My Muse Is a Lazy Magical Bitch
muse: (as used by Tim Ferriss in his book) is nothing more than a business that can generate income without consuming time. It’s at least a partially-automated business. I think of it as more like a side business to whatever else it is you do during the day (be it work or relaxation). In other words, working in a manufacturing plant is probably not a muse. However, starting a website that sells t-shirts for dogs could be considered a muse. For my purposes, most muse ideas will be internet-based, because this is where you can run with an idea at the lowest cost and probably have the highest chance for success (without risking your life savings).
I've starting working through what may be the ultimate solution or ultimate mirage: the 4-hour work week. The book is a combination of time management, demeanor tuning and business management.
Time Management: It talks about ignoring "emergencies"-- On the Internet, where nothing is real, no emergency is real. The author talks about checking email less frequently (twice a day). He talks about batching jobs (like bill paying once every two weeks). And, deferring time-wasting meetings. I do some of this stuff already. Since putting it into practice, it has saved me some time and some sanity.
Demeanor Tuning: These tips verge on the airy-fairy. Keeping eye contact. Asking strangers for their phone numbers. I know the goal of the process: to be daring. Most of our world is shaped by social constructs. Money isn't a physical law. Getting a girlfriend is only partially governed by chemistry. Wealth, access and good social interactions are social results-- output from the social machinery. If you learn to ask and ask in a way that yields your intended results, then you're making the social construct work for you-- like Neo bending the rules of the Matrix. If you never ask, the answer is no.
Business Management: This is the weak link in my chain. My muse won't flap her wings, play her harp or whatever she's supposed to do. No muse: no money: fabulous (pronounced fa-HABU-lous!!!). Our projects hide in stealth mode. Why? WHY!?! FrugalVictoria.com is getting some attention, but saving money and doing stuff for free should have widespread (like thousands of visitors a day) worth of appeal. Some Experience Required should be the tonic for people eager to build job skills and climb into better paying gigs after proving themselves. But it languishes. This is where the value of this book may come for me. A lot of the "self-help" (aka "get rich quick") books, blogs, etc. miss the intricacies of how to manage your business-- how to offload work, manage customer service and become scalable. Scalable is tricky. I've been fighting with it in Drupal. If I take up doing web pages for clients, I will hit a personal version of scalable: I will only have so many hours in a day to earn money-- I will hit this limitation of earning 1.0 wages. The 4-hour Work Week does cover how to make offshoring (aka geographical arbitrage) work for you.
The next goal: get my muse to kick into gear.
I've starting working through what may be the ultimate solution or ultimate mirage: the 4-hour work week. The book is a combination of time management, demeanor tuning and business management.
Time Management: It talks about ignoring "emergencies"-- On the Internet, where nothing is real, no emergency is real. The author talks about checking email less frequently (twice a day). He talks about batching jobs (like bill paying once every two weeks). And, deferring time-wasting meetings. I do some of this stuff already. Since putting it into practice, it has saved me some time and some sanity.
Demeanor Tuning: These tips verge on the airy-fairy. Keeping eye contact. Asking strangers for their phone numbers. I know the goal of the process: to be daring. Most of our world is shaped by social constructs. Money isn't a physical law. Getting a girlfriend is only partially governed by chemistry. Wealth, access and good social interactions are social results-- output from the social machinery. If you learn to ask and ask in a way that yields your intended results, then you're making the social construct work for you-- like Neo bending the rules of the Matrix. If you never ask, the answer is no.
Business Management: This is the weak link in my chain. My muse won't flap her wings, play her harp or whatever she's supposed to do. No muse: no money: fabulous (pronounced fa-HABU-lous!!!). Our projects hide in stealth mode. Why? WHY!?! FrugalVictoria.com is getting some attention, but saving money and doing stuff for free should have widespread (like thousands of visitors a day) worth of appeal. Some Experience Required should be the tonic for people eager to build job skills and climb into better paying gigs after proving themselves. But it languishes. This is where the value of this book may come for me. A lot of the "self-help" (aka "get rich quick") books, blogs, etc. miss the intricacies of how to manage your business-- how to offload work, manage customer service and become scalable. Scalable is tricky. I've been fighting with it in Drupal. If I take up doing web pages for clients, I will hit a personal version of scalable: I will only have so many hours in a day to earn money-- I will hit this limitation of earning 1.0 wages. The 4-hour Work Week does cover how to make offshoring (aka geographical arbitrage) work for you.
The next goal: get my muse to kick into gear.
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