• Employment – also known as wage slavery.  I’ve never met an employer willing to let me do my work whilst living on an atoll in the sun, have you?
• Self employment – also known as self-imposed wage slavery!  For many self-employed people, being physically present in their “business” is inescapable. Every self-employed person I’ve ever met had the same goal: to find a sucker to do all the work while they banked the money
• Investment – this only works if you have enough financial or physical assets to make investing worthwhile.  What do you do if you don’t?
• Business – by which I mean an income-generating activity which does NOT require your physical presence

The question now becomes what sort of business?

• All businesses share one common trait: they deliver a desired value to the buyer.
• The value, whatever it is, must be something people want. 
• And it must also arise spontaneously – otherwise we will have to keep advertising our business, and that’s WORK.

Whatever we offer, it has to be something that will be “in demand.” 

Our next question is, should we offer a product, or a service?

A service usually involves the physical effort of a person.  A few Internet services defy this general rule, but it’s difficult to run an Internet business from a desert island!

Only a product offers the opportunity of earning without being physically present.  This is what marketing gurus call the quality of “separablity.”

Should it be a physical product?  Possibly, but selling physical products means you have to deliver them to buyers, and that’s WORK.

Then, there’s the issue of accepting payment.

It’s a plain fact that money only comes from other people, but doesn’t that mean we have to be physically near the people we accept money from?

Lastly, we have the issue of “sustainability.”  Whatever product we offer, it has to sell dependably, year in, year out, and the product has to be something not subject to the vagaries of taste.

Phew!  Quite a problem! 

But, as with all big problems, when we break it down into smaller ones a workable solution usually can be found.  Remember, all we need is a situation where our income equals our expenses consistently, and we have reached the shore where the struggle for existence is unknown. 

My solution is given below.  I’d be amazed if it was the only one, or even the best, and I look forward to hearing your own ideas and suggestions.

MY SOLUTION:

Problem 1 - “in demand”
There was one area where I knew demand in Asia was both enormous and insatiable: education

Problem 2 – “separability”
I needed product that could be sold and delivered without my presence.... preferably while I was lying on the beach!  My answer was: book

Problem 3 – “sustainability”
I needed a book that would sell year after year, never losing its appeal. After several weeks I hit on an answer: textbook

In two days I had written a 20-page “manuscript” and showed it to a Singapore publisher. They said, “Expand it into a book.”

The final “textbook” is a 130-page paperback on English for Business consisting entirely of “model” answers for past exam papers.  The publisher distributed it in bulk to schools and bookshops all over Asia...and students really loved it!

For our purposes, textbooks offer two crucial advantages:

• A new batch of students buy the textbook every year
• You can update it every year with the latest exam answers if you want, or some other useful appraoch. 

• In year one my book sold 3,293 copies at US$8.25 each = US$27,167.
• I was paid US$1 for every copy sold = US$3,293 in royalties, averaging around US$275 per month.  Thus, 

Did I forget to mention that accounting isn’t much of a problem either?