I haven’t had a job since I was in college. It was a camera store in a train station in Chicago called “Terminal Photo.” I’m not kidding, that really was its name. And it felt terminal – I made $8 per hour taking people’s film and sending it to the processors.
I was in Film School at the time and one day, after pulling an all night shoot, I was pretty fuzzy and I called in to work to tell them I couldn’t make it and Dick (the boss – his son Rich also worked there – they called themselves Big Dick and Little Dick – nice guys actually – remember, this is Chicago). Anyway, I told Big Dick that I couldn’t make my shift and he told me I didn’t have a shift that day (which in my sleep deprived state had eluded me) and he thought I was doing drugs (I wasn’t) and wondered if I was okay and did I need a ride home.
Every time I went to that job, it felt like my soul was being wrenched out. It was mind numbing, boring, completely uncreative and if it weren’t for the old guy that worked there sometimes with me and the smile of that cute girl who worked at the ice cream shop across the way, I would have gone crazy. The old guy, by the way, was a retired photographer for the homicide department in Chicago and he would tell me stories about breaking dead guys off of trains. Apparently, they would hitch a ride in the winter time. The old trains used to take water for the steam engines on the “fly” and these guys would get hit by the water as they went by and they’d freeze right to train. He also had a dog that liked buttered toast – but the toast had to be buttered on both sides – the dog would turn it over before he ate it… smart dog.
So – that is my most recent experience with a job, but you can see it was an experience that was so vivid and so unpleasant that even after 30 years I never want to experience it again.
On the other hand, look at the film shoot I was doing. I would work night and day without sleep to make those student films. My friends at school and I would crew for each other and we’d bust our butts doing the thing we loved – making movies. It wasn’t work.
Big difference.
So you’re in a job that may not be killing your soul and it may not be called “Terminal Photo,” but if what I’m being told by just about everyone I meet is true, you wouldn’t be there unless you had to be.
You may not be a 19 year old college student anymore and you probably have bills to pay and the dreams you had when you were young have been tucked away for another day. But even if that’s true, every once in a while, you wake up in the middle of the night and ask yourself the question, “What if?”
° What if I could quit my job?
° What if I could work for myself?
° What if I could do something I loved?
° What if I could work 8 or 10 hours a week, have a healthy income and play the rest of the time?
° What if I could fire my boss?
° What if I could spend more time with my kids?
° What if I could spend more time with my wife or husband?
° What if I had time to work out everyday?
What if…
You can stop dreaming.
It’s really not that difficult to do if you have the right knowledge and the willingness to follow through and take action on what you know.
Will it make your rich? Maybe – it didn’t do too bad for me and for a lot of my students, but maybe rich financially isn’t your goal. There are a lot of ways to be rich. Most of the others are pretty happy just making $150k or $250k and starting to build a long term portfolio – and doing it without working themselves to death.
Not everyone who goes through my mentor program wants to quit their job – but a lot of them do. Here is what I tell them:
“Before you quit your job, you should be making enough to replace your income (or at least enough to pay your bills) for 3 consecutive months. As soon as you do that, you can be pretty certain that you will be able to do it for the rest of your life.”
Remember, I’m talking about completely replacing your 40 hour job with income that you made in your spare time in real estate investing. I’ve had many, many students who have accomplished this. That means, if you can make that much in that short period of time, how much could you make if you decided to work 20 hours or 30 hours a week?
None of this is rocket science and it’s just not that hard to get going. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme and it doesn’t happen overnight – it takes some study and some practice, but if you learn the process and take action on what you learn, there is no reason you couldn’t quit your job in a very short period of time.
Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up in the morning and look forward to the day? Wouldn’t it be nice if your commute to the office was as simple as walking in your stocking feet to your home office desk? I can tell you that it is – I did it this morning – I do it most every day.
It’s up to you.
I can help you learn how to do it. I can give you a system to work and ways to automate and outsource the grunt work, but it’s up to you to make the decision to learn and to take action on that decision. What have you got to lose?
