What a week.

I already mentioned a colleague’s mother-in-law and an ex-colleague of mine passing away last weekend. I went to the latter funeral today. The family are understandably very upset at his unexpected death at 63. They had a nice booklet with a eulogy that talked in detail about his life. Nice touch.

Just before the funeral I got some health news about someone, which I won’t divulge just now.

Then when I got back home after the funeral I got the news that a guy I know was hit by a tram this morning in Victoria Parade. He’s off the critical list now, and is stable, though there’s some risk of brain damage.

Definitely one of those weeks.

Most days I take my own lunch into work. But if I’ve forgotten or not had time, and I’m not going out to lunch with anybody else, I’ll buy something. Sometimes it’ll be a burger. But most of the other times, I’ll go to a place in the Australia On Collins foodcourt which makes rather nice rolls, with roast chicken, lamb, or pork.

On Monday I went and got one. I found the people had all changed, as had much of the signage. The chicken roll had less avocado than before, the lettuce was rather sloppily placed, part of the tomato had fallen out, and the chicken was less plentiful and bits of it were a little tough.

I’m not sure, but I wonder if the people that used to run the place may have sold up and left. Let me theorise for a moment: they worked out how to run their business, got it running, built up goodwill… then decided to sell the business in its entirety: the shop lease, the equipment, and most of all, the methodology: recipes, customer service, the full bit. It’s only the implementation by the new people that hasn’t quite worked.

I hope they made a lot of money, and I’ll give the new owners another go, but it’s not what it was. Or maybe I’m completely wrong and they just happened to have different — sloppier — people working there that day.

Let me segue into my theory on how to get rich.

The easiest way to get rich is not to work yourself to the bone, but to have other people working for you — or at least helping themselves to your stuff for money.

And the easiest way to have other people working for you is to have good ideas.

The good idea might be a design for a thing, a way of working/running a business, a great artwork, or something else that’s highly marketable and preferably easily duplicated (but protected by law against unauthorised copying). It might be something you thought of yourself, or that you acquired somehow.

I wish I had such an idea. I’ll keep working on it. But brains, not brawn, is the answer.

In the mean time, I’ve been putting Google ads on my various pages. It hasn’t pulled in much money, just a little bit. But given my personal blog gets more visitors than just about any of my other sites, I might try it here too.