The subtitle of the book is, “Escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich.” Uh, a little, perhaps, too good to be true, a little scamy, but is this possible? Absolutely. How do I know this? Because I have plenty of friends who do the exact same thing, and I could actually do this myself right now, granted I wouldn’t be able to live in the United States. So is this possible? Absolutely. But, are most people going to be able to do this? Absolutely not. But, I feel like a lot of people take that and use it as an argument for why this book sucks, or why this book isn’t good, or why this book is scamy. And it’s like, look, can you become in charge of your response? So imagine you wake up and you spilled coffee on your favorite shirt in the morning and then you go down to your car and it doesn’t start. Can you become in charge of the response and still be happy? Of course. Are most people going to be able to do that? No. But, I don’t sit here saying, “Well, you know, that means that Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning sucks and uh, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a scam.” But, with that said, there are certain things that you don’t want to be naive about.
And I actually do have plenty of experience with this, so I do want to clear some of those things up, so let’s get into it. So imagine I come to you and I say, “Hey, I make $30,000 a year. Here’s my friend John. He makes a $150,000 a year. Who’s richer?” You’ll say, “Well, of course John’s richer. I mean, he’s five times richer than you are.” But is that true? Okay, let’s look into that. What if I told you, “I work 10 hours a week, and John works 80 hours a week.” Ooh, what is it now? Turns out that John actually makes about $36 an hour, and I make $58 an hour. Starting to get interesting. Well, what if I tell you John lives in New York City and that’s where his job is.
He can’t live anywhere else because then he won’t be able to make that money. But me, I don’t have to live anywhere. I could be anywhere around the world and still be making that money. Well guess what, John’s in New York now and he wants to take his girlfriend out to a fine dining place. He’s going to pay $200. But, in the country that I’m in, when I take my girlfriend out, that’s only going to cost $20. Who’s richer now? Well, in this case, I’m richer than John is. So I really want to emphasize this point, so let me exaggerate it a little bit. If I told you, “Hey, come work for me in Breadville and I’ll pay you $5M.” You might say, “Yay, I’m going to be making millions!” But then you come to Breadville and a single piece of bread costs $1M, you’re not really rich. So this is really the foundation of the book. Yes, in absolute income, John is five times richer than I am, but in relative income, I can be way richer than John is.
So what’s the basic idea? Well, you create a product, and then you sell it – basic entrepreneurship. The idea is that great things happen when you earn in dollars and spend in pesos or bahts. So instead of explaining some obscure example of a sketchy supplement that he sold, let me give you an example that you’ll resonate with really easily.
So you’re watching this video right now. It’s basically an animation video about a self-help book. Take the exact same concept, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, take this exact same concept, and if you want to know how you can contact me and I’ll be more than happy to help you, but take this concept and apply it to, let’s say, philosophy. That’s what you enjoy. You know a lot about philosophy. Take concepts and explain them in a fun and educational way. I can actually see that becoming a great success.
Grow it a little bit, and then just through ad revenue, just through affiliate marketing the resources that you’re getting the information from, and maybe creating a little product, you can be there. I can actually see that as a great success. Now here’s how that’s misleading and the book does the exact same thing. I’m not lying, but I’m coming from my perspective. What I have to keep in mind is that the average person doesn’t even know how it’s possible to make money online. So when I’m coming to you and saying, “Hey, you could do that in a few months, and I can totally see that becoming a great success,” that’s with the experience and knowledge that I have. So guess what, for a person who hasn’t done that, it might be hard to make a product that’s going to sell. Or a person who has no idea how stuff works on YouTube, it might take more than a few months to start a successful channel.
So make sure you’re not naive about that, but also realize that there is nothing that I have that you couldn’t get to. You could do plenty of research, you could get plenty of experience. So yeah, it might not be in six months, but guess what, you start a channel, it takes a year and it’s a complete disaster, and you learn so much from it, and then it takes another year for you to build a successful channel. That’s two years, even if it was three years, what’s the alternative? If this is what you want to do, the alternative is working for someone as a slave for 40 years. Now here’s the next big thing and a really important part of the book. Things don’t take as much time as we think they should. So I was actually a part of a well-respected, successful, one of the best organizations in the world. And they would take people and literally have them somewhere for 8 hours and be wasting their time when if they had done that individually, they could have done it in a single hour. So two huge things that you want to keep in mind when you want to be effective.
One’s elimination and the other one’s outsourcing. So here’s how I could use those two principles to turn working on my channel all day for seven days a week into only two hours a week, only two hours a week, and basically the same results. A big part of the elimination process is the 80/20 principle, and I actually have a whole video about that. But the idea is very simple… I used to spend hours and hours every day becoming a part of every website and everywhere I could put my video on, and then I realized, “Dude, what are you doing? There’s only one website that’s sending you most of your traffic.” So literally, I turned something that I did for hours and hours into something that I do in 5 minutes now and I’ve kept the majority of the results. The second part is outsourcing. And the book talks about virtual assistants, basically people who’ll do everything for you, schedule things for you, do your email, all of that. And people get really upset about that, “Well, what about my safety?! What about the security of my information?!” And it’s like, look, first of all, what were you expecting? Your increasing your reward, so obviously your risk in going to increase.
But even with that, you could do that really smart, but if you’re not going to do that exact same thing, forget the details, think about the bigger picture. Outsourcing. Focus on that. So in my case, the only reason I haven’t outsourced the animation process for my videos is because I’ve actually enjoyed it. So when I create an animation, the audio recording takes about an hour, and then the animation takes about ten hours. That’s a lot of time. And look, I don’t even have to go overseas to outsource that. I could outsource that to a kid here that goes to high school that has extra time. And I could pay him less than 5% of what the video is going to generate for me. And now each video only takes me an hour to make. So if I’m going to put out two videos a week, that would be two hours of recording and you know, a few minutes of marketing on just one website.
That’s it. But when I first started I had no idea, and I would literally spend all day every day doing those things, and I’ve kept all of those results but now it’s only going to take me about two hours a week when I start outsourcing. And get into the habit of outsourcing, even if you don’t need it, start doing it. Often times, I’ll meet a person, just a fully grown man, a 40-year-old man, and he’ll brag about how he cut the grass all day yesterday and saved the money. And I’m sitting there thinking, “So your entire day is worth $20, that’s it?” So get into the habit of this even if you don’t need it.
The experience coming from it will be invaluable. You’ll learn when you outsource it to the wrong person, and well, they’re not doing the job right, or they didn’t get it done by the deadline. You’ll learn so many things but get into the habit of outsourcing things. So in conclusion, this is a great book. I mean I know a lot about this topic, but I still learned so much, so I would definitely recommend reading it. But, don’t be naive about, and I’ve addressed some of the things that can be a little bit misleading. But, at the same time, don’t take that as, “Well, I can’t do it and someone else can.” You know, is this possible? Absolutely. Are most people going to be able to do it? Absolutely not. Just like most people won’t be able to become in control of their response to negative stimuli around them, actually that’s probably harder for most people. But, that’s not a good enough reason to say why something doesn’t have merit.
