“Don’t waste your days working on one thing but always thinking about another.”

Tim Denning

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Entrepreneur's Handbook

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4 min read

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Sep 6, 2021

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There are several ways to make enough money so a job or profession doesn’t run your life anymore.

It’s not about yellow Lambos or laptop broken dreams by the side of an edgeless pool in the Bahamas. Financial freedom equals the time to do whatever you want. Once you achieve it, make no mistake: you’ll crave work again. You just won’t crave work based on how much it pays anymore.

The traditional paths to financial freedom look like this:

1. Win the lottery.
2. Invest in real estate over multiple decades.
3. Start a business and sell it for bucketloads of money.
4. Buy the US stock market index fund and dollar-cost average into it every time you get paid.

The problem with all these strategies is they’re slower than a horse and cart. They’re old school. They’re out of date. And they don’t factor in new norms such as quantitative easing (money created by governments out of thin air), asset bubbles, record stock prices due for a correction, or an out-of-control global health crisis.

A tweet reminded me that paradigms shift happen. Technology has created side hustles and provided a faster way to financial freedom.

Don’t waste your days working on one thing but always thinking about another

This advice comes from an account on Twitter. It’s bang on.

If you sit at work most days and dream of doing another type of work then why do you torture yourself? If you only had days to live you wouldn’t accept this outcome. So why do you accept it when you’re not guaranteed to live for any fixed length of time?

It makes no sense.

Confession: I lived like that. Most of last year I sat in meetings and dreamt of writing online instead. It drove me nuts. As this year progressed I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It eventually consumed me. I stopped caring about anything other than my writing. I would sometimes even write in a meeting, with my microphone on…