Archive for the ‘Control’ tag
The Fourth Day of Christmas – Who’s In Control?
Did you sit there as a kid watching Dan Aykroyd & Bill Murray catch ghosts and wonder how much their annual salary was, what their 401k (superannuation) fund was like or how many hours per day they worked? Me neither. I wanted to be a ghost buster because it looked like fun, plain and simple.
Where did it all go wrong? At what point did you go from wanting to be a fireman, a life guard, a deep sea diver or a pro surfer into giving in to being a corporate mule?
Focus
I recently read a great article by Ash at The Middle Finger Project that touched on the subject of working at McDonalds in your teens. Working at the Big M isn’t a bad thing, you’re focused and work equals money. You don’t work there because you have a passion for the Big Mac Secret Sauce* or that you really admire the hamburglar. Our first jobs are often the most care free, you go to work to make money to enjoy your spare time, seems quite simple but as we’ve moved on we’ve forgotten what money is ACTUALLY for. Now it’s for paying off our new plasma television, the new car we didn’t need or our credit cards.
Life moves on from being completely carefree and slowly but surely you acquire responsibility. With this responsibility of supporting yourself brings the need for an income, with the income comes the overtime and spending on life’s little luxuries. Before you know it, you and everyone other man and his dog are running along in the same never ending race.
Who’s in Control?
What would happen if we all quit work tomorrow? I love a good ‘conspiracy’ at any time of day, and one of my favourites that I’m always involved in is the whole ‘working, paying taxes and being in the governments ‘rat race’.
It goes like this: you go to school and you’re told to get a well paying job, you then head to university to get a qualification for said well paying job, you start work, pay tax, get a house, suffer the wrath of interest rate fluctuations, watch TV and soak up the media and are easily influenced and under control. Is there a way to step outside of the rat race? To run your own race? Maybe to not even run in the race at all?
What if you didn’t have to pay tax? Or if you could minimise your tax and build some wealth & assets? Maybe start up a few alternate income streams? Or you knew how money worked, how to acquire it and make it work for you? That’d be brilliant!
If only we were taught things like this? Say for example, in a…. school? Who benefits from our tax dollars, controls the school syllabus and has the final say on what we’re taught? It shouldn’t be too hard for you to figure out! 
So luckily we know all there is to know about plate tectonics, we learnt an obscure language that we’ll never need and we can calculate the circumference of the world. But we don’t know anything about how to handle our money, reduce our tax or stand on our own two feet?
Let’s forget money & control and reminisce about a simpler time: playing basketball all day, poking your tongue out, shaving your head bald, wishing you were black and insisting your were going to be Michael Jordan when you grew up.
P.S. *Big Mac Not-So-Secret Sauce = Mircale whip, sweet relish, french dressing, sugar, pepper & powdered onion (in case you were wondering)
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You Only Need One Idea…
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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