A reader feeling stuck in his corporate job asked me if I work for myself or for a corporation, and how he can break free of having a corporation run his life so he can live simply and get back to the land.
I replied:
I actually quit my “real” job in ’05, when I was working as a radio producer. Took some freelance work and lived as light as I could with my family. It’s totally worth doing, but you have to get up each day and attack work like you have a whip at your back until you can make things happen. Making money is totally in your hands, and you can make a lot more or a lot less depending on the choices you make and how hard you work. Over the years I painted houses, voiced audiobooks, edited speeches, wrote articles, gave gardening talks, started a plant nursery, wrote radio ads, worked as a stage setup guy for Country Music events and other things, but I never had to return to a corporate job. Now I live via writing books for a living.
My recommendation is to make a list of everything you’re good at, then see how you can make money from one or more of those skills. At the same time, kill all your debt and ditch payments and liabilities. Be willing to live like a poor man as you build, then work your way up again. If you fail at something, try something else. Fail multiple times but keep trying the next thing.
Also, I committed my work and my life to Jesus Christ and believe that God is directing my paths. Having the assurance that my Father in Heaven is watching over my family has allowed me to operate with little fear.
It’s not easy to work for yourself. It takes hard work and it means you can only blame failures on yourself. If you think you’re going to be safe and secure by working a “real” job, you are outsourcing your potential to be used by someone else as a trade for a level of security.
Yet that security isn’t so secure. Corporations require you to jump through all kinds of crazy hoops every day, especially now that Coronochan is here. I would rather have the right to my own life and decisions. I don’t like sitting in meetings and having to be around people I don’t like. I don’t like being tied to a schedule. I cannot stand having to give up my time to further the vision of someone else, so they profit and I just scrape by. I don’t want to wear a mask while I work.
I would rather have a crust of bread on my own than a feast at a corporation. I’ve turned down good job offers. It’s not worth it.
You may not have the discipline or drive to make it on your own, but I bet many of you do. You’ll be surprised what happens when you push yourself. Breaking the fear of leaving a “secure” position is hard, but I would never, ever go back. You may be more resilient than you think. YOLO
You can have greener thumbs by this weekend!
3 comments
Outstanding advice, David. My professional life has been exactly that. I worked crazy hours when my kids were small because the job required it, and to “make enough money so that my wife could raise our kids.” That was the justification. Now they are grown and I missed big patches of their childhood. Never questioned the status quo. Should have every day.
That is hard. My son was 1 when I went freelance and got out of the office. I would come home from work when he was an infant and would only see him for an hour or so before my wife would put him to bed. I thought, “man, this is terrible… I am missing his life!”
Yeah I’m with ya, working for the man is a raw deal. And a relatively new phenomenon. I think Abraham Lincoln said something about how it’s fine to work for a salary when you’re young, but eventually you have to grow up and be a man and be employed for yourself. But we’ve built this society that trains people to be worker bees in a corporate hive, and in return they give you the illusion of security: health insurance, retirement accounts, paid time off… But then once everyone got used to being dependent on their employers, crony capitalism created all these barriers to entry for entrepreneurs to discourage people from working for themselves, then they started stripping away workers’ rights and watering down their wages, and thinking they can get away with whatever draconian demands they want to impose because people supposedly have no choice but to comply.
My husband is hoping to eventually go independent and start his own business. Right now we can’t even move out of state until he finds a new job, even though he’s fully remote, because of some stupid corporate policy. And ever since the attempt to mandate vaccines, the company’s been waffling about whether or not they’re going to enforce it, in which case he’ll have to either quit or threaten to sue. I know a bunch of people who have already caved to their employers self-imposed mandates despite the fact that coersion goes against the Nuremberg Code…but I digress.
Anyway the whole enterprise seems like kind of a scam. To be self-employed is to be free. They’ve made it really hard to break into a lot of industries or start a business because corporate serfs are much easier to control than people who are free. But we’re working on it. Food security is a big part of that, which is why I’m so determined to grow enough to feed my family.
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