from my website and know the seller always loses the disputes so they can get away with anything. I wrote articles for people who decided not to pay me after I delivered them, and hired people who decided to keep my money and never deliver the work, got fake negative reviews from paid by my competitors on some of my products and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because I didn’t count the time I for screwed by corporations who know they can get away with being unethical.
That’s life, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and that’s only for those who chose to put themselves out there because before you even reach the stage where you can get screwed you need to navigate a maze
Lesson 14.
There’s nothing at the end of the rainbow.
There is a vicious cycle that only if… I do this, I have this, I become this, THEN, I will finally be happy, but the final ugly truth of this post is that if you don’t find
No, you don’t need to become enlightened, rich, famous, or find success in the material or spiritual world to be happy. You have everything you need to be happy here and now and if you can’t see it when you’re living in the trailer park you also won’t see it from your beachfront apartment.
I’m obviously not rich yet, (if I were I wouldn’t be writing this and I wouldn’t be using the internet at all) , but I have learned a lot and it all has served me to stop behaving like I am a victim of society or the circumstances and understanding that if I’m poor is because I chose to be poor and I chose to listen to society when they told me to “get a job” instead of listening to that crazy friend who told me to fulfill a need, solve a problem people, deliver value have and THEN you will make money. Once you stop expecting others to give you money and focus on how you can change their lives or how you can change the world, then it’s time for making money.