Last night, I had a chance to chat with a friend of a friend who happened to be in town. The guy’s name is Todd, and he was stopping by to visit his friend in between his travels from South America to Asia. He was on his way to spend 45 days in Japan visiting 88 historic buddhist shrines. I remembered meeting him once before a few months ago. He was a unique character for sure, and I had to pick his brain.

Short story: he was an owner of an insurance firm, and had significant real estate holdings with active cash flow. He was, by all measures, financially independent.

So last night, I had to pick his brain again, because since the last time I had spoken with him, I had come a long way in building my own business. I learned that he was a big advocate of Tim Ferriss’ ideologies, mainly about efficiency. Now, I’m huge on efficiency and organization (it’s in my blood), and have tried to adapt Ferriss’ recommendations in my life and my business. There were a few revelations that I was only able to see in recent months, that Todd already had been living for a few years. While the crew we were with were playing table shuffleboard, Todd and I exchanged notes. It was more me taking notes from him and verifying what I had been learning in the school of hard knocks.

Here are the nuggets I captured from Todd (disclaimer – this is not intended to offend anyone, but to be a motivation for all):

1. People by and large are blinded by the patterns of their career, because they either fail to see that their abilities and talents are being employed by others for financial gain, and/or they are comfortable with the status quo, and proceeding through their career in a logical, stable manner. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, engineer, developer, banker, marketer, project manager, etc. – if you’re working for someone else, you are employing your own hard-earned talents to benefit someone else’s collective efforts, and you are living off of the highly taxed salary your employer is giving you. Many people are too obsessed with their corporate titles – VP, Executive Director, Senior Manager, so forth. And SO WHAT!? WHO CARES? The higher you go in the company, the more responsibility you have, which requires more time and talented effort on your part. The hamster wheel gets bigger and bigger, basically. All too many people get stuck in this pattern, then get unwittingly laid off when EPS guidance doesn’t meet Wall St. targets.
2. The secret is how you spend your time. Todd mentioned that you can easily travel to multiple countries for a year on a budget under 40k. Of course, this is accomplished by having sources of cash flow that are managed independently beforehand. Much easier said than done, but it is possible to travel for under 40k all around the world. To accomplish the recapture of wasted time, one has to always optimize processes that are not value-added in their business. An even bigger opportunity is when you can outsource tasks that you do not need to do yourself. Then you get your time back to do other more important things. At the end of the day, it’s really about setting up autonomous engines of cash flow that continue to work for you and thereby giving you time back in your life. For me personally, when I am at the point in my life to raise a family, my mission is to ensure I have the time to dedicate to my family. I do NOT want to be running around like a headless chicken helicopter parent, balancing ten thousand things while raising a family. It’s about focus, quality, and care for the things that are truly important in life. Scrambling through 728 work emails while creating a PowerPoint presentation to some execs that don’t give two craps about me while I have a screaming baby at 4 in the morning is not the way I want to go. If this is you, I feel sorry for you, and wish you the best. 
3. People who make significant money are thinkers. They get paid to think. The more that a business owner can extract himself from repetitive tasks that require little thinking, the more value he is able to produce for his company, and for himself. When people are pigeonholed into doing the same thing day in and day out, they can’t help but wonder why they’re getting paid so little to do the same thing over and over again. Rule of thumb: if it’s repetitive, outsource it or hire someone to do it so you can focus on the truly important aspects of running your business.
4. Once you have experienced the scale and power of owning and running your own business, you can never go back to the corporate grind. NEVER. If you experience tough times in your business, you pick yourself up and keep trying. You NEVER give up. For someone as stubborn as me, this one works well in my work ethic.
5. Life is WAY too short to live for someone else’s dreams. And if you’re employed by someone else, you better either REALLY enjoy what you do, or be using your job to develop the skills you want to master. Anything less is a waste of your precious time. The real pressures of life will sneak up on you before you know it, and by that time, it will be too late.

Now, of course, these 5 things can sound like high faluted pontificating, but after having experienced business failure and success in the course of the last 2 years, I know firsthand that this is a way better use of my time than anywhere else. To me, it’s akin to building a really cool car, piece by piece. Once it’s built, you can watch it fly down the racetrack. I’ll be honest, it’s kinda crazy watching dreams come true, slowly and one day at a time.

What’s the dream you’re building?