The Secret To Working Less, Producing More, And Getting Rich

In: How To| Real Estate| Wealth By: Brian Armstrong

16 Mar 2009

There is only so much you as one person can produce in a day. Your time and mental energy are, in some sense, your most precious resource. You have a limited supply that you can use in a focused and uninterrupted way each day.

So the question becomes, what is the most effective way to spend your time and mental energy?

Think for a minute about a person carrying buckets of water for their crops. There is a direct correlation between how much they work and how much water they get. If they want more water, they have to carry more buckets.

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Now compare this to someone who uses their time and energy to build a machine instead. This machine is “passive” in that it works whether it’s owner is there or not.

Obviously there is great leverage in having a machine such as this. It can work day and night while your time is preserved to build new machines or relax.

In the modern day of the knowledge worker, we no longer need to carry buckets of water with manual labor. But there is certainly the mental manual labor of a 9-to-5 job, copying and pasting in Excel, or whatever it is that you do. It really is no different in the sense that there is a direct correlation between your time and how much your earn. If you want to earn more, you need to put in more hours and continue working each week.

Now, if you are surrounded by people who carry mental buckets for a living, the idea of building a machine might sound pretty silly to them. I’m sure the first person who built a water wheel felt the same way. It is more difficult to build, costs money for wood and nails, and might not even work.

While you are messing around trying to get your machine working, your bucket carrying counterparts will probably get a lot more water carried in the short term. They might think you are pretty silly spending all your time and money on a machine that might not even work while they are getting consistent progress each and every day carrying buckets.

But at some point you’ll get your machine working, and it will start to match the output you were able to accomplish manually. Even if your machine is only producing the equivalent of what you could do manually, you still have a very significant advantage: your time and mental energy are still available.

Because they have been preserved, you can now go on to build a second machine, and another, and another. When you have 15 machines running simultaneously your output will be far greater than any one person could produce (or earn in a job).

This is the real key: preserve your most precious resource (your time and mental energy). Build systems and machines that work when you aren’t there. Avoid mental manual labor that require your time for output.

What are the best modern examples of these machines? Owning and investing in businesses, income generating real estate, some web businesses, etc. With these machines in place you can produce far more than any one individual could with manual labor, and get rich in the process.

32 Responses

Jared O'Toole

March 16th, 2009 at 4:34 pm

Great post. It’s one of the toughest leaps as an entrepreneur. Give up that steady, secure income and lifestyle to seemingly take a step backwards at first.

Everyone thinks your crazy at first but they just don’t see the bigger picture. They ask every week have you made it yet and laugh when you still say no. It’s a process but only you and like-minded people understand whats going on and have the goals and dreams that most people think are impossible.

Brian Armstrong

March 16th, 2009 at 9:04 pm

Very true Jared!

KCLau

March 16th, 2009 at 9:28 pm

I really enjoy your metaphor describing the mental bucket. This reminds me of the natural entrepreneur who are directly or indirectly influenced by a successful entrepreneurial mentor. They build machines right from the start!

Brian Armstrong

March 17th, 2009 at 2:46 pm

Yep, I think you’re right a lot of entrepreneurs start out with business ideas that are more manual. For example, being a consultant or making each product in their garage by themselves. Eventually they start to think about a way to make it scale. Thanks!

Ryan K

March 17th, 2009 at 9:49 am

I think my bucket has a hole in it :)

Good post glad to see you get back to the meat of your blog.

What is the update on the moving out of the country post?

Brian Armstrong

March 17th, 2009 at 2:48 pm

Hi Ryan…yeah talking about TV and all that is a little off topic, so glad people stick around to hear me complain :) I’m departing for BA April 29th. I need to do some more updates on UniversityTutor.com as well. It’s making about $500/month right now passively. But I’m still working on getting that new business model in place that takes a percentage of each transaction instead of a monthly fee from tutors. Learning a lot about the payment processing industry so I’ll be sure to post on that once I have some more concrete results to show. Thanks!

College Town Menus (CTM)

March 17th, 2009 at 1:25 pm

Agreed, another good post. It takes a thick head to keep pushing on despite what others say about you and your “water well” idea. For some, its hard to come up with the “water well” idea. For others its easy to come up with the idea, but they dont act on it. It’s another thing to have the idea, take action, spend the money to partially develop a working prototype, and then stop short and effectively losing all the time and materals from before. To get through the different stages, with the hardest thing is keeping motivation and seeing the end-state, is truely the best feeling. I hope to someday (soon) finish my “water well” idea and have it produce for me. Brian’s University Tutor website is a great example!!

Brian, you should write some posts about the many steps you took for your investment realestate properties. What made you decide to buy properties for renting income and what was your inpsiration? Did you have the funding? If not, howd you get it? Once you got the house, how did you find renters? What about legal, maintenance aspects? I’m very intersted in this topic but am very hesitant to just jump into it without knowing much more. Now is definately the time to pusue something like this.
I’m looking into Tax Lien Certificates a little bit more closely, my county pays 19% for those, which are a bit more secure and guaranteed than an actual property is.

