Should you quit your day job?

The idea of living life on your own terms sounds great.  You get up when you want.  You work when you want.  You wear what you want.  And you don’t have a boss to answer to.

Sounds like good work if you can get it.

And if things go really well for you, you’ll end up looking as cool as Frank Kern with a surfboard under one arm, a supermodel under the other, a beer in the other hand all while playing the guitar while you scribble genius on a napkin.

Have you ever wondered why you’ve not yet seen a picture of me with Frank Kern?  Come on people.  Put the pieces together already.

I’ve been through the process of quitting a job and venturing out on my own.  I’ve experienced the exhilaration and the terror.

I’ve struggled with the idea of losing my employer paid health insurance and not knowing where the next check is going to come from.

Before you decide to do anything rash based on my advice, don’t.  Do what you’re going to do because you decided it was the right thing to do.  I’m only here to lend you my two-cents.

Situations vary.

If you have a family to support, you have greater responsibilities to consider.  This isn’t just your decision.

If you have a *known* health condition, it might not be wise to live without insurance.

Your life is different than anyone else’s so you must be the judge and you must live with your decision.

Dude, don’t live in fear.

But really . . .

When you’re on your death bed are you going to say “Gee, I’m glad insurance provided this shared room and this sucky plastic bed?  Or are you going to say, “I lived life without a net.  I’d rather live it and die under a blue sky and an apple tree than waste it in fear”?

All that said, here’s what I have to say about it all.

1.  Are you really ready?

If you don’t KNOW how to make money then don’t hope that you’ll figure it out.  I thought I knew what I was doing on my first try and I was wrong.  Reading books isn’t doing it.  A notebook full of ideas isn’t doing it.  Watching re-runs of The Apprentice and The Shark Tank isn’t doing it (though you can learn a lot).  Doing it is doing it.

You have two options here:

First option is to get a job where someone will pay you to learn to do it.  It’s that great advice Robert Kiyosaki offered in Rich Dad, Poor Dad – “Don’t work for money; work for the knowledge to make money.”

Get a job that will teach you what you need to know so you can make the money you want to make, but be careful that you’re doing it for the knowledge and not the money.

Doing it for the money is a trap.  You’ll never leave.

Second option is to learn on your own and do the work as a part-time gig.

But your life is already too busy?

This is gut-check time.  How bad do you really want it?  If you don’t want it bad enough to give up beers with buddies, Monday Night Football or wasted hours in front of the boob-tube then you probably don’t have the drive to make it happen when you MUST make it happen.

2.  Health insurance and can’t live without benefits

This was my biggest hang-up before leaving the first job I left.  I had excellent health and dental insurance.  I was terrified by the imagined scenarios of woe and disaster that surely would claim every penny I possessed.

Truth of the matter is you have a lot of control over your health.  Doctors aren’t magicians.  In fact, they’re the third leading cause of death in America – and the first two causes are almost 100% preventable, *if* doctors were working to improve health instead of managing disease.  No, doctors don’t cure anything.

Bottom line: if you don’t have health insurance then you’re going to have to take more responsibility for living healthy and that’s a good thing.

I don’t need to lecture you on that but if you’re living unhealthy – drinking, smoking, eating junk, not exercising, etc, then *expect* sickness is inevitable.

Still, health insurance is no good reason in my book to stay in a job.  In addition to taking better care of yourself you’ll come to appreciate that most of what a doctor does for you is nothing much at all.

After all . . .

“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.  You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.” – The Fight Club

I’ve lived without health insurance for about 12 years now.  For a family of six, we put $350 per month into our savings account to cover medical, dental and vision.  We have yet to use all of that money in any given year.

Be sure to make regular preventative visits to your dentist, because that will save you big by preventing small problems (cavities) from becoming big problems (root canals and  crowns).

3.  Do you thrive on adversity?

Adversity will find you when you run your own ship.  This is the single greatest benefit to being employed, in my opinion.  Most problems within someone else’s business are someone else’s problem.

On your own, they become your problem.  All of them.  In fact, if you want to be successful in business then you better be good at solving everyone’s problems!

But this leads to a deeper point.

At some point you’ve got to become willing to sink or swim.

Holding on to a job teaches you nothing about your TRUE ability to swim.

If you know you don’t know how to swim (see point 1) then you’re foolish to let go.

But at some point you need to test what you know.  To put yourself into this situation will bring out your best.  Or, it will teach you that you either have things to learn (start looking for that job that will fill in the missing pieces) or it will teach that you might envy the life of a rock star but it’s just not your destiny.  You might be best suited (read that as happier) being the accountant for a rock star.  No shame in that.

When I launched into my second go on my own I had a 9-month old baby at home, under $1000 in savings and sideline income of only about $500 per month.  It wasn’t an ideal scenario but I hated my boss so much I couldn’t stand another day of that job.

It forced me to get real creative, real fast.  The first few months we just made ends meet.  Then things progressed a little.  And within nine months our monthly income was predictably increasing by about 10% every month.  I knew what I was doing and it just took time to make it happen.

I think it’s important to note that a key to making it happen and to experiencing growth was the quick transition I made from taking on hourly work, initially, to creating working relationships that involved a percentage of sales.  I made less money initially, but the income didn’t stop when the job was done.

You can’t do that if you don’t know what you’re doing but in my case I was far more comfortable forfeiting a guaranteed lump sum for a guaranteed stream of money when I knew that I was doing work that would produce results for my clients.  That’s an easy sell; they preferred that too – there was no upfront cost and they didn’t need to risk spending money on something that would be ineffective or need to be redone later.

Essentially this arrangement became the ideology I would base my affiliate marketing efforts on.  But that’s another story for another time.

So should you quit your job?  I’d say recognize that job for what it is.  Either it’s leading you to where you want to go, or it’s not.  That and you need to be careful to recognize if it’s a crutch, comfortably keeping you stuck in a mediocre state of being.

If you want to have the life you want, at some point you must be willing to risk something to get it.

All the best to you – X

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