Making the Nail Pay Again and Again

My last post was about the book "Millionaire Mind." I'd like to write another post on a different idea in that book.

The author, Thomas Stanley, was getting a good-natured ribbing from a friend who built houses for a living. The friend, DD, said "I feel sorry for you. I get to work out here in the sunshine, pounding in nails, and you have to sit behind a desk, writing your books."

They got a good laugh from this, then Dr. Stanley replied. He said that every nail that DD pounded in was a form of work-for-payment. DD was paid for every nail he pounded in.

Dr. Stanley was also paid, but he was basically paid by the word. Every word he wrote was his form of work-for-payment.

The big difference was, DD was paid for each nail ONCE.

Dr. Stanley got payments for each word thousands of times, maybe even millions of times (depending on how many books sold, which in his case, was millions).

Get paid by the nail once? Or get paid by the word thousands of times per every word you write?

Would it make sense for every business person to be thinking this way? What am I building in this business, and how many times does it pay back? Once? Or ten? Or thousands?

I hadn't thought of it this way before. I've written several books, but now I think I'm going to put more effort into my future book writing efforts, as well as software that I can resell, Web services, etc. Anything that is build once, sell many.