11 ms·

Your Most Valuable Asset Is Yourself

81 points by yarapavan 11y ago

bertr4nd 11y ago
I'm genuinely curious -- do many people with salaried jobs really have a "side hustle"? I'd feel a bit guilty working on a side project for money when I'm being paid as a fulltimer.
- YuriNiyazov 11y ago
  Are you implying that you think of "full-time" as meaning that if you want to write code on the weekend and in the evenings, it has to be either for your employer, or a personal/open source project?
  - bertr4nd 11y ago
    Yeah, that's basically how I feel about it. I'm sure not everyone agrees, and I certainly don't mean to pass judgment. I'm just saying that I, personally, would feel weird about doing so.
    - miseg 11y ago
      I understand what you mean, although I don't take the same stance. You have an employment contract to work a certain number of hours. You have not leased your life to your employer.
    - throwaway999888 11y ago
      It must be very convenient for employers to have employees that feel that their whole lives are leased to them. Modulo burnout and things like that, of course.
    - YuriNiyazov 11y ago
      It's not about agreement or judgment. It's certainly fine for values to be different. What I am confused about is this: what are the underlying values that you hold that inform this feeling of weirdness?
- sdrothrock 11y ago
  I would love to have one if I could muster up the time and/or energy to do it. I don't think there's anything unethical about it at all as long as it's not competing with or using information from your employer.
- trgn 11y ago
  I wonder the same. I rarely side hustle for money doing tech stuff, mostly because I don't have enough mental energy left over after a full day of day-job work. I suppose for side-hustles it may help doing something that's somewhat removed from your day job. Rental property comes to mind. It's fairly rote, it's social, you can put in as much/little elbow grease in it as you like (barring the rare emergency), but it does generate modest income, it's usually more than just a "hobby". A friend, who doesn't work in finance, is really into the stock market, spends a lot of time on researching companies. That's a kind of side-hustle too I suppose.
  - sixpence 11y ago
    Many people doing this are not doing it after a full day of work, they are doing it during their day job.
- sosuke 11y ago
  I've always calculated a full time job as 2,080 hours a year. That leaves 18.3 hours per day, or 6,680 hours per year, to do with what I please. Darn sleep takes up a big chunk of that. In the past I've done a lot of side work much to my full time jobs benefit. Not so much in the last couple of years I've changed around some priorities. It was a bunch of fun though you should give it a try!
  - dheera 11y ago
    I hate sleep. But it would probably not be a good situation if everyone didn't need to sleep, because then we'd all be expected to work that much more. Ideally, it would be awesome if I could avoid the need to sleep, but nobody else should know about it.
- sixpence 11y ago
  It is difficult to do at the peon level, unless you have a lazy job where your bosses give you privacy and lax deadlines. I've had experience with both. I worked at a large insurance company / asset management company in Connecticut. Initially, management was tight, so while we generally worked 9-5, those hours were fully utilized plus some. Curiously, management was overseeing efforts, and not fully utilized, and most people in management had a side gig -- articles they were writing, speaking engagements, properties they were managing -- all during work hours. Then HR changed the promotion policy. You could only get promoted if you had 6 people under you. My manager immediately hired three more people to "stay" a manager. Then, he encouraged each of us to hire people under us, the wordload was mostly the same, we just created a lot more processes, controls, documentation, PMO, etc. But not enough to consume all the time the now-gigantic team had. While incredibly wasteful for the company and our owner (the US government) we had so much free time we were doing contract gigs during office hours. Two guys had full-on startups in play.
- 6d0debc071 11y ago
  I've a few things going on. I'm being paid for 9-5. The rest of the time is mine, gloriously mine, to dispose of however I please. Full time work is a misnomer in common use. If companies wanted to control how I disposed of all my hours, there'd be a much higher price involved.
kogepathic 11y ago
> dcotors > Tradtiional Come on, NY Times, seriously? Is this the quality of journalism these days? At least run a spell check on the article before you hit publish.
- muzakthings 11y ago
  Honest question, why does anyone care about spelling errors? They aren't even grammatical errors; we know what they intended. I'd rather they make spelling errors than factual ones, and I'd rather we focus on teaching kids problem solving rather than memorizing sequences of letters.
  - solutionyogi 11y ago
    Thanks to software, it is extremely easy to not have spelling error. So if they can't achieve this simple thing, how can I trust them to get the facts right which requires significantly more effort? For an author I don't know, a spelling error is a huge negative signal for me personally.
    - hellofunk 11y ago
      Agreed. Journalism is about words. That's it. Words are the sole instrument in print journalism (excluding photojournalism). If the words are wrong, then the instrument is out of tune. No matter how great the musician, if he can't keep his instrument maintained, then how are we to trust his abilities at music in general?
    - dynomight 11y ago
      They're typos. Here's a carefully written article: http://www.educationbug.org/a/typos-vs-misspellings.html http://www.educationbug.org/a/typos-vs-misspellings.html
  - jdimov10 11y ago
    It shows sloppiness. For a journalist, who makes a living out of working with words, such basic level of sloppiness is inexcusable. You can't expect much from someone who does not respect the most basic, elementary rules of their trade.
jweak 11y ago
How very American. With your 10 hour work days + 3 hours commute, you should totally take a side job. Why not work the 10 vacation days too?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
brenschluss 11y ago
Interesting idea, but underwhelming lessons: "invest in education and training, take side jobs, push back retirement". I personally subscribe to the genetic optimization/hill-climbing strategy: To make sure you don't get stuck in local optima, make sure you're time-to-time riskily choosing what may seem like short-term losses, and injecting a healthy degree of randomness/mutation in your process. Over time, your degree of risk and randomness should slowly decrease. Even so, you may find that a boost of randomness/mutation/risk may be necessary even during later stages of life.
donkeyd 11y ago
