I want to choose

My grand­fa­ther worked until he could­n’t any more.

He’d work full shifts as a tai­lor three days a week until after he turned 80. They even­tu­al­ly had to ask him to retire.

I get it.

But I also under­stand wan­der­ing. Dabbling.

It seems that the fastest grow­ing group of employed Americans is the elder­ly.

The future of work

I believe that the way we work is regress­ing to how work used to be among “intel­lec­tu­als”. Work is going to be project based with peo­ple build­ing port­fo­lios around the expe­ri­ence they want to be known for. They’ll explore new areas of inter­est, fig­ure out how to turn them into projects, and grow their careers non-lin­ear­ly (as opposed to “climb­ing a career lad­der”.

I read an inter­est­ing book, Descent, that informed how I under­stand the future of work. In the book, Otis Barton invent­ed the div­ing bell dur­ing one of his “adven­tures”. Otis was an heir to a con­sid­er­able for­tune, and the way he “worked” is worth not­ing.

Disrupting work

When tech­nol­o­gy took 20 years to dif­fuse itself into our lives, one could have a life­time career doing some­thing. Think TV, or auto­mo­biles, or con­struc­tion tech­nol­o­gy. Now, things are mov­ing at a much faster pace. If you worked at Nokia a decade ago, your expe­ri­ence is out­dat­ed.

Change is only going to accel­er­ate. Millennials are expect­ed to have 14 jobs over their career. They’re going to have to learn how to adapt.

We’re all going to learn how to adapt.

Part of that adap­ta­tion is the “side hus­tle”, either to gain expe­ri­ence or (as in my case) as a cre­ative out­let.

Hustlers look at life through dif­fer­ent activ­i­ty (or rev­enue) streams.

That’s where the Elephant’s Paycheck comes in; as a way to have my port­fo­lio align to my side-hus­tle atti­tude by focus­ing on the income it gen­er­ates and how that income will grow over time.

I may work long into retire­ment, but it’ll be my choice as it was my Grandfather’s.

To get there, I save. I invest. I stay so focused on build­ing wealth that I’ve actu­al­ly writ­ten a book. That’s focus!