My 2 cents.
There will come a time in your life when either your mind or your body starts to fail a little. When that time comes, you start to run out of options and chances. When that time comes, you may well start thinking about lots of things you’d like to do, but have never done. And you will realise, ‘It’s too late… it’s too late… my chances were there, and I didn’t take them’.
You only get one life, and then you’re a long time dead. If there are things you want to do, places you want to go, people you want to meet, experiences you want to have, challenges you’d like to tackle, then now’s the time. One day, you won’t have the option. Life doesn’t come with many guarantees, but I can give you two. (1) You will never, ever get a better chance than now to make a choice to life the life you want to live. Even one day older is one day less perfect than today. (2) You will never, ever look back on your life and say, wistfully, ‘Gee, I wish I’d spent more time working in an office for someone else’.
Everyone always says the same thing, ‘but there are bills to pay’. Yep. But working for someone else, doing a job you don’t want to do, and feeling yourself dying on the inside isn’t any good way to pay them. And don’t forget, a lot of the cost of living comes from having a job. When I quit my job, I found I was able to live a lot more inexpensively, and make huge economies.
Make a choice: do what you want to do, or shut up and carry on living this life, and loathe it in silent resignation to your fate. Tough choice? I don’t think so.
I was in your position ten years ago. I walked out of my job, left the whole office thing behind. No salary, no pension, a very small amount of savings. This year, I’m celebrating ten years of working for myself, doing my own thing, surviving, running a successful business and having a great time. You can do the same. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get to your ten years of happy, fulfilled self-sufficiency. You will have adventures you never guessed, spot opportunities that you can’t spot while you’re in an office being part of someone else’s wealth generation scheme. You will never, ever be bored (I haven’t had a moment’s boredom for ten years) and you will be challenged almost every day. Comfort zone… what’s that? I haven’t been anywhere near mine for so long I’ve forgotten what it feels like. You will accomplish things you don’t even dream you can do, and you will also achieve things no-one around you thinks you can achieve (that’s okay, they can own their negativity, you don’t have to).
If you quit your job, what do you seriously think will happen? Do you think you’ll just sit in a chair and wait until you run out of money and food? Not a chance! The human survival instinct is one of the strongest instincts you have. if you have to survive, you will. If you have to earn money somehow, you will. You are swimming in a sea of opportunities every waking second of your life. You know how to get one person to give you paid work? It’s simple: you ask 100. If you want ten people to give you paid work, ask 1000.
I’m not advocating a policy of recklessness. Quite the reverse. It takes a lot more mental energy and thinking power to survive on your own, and plot a successful path, than it does to just do the commute and be an office drone every day (which I found I could do in an almost entirely mindless way). You will need to think intelligently about your opportunties, and be willling to learn by experience. You will need to work hard. You can make economies so that the bills are smaller, but they still need to be paid, so you need to challenge yourself to come up with ways to pay them. You can do it. Your mind is the greatest computer in the universe. Tell it to find a way to earn money, and it will.
Remember: earning money by working for someone else is always the least efficient way to do it, because the employer keeps a percentage of what you’re worth. When you work for yourself, you keep the employer’s share as well.
It will be tough, but that’s good. You will survive, and you will never look back. The only people who will tell you otherwise are those who are locked in the 9-5 drone life themselves, and can’t bear to see you make the break and achieve a better life for yourself.
Of course, if you don’t want this alternative, then just carry on with things as they are. Your next year will go by. Your next decade will go by. Your life will go by.
Whatever else you do, paint some things that you can realistically imagine 1000 people might want to buy, and set up a home website business. This is the easiest, simplest way to make money the world has ever seen (I’ve done it for ten years, so I know what I’m talking about). Even if you don’t make a fortune, you’ll earn enough to get by from month to month. And in the meantime, you can search the horizon for fresh mountains to climb.
If you want any more practical advice, email me.
I won’t wish you good luck, because wishing doesn’t work and you won’t need it any way. Like the wise man said, the harder you work, the luckier you’ll get.