{"id":2312,"date":"2009-11-24T01:07:10","date_gmt":"2009-11-24T05:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joyfullyjobless.com\/blog\/?p=2312"},"modified":"2020-11-01T14:16:03","modified_gmt":"2020-11-01T18:16:03","slug":"money-for-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joyfullyjobless.com\/blog\/2009\/11\/money-for-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"Money for Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been hard for me to understand the popularity of TIm Ferris\u2019 The 4-Hour Workweek<\/em><\/strong>. Take a closer look and you\u2019ll see he\u2019s advocating creating a money machine so you don\u2019t have to work much at all and can spend your money on fun. Despite it\u2019s self-employment slant, it\u2019s just a new variation of \u201cEverybody\u2019s Workin\u2019 for the Weekend.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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This philosophy puts \u201cfun\u201d on one side of the room and \u201cmoney\u201d on the other. (Most people have been too polite to point out that Ferris spends way more than four hours per week promoting his book and himself.)<\/p>\n

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To be truly Joyfully Jobless, fun and money need to be partners in the enterprise. \u201cFun is fundamental,\u201d Sir Richard Branson reminds us. That\u2019s the antithesis of all those business mottos which sound more like Fun is Forbidden.<\/p>\n

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How can you earn money by having fun? There are numerous ways, but the essential thing is to begin by creating a business that\u2019s so much fun for you that you can\u2019t wait to get at it every day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Then you can heighten the fun\u2014and build your entrepreneurial thinking\u2014by creating small projects where you get paid<\/span> to do things you normally pay to do. You won\u2019t get rich with any of these ideas, but your life will be noticeably richer in fun.<\/p>\n

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Do You Love…<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00b0 Classical music?<\/strong> Usher at your symphony hall and get paid to listen. The same goes for theater and other entertainment venues. Sometimes these are volunteer positions and sometimes they pay a token amount. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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When I do seminars in Las Vegas, I build in a performance by Cirque du Soleil<\/a> as part of the event. Of course, I wouldn’t think of sending my seminar participants all by themselves.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00b0 Giving your opinion?<\/strong> Sign up with local agencies that put together focus groups to evaluate new products. Some of the groups are prosaic, but others can be lots of fun. I once participated in a focus group for an airline and we were\u00a0 pleasantly surprised at the end of the session to learn we could be paid $70\u2014or receive a roundtrip ticket to Europe on the carrier.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00b0 Having a day at the spa?<\/strong> Schools of massage need bodies to practice on and sometimes they they even pay to use them. Then there\u2019s the woman who evaluates spa services for a hotel chain. She conducts her research by posing as a client, trying out as many services as she can squeeze into a visit. That\u2019s an idea that could be turned into an independent business.<\/p>\n

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\u00b0 Doing research?<\/strong> Ah, those closet detectives among us are the folks who love digging deeply into a subject. One fun possibility here is to create an independent research project and get it funded. Millions of dollars in grant money goes unclaimed every year. And, yes, there are grants for non-academics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u00b0 Travel? <\/strong>Of course, I have dozens of suggestions for getting paid to travel in my How to Support Your Wanderlust <\/a><\/em>classes. One of those ways is to organize a tour. I met two delightful women from Australia in a London restaurant who told me about a tour they\u2019d taken to the US to visit quilting museums and workshops. If you have a passion you love sharing with other people, this could be a wonderful way to get paid to spend time with kindred spirits.<\/p>\n

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Create your own Money for Fun exercise to wake up your imagination to new possibilities. The options are endless, but not automatic. As the late comedian Danny Kaye pointed out, \u201cLife is a great big canvas and you should throw all the paint on it you can.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0\u00b0<\/p>\n

Got something you’ve discovered to add to the list? Let us know by adding a comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been hard for me to understand the popularity of TIm Ferris\u2019 The 4-Hour Workweek. Take a closer look and you\u2019ll see he\u2019s advocating creating a money machine so you don\u2019t have to work much at all and can spend your money on fun. Despite it\u2019s self-employment slant, it\u2019s just a new variation of \u201cEverybody\u2019s…<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[479],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-making-peace-with-money","jsn-master"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joyfullyjobless.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joyfullyjobless.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joyfullyjobless.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joyfullyjobless.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joyfullyjobless.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2312"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/joyfullyjobless.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7386,"href":"https:\/\/joyfullyjobless.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2312\/revisions\/7386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joyfullyjobless.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joyfullyjobless.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joyfullyjobless.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}