How Much Does It Cost To Invade The World?

(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on January 16th, 2019. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site – and releasing The Vault, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while.)

How Much Does It Cost To Invade The World?

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about motivation. A lot of what motivates a given person will be little anecdotes and personal triggers. Those are far more effective than the impersonal guru-bait that you’ll find on motivational posters and Twitter.

So an example from my personal catalogue; watching my bank balance go up in small increments. Take a new dropshipping store, for instance. You hook it up to your bank through Stripe, and even if you’re selling $5 things (which I don’t recommend) you’ll get a steady stream of micro-payments that you can watch in real-time (excluding the Stripe payment delay.)

That looks cool and it’s more appealing to me visually than a tweet telling me to live free or die trying.

And if you come up with these little triggers for yourself, you’ll find that you can self-motivate.

This is probably a topic that I’ll come back to on a more serious note at some point, but this is a fun article.

World Maps And Your Money

When I was younger, I used to play real time strategy games. Notably, I played the Command and Conquer series.

In the first one, you had a campaign map and it showed your army taking territory.

Naturally, this left an impression, because when I started working on Fiverr, the fact that there was a little map that filled out as you took orders from each new country actually motivated me a lot.

This is all gamification, and today I thought of a way to get you excited for low-stakes ecommerce and other business stuff by playing these games.

This is true whether you’re a westerner or not, although the game is a lot more serious if you’re not.

Check this map out:

This is a map for world average incomes.

The global poverty line, according to the basics of my research, is considered to be $1.25 a day.

That’s $500 a year.

There are a few countries which are below that line, with apparently over half the world living on an average of less than $10 a day.

That’s $3650 per year, or the $2000-4000 orange on the map.

Whilst this is a clear sign why there’ll forever be an immigration crisis into the West and it’s pretty damning from the global income equality perspective, there’s not all that much the average internet guru can do about that.

Back to us internet business folk.

Small Stakes

If I went on Twitter right now and said, “Hey guys… here’s my secret method to making an extra pound per day,” I can guarantee basically nobody would be interested.

And that’s a shame for numerous reasons.

Namely, a pound a day is $500 extra a year but nobody thinks long term enough.

But back to our somewhat lighthearted game; it’s hard to get people to be enthusiastic about the small stakes game of earning an extra dollar or two daily, even passively. In fact, online, it’s called beer money.

But then we look at our map and think instead about WORLD DOMINATION.

Guys and girls worry if they can replace their income online. This might be, say, $2000 a month. It’s a tough ask for a beginner.

Could you make an extra $200 a year though?

If you could, you could cross Somalia off your list of conquered countries. (Holy Christ, if this blog ever goes viral is this colonial nonsense going to get me in trouble.)

If you could make an extra $5 a day, you can tick off most of Africa.

And at $10 a day, you can outstrip a lot of average incomes worldwide.

If you think, “Jamie… I don’t want to think about the plight of the Africans” you might want to look at some vaguely developed countries.

If you make more than £400 in any given month, you’ve matched the Indian average wage of 35,000 rupees. With just over the same amount, you match Romania and Bulgaria, which are EU states.

The point not being to disparage weaker economies, but to give some perspective.

What’s Easy For You Is A Full Month’s Work For Someone Else

If you do the things I say on this blog and other associated properties, you can make a lot of money.

And Twitter’s full of the make-six-figures-or-you’re-a-peasant mentality.

The reality isn’t always that you’re going to be a multi-millionaire though, and faced with that, you’re likely to get discouraged if you have periods where you make tiny money.

But the fact is that if you can make $100 a month in your spare time, that’s great.

And it’s relatively easy.

Sometimes I get affiliate commissions that are bigger than the figures in this post come through in the middle of the night while I’m asleep. I have to look up what they’re actually for.

A few hours working on Fiverr/Upwork will net you that.

And you won’t be a baller by any means making $200 a month extra, but what you might think of as beer money if you live in the US is the equivalent to a North Korean toiling away in god-knows-what conditions for the month.

And if you aim for $1 a day passively, it’s not a big ask. You can do it over and over again, using the game above until you get into real figures.

You’ll find at a certain point, it compounds.

And you’ll probably achieve more long term by creating multiple small stake income generators than you will by chasing the big bucks; especially right off the bat. (Of course, by all means do that too.)