Welcome back to the 1st Law Newsletter - Friday Edition.

In this email:

• The 1% that matters

• Decoupling earnings from time

• Quote to ponder

The 1% that matters

99% of effort is wasted. Spend as much time as possible on the 1% that matters.

Much of your life will be spent on things that don’t really matter in the end. For example, all dating before finding your spouse is time you cannot spend improving your relationship with them. All work before finding your ideal job is time you cannot spend building upon that career path. All the failed businesses were just bad ideas before you come up with the one that you will run forever. This is all wasted time in a goal sense, but not in a learning or experiential sense.

Some of those experiences may have been necessary, and it is all valuable learning to build upon. And at the very least, you learn the value of hard work. But in a goal oriented life, only 1% of your effort will pay off. The sooner you can begin investing into something you know you will be with you forever, the better.

All worthwhile results come from compound interest. It is the same for most aspects of your life: financially, romantically, professionally… they all will benefit from compounding experience and time.

Ideas from The Almanack of Naval.

Decoupling earnings from time

In a salaried job, as I am in currently, the input is linked from the output. Every week I work a set amount of hours and I get paid the same, whether it is a productive week or not. You can build wealth with a salaried job if you have a high enough salary and savings rate. However, there is a better way.

Decouple the output from the input. Find a way to get paid to produce results. This way, as you get better and better, you can deliver results faster and earn more, or deliver the same results in less time and work less.

In order to decouple the output from the input, you must be in the right field. Not all work allows this. Working at a restaurant, you need to be there until close regardless of how busy it is. But being a salesman, you can make 20 high ticket sales in the first 4 months of a year and have made enough money to take the rest of the year off.

These types of results are only possible when you are operating in the realm of ideas. This is where creativity, passion, and results are king. Hours in mean nothing.

Are you operating in the realm of ideas?

Quote to ponder

Thanks for reading!

Lucas