Time Make Explained Clearly

This video is all about how to make your full-time job optional so that you can quit if you want, you can go part-time if you want, or if you just really love the job. You can, of course, stay full-time, but at least you know deep down that you don't need the job to pay the bills, which is the most freeing feeling in the world. If we haven't met, hello, my name is Ali. I used to be a doctor working in the UK. But on the side, I managed to build a business that made my full-time job optional. And I've been documenting that entire journey here on YouTube since 2017. From being a broke medical student to then working full-time as a doctor during the pandemic to now being a best-selling author and entrepreneur.

And I can tell you that when you make a job optional, it is absolutely life-changing. So this video is split up into three parts. Firstly, we're going to talk about why exactly your job is not already optional. Then we're going to talk through the freedom profile matrix to help you diagnose the issues with your job or your business or your career. And then thirdly, we're going to talk about the income versus asset equation and how to actually get started with making your job optional. So we got to start with why is the job not already optional. And primarily the reason for that is that we have expenses. You got rent, you got food, you got bills and stuff. And so let's say just to keep the numbers around, you

got 3k a month in expenses. I'm modeling this off of back when I had a real job when I was single and had no kids. Let's say 3K a month of expenses, but obviously edit the numbers as you like. Because we have expenses, we therefore need income. Ideally, our income needs to be greater than our expenses. Otherwise, we end up in debt and that is not good. And so, the reason why we have a job is because job gives us income which allows us to pay for our expenses. There's some level of profit, shall we say, which if you're smart, you can put into investments, some of it, or you can use some of it for like fun and life. But the real problem is this expenses category. This

is why the job is not optional. Now, there are a couple of different ways to solve this. Number one is you could just delete your expenses, right? You could get your expenses down to zero. When you are a child, a job is optional for the most part. I'm assuming if you're watching this, a job was optional for you when you were a kid. Your expenses are basically zero because your parents are covering your expenses. How else do you get your expenses to zero? You could get your expenses down to basically zero. So you could become a monk. You could go to a monastery. You could live off the fat of the land. Uh you could like have a bowl and request arms from the people in surrounding

villages and stuff. Now your expenses are zero. And your job is truly optional. But that's probably not what we are thinking about when it comes to I would like to make my job optional. So really for people that want to make their job optional, it's like what they're basically saying is I would like to sustain a certain level of like monthly expenditure to sustain my lifestyle and travel the world and live in a nice place and all that jazz, but ideally I don't want to have to go to work in order to make up for those expenses. So what do we do? Well, if we're not open to reducing our expenses to zero, we then need to figure out the other aspect of this equation, which is the income side. You could also get income through universal basic

income. probably not going to happen anytime soon. But you know, when our AI overlords take over the world, governments around the world will hopefully switch to giving us all a universal basic income, some kind of stipend uh that will cover our expenses. But that is not happening anytime soon. So, we can't really rely on that. So, how do you make your job optional when you need the money? This is like the freaking conundrum of modern life. If you need the money, what the do you do? All right, here's the thing. Here is my hot take. My whole take is that it's not actually about making your job optional. The problem with the job is the fact that your job does not have the freedom that you would ideally like.

So the job itself is not the problem. Like for example, Ed Sheeran has a job where he has to record some music and he has to go on tour and that's his job. Most people say it's a pretty good gig. One of my friends dads, his job is that a few times a year he has to fly to mainland China and he meets with hedge fund managers because he has this like newsletter that hedge fund readers like read. And so his job is to assess the performance of the hedge fund or something. It takes him a few days a month to do that kind of work and he gets to travel to cool places. He gets to be whined and dined by these fancy

hedge fund managers. He gets to talk to them about finance and he makes loads of money doing it. If you had that kind of job, that's a pretty good gig as well because it is a high freedom job. So, it's not the fact that the job is the problem. It is actually the characteristics of the job that are the problem. Now, I think every job or every method of generating income, you can kind of map it to what I call the freedom profile. And it's like what are the factors that we're looking for in work? Well, there is fun, there is flexibility, there's fulfillment, and there's finances. So, these are the four Fs. Fun, flexibility, fulfillment, and finances. Now, if you have a good amount

