Intro
If you are reading this, you are human (at least for now). As a human, you have certain resource requirements just to STAY ALIVE. These (loosely) consist of food, water, & shelter. To acquire these resources the OG way (hunter-gatherer / agricultural-style) requires an insane amount of knowledge, skills, and productivity to even come close to acheiving.
Shout out to all the homesteaders out there... I don't know how you guys do it.
Because of the necessity and difficulty of getting good enough at each sub-skill to stay alive, we collectively decided to give up on solving it ourselves. Instead, we got good at a one or two things and traded for the rest. An example:
"I'll give you some of the berries I pick each week in exchange for some of your yummy water." says the berry-picker to the waterboy (lol)
This works for a while but then the waterboy develops an allergy to the berries, and this causes the berry-picker to die of dehydration. :(
To prevent this scenario (and many others) we came up w/ money. A neutral item that everyone agrees to accept in exchange for the resources they have on hand (or their labor).
This saves the berry-picker. They can now trade their berries for money and give the money to the waterboy for some water. The waterboy accepts the trade because they are receiving money instead of berries (which are now useless to them), and can now buy some form of food they can actually eat.
Since we can now convert our resources or our labor into some neutral form that everyone accepts, people start specializing. Mr. Berry-Picker can stack up money by getting really good at finding berries. Same for the waterboy by getting better and better at sourcing potable water.
Specialization, Jobs, and Making Money
In the beginning, these opportunities for specialization (read: jobs), were provided by the environment. Berry bushes were plentiful, local streams provided water. Fast-forward a bit and we've stripped our environments of so many resources that the opportunity to perform a job is no longer a given.
In response, some people decided to "create their own opportunities" by building farms and the like. Nowadays, this would be by starting companies or something similar. When harvest-time came, the average joe could help with harvesting, and in exchange, received some money.
Average Joe accepts less money compared to the true value of his work as a sort of thank-you to the farm-owner for providing the opportunity in the first place. Additionally, average joe doesn't have to worry about, or even think about all that goes into running a farm. He just needs to worry about how to harvest crops efficiently (or not so efficiently if paid hourly lol).
So, to get money now, without the headache, we choose to be an average joe. Go find an opportunity, and exploit it. You trade your time and accept reduced pay (compared to the true value of your work) in exchange for the opportunity to do so at all.
To get money maybe, in the future, but potentially lots of it, we choose to be the farm-owner. You take on the full-complexity of the problem (growing and selling a crop). To do so, you acquire prerequisite resources. Figure out what you need to do to these prerequisites to produce the resource you want. Put people in the right places so you can reap the rewards. And, hopefully, do all of this in a way that is self-sustaining.
Some questions for you, if you chose to be the farm-owner:
- How do you acquire the pre-requisite resources?
- How do you even know what resources to acquire?
- What do you have to do to these pre-requisite resources to yield the the thing you actually want?
- Who's going to do it?
- How will you find them?
- If you find them, how will you know they can do it?
- and many more...
People get rich with the latter, people (hopefully) stay alive and do so comfortably with the former.
On advice, or why everyone thinks they know best for us
Almost all of the advice you receive from family members and peers is in support of the former strategy. The reason I said average joe is because almost everybody does this, has done this, or knows someone who has done this, and they turned out okay.
It's also an easy recommendation to make. The overall difficulty of executing this path is within reach for most.
Lets think about jobs for a sec
Since most of us could theoretically do this, lets think on the ways we could maximize the value we get out of this path. For this, lets imagine the ideal job (we are optmizing for money not happiness or balance). The ideal job then, is undesirable, difficult, something nobody knows how to do, and is in high demand (everyone needs it). Anything that moves you closer to these descriptors yields more money. On the flip-side, if the job you want to do is desirable, easy, something everyone knows how to do, and nobody needs you to do it, then you won't make money. In fact, you might even have to pay for it because we sort of just described a recreational activity.
Profession Analysis
Lets look at two of the top professions (by prestige / earning-potential).
- Lawyer - Boring, Difficult, Few know how to do it, almost everyone (at some point) needs them.
