Own Your Relative Income To Truly Own Your Life As An Entrepreneur

How much do you own your life??

When you own your life, it means you feel secure and free. Your life by contrast is not month to month nor are you consumed by stress or feel like you are a prisoner to someone else’s priorities.??

It means you can’t get kicked out by your landlord or a stubborn client cannot run your life - you are less vulnerable to putting all your eggs in one basket. Owning your life means you have systematically spread out risk and can afford to not deal with people who may want to bring you down.?

If you don’t own your life, you’re renting it. And nothing pains me more than when the self-employed who have sacrificed everything to own their life and help others are unknowingly renting it.

To own your life, you need to be obsessed with optimizing your relative income. This is an overlooked paradigm that popular podcaster, author, and Angel Investor, Tim Ferris, went all-in on in his 2008 bestselling book, The Four Hour workweek.

After two years of internalizing this concept of working smarter and not longer, and making decisions based on it, I had a 12x increase in my relative income. This changed the game. My entire 20’s were a grind and I didn’t realize I was on a dangerous path until the pandemic’s forced slow-down gave me a silver lining; coaching.?

I first grasped the concept of relative income the first summer of COVID-19 when my business coach, Cole Nakatani , listened to my ambitious request of doubling revenue in three months.?

“Paul, we’re going to double your revenue but it may not happen in the way you’re expecting it to happen.” I looked at him with a curious and puzzled look. “Ok…go on.”

“You are going to make the same amount of money but in half the time. Your personal dollars per hour effective rate will double and thus you will make twice the money and have 100% more time to work on another project or enjoy life more.”

When you break down the math, it makes perfect sense even if your goal is to ambitiously grow your business. If you are paying yourself $5000 a month and putting in a 60-hour workweek, your current relative income is $20.88 (240 hours/$5000). For the overworked entrepreneur, this number probably makes your stomach tense up as comparing your earnings to an hourly barista worker likely feels unjust. Now, if you can make $5000 in 30-hour workweeks, an hourly wage of over $40 feels more reasonable and best of all, you have 30 more hours a week to enjoy life and start putting in hours to that side project you never seem to get around to.

When Cole broke down the math I was intrigued, to say the least, although my workhorse ways made it a little uncomfortable to think about working half the time and not feeling guilty about it.?

How would I ever work half the time and maintain or even grow my personal income and where can you start?

It starts with committing to changing your mindset from the work grind to a flow.?

I define the grind as when the energy you put into shallow and unfilling work returns next to nothing in terms of financial and fulfillment returns. Grind-related stress can create a cloudy head and it mutes your creativity, wellness, and gratefulness.?

Flow is a fluidity between your body and mind, where you are totally absorbed by and deeply focused on something, beyond the point of distraction. Time feels like it has slowed down. In flow your best ideas and soul emerge to re-energize your purpose and confidence. It has been studied as the state of peak performance amongst the world's greats in almost every profession. It was popularized by legendary psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose epic life ended at age 87 in late 2021.?

You must reverse the over-glorified grind where we work way too hard for less return than we deserve. It’s about the actions you take to find flow and replenish your emotional and financial bank accounts without needing to suffer unnecessarily for it.

Increasing relative income comes with a commitment to protect more time to do things that give you flow and tap into your superpowers, even if they do not produce income immediately or even cost you money. Coaching is likely the most worthwhile investment you can make to reprogram your way of being to "design a life you don't need a vacation from" as my good friend and performance coach Stevan Baycetich likes to say.

You also must be brave and make time to take a powerful step back to put your foot down with the old guard. The old guards are the people who try to use you or hold onto the status quo out of fear. Think about a bad customer, supplier, "partner", or manager. These people shape your self-limiting beliefs and bad habits which I like to think of like your old self. Old guards and old selves are a common enemy - it's time to stand up to them and raise the bar.

When you have the power to grind less and flow more, your relative income and relative happiness will skyrocket. What is in your way now is the noise in your life and old guards and old mindsets. It’s hard to do it alone so think hard about who is going to support you along the way.

What are the actual tactics to increase relative income and have more ownership of your self-employed life?

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