Life lessons from IHOP
The restaurant gave me an aha moment
It was a Saturday, in the good old south (I live in Florida by the way). When there’s no college football, the days drag on so much. So to kill time, my wife and my kid went outside for breakfast, me and my wife decided to go to IHOP for breakfast (did I say breakfast? I think it was a brunch).
My son ordered pancakes, hot chocolate and me and my wife ordered omelet. When the bill came, it was about what, $16.
So we gave a tip of what, maybe $4. I’m a good tipper so I probably gave $5.
But here’s my point, I gave the waiter $5, but if the lady worked for bigger fancier restaurants, she could have a tip that’s triple that amount, in the same amount of work.
I don’t have anything against people working in IHOP, my point is, at a similar kind of work, you could up the money you get by working in fancier restaurants.
Here’s the point, we are like that in life, we trade our time with dollars, small dollars. In reality, you can trade your time with more dollars. We worked so hard that we hardly see our families and friends, trading your time with dollars.
I’m a chemist, and I worked in the laboratory, but I soon realized that if I worked as a chemist for the rest of my life, I will never be financially independent.
Berkshire Hathaway’s chairman Warren Buffet once said that:
If you work for somebody else and exchange dollars with time, you will be working for somebody for the rest of your life.
When I first read that, that’s when I decided to be an entrepreneur. I’m still a chemist, but I sell information products (chemistry, math and science) on-line, so I consider myself an infopreneur.
It’s still a long way to go, but I enjoy working everyday in my spare time trying to scale my business while I work as a chemist.
The IHOP moment, my aha moment is this: with selling information products, I have a sales man, and I’m not working. The sales man is my sales funnel, an internet site selling my info-product. This sales man will always be online, I just need to bring traffic to the sales funnel (or my sales man).
That means I am not paid to man the store. I’m paid when the traffic buys my product, butI don’t need to be there. The product is online and buyers can consume the information right away.
In this case, I am not exchanging dollars with my time. The sales funnel, my salesman, will be working for me all the time.
