Leaders of the Free World

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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