I am going to keep this short and sweet. The world is always behind when it comes to change. I bet you are also focused on the media headlines, war, inflation and the amount of exposure you have to it is slowly starting to shape your perception of what’s happening in the world. There’s so much fearmongering and a modern day “Kansas City Shuffle” where the media looks right and everyone looks left. They hypnotize you into mimicking their perceptions and shifting your focus when in reality there’s something huge happening here behind the scenes. The truth is that no matter what you see on the news you need to prepare yourself for the future. You need to position yourself now to be in a good spot when this wave of change comes. Driving down the street to McDonald’s this morning to get my sausage, egg, & cheese mcgriddle with round egg (Saturdays are cheat day for my diet) I saw gasoline prices breaking $6 a gallon. I remember as a child that people moaned and groaned about it breaking $2, now about 25 years later, we’ve tripled that and things are starting to rise again. You need to earn as much money as you can right now to stay afloat the inflation, extend loan terms, lock-in low interest rates, and be prepared to buy assets when they crash. It’s a delicate balance between how much cash and how much assets to own. History tells us that following every massive inflation there’s usually a deflation. As you know from previous posts, the asset of choice is bitcoin because it’s simple, elegant, and no one controls it. Many of these ideas are paraphrased by Timothy Ferris in The 4-Hour Workweek. Here’s an Information Age tip from your friendly neighborhood HustleRN.
The age of traditional, hourly based jobs that require physical presence is over. Any big business clinging on to this antiquated system will be perceived as a capitalistic exploiter of young Americans. You can see the ‘Help Wanted’ signs all over the place because people know instinctively that this minimum wage job is not enough to make ends meet even if the whole household was working. It’s easier to not work and collect unemployment. This phenomenon is an instinctive reaction of the perception of the value of time. People believe their time is worth more. I can already see the quality of employees being hired are akin to scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to service. The truth is, American business can no longer afford to hire American workers. The transition has been, as you know when calling a customer service number, outsourced to areas of lower economic yield and that just means it’s cheaper, dirt cheap. However, with the advent of technology and the pandemic forcing the world to adapt to it, countries are developing a workforce specifically focused on dominating this specific niche of remote business like India. Some of my work that I’ve outsourced like research has been cheaper, better, and excessively polite. They treat me like a big business CEO attempting to attend to my every whim. These days, it’s difficult to even get our children to clean up after themselves because they’ve been raised in privilege. They cannot imagine a world that they’ve never been exposed to. The same way we cannot imagine a world without the US Dollar as a world reserve currency. If the US Dollar loses its status, all the services that are performed remotely and available 24/7 will compete worldwide. That’s what terrifying for the future of American jobs. If competition is fierce now, imagine adding another 7 billion people to the mix that will do it at a tenth of your wage and have no problem brown nosing. It’s time to train yourself now to be the best at what you do, remotely.
I currently work two remote full-time jobs, running a business from home, maintaining this blog, and somehow making time for date nights and family time. I wouldn’t be able to run the business or write this blog without the freedoms that come with remote work. The current issue with remote work is that the freedom comes with a price, usually in the form of a 50-75% pay cut from what I made working in the hospital. My solution? Work two of them simultaneously, or three if you’re capable. Preferably you want remote jobs based in California because they pay the highest. It’s not easy by any means because you have to look for jobs that are a good fit for multitasking. If it requires some kind of constant monitoring, let it go and continue looking. This is the hustle part. Some may consider this unethical or cheating and everybody is right depending on your worldview. The way I see it, I am leveraging my abilities as a millenial who grew up with technology. For the first time in my life, there are organizations that are prioritizing tech-savvy employees over actual experience. I am in a strange sandwich generation because I still remember what life was like before wifi using collect calls on payphones to friend’s houses before going over. The product of my experience has been that I excelled in working with technology. I am probably 10 times faster at navigating programs and charting than a majority of my older hospital coworkers. Most times, I am assistance the older remote employees on how to work the program. My children can process this data 5 times faster than me. This is the metric we need to nurture.
The information age employee will be paid for their attention. Like Tim Ferris says, “Do your job anytime and where you want, just get your work done.” Kids today have so much untapped potential that we complain how much screen time they have, how it ruins their social interactions, how different your experience was as a kid but guess what? It’s here to stay whether we like it or not so we need to start finding solutions on how to use these content consuming monsters we’ve created. My kid can process an enormous amount of data instantaneously. I can barely keep up with his modifications on Call of Duty that it dizzied me and I am not your average joe when it comes to gaming and technology. Employing this new work model of selling attention, the two jobs subjectively take up about 30-40% of my attention or max productivity. I can complete the work for both jobs usually in a period of 2 hours of 100% attention. This leaves me 6 free hours to browse the web, think of posts, make business emails, whatever. I can even take my work with me on errands because I run 2 cell phones that both have zoom and mobile hotspot if I need to jump on the laptop for whatever reason. T-Mobile Magenta Max has the best plan and with the uncapped 40gb mobile hotspot which is a huge plus when traveling. I was able to attend a cousin’s wedding in Texas without losing a day of work because I didn’t tell them I was going. Just the other day I was able to take a quick break at my gym’s sauna because I recently read about the effects on growth hormone. Who doesn’t want to look like Thor? Anyway, both jobs collectively pay me $78/hour, Mon-Fri for 8 hours. Voila, you can be in two places at once. The employee model will change because anything that requires physical presence will have to be paid more. This will lead to a shift of remote work paying less because more people will opt for these jobs and this is basic supply and demand. There will also be a long awaited dissolution of middle micro managers because they are usually overpaid and if they scare off all the employees, the business will fail. What’s interesting is that business and organizations will have to compete for the most comfortable work environment. For now, the ratio is about 1:2 but can later change to 1:3 or 1:4. You can see nursing strikes breaking out at hospitals all over California. This is that strange transition that’s happening where you can capitalize before the rest of the world catches up to what’s really happening. Trust me, they won’t like that people like me are being paid twice or three times as much as them for doing less work in less time. The truth is, it’s going to lead to a technological renaissance of trying to objectively record true measures of productivity. Companies will finally see that there is an inequality and there will be differences in pay according to the metrics. They will have to do away with this notion of equality in standardize pay because it simply doesn’t work. People are not equal, but what we can create is a fair system. People will finally have to be responsible for what they produce. If person A can produce 2,3,4x more than person B, then I believe they should be paid as much. What’s kind of embarrassing for others is that at my bare minimum work, I am still more productive than the worst employee at each of my jobs. That’s the sweet spot you’re looking for. But if you’re working your dream company or job, disregard any advice here and go for that one 100%. Give 100% to whatever you truly believe in. These jobs right now don’t mean anything to me and they’re just stepping stones to live on and accumulate enough money for the next step in the master plan. Remember, this is the first step developing a new culture of employee. One that feels heard, feels free, and paid fairly.