The brutal truth about trading time for money
Aug 19, 2022
Are you stuck in the trading time for money trap?
Sadly – most people are.
Trading time for money was ingrained into most of us from an early age.
We were taught to choose a career when we were older such as being a doctor, lawyer, electrician, artist, farmer etc.
And our brains would visualise seeing ourselves working in exchange for money.
Tertiary education builds on this belief system, and this also occurs when you work for someone else (i.e. Work harder – get a promotion and I will pay you MORE money for your efforts).
This is all still trading time for money.
It’s easy to get caught in this trap – and if you’re not careful, it will become your identity.
If you run a business – you may still be thinking this way and it’s difficult to experience freedom while thinking like this.
I was personally caught in this place for many years. But equally – I’ve always been fascinated with figuring out how to break this.
Once you break this mindset – I believe EVERYTHING changes.
You start looking at what problems you can fix and you start realising that people are comfortable paying bigger dollars for you to remove their problems REGARDLESS of how long it takes you to do this.
With this new mindset – you also start looking at other ways you can generate money that doesn’t involve your time.
An example could be fixing multiple people’s problems at once instead of doing it one by one, or in farming, selling directly to the consumer.
Here is the brutal truth about what your hourly rate needs to be.
Let’s assume you have made or you have a goal to make $1 million per year.
If we take an average work week of 40 hours, and we allow 4-week holidays, then your hourly rate needs to be $520.
But the reality is, that not every hour will be productive, so we need to consider 50% efficiency, so in this case, your hourly rate needs to be $1040. This means that doing work for less than this, could be inefficient and just not worth it.
You have to change your thinking before you will ever take action.
A great mentor of mine – Marshal Thurber taught me ‘Andrew – you have to spend more time ‘un-learning’ than ‘learning’’.
This is so true.
My advice is to stop thinking about how much money you can make per hour – and start to think about what problems you can fix and what people would pay for this. OR – what is your profit goal, and what does your hourly rate need to be to achieve this.
Robbo
