Wake up.
Hit snooze 4 times.
Stare at your phone.
Roll out of bed.
Make coffee.
Sit in traffic.
8 hours of unfulfilling work.
Sit in traffic… again.
Argue with your “significant” other.
Walk the pet.
Watch TV.
Pass out.
Repeat.
This should scare the shit out of you.
This is the state of 95% of the population.
Even those that are putting in effort on a daily basis to escape, can’t.
I did everything in my power to avoid a 9-5.
I built businesses from the age of 18 to 22 and didn’t make a penny. (But it was an incredibly fun way to spend my time).
When I did get a job, the list above was my assigned state of living.
I didn’t have control over how I structured 10 hours of my day.
Everything revolved around my work whether I wanted it to or not.
Over the past 3-4 years of my creator journey, I’ve realized a few things:
- Entrepreneurship is the only path for long-term logical thinkers
- Humans have been removing labor work since the beginning of time (and we are on the horizon of complete removal)
- The creator economy is the new economy. If you don’t have a personal brand you lose. Like that Black Mirror episode “Nosedive,” but in a good way.
- Sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing (shoutout Alan Watts for being ahead of his time).
The future belongs to the self improver.
The person that takes responsibility for their future and becomes a fountain of value for those around them.
When done in public, it is almost impossible not to get paid.
That is what we are here to discuss today.
“Entrepreneurship Is Overrated”
I was scrolling on YouTube the other day and a post caught my attention.
It asked, “What are things that everyone loves but you think are overrated?
There were comments about travel,
But this one caught my attention:
I won’t lie, it irked me at first.
How can people not realize that entrepreneurship is the only path to full control over your life?
And full control is the only path to sustainable enjoyment?
But it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find the “perfect” gig for you that allows you to consistently leverage all of the intrinsic drivers that make life good (curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery).
A few things hit me:
People hate what they don’t understand.
They only see 5% of an entrepreneur’s life and assume that’s enough to draw conclusions and close their mind. Curiosity vanishes at this moment.
They think entrepreneurship is overrated because they aren’t entrepreneurs.
“I’m tired of being called a wage slave.”
Sorry, but your feelings are not reality.
If you got let go and couldn’t pay your bills you are forced to work for your survival. You don’t have a choice. You are by definition a wage slave whether you like being called that or not.
Not only that, but most aren’t conscious of the exploitation that is going on behind the scenes. By staying at your predatory 9-5 you are enabling the exploitation of sweat shop workers and actively preventing human evolution. (Not in all cases, of course. Think through who you work for).
“What’s wrong with me offering my skills to already developed corporations?”
Nothing.
But why let the skills you acquire be influenced by a repetitive and income-capped career?
Why not lean into your unique interests and sell those skills to a developed corporation AS a business?
Then you aren’t a slave to certain productivity metrics, create your own systems, take on more clients, and make 5x what you would at the job with less work.
All of this, as always, is coming back to a narrow perspective enforced by a socially conditioned identity.
Or, they have a narrow view of what entrepreneurship is.
“You’re paying a man $50 to escape the matrix, that’s not how it works.”
I don’t care for Tate or his products, but $50 for time-tested marketable skills is better than a $40,000 outdated degree to get trained into the “matrix.”
Entrepreneurs don’t go back to a 9-5.
I’ve never heard of someone quitting a successful entrepreneurial venture to go back to a 9-5. But I hear of 9-5ers leaving their career for a better life all the time.
“You’re busy all the time.”
No, you aren’t.
The entire point of entrepreneurship is to reduce how much you work and prioritize the better things in life. If you are working all day, it’s not because you’re an entrepreneur, it’s because you lack self-management skills.
I work for 4 hours a day (most of the time) and cut myself off there. Because I know the quality of my work increases.
The psychology of entrepreneurship.
Our ancestors were entrepreneurs in their tribes.
And your psyche is not wired to remain stagnant.
You can do what you want, but I believe that the end goal for anyone is entrepreneurship.
