Apart from stealing eurofunds, being a politician, finding some niche to cater to rich people, or setting up some company and hire hardworking Slovaks who will be willing to work for you at starvation wages, you can also find something useful to teach to existing companies. Make it into a course and then go to companies and teach. Even better is to let others do the teaching for a pittance and get all the profit without even having to leave the house.

I still do the actual teaching, but even so, it gets me three times a decent Slovak salary.

The requirements are: you have to be extremely flexible, it’s best if you don’t need sleep, you need an enormous amount of patience, and you need to be able to improvize almost as fast as Robin Williams in Good morning Vietnam (still one of my role models).

Today I got up at 4.45 am. I took three different buses to arrive at a logistical center in the middle of nowhere at 7 am. I’m somewhere in between Pezinok and Senec. I only start teaching at 9 am, but I have two hours to myself in a quiet room. There’s nobody here except for the cleaning lady who opens the door for me. In those two hours I read, I write and I prepare classes. I could get here a lot faster if I owned a car, but not owning a car is why I have a bulging savings account. Want to save a lot of money and do something nice for the environment and kill some of Saudi-Arabia’s sick regime’s profit? Get rid of your damned car.

I will teach four classes today, but that gets me more than some Slovaks earn in an entire week. When I get back to Bratislava I have to teach an other class, a four year old girl. So theoretically I would be working from 9 am to 20 pm today, but the mother of my youngest student cancelled, because she’s sick. The lessons are paid in advance, so in a way, I don’t lose any money, not directly at least.

Yesterday I had my first class at 8 am and my last class ended at 8 pm.

On the plus side: almost none of the ‘regular’ human activities that do not bring any money appeal to me, so you could say I’m just getting paid to entertain myself.

I’m currently working on having more classes at the weekend as well.

Because:

I can do stuff and see time pass and not get paid.

Or I can do sort of similar stuff and see time pass and get paid.

So in a way I guess am running the following experiment:

How many hours a week can I get people to pay for my time?

My rates go from 15 euro per hour all the way up to 30 or more.

I can work 12 hours a day, because companies don’t want to have lessons during the night, so far.

With the money I am going to buy real estate and at some point a small theatre.

My advice: find some line of work that you do not experience as work.

Oh, and here’s that lovely ode to money from the movie The Wolf of Wallstreet.

You see, money doesnt just buy you a better life, better food, better cars, better women, it makes you actually a better person. You can give generously to your church or political party of your choice.

This may be one of the reasons why I got so disgusted working for the PVDA, a stalinist fringe party/political sect in Belgium, I like money too much. Other than that I’m pro many communist ideas, I must say, as long as the people who want to work can get rich.