As I recorded this one, I thought about my many friends who truly enjoy sprucing up their homes as a lifestyle. I’m not criticizing that way of life as long as it is not cloaked in easy rationalizations about improving the value of the underlying asset. And as long as there is a well thought plan for income stability beyond “I hope my job holds out even though my company is going to be acquired” or what have you.

I also think that real estate can be overrated as an entrepreneurial path – if you don’t have a passion for mastering a particular aspect of real estate, then your chances are limited to the hopes of riding a bubble. I once enjoyed real estate but time has sharpened my focus. Hear the chapter for more.

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During the recording of this chapter, I was reminded just how much I have seen people separate themselves and increase their relative job security by taking a different mindset into the workplace, thinking more like owners and less like employees. Of course, you can’t delude yourself into thinking you own things you don’t, but you can certainly find more strategic ways to further your interests on and off the job. This book gets into that in more detail. I also take stock of the book so far in the first of several “gut checks,” this one coming at the end of this recording.

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Of course, the catch is that the real home runs in terms of wealth often come from these devil-may-care projects that appear to have no market value now or in the future. So by all means, if you find it freeing, pursue it – but it’s good to respect the balance between our passions and what is marketable. The feedback loop with our audience will help us a lot with that, and I get into that concept later in the book. So when I classify techo jams and knitting as hobbies, take it with a grain of salt. In my own town, there is a successful knitting store. But I doubt there could be four of them.

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There’s a “no excuses” mentality that comes in here, as we realize that this approach to creating assets not only works, but it works when all our friends would surely pat us on the back and say, “Don’t give yourself a hard time, you’re way too busy to do something like that right now.” That kind of reassurance can be comforting but in the end, we are not heading in the right direction when we allow those comforts to excuse us for fighting for our asset creations – and in many cases, fighting for our solitude. Not to mention our belief in ourselves.

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I get into why that is in this chapter, and also cover a bit of the “Jon Reed keys to time management,” which are nitty gritty things that make a difference for me, and set the table for more powerful and advanced concepts about time that are to follow later in the book.

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As I recorded this chapter, I realized there was a slight contradiction in my own story – advising readers that any space will do, but using an example where I wanted to use my dining table to start my own business and then got more ambitious by renting my own space – going against some of my advice on taking excessive “speculative” risks. In this case, I had no other lower risk options, so in that sense, I too the lowest risk that allowed me to move forward. Sometimes that’s how it goes.

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Most books of this kind push one kind of asset, such as real estate. The problem is that if you have no passion for the real estate business, it should not become your life’s work. So the decision on asset creation should strike a balance between passion and marketability, invoking the “feedback loop” whenever possible. I put my own book through these hoops in the chapter also.

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The key contrast in this chapter is the clash between the “cash is king” and “live within your means” mentalities, and why that clash is problematic. Essentially, individuals tend to land on one side or the other when in fact, both are necessary.

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This chapter is just about the end of what I think of as the “foundational” chapters in the book. While I like these chapters, there’s no doubt that the book takes it up a notch once these chapters are complete. I wasn’t able to solve that during the editorial process, but what I can tell you is that once you have these foundational chapters in place, I think you’ll enjoy where the book heads next. The meatiest ideas and most scathing critiques are coming up. For now, enjoy this piercing view into my own hard lessons on feeling a sense of ownership over that which I did not own.

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More importantly, this chapter lays the foundation for two key concepts in the book: that technology, properly utilized, allows us to do business in a way that is more conducive to our lifestyles (translation: less community gridlock, and that as virtual entrepreneurs, we need a commitment to excellence. We need a business focus that stokes our imagination enough to motivate us to become “world class” in our chosen field.

Download and subscription options: you can download (and subscribe to) all the chapters in the audio book (free) either in our iTunes store or with our audio book RSS feed.