> find a side gig if you can make time Nobody can make time. You can only spend time differently. Time is your most valuable asset, because once you die you have none left. Make to most of the time you have, because once your time is spent, there's no way of getting it back. You could be dead tomorrow, having more money in the bank won't make a difference then. Having spent time with you loved ones will make a difference to them, because they will have the memories.
- mgraczyk 11y ago
  I agree with your premise, but your last point doesn't make much sense. Your loved ones would also get the money. Maybe they value the money more than the memories they shared with you.
  - donkeyd 11y ago
    Yea, I thought of this too while I was writing it. It's a very personal matter probably, but I've often heard that people on their death beds are more concerned about not spending more time with loved ones than not earning enough money. So I chose to write it as is anyway.
    - lmm 11y ago
      I've always wondered how honest such statements are. Even if you'd actually enjoyed work much more than family time, wouldn't you tell your family what they'd want to hear under those circumstances?
      - will_pseudonym 11y ago
        Why not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God to your loved ones in your last moments with them? Don't they deserve that?!
        dagw 11y ago
        Don't they deserve that Of course not, unless of course they happen to be assholes. Tell them what you think they need to hear to make a terrible situation as bearable as possible and try to help them have a loving memory of you. Confessing your 'sins' on your deathbed just to ease your conscience without any thoughts of the consequences is an extremely selfish and narcissistic act which does nothing to help your loved ones.
jdimov10 11y ago
I have a better idea. Fuck "financial planning", fuck retirement, fuck all these people who think they know what's right for you and live your life NOW. Be irresponsible. Be EXTREMELY irresponsible. Work less. Play more. Struggle less. Enjoy more. Save less. Live more. Comply less. Create more. You don't "earn" your way to wealth and you don't "save" your way to wealth - the maths just don't work out! You can only ever play your way to wealth.
- edem 11y ago
  Did you read this in a self help book?
  - jdimov10 11y ago
    People do not learn by reading. Reading only helps to re-enforce what you already believe in and are open to accepting (all other propositions are ALWAYS discarded - no exceptions, regardless of how "objective" you think you are). I myself only accept what works for me. I am pragmatic to the extreme. I know of NO other person who fully agrees with my philosophy on life (my fundamental beliefs are VERY different from what is commonly accepted) - but that's exactly the point - that's what makes 'me' me. Now I have offered the above guidelines for those who are already inclined to agree. I have no interest in arguing or convincing those who do not.
    - marklgr 11y ago
      > I have no interest in arguing or convincing those who do not. In my experience, people who say that have a lot of interest in convincing others. It's like, "I don't care what people think or say". It's mostly pre-emptive reply to criticism.
      - isolate 11y ago
        Abstracting further, explicit and unprompted denials are usually protecting something.
lazyjones 11y ago
I liked the title (expecting advice to take care of your health), but was disappointed by the "you are your job and your net worth" mentality. By that measure, family, happiness, personal relationships are all distracting liabilities and should probably be avoided. Or perhaps maximizing one's wealth isn't a worthwhile goal after all and it's fine to reach a certain level of financial security - as a means, not an end?
isolate 11y ago
tl;dr Step 1: Get a piece of paper. Step 2: Work your ass off. Step 3: Never retire. Pretty sure society has been drilling this into us since preschool, but thanks for the reminder.
trymas 11y ago
TL;DR: to make this work - IMHO you must also be 'money oriented'. I would like to say that this is not always true ('invest in yourself' and expand your bank account in such way). Basically you must be 'money oriented'. Looking into my university, there is a whole spectrum of people, who are all invested in them selves more than 99.9% people in my country. But there are professors who have some successful businesses, and also lecturers who are not 'money oriented' and just like academia, and there are some not so lucky people, who maybe had some bad twists in their life, suffered depression, etc., and just live a basic life. It is probably to find something similar with people who are not so 'invested in themselves'. There some well established folks and not so well..
dschiptsov 11y ago
s/Asset/Startup/
danharaj 11y ago
I think it's really gross to consider anyone an investment, a piece of 'human capital'. I read a book recently by Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos. It's about how modern ideology tries to redefine human beings in this way: You are capital which appreciates in value and gives you return on investment. All other definitions of what a human being is ought to be subordinate to this definition: Human as political creature is less important than human as economic investment. Human as member of society is less important than human competing in the free market. I found Brown's observations disturbing yet plausible, but I never expected to see these pernicious ideas flagrantly advocated in a mainstream newspaper. It feels like the void is trying to suck my soul out of my body when I try to think this way.
- laotzu 11y ago
  I wonder about the linguistic difference between the terms "human property" and "human capital". One is synonymous with "slave" and one is synonymous with "employee" and yet "property" and "capital" are virtually synonymous.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
pitt1980 11y ago
http://radicalpersonalfinance.com/my-plan-for-how-i-would-become-a-millionaire-with-a-minimum-wage-job-at-walmart-rpf0043/ http://radicalpersonalfinance.com/my-plan-for-how-i-would-be... buried link in the story, seems more interesting than the story itself
golergka 11y ago
Why do comments here critisize this article as if it was life advice, when this is not life advice, but life advice purely from investment standpoint? Is a concept of "advice purely from a certain standpoint" too complex for HN comments?
- laotzu 11y ago
  Life advice from an investment standpoint is life advice
  - taurath 11y ago
    Monetary investment is not equivalent to life investment.
cousin_it 11y ago
Don't teach poor people how to outcompete other poor people. Instead, teach them how to cooperate.
- dagw 11y ago
  That sounds like a terrible idea if you're rich person... ;)
  - laotzu 11y ago
    >Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity. -MLK, last speech the night before assasination
J_Darnley 11y ago
Thanks but that asset is pretty worthless here.

