Book Review: Don't Give Your Work Away for Free

I was intrigued to see a book called Don’t Give Your Work Away for Free by Thaddeus Cooper and Dr Frederick Von Greensburg. I thought I should check it out.

The authors start out by discussing how employment typically works today. You have a timeline to do work, you go there for the time, and you are paid for going there.

While I have done that sort of work over the years, it’s certainly not how I prefer to work. I far prefer a project value basis where I determine with the client what needs to be done, work out the value that it will provide, and provide them with a price to achieve that outcome. How and when I get that done is then up to me.

Over the years, I’ve listened to many podcasts from consultants who’ve moved from an hourly basis to a project value basis and have never looked back.

Now not all clients can work that way. Many government and large corporates are totally tied into a $ per hour mentality. But even in those cases, they might be able to purchase something rather than just hiring you by the hour. If not, perhaps they just aren’t your clients.

Content

The book challenges the current work structures. The authors point out that when you do some types of work, large value accrues over a long period of time, possibly unrelated to how long the initial work took. They’d like to see an arrangement where the worker was paid an ongoing amount for a longer term, while the outcome continues to deliver value.

Passive income

In the end, what they’re describing is passive income. They suggest that it would be wonderful if you were on vacation, yet you were still receiving income from work you did long ago. For typical employers, that could be a hard outcome to achieve, and even harder to manage.

The book does suggest some ways to generate passive income. I noticed that some readers enjoyed the case studies presented.

I also think everyone needs to consider ways to become your own boss. I can’t see the current employment model continuing much longer, at least not in its present form. There was a time when working for large companies seemed to offer security of employment. I think those times are long gone. Ask many of my friends at Microsoft about that. I think it’s better to get control of your own destiny. I’ll write more on that in future.

Summary

If you’ve already explored ways to generate passive income, you won’t find anything Earth-shattering here. However, if you’ve never really looked at this, you might find some of the ideas quite interesting, and at worst, it might prompt you to take some action.

6 out of 10

2025-06-23