Freelance Your Way to Freedom

12Automating Your Side Hustles for Passive Income

Contrary to popular opinion, the hustle is not a dance step—it's an old business procedure.

— Fran Lebowitz

It could be argued that the first form of automation happened in 1913 when Henry Ford invented the assembly line. Instead of a single craftsman assembling every element of a product or service, suddenly people were specializing in just one skill set they provided at a certain point in the car production process. It was a revolutionary unveiling that went on to change the world of manufacturing forever.

Before then, entrepreneurs either had to do everything themselves, or they needed to hire employees to help them with the business. Sure, this is one way to scale a business, and it is the model a lot of corporations use today. But the assembly line challenged how businesses operated. If machines mixed with specialized labor could suddenly crank out thousands of automobiles, why wouldn't every business want to operate on a similar level?

Fast‐forward to today, and we have technology that Henry Ford would have given anything to access. We have computers, software, robots, chatbots, forms, and documents that can work for us, as us, on an infinite scale. As I write this book, someone can read through my different Notion documents I have embedded into my freelance marketplace on Facebook. My thoughts can exist infinitely, which makes it much easier to grow a business today than ever before in history.

To sum up Tim Ferriss's ...