- Doctor - Desirable, Difficult, few know how to do it, everyone needs them.
Both of them also have the added buff of being really important to get right.
Now lets look at two lower-paid professions:
- Janitor - undesirable, simple, quickly trainable, necessary
- Retail Worker - undesirable, moderate difficulty, some training necessary, necessary
Notice that there are no professions that don't:
- satisfy a need or want
If you aren't trying to maximally optimize for money there is something else you can seemingly do. You can trade off one trait for another. For example, you could optimize for happiness / desirability by trading difficulty or knowledge (or both!).
A note on common advice
I think this is why the classic 9-5, college-educated path is all you ever hear about. People have done it before, you are optimizing for both money, and the desire to keep living, and you do this by jacking up your knowledge and the relative difficulty of the task. Which most people think is a burden worth bearing (and it kind of is).
But Quib, I'm Laaazzzyyy...
"But Quib... I'm Lazy. I don't want to do all of this." you say to me without realizing I also say this to myself
Instead of optimizing for each of these needs we can just optimize for money! A significantly easier problem. You'll still need to acquire relationships and purpose as separate endeavors because you cannot exchange money for them.
Don't worry about it, CHOOSE THE SIMPLER PROBLEM. It's a miracle of the modern wolrd that we can "store" value in little pieces of paper! (I guess numbers stored in computers now). Instead of growing our own food, acquiring land to do so, collecting and treating water, building a house, etc...
We can just trade our money for the things we want directly.
You don't have to grow food if you can buy it.
You don't have to collect or treat water if you can buy it that way.
You don't have to do lots of things if you just buy it.
But this begs the question, how do we get money?
Money Acquisition: The Default Strat
Unfortunately most think the only way is through a job. Like, they know people can own / run a company but it doesn't even register to them that they could do it. For fewer (but still some), they don't even realize why jobs exist at all (they expect them to exist, they just don't know why). And, if all of this did register, it's still the best option for most of us. Because, there is one core benefit of a job that running a company can't provide. The ability to drastically reduce the amount of work necessary to acquire money. A follow-up benefit is the certainty of money out the other side.
In general, getting a job requires you to "get good" at some skill and then trade your "time spent executing that skill" for money. It also requires the opportunity to execute the skill you are good at. By opportunity I mean that most skills require some set of resources to be present, an environment in which to execute the skill, and an over-arching system that can leverage the particular skill you have for some benefit.
The cost of the simplicity of a job is higher-ups ABSOLUTELY FUCKING FLEECING YOU of the value of your skill by providing you the opportunity to even do it in the first place.
An Alternative Money Acquisition Strat: Already Owning Things
An alternative path to acquiring money is to own shit. If this is you, congrats! You can pretty much ignore most of what I've written, and most of what I will write. All you need to do is deploy your capital (money or assets) to create opportunities to produce more capital.
Side Note: You don't even need to nkow how to do this. You can give a small amount of your capital to someone who will figure all of this out for you, and even execute the plan for you too.
Side-Side Note: Because you started without having to deal with all of these problems, many will be envious and jaded with you.
Side-Side-Side Note: Sitting on capital is the cause for the jadedness people feel toward you. Please, help less fortunate people out by actually choosing to use the capital you have to create opportunities that others can exploit. I promise not only that this will make you feel better, but you will cause a noticeable impact on the world by lifting others up who otherwise would be unable to do so themselves.
A (Tentative) Life Strat
The Ethical Life Strat™
The Ethical Life Strat™ is to figure out some way to acquire your immediate physiological needs yourself (most easily via money) and "use" relationships only to satisfy your sense of belonging, purpose, and sex drive.
An Alternative Life Strat: Optimizing Only for Relationships
An alternative path is to optimize for relationships as you can get everything you need through them.
Side Note: Acquiring your immediate physiological needs through relationships adds strain to your relationships. This means you will either need to constantly keep creating new relationships or find some way to contribute one of these needs yourself (to them).
Side-Side Note: You can exploit love to do this almost indefinitely as it prevents the strain debuff from working properly.
Side Note: This is a really shitty thing to do to people.