Why? Because your psyche demands evolution for satisfaction. It demands an ever-increasing challenge without actually “winning the game.”
In a corporate power ladder, you will inevitably reach a point where challenge ceases to exist. You become docile, comfortable, and get used to mediocre living (and you will think that’s how it’s supposed to be).
The profound and meaningful lie in the unknown and entrepreneurship is your submarine into the depths of the ocean.
Work consumes about 25% of your life.
If you don’t create a career, you will be assigned one.
If you aren’t passionate about your work, you aren’t passionate for 25% of your life. Most people aren’t passionate about the other 75% of their life either.
Our career, or purpose, or mission is how we engage our attention with reality in an impactful way. It keeps us from going insane.
And frankly, we can’t engage our attention with the breath, body, or nature for our entire lives as a mindfulness practice. There must be a balance, but our attention must be engaged with reality to prevent a chaotic state of mind.
A 9-5 is a stepping stone.
I have nothing against a 9-5, but it is a means, not an end.
Use your job to acquire skills, knowledge, and status that allow you to create what you want.
The Dissolution Of Labor
Aristotle condemned manual labor as harmful to the body and soul.
The Ancient Greeks saw work as a necessary part of life. But only as a means to leisure, creativity, and contemplation as they considered them the keys to happiness.
Without work, leisure loses its meaning and vice versa.
Life begins to lack balance and contrast.
Manual work isn’t always bad. But completing mindless tasks for the sake of survival or status makes you no different than a robot or animal.
A sense of mastery must uphold our endeavors to create meaningful work.
Your purpose is the source of suffering you accept.
First, there were slaves that were assigned most of the labor work.
Then, tools like tractors, windmills, and self-checkouts reduced the burden further.
Now, the majority of employees are tied to their cubicles to perform repetitive tasks that go against their nature.
My beliefs are that humanity has evolved to the point of not needing humans to perform the “dirty work.”
Automation and artificial intelligence have seen leaps in development over the years.
There have been many doomsday speculations on this, but I only see good coming from it.
A decline in labor work demands an incline in creative and knowledge work.
From McKenna: “Thought can only go as far as the language that paves the road”
If we want to expand the limits of what’s possible, we have to create the knowledge, ideas, and beliefs that permeate culture and influence language. That way, collective thought can expand and exponential progress can be made.
The future of work, in my eyes, belongs to the creative.
The writers.
The speakers.
The designers.
The creators.
Every person that we thought AI would “replace.”
Instead, AI will act as a tool that allows creatives to push the boundaries.
To do this well, work is necessary, but rest and leisure are of more importance because of the brains Default Mode Network:
“The DMN is a series of interconnected sections that activate as soon as people stop concentrating on external tasks, and shifts from outward-focused to inward-focused cognition.”
In short, the brain is MORE active when you aren’t focused on work.
When we, as humans, prioritize both work and rest (not red wine and bubble baths type rest, but gym and walks type rest), we prime our mind for novel ideas.
And through the power of the internet, collective knowledge increases, and our capacity for thought evolves with it.
To get practical:
You now have the opportunity to pursue meaningful work that unlocks the parts of the brain that modern society has neglected for so long.
Humans can explore reality with passion, improve their skill set, and self-actualize.
The future of work belongs to the self-reliant, self-educated, and those that pursue the creative opportunity that automation and AI have presented.
The future is about balance, not overwork.
The future is about being human, not robotic.
The digital renaissance is here.
The Creator Economy Is The New Economy
I’ve been talking about this for a while now, but Matt Mic wrote an incredible thread that brings an entirely new perspective to my theory.
My theory = the future of work and education will be that every individual will have their own creator business (or work for creators) that act as a public school.
I’m going to summarize points from Matt’s thread with my own commentary and structure, but you can read it here.
First, we need to step back and realize how important social media is.
It can be toxic, yes, but that is a reflection of the individual’s choice to consume that content. Social media is an incredible addition to my life (and most creators’ lives, it is rarely toxic).
