Job Mind ...Business Mind - Which Do You Have?

Hey All

I'm on a 2 week camping trip with my friends, which is a story in itself, but not what I was going to talk about today.

I mean, it is nice to just take off when I want and not ask for "permission", er, ah, I mean "vacation time" from my boss. It seemed like there was always something that needed to be done "urgently" that kept me from leaving when I wanted.

But what got me thinking this morning was the guy in the campsite next to ours.

I don't know the guys name so for the sake of this story I'll simply call him Jake.

Early this morning, Jake went into town to the hardware store to buy a little hand saw and some boards ...about 2" x 2" x 8 feet long. He then spent the next few hours cutting the wood to size and assembling them into make shift poles (think of an X at the bottom and then a pole standing straight up.

Jake then positioned these poles at each corner of his tent and tied a duct tape repaired, plastic tarp to each corner to create a cover over his tent.


Of course, these homemade stands would not hold the tarp once the wind started blowing so he then tied rope to every tree in the area and to ground stakes ...if you can imagine, this made it look a bit like a maze to walk through and his campsite like some disaster relief site (you pick the 3rd world country).

Out of curiosity, I just had t ask Jake why he spent half his day building this tarp / maze / cover contraption and his answer was simple ...his tent leaks.

OK, fair enough, nobody wants to get wet while sleeping.

But the truth is, this "simple answer" is really a LOT more complex. Which is why I decided to write about this and tell you about a transformation that I've been going through since I started doing ecurrency arbitrage.

It really has to do about the psychology of a "worker bee" (having a job) and the psychology of a business owner's mind.

When I had a job, I used to look for things I could do to save money because I knew that I was only going to earn a fixed salary every 2-weeks. And since I had a fixed income, doing things to save money made a lot of sense as my overall net worth is basically income minus expenses.

If I can't affect my income, the only option I have is to reduce expenses i.e. spend less, do more work.

But with my ecurrency arbitrage business, I now have the ability to earn more money as I choose. If I do more ecurrency arbitrage set ups, I make more money. But it does take my time to do this ...there's no free lunch in business.

So now I look at everything a little differently as I can now have an immediate effect on my income and expenses and choose what gives me the best net benefit.

For example, if it takes me 2 hours each week to do laundry, and I could instead use those 2 hours to do ecurrency arbitrage set ups instead. So now I look at what's the real "cost" of me doing laundry?

I don't know exactly what that cost is but I do know it's cheaper for me to send my clothes to the cleaners and let them press my clothes than for me to iron the wrinkles out (plus, I absolutely hate to iron).

And here's where I'm now way ahead of Jake.

I would have just gone into town and bought a new tent instead of going to town for lumber and a saw. I know I could have made more money in that half a day wasted cutting wood than the tent would have cost me, so why should I waste my time building a rope maze?

Besides, I think I would kill myself tripping over all those ropes after a "margarita campfire" ...LOL.

So what's the moral of the story?

Get a business (any business, this is not limited to Paul Jenkins ecurrency arbitrage) and control both sides of your net worth equation. Even if you have a job, you can still work a business part time and do something more profitable than laundry, or cleaning, or yard work.

Make sense?

Ciao

Amy