Leaders of the Free World

Your suspicions are correct; you are smarter than your boss! It’s not just that feeling you get once every so often, being asked to do yet another mundane, repetitive and pointless task… Unfortunately for your boss, you were brought up in the era of the PC, the internet, email, google etc.. It’s a whole new ball game.

Companies today aren’t ready to adapt, the ‘company’ as a model hasn’t advanced at all with the rapid change in technology. Webcams, video conferencing, instant chat, emails, FTP servers, PDF’s, and you’re still having pointless meetings, faxing, printing out mountains of paper and clocking in at the office from 9 – 5!!!

With all this technology and resources at our fingertips, and more often than not freely available, workplaces still aren’t moving towards being effective and efficient. We’re still padding our day out with 8 hours of ‘work’. You STILL sit in your cubicle, if you’ve been good you get an even bigger cubicle. So with the change in technology, your earned dollar still have to pay for the office overheads, your manager, his manager, their company cars, the receptionist, the building lease, the office equipment, your transport to and from work, uniforms etc. All unnecessary items that the freelancer or home based consultant simply doesn’t have to deal with.

The freelancer either has the option of working the same hours and making a lot MORE money, as they save on all of the above mentioned garbage, or they can work LESS for the same amount they were making in the office. Either way, it’s their choice.

The freelancer is providing their value direct to the customer. Sure you might have to work late into the night, because YOU said YOU would to YOUR customer. Not because your boss asked you to.

This all leads to individuals providing value direct to the customer and focusing on their core business.

The 10 reasons why you shouldn’t be at work right now….

1. You’re smarter than that, just because everyone ‘got a job’, why should you?
2. Driving in peak hour traffic this morning was over-rated.
3. You’re becoming a domestic pet.
4. Your pay is limited. You might think you’re lucky enough to have the ‘overtime’ carrot dangled in front of you, have fun working that 65 hours this week.
5. It’s nice to have Friday drinks with your own friends, not people you have to spend 40-50 hours a week with.
6. You’re all grown-up, you should be able to wear what you want.
7. There’s plenty of other ways to make money, you should spend your days doing what you enjoy. Don’t fool yourself, you don’t enjoy data entry, answering the phone and dealing with customers.
8. You’re good at what you do; you should get paid what you’re worth.
9. It’s Friday, long weekends are the shit!
10. You didn’t wake up at 6:30am this morning to sit in a cubicle all day and play solitaire.

Now you might be one of the lucky few who enjoy their jobs, congratulations, you’re in an elite group. But YOU should still be reaping the financial rewards of your job.

Enjoy your day, hang on and battle through, it’s not long until it’s the weekend, and you’ll be released for two days of good behaviour!

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This article is a call to action, delving into your current situation, being ‘stuck’ with your job, an idea to free yourself and some great resources to get you started in making the leap into the free world…

Gloomy

You’ve worked, saved your money, and are looking to the future. A bit of world travel, an investment property or two later, and you’ll be staring down the barrel of 30 years of work, career progression, climbing the ladder and moving into management positions. Which you’ll soon discover means more responsibility, longer hours and an enforced ‘passion’ for the job.

A couple of years of panic, job swapping, research, trialling alternate income streams and saving those pay checks and that brings us to the present day. It’s time to focus our efforts on ‘You’ Pty. Ltd. Not someone else’s company.

Good Friends or Work Colleagues?

I found myself struggling with the concept of ‘being employed’. You’re not in control, your employer controls your life essentially; overtime, family time, waking time, vacation time – you’re not in control.

You could be working so much that the only people you socialise with are work mates? That’s not your fault; you spend all of your time there! I’ve been lucky enough to make some good friends for life in a couple of my jobs, some of them I’ve had lengthy discussions about the state of the working world and even convinced a couple of them to look at investment properties, re-arrange their finances, start freelancing for themselves and say goodbye to the working world. (Personally this is my driver for writing these articles, the feedback & encouragement I’ve had from my converts!)

Stuck

“Get a degree behind you; it’ll open so many doors”. And so after completing my university studies, I found that it also closed plenty of doors. I’d done four years of full-time study, there’s an expectation that surely you wouldn’t waste four years of study and ‘not’ play along with the working world? You’re throwing your career away!

Taking the leap, jumping off the cliff and landing in the free world doesn’t have to mean quitting your job or throwing the towel in, it’s a change of attitude and focus, an adjustment.

Just One Idea…

All you need is an idea, but to get to this stage you’ll need to free up your time. Clear your mind and be able to switch off from ‘work’ and ‘your’ looming deadlines. Your current situation could well be full and too busy, how on earth will you find the time to work on a side project?

I’m a firm believer in de-cluttering your life and this includes your day-to-day schedule. How often do you check your email, read the news online, post blog comments etc? You can batch repetitive tasks that you do throughout the day to once a day; the aim is to become effective. Soon you’ll realise that if you can do your job in half the time, your boss will ask you to do twice as much! This alone should make the light bulb go off and hopefully you’ll realise something’s not right?

