Leveraging your assets to generate income and SelfSell

Reminder of what assets are

as·set
ˈaset/
noun
plural noun: assets

a useful or valuable thing, person, or quality.
"quick reflexes were his chief asset"
synonyms:   benefit, advantage, blessing, good point, strong point, selling point, strength, forte, virtue, recommendation, attraction, resource, boon, merit, bonus, plus, pro
"he sees his age as an asset"

Creating a list of all assets you own

Assets can be resources, advantages, strengths, and can take many forms. Most people have assets without even knowing what they have. Strength for example is an asset which opens the door to all jobs which require physical labor. At the same time a person can always develop a new asset by developing a skill or talent. For instance if a person can make people laugh or decides to develop a comedic routine then this can help a person to become a better entertainer. Becoming a better entertainer can allow a person to charge a little bit more for the service or if we are talking about on Steem then get more upvotes. We see an example of this from @traf / /@trafalgar who uses humor to turn writing into income. People who are "street smart" will observe the writing style, find the blueprint and see exactly how humor can be injected into writing to create more popularity. There are more examples of course for how to generate income but the example of @traf is active income generation by leveraging a skill which had to be developed over a period of time.

There is also esoteric knowledge. Some knowledge is very rare outside of certain circles and yet is also very sought after. Knowledge itself can be an asset, as just by giving knowledge to another person a value exchange could take place. The value of the knowledge depends on what it is and how much that person can leverage the knowledge for their own purposes. The point here is that in a knowledge economy knowledge is the asset being traded. The esoteric knowledge is the rare knowledge which very few people know anything about and as we know with scarcity in general from other things the amount of income that particular knowledge can generate will go up.

Any valued assets a person owns which they can share, license, sell, rent, loan, to others, is capable of generating income. It is up to each individual to assess the markets to determine what they have which is considered valuable to others. That which is considered valuable to others which you possess is what can be sold, rented, licensed, loaned, etc. This could be something like a tangible material object such as a car, it can be a home, it can be intangible like knowledge or information, it can be stuff I can't think of. Creating a list is to simply think about all the junk you have which can be sold, all the talents you have which can be developed, all the skills you have, all the experience and or knowledge you've acquired, and then figure out the entities in this world who have a need for what you can offer.

The list should have on one side everything you have to offer. On the other side should be the world and all it demands. The trick is to leverage what you have to offer to meet the demands of the world. The world is full of customers waiting to be served, who want to feel happiness, who want to feel safe, who are confused due to lack of experience, who aren't as physically strong, or as talented in the area you are. So in this way, the key point is knowing how to study markets, people, cultures, to find both the obvious demands which are overt, but also the covert or clandestine demands which aren't talked about that exist.

It's not just about generating income, providing products and or services, and supplying demand. There is of course other components which have a lot to do with whether or not an individual or organization will be able to keep the wealth they build together. For example, the idea of risk management is a non-trivial yet critical concept necessary for asset protection and wealth preservation. In other words, if a person creates an income in very high risk ways then it's also very easy to lose everything. An example would be a bank robber who takes a very high risk to get a lot of money very quickly only to find themselves on the run, under investigation, and eventually limited in how they can actually store, spend, and enjoy their money, if they even manage to not lose it after being caught.

Ethics play a role here because just getting as much money as possible without any regard to consequences is very risky. In a lot of instances, the amount of risk is actually unnecessary. If we look for instance at scams that take place in crypto we will see a lot of risk taken by entities trying to get rich quick. Some may in fact manage to get rich quick, but it's actually much harder to get rich and stay rich as a scammer than it is being honest in the crypto space. A scammer if they had a good reputation is actually valuing the loss of their reputation as some monetary amount. If the average person is willing to sacrifice their reputation for some threshold amount in $ then we can see that at some point there is potential for scams. Ethics play a role in what people value and if a person values reputation a lot (as some of us do) then there simply may not be a price which a person is willing to sell out, and even if there is some price in theory it might be so high (hundreds of millions of dollars) that in practice no opportunity of such magnitude will ever present itself.

The point here is that wealth building is not the only thing. Personal development means not just building wealth in the monetary sense of the word, but also in the quality of relationships. Quality relationships are built around trust which is built around reputation. Trust is something hard to establish and very easy to lose in practice which is why reputation is so valued. At the same time if a person or entity has quality relationships then these relationships can formalize into partnerships, which can allow for many future opportunities to generate income (much more sustainable than get rich quick). So in the long term view, the high reputation many partnerships strategy in my opinion works well for many people in many industries. Creating unnecessary enemies, at least in my opinion, is not as effective as winning friends and forming partnerships long term.

The "sharing" economy is just the renting economy?

The concept of the sharing economy is something we see with Uber, Airbnb,JustPark, and many other similar examples. These essentially generate income for people by allowing people to share/rent their property. The DAO was attempting to bring about this renters paradise by allowing for all sorts of new ways to rent via the Internet of Things but the problem with The DAO was that Ethereum simply was not production ready, Solidity was and is not a mature capable language, and unfortunately The DAO offered a token which may have ended up acting like a security from a legal perspective. The sharing economy in the digital space on the other hand is kind of interesting because being able to rent computational resources is entirely feasible from a technical and legal perspective. Storage space for instance, CPU processing, etc, can in theory be rented to generate a decent fairly passive income.

What about SelfSell?

SelfSell is a new platform which intends to treat people as assets. The concept of personal IPO is being touted. I took a look at SelfSell which has a token that just launched. It is being marketed at young people who do not yet know their potential or who perhaps know their potential but do not have people willing to invest in them. This of course turns the individual into the product not all that different from the model we currently see a lot. At this time I am skeptical of SelfSell, as it doesn't explain in detail what exactly investors are expected to get in return. If it's merely another borrow and spend the future scheme then a lot of people could end up owing investors going into the future just as people owe college loan debt.

References

1. https://www.ccn.com/talented-individuals-can-leverage-selfsell/
2. https://www.selfsell.com/index-en.html