Getting ahead in life (the old-fashioned way)

Take a trip with me for a second.

It's 500 AD.

To provide for yourself, you fish.

Remember, you can't just go to Bass Pro Shop, though.

So that means during your day, you need to find things to fashion hooks and rods out of. Only after that can you actually fish.

One day, someone comes along, and lo and behold, he has fishing hooks carved from antlers.

They look like some fantastic hooks too - better than anything you could make.

You do the math, and preparing your supplies to go fishing takes you 4 hours.

That's 4 hours that you could be spending fishing.

It's more than worth it to trade him some of your fish.

Specialization

This kind of relationship benefits both parties while pushing humanity forward.

You can spend more time fishing because you don't have to make your hooks.

The hook maker can spend more time making hooks because he doesn't have to worry about where his next meal is coming from.

And since both can spend more time with their craft, they have more time to find ways that it can improve.

Maybe the hook maker figures out that a barb stops you from losing so many fish.

Suddenly, you're reeling in more fish because they're not able to get off the hook.

Now you have more fish to trade for other things that could improve your life.

This is exactly how humans got to have supercomputers and vessels that could get us around the world in a day.

The ability to trade leads to innovation.

Trade encourages specialization.

Add the two together, and your basic life activities that used to take 18 hours now only take 8.

The rest is yours to use.

Time Poverty

Looking back to our hunter-gatherer days, there wasn't much time to do anything else.

The same goes for anyone who's living off the land.

They spend their day ensuring that they're meeting their basic needs.

Taking care of the animals that are going to provide dinner next week, fetching water (that might have cholera) from the creek, and chopping wood so you have enough for winter.

For "basic needs," these tasks fill your whole day.

The main benefit of trade is not that you can thicken your wallet.

It's that it gives you time to do things that you actually want to do.

It's easier to go to the butcher and buy a steak than to raise a cow, spend the time preparing it, and then somehow store it.

It's easier to pay someone to put pipes in your home to give you access to clean water than it is to collect water from the creek and hope you don't get sick.

Paying a specialist frees up your time exponentially.

Now you have a few extra hours in your day that you can use to innovate on other things.

Your time is the most valuable thing that you have, but we need to create lives that give us the most agency over our time.

It doesn't come naturally.

Getting ahead

Most people will live in ignorance of the way that trade and money used to work.

But if we take a close enough look, the core of it hasn't changed much.

Despite predatory marketing and consumerism, there's hope for anyone and everyone.

You just need to have the right way of thinking about it.

Let's dive in.

Realize

Getting ahead requires you to realize one thing.

Money isn't about the things that you can buy with it - it never was.

It's about time.

The same story that we talked about earlier applies today.

You work, and instead of directly getting fish or fishing hooks, you're given money.

Rather than having to barter for what you need, you now have endless options of exchanging money for whatever you'd like.

Anything that you could need is within a 5-minute drive or at the tip of your fingers.

The best life optimizations and upgrades are those that free up time.

Those upgrades are something that we're willing to pay for.

We stop at the drive-through because we don't want to spend the time cooking dinner.

We use Google because searching through an encyclopedia takes too long.

We buy that new pair of shoes because learning how to make our own would take ages.

Shifting your perception of money to a store of time rather than a store of value allows us to see past modern consumerism. This shift makes life easier.

And just as we used to, we can increase our time freedom by playing by the old school rules.

Specialize

Specialization is as important today as it was 10,000 years ago.

It's no question that the people who create the best results get paid the most. Well, at least they should.

Promotions come with experience or results. As do pay raises.

Companies and people are willing to pay for things and services that make their lives easier.

If you're able to provide that as a service, then your time freedom will go through the roof.

This is because of two things:

- It will take you less time to do the same work

- People will be willing to pay more

Results speak for themselves.

There are ways to accelerate your specialization too.

Many people don't realize that investing in your skills has a higher return on investment than sticking it in the stock market.

Spending $1,000 on a course or class could land you a $5,000 raise or two $2,500-per-month clients.

Those kinds of returns would take you years to see in traditional investments.

Honing your skills is what will give you time freedom.

But the people that you know are as important as your skills.

Connect

We're always told, "your network is your net worth."

I didn't really understand how true this was until recently.

It's shocking, the amount of random people that will talk to you on the internet.

You'd also be surprised by how many of them you can help.

Human nature is connection.

Trade and specialization wouldn't exist if we stuck to ourselves and what we knew.

There are countless opportunities out there by simply having conversations.

And if you fit the right bill, people are willing to pay you to make their lives easier.

Connecting isn't even about the money. It can be, but it doesn't have to be.

Knowledge sharing is at the forefront of conversation and is so easy with the internet.

Everyone has ideas - everyone's are unique.

Maybe you have the solution to someone else's problem, but you didn't know that it was ever a problem.

You stand to gain everything but lose nothing when you chat someone up.

Well that’s it for today.

I had a lot of fun writing this one and connecting dots between past and present.

It’s a concept as a whole that I’ve been toying around with lately.

Anyways, I hope that you found your path to getting ahead through these words.

Until next time, with love,

Noah