I would like to eventually be a researcher and author by trade. Sitting on my very own boat docked just across the bay from the Queen Mary in Shoreline Marina. 28 short miles away from our beautiful little island gem of Catalina, just off the California coastline. No more than a short trip across the water for a weekend stay. And this just doesn’t seem feasible as a wage slave. I no longer want my lifestyle to depend on my bartering with my time beating the same drum week after week.
I’m no longer interested in simply trading my time for money. Don’t get me wrong I will always need access to currency to live in the world we live in, but I’ve learned that no matter how much you make per hour, simply trading your time for money, a wage, is not the right mindset to have. I want to create assets that will continue to bring forth fruit long after my hands have completed the work.
It has become apparent to me that doing whatever it takes to increase the amount of money I can make per hour is just the wrong way to go about generating income. Futile to say the least. I heard Jim Carrey once say,
“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”
I think he’s right. Not that I’ve yet achieved riches and fame, but I have made minimal amounts of money per hour and I have earned rather significant amounts of money per hour and neither end of the spectrum made me feel any better about the work I had been doing. You either like what you do or you don’t. More money does mean that you can potentially buy more things, save more money or give more to your favorite charity, but it also means you are going to be paying more in taxes negating the whole point of making more for most people.
If you want to achieve wealth that is truly significant, what needs to be done is achieve what John Goodman in the 2014 movie, The Gambler suggests. What he called, “A Level of F.U.”
You get up two and a half million dollars, any a$$hole in the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year roof, an indestructible Japanese economy sh!tbox, you put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that’s your base, get me? That’s your fortress of f’ing solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of f**k you. Somebody wants you to do something, f**k you. Boss pisses you off, f**k you! Own your house. Have a couple bucks in the bank. Don’t drink. That’s all I have to say to anybody on any social level. https://youtu.be/qGC9FY65HBo
And this just makes sense. Of course, the problem for most still depends on their ability to get to that point and how that happens. Well, I can tell you, the answer is not to simply get to fifty, sixty, seventy, or one-hundred dollars an hour, because even then it will take a long time to get there. And whatever you are doing to get those increased amounts of wages are not stable as long as they are wages traded for hours of your time.
And for me, that answer likely is found within the world of content creation, whether it be audio(podcast), videos(YouTube), or publishing books as an author. It is in these areas that I have already achieved the level of master. More than 10,000 hours experience. And I would be silly to try and retool my life at this point because it would mean that I would have to start all over again at something new.
And so I am going to continue focusing my energies on writing. And that the title of this post comes from. 500 words a day is my goal, and if I end up writing more, it will just be icing on the cake. The answer has been staring me in the face for a long time. I’ve said it over and over and over again to many a person that I can pound out 500 words in a response to someone on Facebook, but getting to 30,000 words or more I am at a loss. Well silly me kept telling myself how I could do it.
500 words a day…
And guess what…In just 60 days, I will have written 30,000 words. Why did it take me this long to figure it out? Because I was focusing on the wrong part of the goal and not that which is achievable. That which I already know how to do well. 500 words a day.
Do I think I will be a New York Times best-selling author? I believe I will if I just keep at it. This is how success works. I know the answer. And knowing the answer is half the battle. The other half is putting into practice the first half.
So here I am, and here is my answer, and I will achieve success eventually. And I will eventually be able to achieve the level of success that means I can do whatever I want to do with my time. That and I will be giving a gift of myself to my children and their children and so forth so that they can get to know me better long after I am gone. And hopefully, I will continue to get wiser along the way so that my words can inspire them from far beyond the gift of life and fullness of time I have been granted. At 500 words a day.
-Michael J. Loomis