Clarity, and plan-monkeys

I’ve talked about taking action and doing things, but I want to add a bit of clarity.   There’s a difference between smart action and dumb action.

Smart action involves small steps towards a goal.  Such as staying up late and writing a blog post or studying some new material.

Dumb action involves taking large steps towards a goal when you have no idea of the first step.  A good example of this would be to think you are going to make money blogging on day 1. 

Sure, go out and blog to make money.  But don’t jump ship on your day job until your blog is close to replacing your current income or replacing your current income.  Case in point: I still have an 8 to 6 or so day job.  Should the Android app I’m writing take off, I’m still going to have my day job.  Deciding when to quit the day job is more complex of an answer than I can give right now, because I haven’t quit my day job.  I’m still here. 

But, I’d have to say this: 12+ months of living off the income of the side job alone.  And by that, take your day job paycheck and plow it against any debt, emergency fund savings, or investing (in that order).  Personally, I wouldn’t quit my day job until the only debt I have is my house.  I don’t own a house, so that’s a ways to go. 

I guess I need to add more clarity to what I’ve muddled up quite a bit in this mess.  Smart action will often result in failure.  Dumb action will also result in failure.  The difference is in scale.  A smart action that fails and costs you $20 has been an interesting learning experience.  Continue to lose $20 here and there to learn at a small scale and with little hope of bankrupting yourself.  There’s a mental thing that happens when you lose $20 on a venture.  Because if you can’t make money on the small scale, you can’t make money on large scale.

If the only way to make money is invest at least $100,000, your plan sucks and you need a new plan.   Any plan that can make money for $20 invested can be scaled up to $50 invested.  From there, your plan out to feed itself.   If the plan isn’t cranking out at least the amount you’ve invested by $50, you should seriously think about shooting that plan. 

Somewhere in that last sentence, Dave Ramsey’s speech about employees carrying problem-monkeys came into my brain.  Maybe these are plan-monkeys.    Dave’s discussion was on decision making.  Essentially, every person that comes to you with a decision that needs to be made has a monkey on their shoulder.  When they tell the boss, the monkey goes from the person to the boss.  The goal of the boss is to make sure the monkey leaves with the person. 

So the goal with these plan-monkeys is feed them a bit in the form of money.  If they don’t start handing money back to you, you need to quit feeding them money.  Simple as that. 

Time invested is a different thing, though.  In creation of this blog I have invested zero dollars and a lot of hours.  And I’m okay feeding this monkey, because it doesn’t cost me any money.  It doesn’t make me any either, but it doesn’t cost me anything.

When do you shoot the non-cost plan monkey (like the blog)?   When you want to.   It’s not costing you anything, so you won’t suffer if it goes away.   If you need more time to do other things or if you feel you aren’t gaining any traction, then just shoot the monkey.  If people miss that monkey, they will let you know.