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What's the easiest way to make a living?

11 points by bkovitz ↗ HN
What's the easiest way to make a living today?

By "easiest", I mean in terms of time and attention. The idea is to have lots of time to work on projects that you enjoy. That time has to be good "maker time", not time when you're mentally exhausted from working at a job that consumes you. Think Einstein working at the patent office.

By "make a living", I mean enough money to pay the rent on a modest apartment, eat cheap food, and occasionally buy nice toys. US$24,000/year is probably the minimum.

Inheritance, sugar daddy, and living off your parents are amusing cheap-shot answers, but that's not what I'm asking about. I'm thinking that since technology has made us all so productive, it ought to be possible to work very few hours to make a passable living, and thus enjoy much more leisure time. Most people don't do that, though. People in the U.S. seem to be working harder than ever, but not getting much enjoyable leisure time. What might we find if we looked seriously at how to earn a living in a way that leaves the most time available for person projects that probably don't make money? Such projects could be anything from taking care of your kids to painting pictures to proving theorems.

Example: An entrepreneur friend of mine works four days a week as a cab driver, and spends his remaining time working on two small businesses. The money from cab driving is terrible ($60/day, with a lot of variance), but it gives him time and freedom, and he enjoys cab-driving. But let's not limit this to "Ways to finance your start-up." Just, ways to pay your rent, long-term, while you work on whatever you like, regardless of financial return.

16 comments

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mikeegg
Seems like playing the stock market is the easist way I've found so far. If you bet on a stock by buying 500 shares, the stock goes up ten cents (USD, $0.10), you've made $50 (I'm not counting transaction fees, just the base numbers). If you buy 5000 shares you've made $500. Make $500 three times a month and you're at $18,000 a year. Each $500 gamble may take one or two hours depending on how quickly the NASDAQ is moving.

For the specified amount of $24,000 per year, that's four $500 bets per month.

Mike

bkovitz
Interesting that you don't need a lot of winning bets to make a living. What about losing bets, though? Isn't this a pretty high-risk way to make a living? Also, doesn't it require a fair amount of capital to get started?
mikeegg
Using this idea you only bet when your batteries are charged, you have two hours guarenteed before your next crisis, you know the market is moving (almost every day something is moving), you feel good, you got enough sleep, you've already been to the bathroom, your favorite Starbucks/McDonald's/$WIFI-HOTSPOT is open, etc. Make sure you're ready to bet, watch the market, bet, go eat lunch.

I've been playing with this very idea. I've had to mentally hold one position over night. I don't like holding a position. I want to be in and out in two hours.

Gambling on the stock market is risky. I think lots of people, maybe most of the people that gamble this way, want to be rich. Well, I don't. As the OP asked the question, I only want to make enough to comfortably get by so I can spend the rest of my time living and learning.

philwelch
I've heard people say almost exactly the same things about horse races and craps, but in reality both of those are -EV. As far as my understanding of economics goes, day trading is 0EV at best, -EV when transaction costs are considered. I'd rather gamble when it's +EV--and then, gamble a small amount a large number of times to ride out the variance.
simpleton
Interesting - although I've heard tell that sometimes stock can actually go down, instead of up.
mikeegg
Very true, but consider that a stock can only move three directions: up, down, or sideways. This takes money. If you have the money to buy 5,000 shares of a $5.00 stock ($25,000), how long does it take that stock to move $0.10?
froo
"how long does it take that stock to move $0.10?"

I guess that really depends which direction you're talking about.

If you're not careful, having it move down 10 cents is fairly easy to accomplish and then all you're doing is working to lose money.

I would not go the investing route if I was the OP.

secret
I would just want to warn everyone (if it wasn't obvious enough already), that this is a pretty crazy way to attempt to make a living. While investing is not zero-sum and therefore different than gambling, the strategy described is fairly close to it. For starters, for most individual investors it would be a fairly safe assumption that intraday price fluctuations are random. I could write more, but I just couldn't leave that comment alone.
metaforth
The obvious answer to this might be to create a startup around your passion. You still have the problem of finding a way to fund the initial phase before you start making money. But that seems like a smaller problem than the original one. Maybe recursively reduce the problem in this way until it has been solved.
bkovitz
Unarmed security guard.

Some friends of mine long ago have done this. I don't know what the money is like these days (does anyone here know?), but I expect it's bad. The advantage is: you actually get to work on your laptop or notebook or whatever you like most of the time. Mostly what a security guard does is let truckers sign in when they make deliveries. Between deliveries, all you need to do is be there.

Has anyone here tried this?

froo
Has anyone here tried this?

Not first hand, but I have a friend who codes while working as a building attendant.

Money isn't great, you have to work odd hours - but he says the best shifts are the late night ones because nobody bothers you and its quiet.

waterlesscloud
I did it for a bit in college. Graveyard shift, lone person in an office building. Basically my job was to lower the fire insurance premium by having someone in the building all night. 2-3 times a night I'd walk through the building and make sure it was all still there, the rest of the time I read, did homework, etc.
fezzl
Teach, if you like it.
bkovitz
Funny that you mention this. The inspiration for submitting this question was my frustration with teaching while in grad school. Each of my four semesters so far, I've taught or assistant-taught a class. Each time, it consumed my mind, to the point where I found it difficult to think about anything else. My subconscious creativity was all spent on things like: how do I get the students to see X, how do I convince the prof not to obscure X, what would be a good homework assignment, how can I set up the homework so I can grade it super-efficiently.

I thought I'd get a lot more out of grad school if I financed it by working at a job that requires no thought or creativity. Ideally, my subconscious creative churning could continue while working at the job, and stay focused on my research. (Doing good teaching in grad school goes completely unrewarded.)

And then I thought, well, why bother with grad school at all, if what I want to do is learn interesting stuff and do research? If I had a subsistence-level job that didn't suck out my brains, I could pretty much spend every waking moment either letting the subconscious creative process run, or actually building stuff, researching stuff, and writing papers.

bkovitz
It seems strange that there have (so far) been so few ideas that leverage the high productivity that ought to be possible with technology and the highly interconnected economy. (So far, day-trading is the only one like that.)

How could one be very productive for only a few hours a week--enough to genuinely earn US$24,000 a year?

Is it Timothy Ferris or nothing? Has anyone gotten his "Four-Hour Work Week" to work?

dnsworks
Figure out what state has the best unemployment rates. Get a fluffy programming job at a large company in that state for about 6 months so that you can max out your benefits. Then get laid off and start collecting. Rhode Island looks like it's the best option with a maximum payout of $641/week, or $33k per year.