There’s a smarter way to make money than swapping your time for money, like most people do, and that is to build a business or system that allows you to leverage your time.

For instance, most web programmers understand the power of financial leverage in this sense as whilst they could earn in excess of $100 as an hourly wage, it would be much better to develop an app, that can then be downloaded multiple times, meaning they receive subscription revenue as a passive income without having to do too much extra work.

This is clearly the smartest way to make money, yet we are often conditioned to trade our time for money, as an employee or small business owner  by society, the school system, and our lack of self-belief.

The challenge here, of course, is there’s an intrinsic limit on how much a person can make if they are caught on the financial treadmill of trading time for money, as there are only so many hours in a day… plus there’s a clear ceiling to the amount anyone can charge for each unit of time; of course education can help, such as if you were to study a masters in nursing online degree then you could charge more for each unit, but there’s still a limit.

However, when you build a system, you can leverage this system time and time again with uncapped potential; just look at apps like Netflix or Spotify for instance, in terms of the revenue potential – but it doesn’t have to be that extreme.

It could be as simple as being the person that employs a few ice cream vans, and leverages this network around your city, rather than the self-employed or employed ice cream van owner that has no financial leverage.

Essentially, the only way to make a serious amount of money is to break free from the paradigm of swapping an hour of time for a particular amount of money, as the smarter way to make more money is to step off the financial treadmill of employment and set-up your own business in order to invest in cash generating assets.

These might take some time to develop and mature, but the effort tends to be worth it in the long run, after all how many property developers do you know of that worked extremely hard for the first ten years, and now sit back, whilst enjoying the passive rental income from each of their properties.

They are not lucky, we each create our own luck – and the way to achieve whatever you want is to take the first step, and just keep walking those steps as the path unfolds; you don’t have to see the whole staircase to take the first step.

The biggest challenge when looking to make an extra income is that most people earn a living by trading the most precious resource of all, their time in return for money; whether you stack shelves in a supermarket or perform open heart surgery – in both instances, you are swapping your time for money.

The smarter way to make money is to leverage systems, processes and assets so that you aren’t stuck in the rat race directly trading your time for money.