of these things that you're looking for, then you have a high freedom profile. If you don't enjoy the balance of fun, flexibility, fulfillment, and finances that your particular job gives you, you have a low freedom profile. Now, these are not like value judgments. It's just like, is it good for you or is it bad for you? Do you personally like the freedom profile that your specific job or career has or do you not like? And so my contention is that if you had a high freedom profile job where your job gave you enough fun, enough flexibility, enough fulfillment, and enough finances, you wouldn't be looking for something new. But if you are looking for something new, it's probably

because your job does not have those things. And so at this point, it's worth pausing and rating. If you imagine rating it out of 10, how would you rate the fun of your job out of 10, the flexibility out of 10, the fulfillment out of 10, and the finances out of 10? Now, there are certain jobs that have a very high freedom profile. I've got a friend who is a remote software developer. He works for some big US tech company. He lives in uh Romania. He makes an insane amount of money. Finances a 10. He's got loads of flexibility. He doesn't actually have to I mean he has to attend like one meeting with his manager once a week and then maybe one like engineering standup or whatever. And he has quite a lot of fun

because he enjoys writing code. The thing he's kind of missing is fulfillment because he's working for a company. He doesn't really believe in the product, but he's like, you know what, I feel fulfilled enough from like doing the tech stuff. That's actually a really good gig. He's not looking to change anything about his setup because he's got these four Fs and they're sort of high across the board. Alternatively, you could have careers with a very low freedom profile. So, for example, I have a friend who's a corporate lawyer, works like 16 hours a day. Finance is a 10 out of 10.

Fulfillment, uh, he tells me, is like a 1 out of 10. Flexibility, he tells me, is a 1 out of 10. And fun, he tells me it's a five or six out of 10, depending on what's going on and stuff. So, that would be a low freedom profile. In fact, maybe it's not even high and low. Let's slightly refine this. Maybe it's actually a good freedom profile or a bad freedom profile. You know, this is I don't like it and this is I do like it. So, if you are watching this video, I'm assuming there's something about the freedom profile of your own job/career that you don't necessarily enjoy. A job/career generally you can define uh as working from someone else. But one thing that we often talk about here on

this channel is you could choose to start your own business where you are working for yourself rather than for someone else. So, let's say you could be a freelancer uh working for yourself with multiple clients. You could be an agency working for yourself with multiple clients and a couple of team members. You could start a software business. You could start a online education business. You could make YouTube videos. You could start a tech startup. Like there's all sorts of different businesses you could start. And the key differences between a job and a business is just a job someone else is the boss and in a business you are the boss. So, but otherwise the work is broadly similar enough. Now, the thing is even if you were to start a

business, there are businesses that have a good freedom profile for you and then there are businesses that have a bad freedom profile for you. I suspect you your ideal business would not involve starting a factory. I have one friend who runs a factory. It's not particularly fun. It's not at all flexible. He says it's not very fulfilling and the finances are actually really tough because the margins on factories are razor thin because he's competing against China and Vietnam and India and Bangladesh and stuff. Factory would be a poor choice of business if you were to start it. But then there are businesses that you can start that have a high freedom profile. Uh for example, freelance web designer. I have a friend

who's a freelance web designer. He charges like somewhere between 15,000 and $50,000 for every website he makes. He taught himself to code over the period of about 6 months. became active on Twitter, found a couple of clients, and now he's a freelance web designer, and now he's using AI for everything, and it's great and stuff. And so, he has quite a lot of fun. He enjoys web design. It's a lot of flexibility cuz the clients don't really care when he's doing the work. It's fully remote. So, 10 out of 10 flexibility. Fulfillment. Uh, he finds that if he works with certain types of clients, it's more fulfilling than others. So, if he works with like education businesses or like nonprofits, he really enjoys it.