81 points by yarapavan 11y ago

I'm genuinely curious -- do many people with salaried jobs really have a "side hustle"? I'd feel a bit guilty working on a side project for money when I'm being paid as a fulltimer.

YuriNiyazov 11y ago
Are you implying that you think of "full-time" as meaning that if you want to write code on the weekend and in the evenings, it has to be either for your employer, or a personal/open source project?
- bertr4nd 11y ago
  Yeah, that's basically how I feel about it. I'm sure not everyone agrees, and I certainly don't mean to pass judgment. I'm just saying that I, personally, would feel weird about doing so.
  - miseg 11y ago
    I understand what you mean, although I don't take the same stance. You have an employment contract to work a certain number of hours. You have not leased your life to your employer.
  - throwaway999888 11y ago
    It must be very convenient for employers to have employees that feel that their whole lives are leased to them. Modulo burnout and things like that, of course.
  - YuriNiyazov 11y ago
    It's not about agreement or judgment. It's certainly fine for values to be different. What I am confused about is this: what are the underlying values that you hold that inform this feeling of weirdness?
sdrothrock 11y ago
I would love to have one if I could muster up the time and/or energy to do it. I don't think there's anything unethical about it at all as long as it's not competing with or using information from your employer.
trgn 11y ago
I wonder the same. I rarely side hustle for money doing tech stuff, mostly because I don't have enough mental energy left over after a full day of day-job work. I suppose for side-hustles it may help doing something that's somewhat removed from your day job. Rental property comes to mind. It's fairly rote, it's social, you can put in as much/little elbow grease in it as you like (barring the rare emergency), but it does generate modest income, it's usually more than just a "hobby". A friend, who doesn't work in finance, is really into the stock market, spends a lot of time on researching companies. That's a kind of side-hustle too I suppose.
- sixpence 11y ago
  Many people doing this are not doing it after a full day of work, they are doing it during their day job.
sosuke 11y ago
I've always calculated a full time job as 2,080 hours a year. That leaves 18.3 hours per day, or 6,680 hours per year, to do with what I please. Darn sleep takes up a big chunk of that. In the past I've done a lot of side work much to my full time jobs benefit. Not so much in the last couple of years I've changed around some priorities. It was a bunch of fun though you should give it a try!
- dheera 11y ago
  I hate sleep. But it would probably not be a good situation if everyone didn't need to sleep, because then we'd all be expected to work that much more. Ideally, it would be awesome if I could avoid the need to sleep, but nobody else should know about it.
sixpence 11y ago
It is difficult to do at the peon level, unless you have a lazy job where your bosses give you privacy and lax deadlines. I've had experience with both. I worked at a large insurance company / asset management company in Connecticut. Initially, management was tight, so while we generally worked 9-5, those hours were fully utilized plus some. Curiously, management was overseeing efforts, and not fully utilized, and most people in management had a side gig -- articles they were writing, speaking engagements, properties they were managing -- all during work hours. Then HR changed the promotion policy. You could only get promoted if you had 6 people under you. My manager immediately hired three more people to "stay" a manager. Then, he encouraged each of us to hire people under us, the wordload was mostly the same, we just created a lot more processes, controls, documentation, PMO, etc. But not enough to consume all the time the now-gigantic team had. While incredibly wasteful for the company and our owner (the US government) we had so much free time we were doing contract gigs during office hours. Two guys had full-on startups in play.
6d0debc071 11y ago
I've a few things going on. I'm being paid for 9-5. The rest of the time is mine, gloriously mine, to dispose of however I please. Full time work is a misnomer in common use. If companies wanted to control how I disposed of all my hours, there'd be a much higher price involved.

