The Best Feeling in the World Is Getting Paid to Play
This is how I live. Here's how you can live this way too.
Work feels like death for most people.
99% of people don’t describe their work as play. This idea sounds like clickbait Alex Hormozi garbage to the masses.
It feels like it’s time to roll out the cliche “Do what you love little Timmy Tucker.” Over the last few years I’ve turned my life into a video game. The only objective of this game is I want to keep playing it forever.
That means I need to continue to get paid to play this game. The difference here is I’m not doing the work I do to earn money or get rich. I just want to keep doing this type of work that feels like play to me.
It’s a radical mindset that blows up most people’s brains.
I didn’t invent this way of life, and I stumbled across it by pure accident. Here’s how you, too, can get paid to play and experience what is the best feeling in the world.
Don’t play stupid games with stupid people
The most important goals always start with figuring out what you don’t want (also known as anti-goals).
I used to spend my days in meeting rooms playing stupid games with stupid people. I never got anything done. Even changing a logo on a sales page required a committee of pinheads to agree.
I’d wake up and answer stupid work emails that a chatbot could easily answer. I’d sell stupid bank products that I didn’t agree with to stupid people who thought these products would make them rich (banking products make the bank rich, not you).
I disliked most people I met in business. They were so mediocre.
They’d have Friday drinks, get drunk, watch the football, and talk about some meaningless Netflix show. It all felt so … boring. I accepted this boredom as my reality. I’d never known any other way to live.
My life felt stupid.
I eventually got off this hamster wheel. I discovered that people were building new careers for themselves on the internet with no boss and no employer. It seemed like clickbait at the start until I was surrounded by an army of people living this way.
They chose a topic, made it their obsession, then centered their whole life around it. I discovered they turned their life into a video game.
Get paid to keep playing the video game you obsess over
Once I succeeded at online writing it was all I wanted to do.
When I quit my 9-5 job the stakes became higher. My mantra became, “How do I keep getting paid to play this amazing video game?” It wasn’t a game of survival or trying to become a rich b*tch so I could buy a Lambo and take selfies in Santa Monica.
I just wanted to keep living the video game…
Wake up whenever
See my daughter whenever
Goof off a day a week
Walk in the sunshine
Hit the gym 4 times a week (whenever)
Work from home or an Airbnb anywhere in the world
Never get told what to do by a micro-managing boss ever again
Write every day without filtering who I am or worrying about opinions
So I set up my online business to do that.
This meant I had to…
Find predictable income streams
Make money from my strengths
Find ways to make recurring revenue
Learn how to craft high-ticket offers ($10,000+)
Build affiliate partnerships
Grow my email list
Figure out how to get predictable traffic to my email list
These seven steps allowed me to set up a foundation to keep getting paid for the rest of my life. It’s the kind of feeling I can’t describe. I’m 100% self-sufficient and will never ask an employer for a salary again. It’s what I call the permissionless life.
Here are the steps if you want to do the same.
1. Turn an “interest” into an obsession
There’s a threshold of participation most people never reach.
It’s easy to get h0rny when you’re in the virgin territory of a new interest. Those first few weeks of a new interest are orgasmic. But after the endorphins wear off the average person can’t keep the habit of an interest long enough to get results.
They need dopamine. They need the ear candy of compliments and strangers kissing their smelly feet to keep going.
The only way to overcome this “interest” problem is to dial up the intensity.
I call it “going all in.” You must fully commit.
For some people that means quitting their job.
For others it means giving up all their other hobbies.
In my case it meant dumping my ex-girlfriend so I could get rid of all BS distractions and focus on online writing.
It also means putting ya money where ya big mouth is.
Interest is hard to maintain. When you invest money in an interest you start to expect an ROI. That gives you leverage on your lazy self (a side we all have) to wake up early and actually put in the work.
No money, no commitment.
Interests need to peculate for long enough too. The 10,000-hour rule is a good rule of thumb. But doing the same thing over and over and expecting results is the definition of insanity. The 10,000-hour rule also needs 10,000 iterations.
