Okay, okay, okay, I have a THESIS.
(How long have I been waiting to type that?)
(Answer: Since 2009 when my grad school professor told me we were doing a capstone project instead of a thesis. 🙄 That guy hated me. He looked like a less attractive Stanley Tucci. I can still picture his puckered little haughty mouth, just jam-packed with disdain.)
So, my thesis is this.
You know how I've been yammering on for years and years and LONG INTERNET YEARS about using email marketing to sell for you, so you can go and actually enjoy your life?
*pops collar*
*waves to the crowd*
And, you know how I insist that free time is modern form of valuable compensation?
And, you know how I'm always like, "Hey, bubs, ya gotta make sure the juice is worth the squeeze." 🍋🍊🧃
I mean, I have never said that actual phrase. But, it's true: you have to weigh the costs. Sure, you can take on that BIG client project, and that BIG client project will earn you BIG compensation in the form of money, but it will also simultaneously cost you BIG compensation in the form of your time.
That idea isn't new.
That's traditional opportunity cost.
We all know that if we say yes to eating a burger tonight, you can't also say yes to pizza. (Unless you're my spirit animal.)
That brings me to "The Thesis." (Scream.)
And, the idea is this:
Opportunity cost is about to get a lot more expensive.
In the past, you could only do so much with your time. Which meant that losing it could only cost you so much. It was finite. Sure, you take on an extra client project, but you didn't feel too terrible about it, because what you could accomplish in those two hours lost was minimal. (Clip your toenails. Move a very large vacuum cleaner and pretend to use it. Sit in the car in a construction zone. Bake a ham.)
Now do you know what you can do in two hours?
You can create entire worlds.
You can build apps.
You can build websites.
You can build products.
You can build whole entire businesses.
You can build an app where a caterer enters a headcount and a menu and gets back the shopping list, the cost per head, and the price she should be charging.
You can build a tool where a contractor photographs a wall of stone and gets back a square footage estimate, a material list, and a bid he can hand over before he's back in the truck.
You can build a platform where a restaurant owner photographs his walk-in cooler on Sunday night and gets back Monday's prep list and an order sheet.
Or you can deploy all-new landing pages that match your brand.
Or spin up a dashboard that aggregates your daily income across Stripe, Kajabi, Gumroad, and Kit.
Or make a slick new lead magnet tool that *everyone* wants to give you their email address for.
Or put up a pre-order page for a cool new book you want to write.
Your. Time. Is. Now. More. Expensive.
The exchange rate went up.
You now have more purchasing power with those same two hours.
Because you know what you can do with two hours now?
You can actually create.
You can be bigger than the sum of your parts.
And, you're going to be pissed at me when I say this, but I'm saying it:
Because of this?
I am now officially Team AI.
Not for writing, meh, but for building. Making. Creating. Experimenting. The tools I've been using this past year are mind-blowing force multipliers, and they literally 100x your efforts, and not learning how to use these now is going to cost you a lot later.
It's the equivalent of the people who were once resistant to "get online."
Think of all the people who were building entire online businesses ✋ when others were still griping about their Yahoo email address.
The time is now.
The early adoption window is closing.
Your chance to shine is here, right now.
So, tomorrow morning I'm going to send you something.
Because, we ain't letting you fall behind.
(Yahoo email addresses be damned.)
XOXO,
Ash
P.S. The word "capstone" can also be damned. So can the phrase "the juice is worth the squeeze." I'm really sorry about that.