📗Be a Free Range Human

  • Blinkist BlinkistFavorites 📗Be a Free Range Human
    • Free Range Humans are people who escape the 9-5 office regime.
    • A stable job is no longer as stable as before. Retirement plans are getting worse, which means people need to stay in the job until they are 80. It makes more sense to start Freelancing or start a Business .
    • We should save our time and live our life to the fullest. Regular 9-5 office job prevents us from doing so. However, it is not easy to figure out what it is it that you really want to be doing.
    • Interesting questions to ask yourself to figure out what you really want to be doing:
      1. When was the last time you felt alive and completely engaged in the moment?
      2. If a genie popped out of a bottle and gave you 12 months off with full pay, what would you do? Note what is it that excites you about the answers. What makes them appealing.
    • Focus on your weaknesses and figure out if they can be turned into strengths.
    • How to get original #Ideas:
      1. Read books no one else in your field is reading
      2. Start noticing what’s going on around you.
      3. Start making connections among unrelated parts of your everyday life (Notetaking may help)
    • Four types of Free Range Humans Business ventures:
      1. Services
      2. Virtual Products
      3. Physical Products
      4. Advertising
    • Stop Overthinking . Even the best plans may fail. Doing is better than getting ready. Re: 📗Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.
  • BookNotes 📗Be a Free Range Human
    • How to know if your idea can pay enough
    • I once received an email from someone who was trying to make a living from hand-made envelopes. She’d been making and selling her beautiful envelopes for years but never quite got it off the ground enough to cover her city lawyer salary and two mortgages. When I asked what had been holding her back, she immediately replied, ‘Time. I’m so busy, but I know if I find time to make more envelopes then things will work out.’
    • Hmm. Something didn’t add up here – and I mean that literally.
    • Five minutes and one calculator later it was crystal clear that in order to make her bare minimum she would have to sell more than 80 envelopes a day. That’s about 2,500 a month.
    • When I pointed out the numbers she was floored. Somehow, this highly intelligent person had never stopped to do a five-minute calculation. Discovering the truth meant she was able to focus on making another more profitable idea work as her escape vessel, and continue to build up the envelopes on the side as a secondary income stream.
    • Moral of the story: calculators can be cool, kiddies. Here’s how to do this for yourself right now.
    • Identify how much you need to make per month (very roughly). Now divide that by how much you expect to make from your main product. So if you need to make $5,000 (before tax), and your main product/service is $500 that = 10 sales per month.
    • That’s little more than two sales a week. Now imagine you’re launched, and have been out there doing this for a while, and people are interested in what you have to offer. In that scenario, does two per week (or whatever your number may be) sound like a reasonable number to achieve? If so, congratulations! You have an idea worth exploring further.
    • Tip: don’t get bogged down in finding exact numbers. This is a sanity check, not a plan. Do the calculation now.
    • Tip
    • If you realize the idea as it stands isn’t going to make what you need no matter how successful you get, either adapt the idea (eg raise the price or find another sort of buyer who can pay/buy more) or add in extra income streams (eg create those greeting cards as part of a wider portfolio). It doesn’t mean you won’t end up using that idea at some point, it simply means it might not be the fastest way out of your work right now.
  • BookNotes 📗Be a Free Range Human
    • Outside of employment, nobody is interested in years of experience. They want to know what can you help them with.
    • Doing regular blogs/podcasts/events can help validate ideas quickly
  • BookNotes 📗Be a Free Range Human
  • 📗Be a Free Range Human

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