Unfortunately, they tend to pay less money. If he works with corporations, he enjoys it. He finds it less fulfilling, but they pay more money. So, you know, it's still a little bit of a trade-off. It's not like starting your own business is this magic bullet for fun, flexibility, fulfillment, and finances all across the board all on day one. There's still a little bit of a trade-off, and the finances are pretty reasonable. He was previously working in like private equity or something. And so, he's not quite making as much money as a private equity partner would be,

but he's like working he's making enough money for himself to be happy. So, he would rate the finances probably an eight or a nine. But overall, that is a good freedom profile for him because it is a good balance of fund, flexibility, fulfillment, and finances. So given that we kind of have to do something to make an income, it's either some kind of job or some kind of business. We ideally want to pick one of these that has a freedom profile that we like. A job or a business is not the only way to make money. Uh in a way, these are correlated with your time. Time plus work. A business less so, but a job certainly like you're being paid for your time and you're being paid for your

work. With a business, you're being paid less for your time. Again, depending on your billing model, more you're being paid for the work, for the outcomes that you deliver. There is a third way of generating income which is passive income which everyone loves the idea of. Passive income is generated from assets. Assets are things that put money in your pocket. So for example, let's say you have a house and you put it on rent. Obviously you are generating passive income from the rental yield on that house. Uh let's say you bought some stocks and shares and they are generating dividends and or growing in their in a capital appreciation over time. That can give you some level of

passive income. All right. So, once you've made any amount of money, you're going to want a place to invest that money. And that is where the sponsor of this video comes in, and that is Trading 212. Trading 212 is an online investing platform that makes it super easy to invest in stocks and shares and funds and ETFs. And actually, me and my wife Izzy have both independently been using Trading 212 for absolutely years to manage a portion of our investment portfolio long before they started sponsoring our videos. The platform makes investing super easy. It is a very user-friendly app. There are no commissions. They let you invest in fractional shares, and there's none of that unnecessary friction that just puts

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allocated to the funds or the stocks that you choose. Now, if any of that sounds good and you would like to get started with investing, then check out the link down below. And if you sign up using that link, you will get an entire free fractional share worth up to £100. So, it's free money. You might as well give it a go. So, yeah, click the link down below or head over to trading212.com/join/ ali to take advantage of this offer. Big thank you to Trading 212 for sponsoring the video. And let's get back to it. Let's say you write a book titled Feelgood Productivity and it's available in bookstores all around the world and it's been translated into a few different like 35 different languages and it's sold a few hundred thousand

copies and each quarter you get royalty checks because you wrote the book once. I mean it took you three and a half years to write the book but you wrote the book once and now it has created an asset that is putting money in your pocket every single quarter. Passive because it's de it's now decorrelated with your time. Of course you had to put in the work to write feelgood productivity or to I don't know have enough money to buy a house or to build a house or have enough money to buy stocks and shares. you know, you had to invest something in it. You don't just get it for nothing. Uh, unless you were gifted it by a parent because your parents are rich or whatever. But you either have to buy an asset or you have

to put in the work to create an asset, assuming you are not going to inherit the asset. And so, really, ideally, what happens is that you got work, your work gives you income. You use that income to pay off your expenses. That generates, shall we say, profit. You invest some of that profit, invest into assets. Over time, those assets give you more income. And then you spend some of that profit on having fun and games and all of the good things in life. So this is basically the equation. And the more assets you have, the more assets you own, the more your income starts to come from assets rather than work. And so more of the income equation comes from assets. Then the work equation goes down. And then eventually the job

becomes optional or even the business becomes optional. Whatever the thing is that you are doing for work, work becomes optional, shall we say, right? I think the ideal situation that a lot of us are aspiring to is where work is optional. That doesn't mean we're going to quit our jobs. That doesn't mean we're going to stop running our business. That doesn't mean we're going to just stop working because work is a thing that generates us fun, flexibility, fulfillment, and some amount of finances. Humans need work to flourish. Maybe flourishing should be another F. Flourish. That would be fun. When people retire, their chances of having a heart attack and depression go through the roof because suddenly they lose this big sense of

purpose. But it would be nice if you didn't have to do the work. It would be nice if you could do whatever you choose to do. And so the way you get that is well either you have so many assets that work becomes optional. Or the other definition of retirement is where what you are doing for work is what you would choose to do anyway even if you didn't care about the money. So for example a lot of authors successful authors fall into this camp. One of my favorite authors Brandon Sanderson. Brandon Sanderson writes amazing books. Brandon Sanderson works all the time. He works 8 hours a day and plays video games 4 hours a day and hangs out his family like 8 hours a day or whatever the thing

