Get Paid For The Stuff You Created Years Ago

There should always be a delay between the time you do something, and when you get paid for the work you did. That means you’ve created an asset or product or invested capital that’s making money for you.

Time in → asset out → money in.

What you want to avoid is exchanging your time directly for an hourly wage. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, “If someone pays you for anything other than a specific transaction, you are a slave.”

Since most of us don’t have enough capital to invest to live off the return, it makes sense instead to build assets that go out into the world and make money for us. That way, you can get paid for the stuff you created years ago.

Get Paid For Outputs, Not Inputs.

The entire industrial revolution was built on factory work where the more time an employee put in, the more widgets the factory kicked out. Those days are over. With leverage, the number of hours you put in to make something matters far less than what you create.

For example, Tara and I spent two years writing our first movie script, and six months writing our second. Because we wrote them both on “spec” - we are speculating that they will sell - we had the freedom to take as much time as necessary to get it right. The first movie took much longer because we had never written a movie before - we had a lot to learn. The second script was faster because we applied everything we learned from writing the first.

But here’s the point:

The time it took to write either of them doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is how good the script is.

The marketplace doesn’t care about “time spent” - only the quality of the screenplay.

Here’s Naval talking about this in The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant:

“What you want in life is to be in control of your time. You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs. If you do something incredible to move the needle on the business, they have to pay you. Especially if they don’t know how you did it because it’s innate to your obsession or your skill or your innate abilities, they’re going to have to keep paying you to do it… You don’t have to worry as much about time management.”

What I love about writing is that there’s no template. Once you’ve mastered dramatic structure, it’s all instinct. The dialogue, pacing, characterization, story, and plot all come from a place that’s innate to the writer.

Then, with a little luck, it gets produced into a movie or TV show. The producers of the project don’t know how you wrote it, so they have to keep paying you to do it if they want more of the same. That’s how you can get paid for outputs, not inputs.

Good Timing Is Having The Right Thing At The Right Time.

When you’re creating products or assets, timing plays a big role in determining whether the project “hits” immediately or not.

Sometimes you get lucky and something has a lot of fire quickly. But if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay too. As long as what you’ve made is quality, you can be patient waiting for the right time.

This is what happened with the script for the hit TV show ER. The pilot script sat in the creator’s drawer for eighteen years before getting any traction at all! Here’s Steve de Souza talking about this in the book The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters:

“Be patient, keep your fingers crossed, and believe your ideas are viable and valuable. Though studios don’t want what you just wrote this week, the tide can turn on a dime. Michael Crichton told me he had the script for ER in his drawer for eighteen years! He wrote that script as a pilot for a network series but had the dumb luck of turning it in right after a movie of his flopped. Unable to come to a decision based on the merits of the script, the network executive decided to pass. So Michael kept this script in a drawer and concentrated on his novels and big movies. Then he heard that Spielberg was looking for a medical show, so he took the script out of the filing cabinet and thought he’d have to rewrite it. But to his surprise, he only had to update the equipment and technical jargon.”

There’s a mantra I like to repeat to remind myself how the world really works: anything can happen at any time.

Just because something doesn’t take off now, doesn’t mean it won’t later. So build assets and send them out into the world. If they’re really great, anything can happen.

Build Stuff That People Will Always Need.

There’s another trick that will make timing easier: make assets that people will always want.

I chose storytelling. Human history is built around myths. We will forever crave impactful stories based on the basic story principles of Aristotle. That’s why film / TV / novels / fiction will always be around. And producers will always need great movie scripts.

Wealest is another example. It’s the timeless ideas of wealth creators. And while how you get this information may change - you may one day get it from an AI bot that summarizes this site - the ideas are evergreen. They’ll be just as valid fifty years from now as they are right now.

So use leverage and be patient. Create products and assets and send them into the world so you can eventually get paid for stuff you created years ago. And live your life on your terms, not someone else’s.

Start now.

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SOURCES

Iglesias, Karl. The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters. Adams Media.

Jorgenson, Eric. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. Magrathea Publishing. Kindle Edition.