Internet freelancers are available at the click of a button to do practically anything you need. Virtual assistants, shelf companies, freelancers, designers – the possibilities of out-sourcing are endless.

All you need is an idea. Now it’s probably best to not try and re-invent the wheel, or grab the old wheel and put an alarm clock in it. What do you do at work? Ever think you could do things a better way? If you’re a nurse do you spend your whole day hauling fat people off to the toilet or lifting them out of bed for a sponging? What would make your day easier? What about getting a cradle or sling designed, taking out a patent, getting it manufactured overseas and selling it online? Anything! If you think there’s a market for something have a go! Like everything else, if you try and fail you’re only going to end up right back here.

If you still don’t believe me, I want you to think about this;

The Ped-Egg;

For those of you not familiar, the ped-egg is a small hand-held container/fine grater that is used to remove dead skin off your feet, yummo. It’s just an Ikea cheese grater scaled down, used in a different application and with a bit of marketing spin! I use the ped-egg analogy because it’s the perfect product.

• Priced at around $20
• Appeals to general public/consumers
• No moving parts (nothing to break)
• Cheap to manufacture ($$)
• Small (easy to distribute/ship)

And so there you have it, an example of an idea that isn’t rocket science. You don’t have to be quitting work or jumping into the free world just yet, but could you be more effective at what you do? Potentially freeing your time up to investigate other streams of income or just enjoying yourself a bit more?

You

You work hard (probably) and surely there’s a thing or two you could change around the workplace, or you’ve had one of those “I wish someone would invent such and such” moments. What are you waiting for?

There are some great free resources online, here are a mix of some great FREE eBooks and blogs to check out; The Middle Finger Project – a website from an alternate leader of the free world, Rejecting the Status Quo & Rebelling Against Mediocrity; Rules Optional – Andrew from RulesOptional explores on a sail boat, runs, kayaks, swims, manages his own ad agency and is an excellent writer; The Art of Non-Conformity – prepared to be jealous, a blog and travel journal of Chris Guillebeau, grab his brief guide to world domination; Through the Illusion – A very well written blog, in particular this article is a must read. And lastly the article that gave me the kick in the arse I needed, Steve Pavlina’s ’10 Reasons you shouldn’t get a job’, the king of the free world who has managed to decouple his time from his income and is a wealth of knowledge. I challenge you to read Steve’s article and not be pissed off at your current situation.

Is working for someone else, being employed and trading your time for money really the most effective way?

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Did you wake up this morning, alarm set as the same time as yesterday, and the day before, and tomorrow? You might drive a different way to work, or wear an obscene tie that doesn’t match, just to mix things up. Ever wake-up to the alarm on a Saturday? And on auto-pilot find yourself in the shower way too early, only to laugh annoyingly at the fact that you have a day off but still got up for the Monday – Friday routine?

I want to tell you that ‘this’ isn’t it… There’s more out there for you, you can have and do whatever you want, but unless you scratch the miracle lotto ticket or a long lost relative leaves you a heap of cash, you’re going to have to make the changes yourself.

So what are you doing? Shuffling papers, working towards next Tuesday’s deadline, sucking up to your boss, hiding in your cubicle or trying to figure out which way you can sit at your desk and not get caught having a snooze? Just for a minute take some time to think about how your life would be if you were enjoying yourself all day, every day?

What do you do?

I want a world where you strike up a conversation with a stranger, when they ask you what it is that you do for a living, you don’t answer with what you get paid for, you answer what you love doing. Unfortunately we spend too much time of the week earning a crust that we adopt our mindless job as ‘what we do’. It’d be nice to meet someone and automatically answer with – I’m a; Photographer, Surfer, Musician… anything that YOU love doing. I want to know what YOU DO, not what you get paid for.

You’re saving your money, putting some aside for the glory years, maybe a holiday once every now and then and some investments here and there for retirement. If money buys you time (retirement), then when do you declare there’s enough money to spend it on time? Is a lengthy retirement really the goal? Why can’t you have your freedom now or a little bit here and there? If you do have a prosperous retirement then you’ve probably worked too hard to get there and won’t know what to do with yourself.

The Epiphany

My realisation came at work, having a conversation with an older co-worker, he was telling me how he’d recently sold a fishing trawler for well over a couple of million bucks cash, $2m cash! After I slapped him around and beat some sense into him* I clicked that for a lot of people, work isn’t the thing that people do for money, it’s just a thing they do, it’s the norm, it’s their life. Friends, the routine, the auto-pilot; something has gone terribly wrong here?

So What?

I want you to take some time out to REALLY think about what you’re doing at work and why you’re doing it. Can you remove the safety blanket of the weekly paycheck and take a chance on yourself?

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This article will not self-destruct in 5 seconds. You’re not Ethan Hunt and unfortunately your workplace isn’t Mission: Impossible. The corporate world and the office work model are too full of corporate fluff and their own bullshit that business, companies and you as an individual forget what it’s all about.

I’m proud to say that Tim from The Discomfort Zone was nice enough to let me guest post for him! Read the rest of this article here…