Your AI Roadmap

CHAPTER 13Are You Ready for It? Wealth Expansion, 41 Ideas to Grow Your Income Streams

In the last few chapters, we've explored getting to know our financial picture better. Here comes more of the fun stuff, growing your money! When I moved to Arizona for my PhD program, I transitioned my side income from French tutoring to tech consulting. When I arrived on campus, I had tons of intro meetings with professors and staff around campus. I learned that several professors had connections with start-ups and companies. They were eager to hire relatively cheap and highly technical PhD student interns and consultants. Companies saw a direct line between my graduate research in linguistics and technology to the products they were developing. This is the strength of weak ties! I began to be known as “the PhD student who does speech tech stuff,” and even people who didn't know me well referred me to opportunities. My personal brand worked in my favor. Quite literally, it was helping pay my bills.

Usually it went something like this for warm intros: professors sent email introductions. I'd take a meeting with the company, and then we'd talk about potential partnerships and work. If it was mutually beneficial, we'd start a project. Especially for warm, friendly introductions, companies often already had a specific project in mind they wanted side help with. Maybe they didn't want to hire a whole research and development team. But they did want an outside opinion. So I'd say phrases like, ...