On assets
Seth Godin is spot on in Where are your assets? Please go read it.
Do work and get paid once. Build an asset and get paid for as long as it lasts.
Key takeaways: real estate pays regularly, stocks are the promise of a later payoff (maybe a little more regularly with dividends). Build your brand by overdelivering to earn trust. Ensure you’re always building value (people miss you when you’re gone). Gain expertise – don’t do the same thing over & over again. These apply to companies as well.
The picture shows a boxed set of Red Hat Linux 7 & 8. Shortly thereafter they became RHEL & Fedora. Red Hat built assets and look where they are now – listed on the stock exchange and arguably one of the largest companies in opensource. Cygnus started with no more than $6,000 in capital, had a great exit to Red Hat and formed much of the basic underlying toolchain.
A salesman would say, “always be closing”. I think the mantra should be: always be building assets.
