Million Dollar Experiment－－百万美元赚钱实验

2006/10/14 17:27 ..by zhanghongbiao

一个外国人的百万美元赚钱实验，挺有趣的
以下是原文（该文讲述了他的金融背景以及为什么会萌发让大家一起赚取百万美元并且每个人都公布自己的进度的想法）：

Since the polyphasic sleep experiment has gone so well, I figured it would be nice to try another interesting experiment in a different area of life. This one will be financial in nature. I’m going to see if I can manifest $1 million by using the intention-manifestation model.

First some background info on my financial situation to set the stage for the experiment…

For many years my family and I have been living very comfortably (by U.S. standards, which means insanely rich by global standards), but I certainly don’t consider myself to be incredibly wealthy in purely financial terms. My wife and I have enjoyed a healthy six figure annual income from our businesses for many years. However, with all the business deductions and exemptions and such, our actual taxable income drops to five figures. Partly this is because I tend to invest extra cash in deductible expenses like attending conferences and seminars and other forms of professional development, which I feel yields a better payoff than giving away money in the form of taxes that would subsidize certain forms of idiocy I’d rather not pay for.

As for financial security, that’s never been a problem for me, but I’m the kind of person who has an extremely high risk tolerance and could feel perfectly secure living on a park bench. I’ve never been afraid of going broke. My wife doesn’t seem to share this point of view, however. ;)

Seriously though, the fact that my wife and I both run businesses with about ten different streams of income puts us in a very secure situation. We cannot be fired or laid off, and since our risk is spread across different areas, we often see a drop in one income stream accompanied by a spike in another. Since most of our money comes from internet business, we have a lot of control over how much money we make. Aside from our home loan (we bought a house in January), we have zero debt. We own our car outright, and we pay off our credit card balances in full each month.

But we certainly aren’t gazillionaires. However, we’ve never really tried to be. You may notice that I haven’t written any articles or blog entries about how to become a millionaire or how to make ludicrous amounts of money. That’s because I haven’t done that, so how can I possibly teach that to others with any degree of integrity? I don’t write “how to” articles on things I’ve never done.

Did you ever see the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Peak Performance?” In this episode Commander Data plays a game called Strategema against a humanoid opponent named Kolrami. Everyone expects Data to win because he’s an android, but he actually loses. However, later in the episode Data and Kolrami play a rematch, and Kolrami gets more and more frustrated and eventually gives up, so Data wins the match by default. Data reveals how he played this second game differently. Data realized Kolrami’s strategy was based on the assumption that Data would be playing to win, so Data broke Kolrami’s strategy by striving to play for a draw instead of a win. Data passed up obvious opportunities for advancement in order to maintain the status quo, and those decisions threw his opponent off balance.

One idea I learned from this episode is that you don’t have to pick the obvious strategy when going through life. Much of the world is designed around the expectation that you’ll choose the obvious strategy. For example, you’re expected to get a job and earn a salary from it. That’s what most people do. However, having a job is one the most difficult ways to make money, mainly because you have to trade so much of your time for cash, most of which you spend anyway. It’s the obvious strategy, so it also attracts the greatest amount of competition and becomes a highly inefficient way to make money in the long run. It only took me six months of working as an employee to figure out that it wasn’t for me, so early in my 20s I dropped this strategy and decided to try something different. Instead of trying to earn money by having a salary, I decided to earn money by starting a business. A few years later I refined that strategy a bit further. I decided to pursue greater freedom by setting up systems that would provide me with income instead of working directly for money. This way I could maintain an abundance of free time without having to spend much of my time earning green pieces of paper. I wanted to put my income on autopilot, so I could spend time doing more interesting things than earning money. I especially wanted the freedom to pursue my own personal growth as a human being, whether or not such pursuits would directly generate income.