Brian Armstrong

March 17th, 2009 at 2:52 pm

Good point. I’ve written a little about it, for example: http://www.startbreakingfree.com/190/how-to-find-killer-real-estate-deals/

But the short answer is that I got interested in real estate because most wealthy people own it. I read about a half dozen books on it, but still didn’t think I knew enough to actually take action. Eventually I joined a local real estate investor group which had a bunch of classes and provided people I could call for real advice in my local market (Houston). This is what got me to actually take action. I had a little bit of money to invest, so this helped. Basically, if I could narrow it down to one thing which helped me get started it was finding mentors and getting around other local real estate investors in a local group. Most cities have one so keep an eye out.

Samuel McCrohan

March 17th, 2009 at 1:47 pm

I love this metaphor.
Bare in mind a machine such as that will require maintenance… I’m not sure many things are truly passive.
I definitely think you can have a crossover though (as in build the machines whilst carrying buckets) at least in the short term, which alleviates a lot of the risk factor. I guess that is the main putoff for most people in the first place.
Becoming good at scheduling is the key to getting that to work. :)
Sam

Brian Armstrong

March 17th, 2009 at 2:56 pm

Hi Sam…totally agree. This is how I got started as well, started to build my machine on the side while still carrying buckets (because no telling how long it will take to start working). Then when the machine started working barely I quit carrying buckets. Took a pay cut to do it, but now I had all my time free to build machines. This is the natural transition I think, unless you have lots of cash saved up.

Also I agree about maintenance…how “passive” it is can really vary. Lots of people invest in businesses which take all their time, etc. So there is certainly an art to doing it. UniversityTutor.com is an example of a machine designed to be almost entirely automated once it really got running. I keep adding more FAQ’s to the help section and the users are doing most of the work, so I am having to answer fewer and fewer emails from it each week, and the phone calls are down to zero.

Thanks for the comment!

Matt Thomas

March 17th, 2009 at 7:30 pm

Great post, and excellent metaphor.

I think I can take this concept one step further. Instead of spending YOUR time building a machine (ie: software) that carries mental buckets for you, why not hire a freelancer to write the software for you? Depending on the complexity of the task, it might not even be that expensive to do.

That way, NONE (or little) of your time is being used to do work that can be automated or outsourced.

College Town Menus (CTM)

March 17th, 2009 at 10:00 pm

Funny thing is, that’s the EXACT thing I did for my site! I knew exactly what I wanted, but knew that there was no way (or want) to do all the programming, and that I could hire someone to do it better and faster for me. I’m very satisfied with the results! If I could, I’d outsource everything =).

Not sure what Brian is doing, but I’m pretty sure he is doing at least some outsourcing for his site…

Brian Armstrong

March 18th, 2009 at 1:02 am

Yep thats true, I use freelancers for some tasks…good point Matt, there is always another level of automation!

William Bakhos

March 17th, 2009 at 7:46 pm

Fantastic Post.

You share very similar ideals to myself so expect to see me back here more often!

I believe a persons true monetary wealth can be defined simply as “the income you generate for every minute your not working”.

Look forward to reading more from you.

William Bakhos

Brian Armstrong

March 18th, 2009 at 12:58 am

Totally agree William. That reminds me…also heard it defined one time as “how long you can continue to earn money once you stop working”. I think Robert Kiyosaki said that but not sure. How’d you come across the site?

William Bakhos

March 18th, 2009 at 1:05 am

I came across it surfing through some blogs in Technorati and liked your article..

Uno I think it was Robert Kiyosaki… Rich Dad poor Dad… thanks for reminding me.. it definitely stuck in my head! I used a poetic licence to mess the words up a bit but it’s kind of on the same line..

Keep up the great work and look forward to reading more from you.

Cheers
Will

Brian Armstrong

March 18th, 2009 at 1:11 am

Sounds good thanks Will!

Na Na

March 17th, 2009 at 9:45 pm

I love your blogs Brian! I get alot of people, even my own family laughing at my goals and ideas when I say that I will be a successful millionaire before I’m 35. Making it to where I want to be will not be overnight, but I refuse to let a 9-5 take over my life. No JOB is guaranteed. I want freedom and not security.

Brian Armstrong

March 18th, 2009 at 12:59 am

You can do it…count yourself amongt a different group of “friends” on this website, even if it’s only virtual :)

Chiko777

March 22nd, 2009 at 1:09 pm

Great post, I just recently wrote something similar to this post on my blog last week. Passive streams of income is definitely the way to go. I am currently working on a couple of passive income streams and encourage others to do the same. Hey Brian, how many passive forms of income do you currently generate (that is if you don’t mind sharing? I am looking to have about 3-5 by the end of next year.

Brian Armstrong

March 23rd, 2009 at 1:12 pm

1. Real estate
2. Blogging
3. UniversityTutor.com

Thanks Chiko!

Na Na

March 23rd, 2009 at 2:06 pm

I wanted to know how did you find a web developer to develop your websites? I do web design myself, but I would rather pay someone that knows programming and use their time. Any suggestions?

Brian Armstrong

April 6th, 2009 at 2:25 pm

Try odesk.com

Chiko777

March 23rd, 2009 at 8:02 pm

Good stuff Brian, eventually I would like to have these streams of income.

1. MLM Business
2. Stock Trading/Investing
3. Ebay Business
4. Blogging
5. Educational Business (Books, CDs, Seminars)
6. Traditional Business (once I am free at 25)

Flint

March 26th, 2009 at 1:33 pm

I am Flint who is an enthusiastic guy and have developed a site called http://money-making-system.synthasite.com which has information about sites where you could make money. I have written every single word on the site by his life experience.