Everyone wants to decouple time from money.

The problem? It's an extremely unpredictable way to make a living. For every successful creator, there are thousands who make nothing or almost nothing.

So, how do you make the unpredictable, predictable? Here's what I learned:

See, there are two very distinct worlds of how to make a living in our universe.

The first world is the one we're mostly familiar with, where you follow a predictable career path.

Say you want to make a living as a programmer, a doctor, a plumber, an English teacher, etc. If you do certain things (learn to code, get a specific degree, etc.) you can increase the odds of getting what you want to very close to 100%.

And you can also expect such a profession to earn you a certain amount of money within a relatively narrow income range. Payoffs in this world tend to follow a normal distribution. The path to get what you want, and the expected payoff, are both highly predictable.

In the second world, the payoffs tend to follow a Pareto distribution, where you can expect wild differences in income among people doing the same thing. Making a living in this world is far from predictable.