We all get the same 24 hours each day, of which almost half is devoted to attending to sleeping, eating, transportation and errands. On a good day this leaves 12 hours with which you are free to do as you please to further the achievement of your goals and desires. How is it that some people manage to get so much more out of that 12 hours than others? Why is the time of some people so valuable that they can command $250/hr for their attention? How do I go about earning that, and perhaps more?

The answer to this lies in the prehistoric days, a vague and poorly documented era that I am free to take artistic liberty with. Og was a particularly smart caveman living in that particular era and like all good cavemen he spent the bulk of his days hunting animals while simultaneously avoiding being hunted by said animals. Og was rather fascinated with the world around him, often getting lost in his primitive caveman thoughts as he spied a particularly interesting leaf. It was perhaps the first case of ADD ever noted, and unfortunately for Og it meant that animals would often creep up on him and catch him off-guard. Many wounds later Og realized that he was very poorly equipped in comparison to the saber-tooth tiger that had just run him up a tree. Something had to be done lest he starved.

Og did some heavy thinking and came to the realization that a wooden stick would help him fend off attackers if wielded in the right way. It was a bold idea with much potential. Up until now everyone simple wrestled smaller prey to the ground or settled on sharing termites with the chimpanzees (history suggests it was them that first invented the stick, but accurate patent records have yet to be dug up). After much testing and determination Og had his first functional hunting stick and the first real meal in weeks. The human race had its first tool and soon Og became the most well-fed caveman around.

Other cavemen began to take note of his bulging waistline and came to Og hooting angrily. They too wanted to hunt more effectively as the cavewomen at home were beginning to notice how much better Og was fairing. Og pondered this situation carefully and gestured wildly that yes he would share the powerful secret of the Hunting Stick. In exchange each caveman using said stick would be required to provide Og with one chunk of mammoth meat per month. It was a fair bargain and so Og was able to provide food for himself and his family nearly effortlessly.

So much is written about how to manage your time effectively, but performing low-output tasks efficiently will still get you far less than performing high-output tasks inefficiently. Og’s key to success was his propensity to find ways of leveraging his resources to achieve exponentially higher gain. His first breakthrough came from the stick, which allowed him to catch bigger prey faster than the other cavemen. Rather than using just himself to perform the work, he had transferred some of it to the stick. With the spare time this provided Og was able to think harder and an even bigger breakthrough came next. Og realized that he could equip others with a marvelous Hunting Stick in exchange for food. Suddenly Og didn’t have to do any hunting at all thanks to properly leveraging his resources (the stick idea). At this point historical records are again rather faint, but we can theorize that Og continued to profit from his invention by creating product upgrades like the Sharpened Hunting Stick, Hunting Stick Classic, and the Armored Tank.

You don’t need to be an inventor or a caveman to have this model work for you. What you do need is a change of mindset from the rat race of getting as much done as you humanly can within those 12 free hours into figuring out how much you can leverage your resources and abilities to exponentially increase the return you receive on each hour you work. As a work machine a human being is actually quite terrible. We are high maintenance, error-prone, and can only do so much work in a given period of time. The most productive use of that 12 hours is thinking up ways to generate value through available resources, and then putting those resources together to generate that value. You don’t want to get stuck requiring yourself to be able to generate the value, as the opportunity for expansion becomes highly limited. Og could have sold his hunting services rather than the Hunting Stick, but then he would have to be constantly working to receive payment and would have likely been stomped on by a mammoth. Remember that as impressive as a consultant’s $250/hr rate may sound, many millionaires are making much more than that from passive income streams and doing so while they sleep.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 6:42 am and is filed under Productivity, Business, Entrepreneurship, Business Strategy, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.