Playing video games can help.

Playing video games are about as unproductive as you get, but at least they are fun (c'mon don't tell me you've never at least once played solitaire).

Even if you don’t play computer games, heres how playing strategy games like Command and Conquer or Age of Empires helps the quest for a better income solution.

If your not familiar with these types of games. They are a bit like the natural evolution of chess/risk. They are war games where the objective is simply to annihilate the enemy. You achieve this objective by building armies to attack with. All units (be they stone throwers or tanks) require resources to ‘build’. In these games you must collect the resources (gold/wood/food/stone/money etc) to spend on building your armies.

How is this going to make me any money you ask? It's not. But its a great example of building an income stream. Look at it this way. In a game you collect resources to ‘spend’. In the real world you trade using money. For the purpose of simplification, resources=money (because in both cases we use them for purchases). In the case of Command and Conquer (because it takes place in a more recent time) the only resource actually is money.

In order to collect resources (earn money) you have to build things like timber yards, mines, or even (Command and Conquer Generals) 'Internet hackers' who “suck the Internet dry” (bring in money). Making this happen has an initial cost but will bring in a lot more in the long run.

In the game, whoever has the most resources wins.

There are a lot of parallels here to life (except you don't “win” in life). The most important for me was that you need to create various income generating vehicles.

I found while playing strategy games, I was doing exactly what is necessary to make money in life.

In Galactic Battlegrounds, a Star Wars version Age of Empires (PC game), there are units who collect Carbon which you can pretty much trade for anything. What’s more as in all these strategy games, once created and ordered to do a specific task, they just keep doing it with minimal maintenance. This is precisely the kind of income vehicle we are looking for.

To win the game you have to create an income stream with minimal maintenance. Duplicating that income stream as often as you can and to make as much as you can, not because you’re greedy, but because money (as in life) increases your ability to do what you want.

Believe it or not, this is the financial model I use in my life. I try and create “carbon collectors” to bring money in for me, concentrating on always minimising the effort and making the process as automatic as possible.

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