Posted by Canadian Dream on August 18, 2011
Some times you read the right book just at the right point in your life and then interesting things start to happen to you. I recently had this occur to me when I borrowed The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau. Chris’s name might be familiar as he has written the online manifesto “A Brief Guide to World Domination” which is the inspiration for the book.
The subtitle of the book is “set your own rules, live the life you want and change the world.” Basically Chris is trying to teach people that you don’t have to just live a conventional life of: get some post secondary, get a job you don’t really like and buy crap you really don’t need and save for a distant retirement.
We far too often in life settle for what we want. We settle for our jobs, what we do with our time, or how much of a difference we can make in the world. Chris is trying to teach people in this book how to live a different way where you point your compass to your dream life and actually get there. He also deals with the common issues that are going to come up from doing this: fear of the change, people saying ‘no’ and generally people not understanding how you really do want to change the world.
He also rightly points out that most people really don’t want to ‘do nothing’, but we often actually done something that we love so we don’t understand how ‘work’ can be an enjoyable thing. Would you ever really get tired of doing something you love to help others? Likely a lot more slowly than your current job.
In a nut shell it is basically required reading in my mind for anyone wishing to be retired early as the book might change how you view your current goal of early retirement. I know it did for me. You see I have always had this idea that once I’m financially independent that I could then write as much as I want. Now I realize that I’m approaching the problem in the wrong way. By aiming to be financially independent first I’m basically making the assumption that I can’t make a living writing, which is really what I’m after. The problem is that is an assumption that I have made. What if I can making a modest living at writing? Would I need to be fully financially independent? No, I could instead aim for being partly financially independent from my investments and the rest from self-employment income.
So overall I enjoyed the book which was fairly short so you can read through it rather quickly, but working some of the ideas through your mind afterwards might take a little bit longer.
So what’s your dream and why are you not doing it?
Posted by Canadian Dream on March 30, 2011
Every time I hear the words ‘passive income’ my teeth grind down a little bit. Why do I have such a hostile reaction? Well it comes from the fact: there is no such thing as passive income! Every source of income requires some investment of time and effort on your part.
Don’t believe me? Let’s go down the list of few of the common ones.
- Dividend Paying Stocks – You think this would be a easy one to say it is passive, but most people seem to forgot the up front work of researching the company and then following the news on the company to protect your investment. You don’t have to read every news story on them, but you should have a clue on what the company is doing by reviewing the annual report.
- Real Estate – If you never had to look after a rental unit, people like to think that it really isn’t much work. They can be so wrong! Bounced cheques, late rent, repairs and upgrades and that doesn’t even include the work of showing the place to get tenants in their in the first place. Granted you can hire someone to do this for you, but that still requires the work to get the unit and research a company to look after it for you.
- A Blog – To be honest, this one always surprises me that people think blogs don’t require work. Have you every tried setting up a WordPress installation? Granted it isn’t hard, but it takes time to get all the plug-ins that you want loaded up and running right. Then creating content, linking to other blogs and rising up your page rank. It all takes time to get up and running even if you turn it into a static site down the road.
- Small Business – Depending on what you do here it can be set up fairly easily, but getting sales still takes time and effort on your part. After a while the business may require less handling, but in the beginning you can bet you will be putting in lots of hard work to get it running right.
This isn’t to discourage you from going after these kinds of means of making money, but do keep in mind some front end work will be required no matter what you pick. Granted if you like doing that kind of work, it won’t really feel like a burden at all. So make sure to pick what will work best for you.
So what do you do beyond your day job to earn more money? Why did you pick that method? In my case, I do #1, 3, 4 since I cover off #2 by owning a REIT instead of a single unit because as much as I like real estate I’m not interested in owning a unit directly.
Posted by Canadian Dream on February 2, 2011
So can you really make money at what you really love to do instead of your current job? Well for Gary Vaynerchuk who wrote Crush It!: Why Now Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion
, the answer was: YES! So with some personal branding and social media work Gary managed to take his dad’s liquor store from a $4 million dollar business to a $50 million dollar business in eight years.
Impressive, but how does that help you? Well in this short book, a mere 134 pages, Gary outlines how to utilize your natural talent and passion in order to grow just about any business or even a blog. So regardless of what you are doing selling an actual product or just blogging about what you love he provides a clear cut method to get the most of your social media networks. Including a few tips that I found myself taking notes on since while I like social media I suck at using it (just look at my twitter feed if you don’t believe me).
While some of the advice in the book might strike anyone who has been around the internet as obvious, for example, that social media has dwarfed some other traditional media methods to reach people. He is still honest about running a business is a lot of work. My favorite quote in the book is:
Many are probably just sick of the killer hours and inflexible schedules and demanding bosses often found in the corporate world and think entrepreneurship will somehow be less taxing. I hate to disappoint, but if you’re looking for an easier time here, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
So should you read the book? Well to be honest it really isn’t for everyone, especially if your business has little to no internet exposure. Yet if you do have a Twitter and Facebook account it might be worth reading to get a few ideas on how to use both of them more effectively.
PS: I want to thank Frank Wiginton for bringing this book to my attention a while back with one of his comments.