might be. Brandon Sanderson does not have to work cuz he's made his millions already from the fact that he's got all these successful books. He could retire if he wanted to, but he just freaking loves writing. He's not doing it for the money. He's doing it for the vibes. In that context, work is optional for Brandon Sanderson, but he's doing it anyway. And the thing is, you don't need to have already made it financially or be officially financially free in order to find work that you would choose to do anyway. Whatever work you're doing, there will be some percentage of it that's in the camp of work I'd do anyway if I didn't need the money. And then there is work that I'm only doing this

because I need slash want the money. And so then goal number one is how do you make so much money from your assets that you don't that the work becomes fully optional. But then goal number two is how do you move this line given that we're going to need to work to make money to buy the assets anyway. And also given that work is a key part of what makes a fulfilling life. How do we make it so that as much of the work as possible is work that you would do anyway even if you didn't care about the money and as little of it as possible is work that you are only doing cuz you need the money. This is the question. But I think that kind of changes the equation away from man I hate my job.

How do I quit my job? To be like, actually, either we increase the finances, use that money to generate more assets, and then the amount of time we spend on work can decrease because our assets are generating passive income, or in addition to that, how do we also make it so that we're actually enjoying our work so much that we would choose to do it even if we didn't care about the money? For example, for me, even if I didn't care about the money, I would still make YouTube videos cuz I enjoy it. I like to think I'd care less about the views, but this is why I'm doing a video like this one, for example. It's fairly under underoptimized. Not sure how many views it's going to get, but I would do this sort of thing even if I didn't care

about the money. I would write books even if I didn't care about the money cuz it would be VIB and fun. I would do talks on stage and workshops and stuff even if I didn't care about the money cuz it's VIB and fun. I'll be honest, I probably wouldn't do sponsorships unless it was like I don't know Apple or something. We interrupt this video to bring you a message from our sponsor is a thing that I'm doing for the money. I'm going to be honest. I believe in the product of course and I use it anyway which is why like you know it's not that bad. Uh but it pays the bills but if I had like a zillion dollars in the bank I wouldn't need to have advertising on my videos for example.

But beyond that, there's actually very few things that I'm doing that I am doing for the money rather than for the vibes. It's worth making this list. In your current job or in your current business, what is the stuff that you actually enjoy doing that you would choose to do anyway, even if you were retired? And then what are the things you would choose not to do if you could? Maybe it's attending the meetings, maybe it's doing the performance reviews, maybe it's having a manager, maybe it's like dealing with direct reports, maybe it's dealing with uh bureaucracy, maybe it's filling out the metric scorecard once a week, whatever the thing might be, there's aspects of your job that you're doing

kind of cuz you have to, and then there are other aspects of your job that you're doing cuz you want to. The other nice thing, and this is why I think like building a business is a good thing, is because when you have a job, you generally have less control over your work setup compared to if you're working for yourself. If you're working for yourself like I am, you know, there's still things I need to do for the business to stay out of jail and stuff, but I've got the ability to hire people who can then do the stuff that I don't really want to do. And that's great because now my list of things that I really want to do goes up to close to 100%. Which is also interesting because the stuff that I want to do that

I feel energized by is also the stuff that generates the most money for the business. And so it's just like a nice virtuous cycle that works. I think everyone should at least try and start a business even if you don't want to be an entrepreneur. There's not that much difference between an entrepreneur and an employee. It's just that an entrepreneur has multiple clients and an employee has one. Like you are already an entrepreneur. You are already running your own business. It's just the business of you. And you are contracting your time to the highest bidder, i.e. your employer. And yes, it means that your salary is sort of weathered against like the impact of the business. Being a business owner is way more stressful

than being an employee for the most part cuz profit and loss of the business. If the business crumbles, then my employees still get paid. I'll be the one who loses out. If we have to give refunds to people, the employees still get paid. I'm the one who loses it out. So, you know, it's not like it's a panacea or whatever the word is. It's not it's like there's trade-offs. It's sort of like with electric cars. There's a stat that when someone drives an electric car for the first time, they are way more likely to buy an electric car in the future. Very few people go electric and then switch back to a gasoline powered car.