kogepathic 11y ago

> dcotors > Tradtiional Come on, NY Times, seriously? Is this the quality of journalism these days? At least run a spell check on the article before you hit publish.

muzakthings 11y ago
Honest question, why does anyone care about spelling errors? They aren't even grammatical errors; we know what they intended. I'd rather they make spelling errors than factual ones, and I'd rather we focus on teaching kids problem solving rather than memorizing sequences of letters.
- solutionyogi 11y ago
  Thanks to software, it is extremely easy to not have spelling error. So if they can't achieve this simple thing, how can I trust them to get the facts right which requires significantly more effort? For an author I don't know, a spelling error is a huge negative signal for me personally.
  - hellofunk 11y ago
    Agreed. Journalism is about words. That's it. Words are the sole instrument in print journalism (excluding photojournalism). If the words are wrong, then the instrument is out of tune. No matter how great the musician, if he can't keep his instrument maintained, then how are we to trust his abilities at music in general?
  - dynomight 11y ago
    They're typos. Here's a carefully written article: http://www.educationbug.org/a/typos-vs-misspellings.html http://www.educationbug.org/a/typos-vs-misspellings.html
- jdimov10 11y ago
  It shows sloppiness. For a journalist, who makes a living out of working with words, such basic level of sloppiness is inexcusable. You can't expect much from someone who does not respect the most basic, elementary rules of their trade.

jweak 11y ago

How very American. With your 10 hour work days + 3 hours commute, you should totally take a side job. Why not work the 10 vacation days too?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

brenschluss 11y ago

Interesting idea, but underwhelming lessons: "invest in education and training, take side jobs, push back retirement". I personally subscribe to the genetic optimization/hill-climbing strategy: To make sure you don't get stuck in local optima, make sure you're time-to-time riskily choosing what may seem like short-term losses, and injecting a healthy degree of randomness/mutation in your process. Over time, your degree of risk and randomness should slowly decrease. Even so, you may find that a boost of randomness/mutation/risk may be necessary even during later stages of life.

donkeyd 11y ago

> find a side gig if you can make time Nobody can make time. You can only spend time differently. Time is your most valuable asset, because once you die you have none left. Make to most of the time you have, because once your time is spent, there's no way of getting it back. You could be dead tomorrow, having more money in the bank won't make a difference then. Having spent time with you loved ones will make a difference to them, because they will have the memories.

mgraczyk 11y ago
I agree with your premise, but your last point doesn't make much sense. Your loved ones would also get the money. Maybe they value the money more than the memories they shared with you.
- donkeyd 11y ago
  Yea, I thought of this too while I was writing it. It's a very personal matter probably, but I've often heard that people on their death beds are more concerned about not spending more time with loved ones than not earning enough money. So I chose to write it as is anyway.
  - lmm 11y ago
    I've always wondered how honest such statements are. Even if you'd actually enjoyed work much more than family time, wouldn't you tell your family what they'd want to hear under those circumstances?
    - will_pseudonym 11y ago
      Why not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God to your loved ones in your last moments with them? Don't they deserve that?!
      - dagw 11y ago
        Don't they deserve that Of course not, unless of course they happen to be assholes. Tell them what you think they need to hear to make a terrible situation as bearable as possible and try to help them have a loving memory of you. Confessing your 'sins' on your deathbed just to ease your conscience without any thoughts of the consequences is an extremely selfish and narcissistic act which does nothing to help your loved ones.

