If you are reading this article Id like to welcome you to my first post and hopefully the start of many more to come.
First let me tell you what this site is about. Its for people who are like me or are in a position I have been in.
You know why? Because that is what I know about. I will never be giving advice on something I have not actually accomplished myself.
For example I have not personally made a million dollars so I wont be giving advice on that (until I do). I also don’t have a 6 pack like the guy in this picture so wont be giving advice on how to get shredded.
All of my articles will be from personal experience.
So is this blog for you?
Well do you have a decent career and make good money but you feel like you are missing out on something bigger or could be doing more in life?
Do you have a career that makes you enough money for a comfortable lifestyle but robs you of all your free time?
We live in exciting times where Technology, along with some research and hard work have created opportunities for people to quit their 9-5 day jobs and start a life where they are in more control of their time and the amount of income they can make.
This opportunity of escaping the 9-11 hour (with commute) daily grind of working for someone else is an intoxicating idea.
You have seen the Internet Marketing gurus living the good life like Tai Lopez or Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income.
And you imagine what if you had more time to do things you want to do?
What if you could pursue the activities in life you actually enjoy?
What more could you do with your time if you didn’t have to work 5 days a week and only have 2 to yourself?
My Story
Here is my story. I actually have an amazing job. I’ve been working in IT for almost 15 years and have reached a very Senior level position. I make over 6 figures (not bragging, just giving context), work with great people and a fun company.
My employer is one of the largest and well know Film and Television studios in the world and I work every day right on a real live Hollywood studio lot right here in Los Angeles.
Really sometimes I am walking around the studio lot and have to ask myself ‘How the hell did I get here, this is awesome!”.
Sounds great right? But here is the problem.
Before I started working at this awesome company I already saw the Matrix. I don’t mean seeing the actual movie the Matrix but the modern American work lifestyle that I relate the Matrix movie to.
If you dont remember the infamous blue pill vs red pill scene, here it is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE7PKRjrid4
Morpheus: It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are slave Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.
Unfortunately no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
Morpheus: This is your last chance….After this there is no turning back. You take the BLUE pill, the story ends and you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the RED pill, you stay in Wonderland….and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes…(NEO reaches for the red pill)
Morpheus: Remember..all I’m offering is the truth….
So here is how I match this analogy from this amazing scene for my purposes.
The Matrix is this default world of work and life that we are all trapped in that says, study hard then go to Corporate America and slowly climb the ladder for 30 years, until you either fall off or reach the top and then retire/die.
The Blue Pill is choosing to continue on the path of not exploring anything new or different but just going with the default options. When you see someone having success online or with a new age business you say “they got lucky”, or “they are just better at that”, or “that would never work for me”. So you go back to your daily grind/routine and only allow yourself to daydream of this lifestyle every once in awhile.
The Red Pill is choosing to open your eyes to new possibilities. Rejecting that the default plan to work for someone else the rest of your life is the only option for you. To look and listen to the people living this alternative lifestyle and saying, “If they can do it, well so can I!” “they are not necessarily smarter or luckier than me they just kept at it until they reached their goals”. Taking the Red Pill is making the decision to explore this possibility for yourself.
Morpheus is that person that has seen and is already living the possibilities you aspire to. Maybe you have a friend who works from coffee shops all day, travels when he wants to and never has to deal with commuting to an office everyday during soul crushing traffic jams. Or maybe you do not know that somebody personally but you follow someone online who is living that life you aspire to.
That is what happened to me. First I discovered the book the “4 Hour WorkWeek” by Tim Ferris. This is the first thing I remember coming across that opened my eyes to the possibility of not having to just do the default life and work path that society has laid out for everyone.
Next I found online these people who were living these incredible new age entrepreneur lifestyles. And when I say “incredible lifestyles” I don’t mean driving nice cars and living in nice houses (although that can be awesome to lol).
What I mean is they seemed to have complete control of their time and how they choose to spend it. People like Pat Flynn, John Lee Dumas, Alex Becker and others had created their own online business in a (relatively) short amount of time.
They had control of their business, their income and most importantly their time!
You see no matter how high up you get on that Corporate ladder you are still leaning it up against someone else’s wall and they have control of you and how you spend your time.
Time is our most valuable commodity. We can make more money but we can’t make more time. And when your are working for a company 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 30 years you are giving away life’s most valuable asset.
You are giving away your most valuable asset.
How did I get here
I think it was already politically incorrect by the time I graduated High School but if there was a “Most Likely NOT to Succeed” category I for sure would have been on the contenders list.
I grew up with very little parental guidance and as a consequence did not care much about school.
Luckily I had always been an avid and voracious reader so with that I was able to (barely) get through High School even though I gave very little effort.
After High School I took a few Community College courses (mostly to meet girls) and held just above minimum wage jobs with decisively little room for growth.
A few years into that I got extremely tired of having jobs that paid so little and were barely enough to get by. So I decided to start studying computer support on the side.
This was amazing timing right before the dot com boom where there was such a demand for IT knowledge that all you had to do was pass a few certifications to get hired somewhere.
I talked my way into my first Tech job with no experience and a couple of Microsoft certifications under my belt. Over the next 10 years I completely dedicated myself and made up for all those years of being a screw up.
On evenings and weekends after work I would study and work overtime which allowed me to quickly make my way up the IT ladder into more Senior level positions.
Fast forward to today and for the past 4 years I have worked at pretty much a dream IT job here on a Studio Lot in Los Angeles for one of the worlds most famous entertainment empires.