Similarly, very few people start a business and that business is successful and then they go back to having a job. It just it tends not to happen that way. It happens in some situations sometimes as if you're being offered a job at a cool place you like the idea of and you want to learn skills. as VIB, then great. Uh, you want to be part of a bigger mission. I can see myself, if I stopped wanting to do the business, wanting to work at like OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or YouTube, like, you know, these sorts of companies or Apple, that would be cool. I probably wouldn't see myself working for the local accountant or working at a local hospital. I'd want to do something a little bit bigger, a

little bit more interesting. So, but for the most part, when you speak to business owners, they don't want to go back to having a job. And so this is why I think everyone should try entrepreneurship at some point in their life anyway cuz you take your income generation into your own hands far more so than when you're an employee where really the income generation is handled by the business and the other people in the business and you're like one contributor to that income generation when you're doing it yourself. It's more stressful sure but it also makes you learn a lot more and it also means that uh you have more control but it's just you know harder to succeed in that world. So again it's all just trade-offs.

starting a business is trading a 925 for a 24/7. So, this is a thing that you do hear quite a lot amongst business owners. You also hear that they wouldn't have it any other way, which is interesting. It is trading a 9 to5 for a 24/7. The thing I miss most about having a real job when I was working as a doctor is that I could genuinely switch off from work when I got home. I did not like I physically could not interact with the patients in the hospital. as you get more senior that actually becomes less of a thing because now you have to have you're worrying about the patients overnight because you're responsible for them. And so in a way a 9 to5 at a senior level where you're earning lots of money is

not truly a 9 to5. It's more like a 996 with quite a lot of like staying up at night thinking about it. In fact, I would say the more money you earn in any field, whether it's a job or a business, the more it becomes a 24/7 cuz you're always sort of thinking about it. But in many ways, yeah, starting a business is indeed trading a 9 to5 for a 24/7. Having kids is a 24/7. Being married is a 24/7. These are not things that fit neatly into like a box on your calendar. But for the most part, people with kids don't regret having kids and people who are married don't regret being married. And similarly, for the most part, people who start businesses, provided the businesses is like at a certain

point of success, do not regret starting the business. Another phrase I like, I think it's from like a famous economist or something. There are no solutions, only trade-offs. Everyone I speak to who wants their job to be optional because they have like a low freedom profile career or whatever, it's like we all want what we don't have. There was this a really good thing I watched from Alex Rossi the other day like on his YouTube shorts channel or whatever. there. He goes like, you know, entrepreneurs uh remember wish that they could go back to a 9 to5. Sometimes employees want to be entrepreneurs. People who have like a remote business love the idea of having a team. People who are solarreneurs want

to have a team. People who are like have big businesses like long for the time when the team was smaller. Uh a lot of us generally want what we don't have. There are no solutions, only trade-offs. And so my opinion on this is that if you're at this point in the video and you haven't yet started a business, you're probably the sort of person who probably should start a business. Even if the only reason to do so is so that you don't like die with regret that this is a thing that you could have done that you I don't know were too chicken to do or like were too scared to do or were too like anxious to do or whatever the thing might be. If you don't want to start a business cuz you're like you know what actually I'm

quite happy with the freedom profile of my job. Amazing. More power to you. But in general for the people that watch my stuff I actually think starting your own business or even giving it a go is a very worthwhile skill. Cuz like worst case scenario it doesn't work out. Okay cool. You just go back to a job. But now you go back to the job with like way more skills than you did previously. Because when you're when you have a job, especially if you're at a big company, you're a very specialized role and probably you are not interfacing with sales, you are probably not responsible for income generation unless you are literally in the sales or marketing team or unless you're a partner at a law firm or accounting firm

