Most work pays you for showing up.
Show up, you earn. Stop showing up, you don't.
Then there's a different kind of work. Do it once, and it keeps paying you long after you've moved on to something else.
There's a moment when work crosses from the first kind into the second. Most people never find it. They spend a whole career on the wrong side of the line.
Warren Buffett crossed it decades ago. He's an investor, but most of his time goes into reading, building a deep understanding of businesses most people skim past. The trades themselves take minutes. He might only do a handful of them in a year. Each one can keep paying him for the next twenty.
Look around. It's everywhere once you notice it.
A hit song written in an afternoon pays for forty years.
A line of code, written seven years ago, runs a thousand times before lunch.
A recipe perfected once becomes the menu in three hundred locations, cooked by people who've never met the chef.
A teacher explaining algebra to one student earns a wage. The same teacher on YouTube earns while she sleeps. Same lesson. Same algebra. Different side of the line.
When you do show up for your work, the question worth carrying is what would make this effort worth ten times more.
Sometimes it's recording the thing instead of repeating it live. Sometimes it's writing it down instead of saying it out loud each time. Sometimes it's handing the task to a system instead of doing it yourself.
Find the leverage. Then go and do the work you were already going to do.
* * * * *
Three things that made me write this:
1. I found a landing page I wrote five years ago, still live, still being used by a client. I'd forgotten about it. They hadn't.
2. I remembered the story of Picasso charging a man a fortune for a sketch he drew in thirty seconds. When the man complained that it only took thirty seconds, Picasso told him he was wrong. It had taken him forty years. That's the whole game in one sentence.
3. I looked at my newsletter data and saw emails still getting opened months after I sent them. The writing stopped. The reading didn't.
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