The Conical Glass: Outsourcing life

Friday, July 27, 2007

Outsourcing life - the investigation!

In an exclusive Conical Glass investigation, I spent 10 minutes at Barnes & Noble yesterday paging through The Four Hour Work Week in order to glean its secrets -- chiefly, how do you create an $80,000-a-month, "hands-off business" that will enable you to live the glamorous lifestyle of the New Rich? Here it is: become a professional middleman. In other words, find something that people want to buy; sell it over the Internet at a big mark-up; outsource the fulfillment; make $$$. One of the examples used in the book was French sailor shirts. Use Google Ad Words to draw traffic to your web site. Voila -- instant riches!

OK, I'm simplifying (you didn't really expect me to read the entire book, did you?), but it seems like this would be more likely to lead to a lot of people overestimating the demand for things and thus being stuck with gigantic caches of merchandise they are unable to unload. Maybe I'm just bitter because I'm sitting on a storage room full of unsold CDs.

I know one person who is very rich. He has the lifestyle that I'm sure Four Hour readers would love to emulate -- first class travel, a luxurious home in a desirable area, meals in fine restaurants, lavish home theater, etc. How did he make all of that money? He worked really, really hard for years and years, at the expense of personal relationships, sleep, etc. Believe me, it was no easy road to riches, and I wouldn't want to do what he did.

The truth is, even though it's sometimes aggravating, I like my job and would probably keep doing it even if I won big money in the lottery (unlikely to happen, as I don't play the lottery). It's a fairly creative, fulfilling career, and for the most part, I really like my clients.

My advice: if you can't cut your work week down to four hours, find something that you like to do that also pays a decent wage. Save 10% of your income in stocks, bonds and/or a high-yield savings account, so if your job becomes intolerable, you won't feel trapped, because you're not living paycheck to paycheck. If anyone wants to try and spin that into a book, feel free.

posted by 125records @ 11:22 AM

2 Comments:

At 7:18 PM, Janet ID said…

The very idea of wuch a brief "workweek" must be totally incoherent to you - you've twice typed the book title in this entry as The Four DAY Workweek. I completely understand. Titles like this one make a lot more sense to me. I for one would enjoy adjusting to a nonconventional arrangement of work and leisure time.
At 10:36 PM, 125records said…

Yikes -- thanks for the correction, Janet! I've fixed it, so no one will be confused...