or whatever thing might be. So you're probably doing the work rather than selling the work. The hard part about building a business is actually not in the doing of the work, it is in the selling of the work. When you're an employee, the only time you need to sell the work for the most part is when you're negotiating a raise or when you're trying to get a job offer handed to you. That is the that you're spending 1% of your life selling. When you're a business owner, you're spending like 70% of your life selling. And the skills of selling are skills that are in many ways way more valuable than the skill of actually being able to do the work. So even if you do start a business, you get

it to a couple of grand in revenue, maybe 10K in revenue, maybe you join a program like ours like Lifestyle Business Academy, whatever. You learn skills, you learn the skill of sales, and it means you are way more valuable in any future job that you go to uh compared to if you just stayed in that job. How do I actually start the business? That's a whole other video. But I would say that there are kind of two paths here. Path number one is you could do it yourself. And path number two is you could get help. The do-it-yourself path is the path that I followed for the first like 10 years of my business journey where you just kind of figure it out. You watch a bunch of YouTube videos, you read some articles, you listen to the podcast. Loads of people

out there now are giving very free, very, very good free business education on the internet. You can watch some videos on my channel on how to get started. You can watch videos on Alex Hormuzzy's channel. You can watch a Dan Martell. You can watch Cody Sanchez. You can watch there's loads of people giving advice on how to start a business. Information is not the problem. You can talk to AI. You can literally go to Claude or Tragy PT being like, "Hey, I want to start a business. How do I do it?" And it will actually give you pretty reasonable advice. That is option number one. You could just do it yourself and figure it out. In the same way that like how do you learn any kind of skill? How do you learn how to

be a plumber? You could figure it out or you could do it yourself or you could get help. How do you learn the guitar? I learned the guitar by watching some YouTube tutorials and then signing up to an online course from just guitar.com back when back in like 2013. And that was how I learned the guitar. That was sort of like the DIY approach. Or alternatively, you could get help. Now, there's various different forms of help available. You could sign up to someone's course, pay a few hundred, you sign up to a video series, you watch the videos, you do the work, etc., etc. If you want to start a YouTube channel, you could figure out yourself or you can sign up to my part-time YouTuber Academy

course. It's like $1,000. We offer scholarships to people who can't afford it. It gives you the road map on how to start a YouTube channel. And loads of people have done that and they have succeeded on YouTube. That's the course side. You could get coaching. So, our lifestyle business academy, our most recent thing, is like an online business school that it has a course component, but it also pairs you with a dedicated one-on-one coach who acts as your mentor. And then it's sort of like a course can give you like the generic instructions and then the coach can help personalize it for whatever the thing that you're doing is. I currently spend about $250,000 a year uh on coaching

because I have other coaches and mentors who I work with to help grow our business from 5 million a year to 10 million a year in revenue. I don't really watch online courses because there's not that many online courses for that sort of thing, but I work with my coaches and or you could join a community of other people who are like also doing the thing. So, I pay $60,000 to join a mastermind from a guy called Takim Moore, and we get together once every four months. The last one was in Australia. The one before that was in California, and that is a community of other million-doll plus entrepreneurs, and we sort of exchange ideas. So, that's sort of the help approach there.

Now, these numbers sound absolutely insane, but like once you get to the point where you're making millions from your business, then it makes a lot of sense to spend 50, 60, 70, 100 grand on mentorship and community and coaching and this sort of thing. But there are lots of these different options that are available. Interestingly, our lifestyle business academy gives you all three. You get a course, you get coaching, and you get community allinone. People get a lot of value from it. So, you can check it out. Link down below if you want to try it out. But these are basically like the two ways to go about learning

anything. If I wanted to get better at the guitar, yeah, if I had loads of time, I could just watch more YouTube tutorials. But really, if I wanted to get better at the guitar, what I should do is just hire a guitar teacher cuz I can afford it and because my time is at a premium. But if I was a student and I had no money but loads of time, why would I get a guitar teacher? I'll just figure it out. So, those are broadly the two paths that are open to you. And if you decide you want it, like there are loads of people making million-dollar businesses without paying a penny for any resources. There are, I would say, even more people making million dollar businesses who are actually paying for mentorship and help

