1) Find a company you know is going to blow up. (Facebook, Groupon, Zynga)
2) Invest as much money in it as possible, at every opportunity.
3) Once the media jumps on it and other investors get in…
4) Get out (cash out).
5) Repeat.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/this-is-how-yuri-milner-has-already-made-billions-from-the-new-bubble/1717
Being the best at things has it’s perks. When you look at Kobe Bryant, the best player in the NBA, he gets paid over ten million dollars a year to do what he loves.
Emulate the best, and then improve upon it
Every generation that comes, there are advancements in technology. When you look at the NBA, you see it constantly improve because you have guys like Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson to style your game after. If you see the CEO working efficiently, you emulate his time management skills and improve upon them to fit your style.
The need for automation is quite evident in today’s world. We can’t all expect to do this manually, otherwise it’ll be way too tedious. Most PHP programmers will tell you that if you find yourself doing something menial and trivial over and over, you should create a script to automate it. That way, it’ll save you time which you can use to do other productive things, or have fun.
You could also apply this in real life. Say you’re being paid $10 to mow the lawn once every week. You could delegate that job to someone like your little brother or a neighbor for $5, for a free $5 a week. You pay your little brother $5, and then you pocket the $5 that your parents would give you for mowing your lawn for no work.
Say everybody on the block decides to have you mow the lawn. We’ll say that you have a total of 10 neighbors who want you to mow their lawn. Delegate all of those to a different person for $5 a week and you’ll find yourself pocketing an extra $50 a week for no work, just collecting.
There are actually a lot of contractors who use that same concept. They find the customer, and then they find another contractor to do the “dirty work”, while they collect and make sure the customer is happy.
There are certain hobbies that allow the gifted in that respective hobby to make a lot of money. An example of one of these hobbies is poker (basically anything that deals with “real money”, such as stock trading). For poker player that reaches the top through hard work, the reward is a lot of money. The same goes for singers, who are discovered by someone/a label that can sign them and market them.
Therefore, you should always be looking to find hobbies with high potential. For example, it isn’t very often that you hear bboys (that is, breakdancers) and how they make millions. They just don’t have the capacity to make a ton of money, unless they are marketing geniuses or something. However, if they were marketing geniuses, then they could make much more doing just that.
Likewise, there aren’t a lot of professional skaterboarders who become millionaires from their trade. To do so, you’d have to be the best of the best, the cream of the crop, and an extremely attractive figure in public like Tony Hawk. The same goes for boxers. You don’t want to have a hobby that can only make you a lot of money if you are the best of the best — it takes either enormous skill and hard work or a prodigical gift that you were born with.
I believe the most commonly accepted thought is that people should do what makes them happy. I say find something that makes you happy with the potential to make you a lot of money.
Let me refer you guys to a potentially life changing document called The Perfect Business– by Richard Russell.You’ll find that internet businesses meet many (maybe even all) of the characteristics of a perfect business.
The reason why I feel that e-commerce is the best is because of low high start up costs with a huge margin for potential.
- “2004 online retail sales rose 23.8 percent to $89 billion, representing 4.6 percent of total retail sales. Including travel, online sales also rose 23.8 percent to $141.4 billion. Online retail sales will reach $109.6 billion [in 2005]. Online sales including travel will rise to $172.4 billion this year.” — Forrester
This means that the internet is a great place to do business, and it’s constantly growing. It can be just as profitable as running a brick and mortar (real life) store, but is easier to manage because of a variety of programs that you can use.
The fruits of labor show almost immediately, compared to traditional brick and mortar companies. You can monitor traffic at pin point accuracy and know how you’re doing, where people are coming from and where they are exiting from. This allows you to plug holes that you might have, that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to see in real life.
There are dozens of monetization methods on the web like Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Azoogle, just to name a few.