Another Labor Day has come and gone.
This long weekend signifies the end of summer, gives folks a chance to take a breath before the school year kicks in, and allows Americans to celebrate … work?!
Not many people know that the patriotic Labor Day holiday has its roots in Canada. U.S. President Grover Cleveland fast tracked the first official Labor Day in 1882. The timing and even the name of the event was largely due to the pressured politics of the day.
So it might be fun to celebrate a more relevant theme the first Monday in September. Maybe we can celebrate the idea of working smarter.
Most people labor under what I call the “Work Once, Get Paid Once Model.” Hourly workers, for example, toil for 60 minutes and get paid for that 60 minutes. Many workers get paid upon the completion of a project.
Yet, smart workers are learning about the “Work Once, Get Paid Forever” model.
Successful Internet marketers, for example, have figured out how to create print books, e-books, audio programs, and DVDs and then sell them in perpetuity.
If the content is “evergreen” in nature, it only requires slight revisions, so once the product is created, you can “set it and forget it,” so to speak.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his great book, Outliers: The Story of Success, claims that anyone who works at something for 10,000 hours is, for all intents and purposes, an industry expert.
In other words, if you’ve worked in an industry 40 hours per week for five years, you’re probably more than capable of creating passive income from an information product.
As a bonus, being known as an author will give your reputation a bit of a shine.
In any event, working smarter is a good goal for us to focus on at least one Monday a year, don’t you agree?