Humans are social creatures. Social media removes the barriers to socialization through media.
Media is how we learn.
Media is how we get new information.
Media is how we communicate the value of our businesses.
Media consumes a large portion of our lives. It creates a social fabric that people rely on for civilization to operate as it does.
P.S. I teach all of this, with Notion templates and systems, in Digital Economics. It is a masterclass on creator brand, content, product creation, and promotions for the future.
The 3 Layers Of Social Media
Platforms form the first layer of digital media.
Apple and Google created the majority of the tech we hold in our hands and have in our offices. They laid the foundation for social media.
The second layer is apps like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.
These apps captured the same value as the platform layer in that they have billions of monthly active users and trillions of dollars in value.
Over the past decade, a new and 3rd layer has emerged:
The Creator.
Like the apps themselves, huge creators like Rogan will garner billions of followers (over the next decade) and generate trillions of dollars.
Creators are “atomizing” what the social networks did by capturing mass attention, forming communities, distributing media, and generating revenue.
The Need For Human
With automation and AI seeing exponential growth, it only makes sense that people will get their media fix from humans.
Personal brands.
People that educate, entertain, and inspire according to their interests.
Unless we rewrite the collective psyche (which hasn’t changed much in a few hundred years) then this is inevitable. People are attracted to people, not robots.
Robots have their place in decreasing labor and increasing human creativity, though.
My Philosophy
Business is an extension of the self.
It is a vessel for your purpose.
Your purpose evolves, and you must solve the superficial problems in your life to reach your deepest purpose.
The pattern here are the eternal markets (where the most money flows).
Health, wealth, and relationships.
Solve your own problems by acquiring the skill and knowledge necessary to do so through the internet.
Pass down what you learn in the form of free content and paid products.
By doing so, you not only create an independent income source, but massive social leverage.
I’ve written about this extensively, but the most organized place to get the information is from the One Person Business series on my YouTube.
Creator Monetization Methods
Once you’ve built an audience, or even if you haven’t, there are many ways to monetize, but I will list them out by priority here.
1) Freelancing, Coaching, or Tutoring
To monetize from the start, you need a service.
Building a digital product or membership or software isn’t sustainable when you don’t have ample traffic to pull in an income.
When you create a minimum viable offer for $500-$1000, you can use direct outreach strategies to sell your offer.
Once you get some results and increase your prices you only need 2-3 clients a month to pull in more than the average US salary.
You don’t need a large audience and 500 product sales a month to generate an income.
What service do you create? I wrote about creating a minimum viable offer here.
In short, improve yourself and build something you would have wanted on your journey.
Pull inspiration from the products you purchased to achieve your self actualization.
Then, help others do the same.
2) Cohorts & Courses
Once you have a small audience and client results, you can transfer those results into a cohort style course.
This way, you can still:
- Charge higher prices
- Maintain a sustainable income
- Not need a ton of customers
A cohort-based course is a regular course with a time frame, helpful group calls, and a community to answer questions.
Then, when the time is right and you have a larger audience, you can turn it into a full-fledged do-it-yourself course.
3) Build Whatever You Want
Now that you have distribution and leverage, you can sell anything you want really.
- Want to start a clothing brand? Feel free.
- Want to sell a physical product like a supplement line? All you.
- Want to drop everything and build a physical gym or coffee shop? Go ahead.
You have the resources to make any business model work.
Your reputation is high. You have social capital. And your digital products are pulling in $50,000 to $200,000 a month.
This is on a 3-4 year time scale of course.
And just like that, you create your own career.
By learning, creating, and selling on the digital marketplace, you remove the barriers that once existed in the physical world.
The future is bright, and anyone that wants to take advantage has the ability to do so.
The eternal markets in business are:
- Health
- Wealth
- Relationships
- Happiness
These are all burning evergreen problems that people will face until the end of time.
Solve your own problems.
Document the solution.
Give it to others.
Get paid.
– Dan Koe
