Art Of Money

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How to Continue the Shift from Employee to Business Owner

In this edition I want to continue on with the topic of assets from the last edition. The last time it was an overview of external and internal assets and judging by the number of responses [just hit reply and let me know what you think] and it seems like it was something that readers could relate to.

Therefore I want to dive in a little deeper this time and focus on building assets while you work at your job. These techniques will ensure that the money from your paycheck is the least valuable thing that you acquire from trading your time for money every weekday.

“Know the Ladder”

As opposed to fighting the ladder, which is what most employees do.
This is a technique that I used extensively before I quit my job and not only does it build internal assets, but it can greatly reduce that soul rotting feeling of being trapped in a completely irrational system.

The ladder, if your job is like most, is the systematic torture system that stomps creativity and keeps most everyone miserable. On the surface it is comprised of your supervisor, your boss, their boss and the director or whoever…all the way up to the CEO or in my case, the premier of our province.

Knowing the ladder is a simple exercise of empathy and problem solving. Step one is to understand your boss’s job. Put aside whatever emotions are involved and simply observe what they do and try to understand why they are doing it.

What is in their job description and what pressures are squeezing them. You’ll know that you’ve fully got their job once you come to a key understanding:

If you had their job, you probably couldn’t do it any better than they are.

Do you now why?

Because, except in the rarest of circumstances, the job is shaped by the system. No matter what the problem; it is always the system that is to blame. That’s why 99.9% of the time it is irrelevant who wins an election; unless that person is truly exceptional at changing a system, the system will just crush the newly appointed into the same mold as the last person. New face, same results.

Keep moving up the ladder until you understand the pressure and the systems that make up your entire organization. Don’t even think of solutions: that isn’t relevant at this point.

By the time you complete the exercise you’ll have acquired a couple key inner assets: one will relate to how important it is to create simple systems right from the start of a business and the other will relate to how tough it is to change those systems once they are established.

If you can do this exercise, even quickly without getting bogged down in judging the people on the ladder, buy yourself a glass of champagne because you’re now thinking like a business owner rather than an employee.

Congrats,

Jon Symons

P.S. The first thing I did to start my transition from employee to online business owner was to start a blog. If you’d like to get paid to learn about Internet business systems you may be interested in a new project of mine.