Rich Dad! Poor Dad!
Getting the money
Last time we looked at the plan to get a PhD in computer science. The first step was setting up the roadmap to pivot into Computer Science. That started with my entry to the University of Colorado Boulder to obtain the necessary undergraduate CS course requirements necessary for graduate study. We also came up with the conclusion that I needed an additional $11,482 to fund my first year of study or as self-help gurus like to say; it’s just $32 a day (how hard is that?).
I need to make money and fast. What better way to look at a high level picture of the situation than checking Robert Kiyosaki’s cashflow quadrant. There are a total of four ways to make money.
Either being an employee (your manager is your boss) or being self-employed (your clients are your boss) and selling time for money. I am already working so I’m not looking to be employed yet again so the E quadrant is not for me. The S quadrant looks promising but I do need to optimize the Price / Time ratio. We’ll look at that in a bit.
Now being a business owner leverages other people’s time for money and if the system works (i.e. the company is profitable) you get an asset that can be sold later for anywhere between 2x to 10x of profits.
The downside is that you still have to pay money in terms of salaries, rent, software, tools and equipment to do anything meaningful. So there is a lot of overhead getting jobs or selling products and services as well as managing people. I don’t have that kind of time or patience so the B quadrant is out of the question.
The final quadrant is the investor quadrant, the holy grail of money making where your earnings are not directly linked to your time such as rent, stock dividends, royalties, ad revenues, affiliate commissions, etc…
Many assets in this quadrant are also appreciating so you can sell later for more than you initially invested in them. This promises to have the lowest time commitment for the highest returns. The problem is that it also takes a lot of time for the returns to materialize and so is not a fast way to earn additional income.
Therefore, I’m looking at something like this.
I’d probably start in the S quadrant (maybe doing some freelancing, consulting or contract work) but with something that maximizes my rate equation above either by increasing my price or lowering the time needed to do a good job and if both then that’d be fabulous. After that, I’d be slowly moving to the I quadrant. I’ll talk about how to do that in later posts.
So now I want to find my Ikigai (may be too much but it’s a cool concept that I’d like to mention here). Ikigai is a Japanese concept describing the things that make your life worthwhile and give you a deep sense of purpose, satisfaction and joy. It’s the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what you can be paid for and what the world needs.
As Naval Ravikant once tweeted (which I am paraphrasing here) “Do what will feel like play to you and like work to others”. This has the advantage that you’d outwork everyone else because you won’t feel tired, bored or burned out which is a real problem in this day and age.
The hard part is finding an answer for each one of the Ikigai questions. This does need a bit of soul searching, here’s what I came up with answering these questions:
What I love? teaching, learning, writing, swimming, going out with friends, having engaging conversations, walking, table tennis, traveling, science fiction, entrepreneurship and startups, sketching and coloring.
What I’m good at? empathy, motivation and inspiration, electronics, coding, strategy, experimenting and solving problems.
What I can be paid for? tutoring, coaching, coding, project management, product management.
What the world needs? This is hard but I’d say that, better education (learning valuable skills) to get better opportunities (full-time jobs or starting businesses). In William and Sanjay’s book Workforce Education, they mention that having a college degree is the best indicator in the United States for getting better opportunities.
The sweet spot would be inspiring and teaching people valuable skills using technology. So, low risk, fun work, teaching and coaching others to improve their tech skills preferably in a live format. I had a chance to teach Udacity’s Intermediate JavaScript program in 2022 and really enjoyed the experience and so was searching for a similar remote opportunity.
I finally landed a remote teaching position at the intersection of entrepreneurship and technology with MIT Professional Education facilitating two of their courses and coordinating one of their professional certificates:
Digital Platforms: Designing Two-Sided Markets from APIs to Feature Roadmaps
Forecasting Technology Innovation Using Data for Strategic Advantage
That was a great find and am really happy to be teaching again. Here’s my income from last year:
The question remains as how did I land a position at MIT professional education and I’ll leave Kaelyn to answer that because I had a similar experience and her episode with Ali Abdaal is more fun to watch.
Probably between teaching, grading and communicating with students, I ended spending around 250 hours last year. So my rate was around $54 an hour. I did have a lot of fun teaching and prepping but grading was a real chore. Oh, by the way, I reached the target with a surplus of $2,000. That’s cool!
Now to improve my rate and gain some lost time. I need to either raise my prices which I doubt is possible or reduce the number of hours spent. That’s possible! I believe I can have that down to less than 100 hours. The bare minimum is 64 hours which are the number of live sessions that I have to be part of.
So can I reduce 186 hours spent grading to 36 hours without reducing the quality of feedback? thus raising my rate to $135 an hour and gaining some valuable time to put in learning, family or fun.
I have an idea how but that’s the topic for another post so stay tuned. 😉