To dial up the intensity to the max you also need to be around other people on their way to obsession who care about similar things. Obsession is an identity. It’s not for everyone, but without it you stay a no one.
Go all in or don’t get paid to play. Ever.
Obsession turns average people into outliers – Zach Pogrob
2. Value growth more than you value safety
I spoke to a guy today.
His email started with “I’m obsessed.” He then went on to tell me he’s only willing to explore his obsession if it’s free. He won’t invest in anything from anyone. I suggested a $100 option he could try from a creator I admire. He still wouldn’t do it.
If you won’t invest $100 in your obsession, you’re not obsessed.You’re lying to yourself. Where we invest money helps us to understand what we care about. Mastery in any field isn’t free.
(For some reason people will pay $100K for a mostly useless college degree though.) What stops us investing in our obsession is we’re taught to value safety more than we are to take risks.
An investment always carries some risk but so, too, does playing it safe.People spend so much time trying to protect the little they already got, that they miss out on the enormous upside they could have by investing in their obsession.
Most people’s security blankets aren’t worth protecting. $20,000 in savings feels like a lot, but you can never really live an extraordinary life with it.
You’ll always be one step away from broke. One curveball. One medical disaster. One parking fine. Bam. It’s all gone. Mayday, mayday. That’s no way to live.
Protecting the little you have is a sign of a scarcity mindset. Obsession is fuelled by a growth mindset grounded in optimism.
You must believe life can be better than it is to truly get paid to play for the rest of your life.
3. Get so good people pay you
Work that feels like play doesn’t turn into money until you get good.
In my case, there are a lot of writers online. Anyone can write. But most never get paid to do it every day because they don’t master the video game. Like anything, there are a stack of micro skills needed to go beyond the average results most will achieve.
On the surface it looks like all you need to do is write. Once you get far enough into the game you realize there’s 100x more to it.
At this point you can either get overwhelmed and frustrated by it, or you can play the game and push yourself to mastery. Either way, people won’t pay until you get good.
So you either good, or keep falling short and wondering why you never can get paid to do work that feels like play while others do it and make it look easy.
I don’t make the rules. Use obsession to get good or give up.
There are millions of office cubicle jobs on LinkedIn right now that’d be glad to have you, so you can play boring office games until 65, then die. Choose wisely.
4. “Work turns into play when improvement turns into passion obsession”
(Dan Koe)
There’s a meme on Twitter/X that goes “XYZ thing is self-improvement in disguise.
Business is self-improvement in disguise.
Gym is self-improvement in disguise.
Leadership is self-improvement in disguise.
Losing weight is self-improvement in disguise.
Writing is self-improvement in disguise.
All of these and more are true. What makes a goal a video game that’s fun to play is when improvement is built in.
As Dan Koe says, work turns into play when you force yourself to improve. This improvement mechanism is how you progress from an interest to an obsession. That’s what happened with me and writing.
I kept wanting to improve. I kept challenging myself to write better essays, do more research, and attract more email subscribers. The improvement aspect is now automated. It’s a flywheel that keeps on spinning and won’t die out until I die.
Not improving is where people go wrong.
We’ve all seen it. You know, the friend who sells their arts and crafts at the Sunday market each week and is still doing the same number of sales that they did a year ago. Or worse, their sales keep plummeting.
They never move out of hobby mode because they haven’t set up systems to force improvement. And they refuse to pay for help or consider the real fact their business is sh*t and will never make money.
1%-better-each-day is cheesy as hell because it works.
Closing Thought
The best goal you can ever have is to turn a passion into an obsession, then get paid to play this infinite video game for the rest of your life.
Somehow I figured out this glitch in the matrix. I’m not the only one. Every day more people are building small online empires around their obsession. If you’re bored in life, it’s time to migrate to a new way of living.
Tell me which of these ideas above you find useful and why in the comments.
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Tim, this essay didn't blow my mind. For a good reason. I'm going all in. I can't afford to quit my job yet but my free time is spent writing online. The longer I do it, the more interesting things happen to me.
No. Just no. The best feeling in the world is gazing at the stars in the woods. Maybe in the category of "getting paid" it's not bad though.