The Eternal Hour : Divorce Your Time From Money

ericz (38)in #writing • 6 years ago (edited)

Two Know-It-All’s and a football

In one of my D.A.W.D.’s (daily argument with Dad) we got into the “making money online” viscious circle:

“No pop — you gotta divorce your time from your money!”

“That’s impossible! The first law of thermodynamics is: ‘Energy can neither be created nor destroyed,’ finis!”

“Pop I’m not talking about thermodynamics, and money does not follow those laws anyway, especially since FDR and Keynes took over…

…I’m talking about Ebooks on Amazon!”

“Aw, don’t talk to me about that balogney, you still gotta work! You can’t divorce time from money.”

“OK, look at this book on Amazon, one of my kids books:

It took me TEN hours to make and it net me $875 bucks last month. Now…what was my hourly wage?”

“Well 875 divided by 10 is $87.50 per hour. Not bad Junior, not bad.”

“OK, so I made $87.50 per hour for that book for that month. But guess what Pop, that book is STILL on Amazon, and next month it will make around the same…

NOW what is my hourly wage?”

Blank stare off into the distance, open mouth, then, an eternity later comes —

The Zen Buddha “Oh…”

Now this is the part where most know-it-alls would deliver the final blow, or some kind of cool post-hypnotic suggestion, but I just wanted my dad to understand…

“You see pop, when you work for an hourly wage, you have “closed hours,” they are done, fixed, finite, you will never make any more money for them, that fixed rate of, whatever, $20 per hour, STAYS $20 per hour for the rest of your life.

"But when you get CREATION right, in the digital age, you can make “OPEN HOURS”… that is digital products that keep earning you money for YEARS after you have created them."