along that path. So, there are a bunch of people out there, just on this note, who are like paying for a course, paying for a coach, paying for a community. It's all scammy. The only people it benefits are the creators of the courses. I would never buy a book on anything because the only person the book benefits is the author of the book. I would never go to university because the only person benefiting is the university itself. You probably don't think that, right? You probably think that university is fine. I know plenty of people who went to Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and Yale and Stanford, MIT who are struggling to get

jobs even though they got first- class degrees and 4.0 GPA at those fancy universities and paid loads of money for it. Does that mean university is a scam? Well, no, not really. Like, you should go in eyes open, right? Would you think it's a scam to pay $20 for a book that's written by someone who started a business that's that's telling you what they've learned along their journey? Probably not. You know, Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, has a book. you can pay the pay $10 to get the book or like $5 for the audio book or whatever and you can learn the business lessons that Phil Knight has learned over the last 50 years of building Nike

into one of the world's most valuable companies. You probably don't think that's a scam. We got to like really try and figure out like what is this idea that like paying for education is a scam cuz you probably you're probably okay paying for books. You're probably okay paying for university. So it's not even the cost, right? Cuz a book is like I don't know $10. University is shall we say $100,000 if not more. Ultimately these are all forms of education. One of our team members here at Sparkle Studios is doing a part-time masters at a university. She's paying like tens of thousands of dollars

to do this part-time masters. So once a week there is a Zoom workshop where the facilitator teaches a Zoom workshop on whatever the topic of the masters is like AI or something. Most people would think, okay, that's reasonable, but it's basically an online course. That university is basically selling an online course. They're just charging $20,000 a year for it or $30,000 a year or whatever it is. And the reason people think it's not a scam because loads of people have signed up to this part-time masters even though it's basically an online course with like one Zoom live Zoom session every week is because it is a masters. So it gives you some CV points. You get some letters after your

name. Okay. What is the value of the letters after your name? Does it actually increase your likelihood of getting employed in the future? Maybe, but maybe not. Depends what kind of job you're going for. If you're trying to become an executive at IBM, then okay, do an MBA. I have a lot of friends who run like multiund million dollar startups and even a couple of friends who run like billion dollar plus startups. If they see someone with an MBA applying for their jobs, they will actively blacklist them from that particular job because they see an MBA as being a negative signal. I was speaking to another friend who's insanely clever, one of the most intelligent people I've met. Uh went to Cambridge with him. He's doing

like cutting edge research in the field of like cancer genomics and like viruses and you know all that jazz to splice DNA and things like that. And he's doing a project that basically he would normally do in a PhD. I asked him why don't you just do a PhD and he laughed and he said lol but one of his mentors said to him uh that a PhD is just a sign of low ambition but I was surprised by this cuz in my head PhD used to be a big thing 30 years ago but now the letters PhD have lost quite a lot of the luster that they once had which is why you know this friend of mine in this lab this super cutting edge lab that's publishing loads of research managed to like hired him into his lab because he was

intelligent not because he had a PhD and his mentor in that lab who is like one of the world's most published and wellrespected people in the world in that specific field actively told him that a PhD is a sign of low ambition, not a sign of like high intelligence or high ambition. So, it's interesting. Of course, some online courses are scams as well, and of course, you hear the stories and that kind of thing. So, it's just like you got to go in with your eyes open. I have lots of friends who run online courses. Pretty much all of them are like do it in a good way. Like the courses are really good. They really know what they're talking about.

They have a very liberal refund policy. They're not doing the scammy marketing tactics. So, what we shouldn't do, I think, is to throw the baby out with the bath water and say all forms of online education are a scam. Because also, you don't believe that. You believe books are fine. and you believe university is fine. Even though many people argue university is truly a scam, we shouldn't think that just because there are some people that use dodgy marketing techniques that like the entire industry is bad. So, I think we just really need to question where do these beliefs come from. I speak to so many people that are like, "Oh, online courses are a scam."

Are they? I think it's worth doing a little bit of critical thinking about this whole like all coaches are scammers, all online courses are scammers. All right, so with all that said, if you're still at this point in the video, firstly, thank you for watching. And if you haven't yet checked out my five-step plan on how to go from zero to a $100,000 a year business, there is a very simple road map. It's in this video right over here. Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.