There’s a saying, “Work smarter, not harder”. It means that with a little thought, you can make a process more efficient and reduce the amount of hard work you have to do. I totally agree with this statement, it makes perfect sense and I love making things more efficient.

The trouble is it only works so far: there will always be hard work to do.

One of my dreams is to be wealthy. This is a dream which has arisen from my reading various blogs and books about business and wealth. I would call this a “secondary” dream. It comes from a love of companies like Google, who put their users first, and Fog Creek Software, who really do care about their customers and employees. I read Seth Godin‘s blog about marketing, and Joel Spolsky‘s blog about running a [very] successful software company, and I love their approach. And it happens to be profitable, too. It’s the genius, the cleverness, the ethics that inspire me to become wealthy. It’s the route to wealth that interests me, not the wealth itself.

There is a temptation to think that their wisdom and genius will waft from the screens and into my life, kind of by osmosis. And in a way it will. Seth’s thinking has, in a small way, become a part of my thinking. Joel’s ethics have become my ethics too. But reading will only ever produce things “in theory”. It’s only when you get moving that dreams start to become reality. That’s the difference between success and mediocrity: successful people did something about it. The big wide world of practicality is so much more concrete than the infinite, though unreal, world of imagination.

I’m naturally biased towards the theoretical. I daydream. I did well academically. I love reading. I love thinking. These things are great, I think they’re very important, but I heard someone say that A grade students end up working for C grade students, and it made me realise that where the “real world” is concerned, theoretical knowledge is inferior to practical knowledge. That’s humbling for intellectual people.

I still think there’s an important place for the theoretical. There is incredible beauty in the workings of, say, the cell, or animal behaviour, or the life cycle of a slime mould (seriously, look it up, it’s astounding). It’s just that when it comes to business, that kind of approach holds too tightly to ideas. Business thinking is broad, simple and quick, whereas intellectual thinking is deep and slow.

So to take it back to my original point, there’s only so much that “work smarter” can do. You can only optimise to certain degree. The person who spends their whole time thinking about it will always lose out to the person who spends their whole time doing something about it. Action beats inaction.

I want to make money online. I love the idea that you don’t have to do anything to make money. Who spotted the deliberate over-simplification? Yes, you have to put the work in, maintain things, watch out for trends, check your statistics and all that, but it sure beats minimum wage. I think of all the time I’ve spent learning how to make websites instead of, I don’t know, going outside and getting a sun tan — well now it’s time for those lessons to make me money.

Naturally, I have been thinking and reading about this, and I’ve learnt something. The biggest roadblock to making money online is in your mind. Maybe we could call it the learning curve. If you google around for making money online, you’re sure to come up with a bunch of sites that promise thousands of pounds for doing nothing. Make £££s from home! Or some other horrible contortion of typography.

These are aimed at people who think that making money is magic. They will find that they make £2 a day, maybe. But there is no magic. It’s simple. Here’s the deal: learn how to do it. Then do it. It’s a simple learning of a skill.

I think of all the things I got my head around at school that I thought were impenetrable, but that now seem easy. Ionic bonding. Simultaneous equations. Trigonometry. OK, so I lied about simultaneous equations. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I came across it today, but the point is at one stage I got it. It just took a little effort.

This is where most people go wrong. They think it takes a lot of effort, and will forever. Working for a living takes a lot of effort. I work in a cafe, and while I love it, I have realised something. The cafe won’t run itself. I clean a table, and someone comes and sits on it! I can’t just set it up and leave it — I have to keep cleaning, keep making coffee.

This takes energy, and it would be better to direct that energy into something that maintains itself, because energy is costly! So I’m directing energy into learning how to make money online. It’s a strange new world, but it’s exciting. A little effort now means a system, some time in the future, that generates money for me.