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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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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