jdimov10 11y ago

I have a better idea. Fuck "financial planning", fuck retirement, fuck all these people who think they know what's right for you and live your life NOW. Be irresponsible. Be EXTREMELY irresponsible. Work less. Play more. Struggle less. Enjoy more. Save less. Live more. Comply less. Create more. You don't "earn" your way to wealth and you don't "save" your way to wealth - the maths just don't work out! You can only ever play your way to wealth.

edem 11y ago
Did you read this in a self help book?
- jdimov10 11y ago
  People do not learn by reading. Reading only helps to re-enforce what you already believe in and are open to accepting (all other propositions are ALWAYS discarded - no exceptions, regardless of how "objective" you think you are). I myself only accept what works for me. I am pragmatic to the extreme. I know of NO other person who fully agrees with my philosophy on life (my fundamental beliefs are VERY different from what is commonly accepted) - but that's exactly the point - that's what makes 'me' me. Now I have offered the above guidelines for those who are already inclined to agree. I have no interest in arguing or convincing those who do not.
  - marklgr 11y ago
    > I have no interest in arguing or convincing those who do not. In my experience, people who say that have a lot of interest in convincing others. It's like, "I don't care what people think or say". It's mostly pre-emptive reply to criticism.
    - isolate 11y ago
      Abstracting further, explicit and unprompted denials are usually protecting something.

lazyjones 11y ago

I liked the title (expecting advice to take care of your health), but was disappointed by the "you are your job and your net worth" mentality. By that measure, family, happiness, personal relationships are all distracting liabilities and should probably be avoided. Or perhaps maximizing one's wealth isn't a worthwhile goal after all and it's fine to reach a certain level of financial security - as a means, not an end?

isolate 11y ago

tl;dr Step 1: Get a piece of paper. Step 2: Work your ass off. Step 3: Never retire. Pretty sure society has been drilling this into us since preschool, but thanks for the reminder.

trymas 11y ago

TL;DR: to make this work - IMHO you must also be 'money oriented'. I would like to say that this is not always true ('invest in yourself' and expand your bank account in such way). Basically you must be 'money oriented'. Looking into my university, there is a whole spectrum of people, who are all invested in them selves more than 99.9% people in my country. But there are professors who have some successful businesses, and also lecturers who are not 'money oriented' and just like academia, and there are some not so lucky people, who maybe had some bad twists in their life, suffered depression, etc., and just live a basic life. It is probably to find something similar with people who are not so 'invested in themselves'. There some well established folks and not so well..

dschiptsov 11y ago

s/Asset/Startup/

danharaj 11y ago

I think it's really gross to consider anyone an investment, a piece of 'human capital'. I read a book recently by Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos. It's about how modern ideology tries to redefine human beings in this way: You are capital which appreciates in value and gives you return on investment. All other definitions of what a human being is ought to be subordinate to this definition: Human as political creature is less important than human as economic investment. Human as member of society is less important than human competing in the free market. I found Brown's observations disturbing yet plausible, but I never expected to see these pernicious ideas flagrantly advocated in a mainstream newspaper. It feels like the void is trying to suck my soul out of my body when I try to think this way.

laotzu 11y ago
I wonder about the linguistic difference between the terms "human property" and "human capital". One is synonymous with "slave" and one is synonymous with "employee" and yet "property" and "capital" are virtually synonymous.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

pitt1980 11y ago

http://radicalpersonalfinance.com/my-plan-for-how-i-would-become-a-millionaire-with-a-minimum-wage-job-at-walmart-rpf0043/ http://radicalpersonalfinance.com/my-plan-for-how-i-would-be... buried link in the story, seems more interesting than the story itself

golergka 11y ago

Why do comments here critisize this article as if it was life advice, when this is not life advice, but life advice purely from investment standpoint? Is a concept of "advice purely from a certain standpoint" too complex for HN comments?

laotzu 11y ago
Life advice from an investment standpoint is life advice
- taurath 11y ago
  Monetary investment is not equivalent to life investment.

cousin_it 11y ago

Don't teach poor people how to outcompete other poor people. Instead, teach them how to cooperate.

dagw 11y ago
That sounds like a terrible idea if you're rich person... ;)
- laotzu 11y ago
  >Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity. -MLK, last speech the night before assasination

J_Darnley 11y ago

Thanks but that asset is pretty worthless here.