Have You Really Considered Your Business Model?
Most people pursuing something may not even know what it is.Because the definition is unclear, their thinking becomes vague, their criteria for choosing are missing, and their actions are misguided… which then affects their entire life.
Without a clear definition or way to measure it, you can't turn it into concrete goals, making it easy to keep busy without achieving results.Everyone is selling their own time.
That's because if you no longer need to sell your time to meet your living needs, you've achieved financial freedom. In other words, until you reach financial freedom, everyone is selling their time.
Once you see this clearly, you can use the following simple sentence to define a "personal business model": A personal business model is simply how a person sells their time.
Let's look at the basic categories of personal business models:
Category 1: Selling one unit of time once.
Category 2: Selling the same unit of time many times.
Category 3: Buying others' time and reselling it.
There are many gig workers in the world who "retail" their time—not just "retail," but with a "limited inventory" (only 24 hours a day, and not all of it is available for sale; unsold time doesn't become "inventory" but simply vanishes). This is a poor subcategory of the "sell one unit of time once" model.
People with fixed jobs are essentially "wholesaleing" their time.Many live a nine-to-five schedule, selling off eight hours a day in a lump sum for all days except 115 statutory holidays per year. Clearly, the result is a bit better than the previous approach. But as you might have guessed: their hourly rate often has a low ceiling.
Yet, whether retail or wholesale, both involve selling one unit of time once.
Starting a business and investing actually fall under the "buy others' time and resell it" personal business model.When you start your own business and become the boss, you hire people to work for you (which is essentially buying their time), use these resources to create something (a product or service), and then sell it. Investors also fundamentally buy time—part of the entrepreneur's time (or "the time of more capable people")—and then figure out how to sell it. From this perspective, we can also understand why "investors first value the founder's qualities, and then the direction the founder chooses."
Broadly speaking, for an individual, "progress" means gradually learning and using various personal business models, then finding ways to optimize each one. On a broader scale, anyone can at least proficiently (or at least think they are proficient) use the first personal business model, while the latter two are only mastered by a minority after learning them. However, some people can proficiently use any of the three models, or even combine them skillfully.
][/wptao]