My boss is cool, the pay is incredible, the work is good and I even just recently got another promotion and another bump up in compensation.
So what’s the problem? Well the problem is I have already taken that Red Pill.
Like NEO I know there is more out there, that others have seen but I’ve only caught glimpses of. I WANT to go down that rabbit hole and see where it leads!
I have seen the dream of working for yourself and controlling your own time for myself and now there is no going back.
No matter how great my job is and how much it pays its just not worth the time cost to me to work for a company, not any company.
I commute an hour to work and an hour and a half back home. We have a 9 hour day with lunch so that’s over 11 hours a day, 5 days a week my time is controlled by someone else!
For that 11 hours a day I have about 5 hours of free time for myself and family (not counting sleeping).
For those 5 days a week of work I get just 2 on the weekend to have fun and take care of all my personal business (and sometimes I have to work for my company on the weekends).
For those 50 weeks of work a year I get 2 weeks off for vacation where I try to jam all my travel plans into.
Besides all that when you are in high level engineering you are expected to participate in an “on-call rotation”. Meaning they can call you anyplace, anytime and you have to drop everything you are doing and work.
My friend LJ Young who is also an engineer sums up what a pain in the ass this is in the video below:
And that is what my main reason for looking at other alternatives to income is. It comes down to getting my time back.
What is my escape plan?
For about the last 3 years I have been making money on the side with online projects and business. I am only able to dedicate about 4-5 hours a week on this since my day job and family keep me so busy.
Not going to lie. This has been difficult. Many, many of my attempts have failed and I have wasted countless hours going down rabbit holes that came back with no results.
But I did not give up! With a full time income at my job it wasn’t much for me to lose some money and time to try to achieve this on this side.
My first substantial success came with helping someone else business out, not my own.
I have a family member who owns a successful Law firm in LA along with his law partner. They were doing well but almost NONE of their leads came online or through their website!
They were getting all their clients just from word of mouth and offline networking efforts.
I made a deal with them that I would generate leads for them using Internet Marketing and they would pay me only per lead.
It was a great plan for me because I could put into place all I learned and it was great for them because they were only paying me per actual lead.
Want to guess how much my first paycheck with them was after the first month of hard work?
It was $88 dollars….needless to say it was less than I expected…BUT I was actually pretty encouraged. (I wish I still had the picture but dropped my Iphone with pic in the Ocean!)
If it was even possible to make $88 dollars I reasoned that could turn into more. It showed that what I was doing could produce income. Now it was just a matter of figuring out how to scale it.
Progress was slow. The next month it jumped up to a few hundred dollars. 6-8 months later it was regularly in the thousands. Now as of this writing it averages about $5,000 a month with a few $7,000 and $8,000 dollars months here and there.
When it reached a few thousand a month is when I really realized the potential of this. After all this was really only one client (their firm).
If I can make $5,000 a month with just one client all I needed was 2 more for $15,000 a month! That would more than match my income from my job and I could quit!
But here is the issue I’m having. I barely have time to work on this Internet Marketing stuff between my full time job, my family and friends and living life.
Even with my one existing client that is generating the majority of my Internet Marketing income I only spend about 4-5 hours a week working on his stuff.
So the answer is obvious… I need to quit my full time career and focus my full time efforts on my own business.
And that takes us here and why I wrote this post….
The Goal of this Blog
My goals for this blog are mainly 2 fold.
The first is to publicly hold myself accountable to quit my current job/career in 6 months. (January of 2017) So I can pursue my dream of owning my business and having control of my time and lifestyle.
The second is to give an inside step by step look to others who are interested in pursuing this lifestyle and hopefully inspire them to do the same.
There are tons of great blogs out there like Smart Passive Income and Charles Ngo that talk about how they quit their day jobs, started an online business and took back control of their own time.
But most of these guys have a similar story. They typically started in their early twenties and did not make much money in their day jobs or had not established themselves in another career yet. And you dont typically hear about them until after they have already had success online.
My story is a bit different. I did not really “discover” this online lifestyle possibility until I was in my late thirties. I worked for years diligently in my career field to build myself up to that ‘6 figure income’ most middle class Americans aspire to.
There really is no financial desperation aspect to my situation. I could just continue on like this for the next 30 years and retire safe and sound in my sixties and wait to die like everyone else.
But.. for me it’s not that I am in desperate need for more money or hate my job. Its just that the Internet lifestyle has opened my eyes up to the fact that the default career path I am taking is robbing me of the best years of my life.
For example I spend 40 hours a month just commuting to and from work! Let alone the 45-50 hours a week spent at work.
I know they are others out there like me and that is who this blog is for.
You are in your thirties, forties or even fifties and you already have a good career but you want to try something else. Something that gives you the income you need but more importantly gives you your time back and affords you the opportunity to lead your ideal lifestyle.
I will also be documenting this transition to online success as it happens! I have not yet quit my day job and no where close yet to my online goals.
I want you to see the steps to the destination not just the final outcome like we see with so many well know people who have had great success online already.
What you will get out of this blog
This blog is a journey we are going to take together. I will be documenting how I am going to take my side business (with just one real client) and use it to replace my 6 figure income from my job. I will also be quitting that 6 figure job and career in the next 6 months.
My goal is the end of January 2017. Its very scary but I hope writing this blog and sharing my story with you will help me with the courage I need to make this final step.
Along the way Ill share my wins,losses, philosophies and lessons. And I really hope to hear from you and others like you.
You have worked so hard for the success you have now but you are ready to go out there on your own and really take your work and life to the next level!