QUICK QUESTION: Want to earn $5 billion dollars/month while working 6 seconds each day from home (results may vary)? If so, then click on this link now.

I get lots of questions in my inbox each week. Last week’s best question came from Frans D.

I’ll get to the question and then answer it.  But before I do that, I want to mention that these questions are generally answered in the VIP newsletter and NOT on this blog.  To make sure that you get all Q&A updates, subscribe to the newsletter now by filling in these boxes:

Question:

“Looking at those who succeeded in killing their day job, knowing their stories and combining this with your own knowledge and experience, if you had to start over tomorrow from scratch (day job) to funding your freedom; how would you do it, what would be the most important thing to do and what do you suggest I do to get a jump start?”

Answer:

If I could go back in time and re-murder my day job I would have STARTED with “Lifestyle Design Reverse Engineering.” And I would have started doing it LONG before I quit my day job.

I’ll talk about this reverse engineering nonsense in a second, but before I do that I want to emphasize the importance of . . .

Getting Specific About the Life You Want

Yeah, I know. Everyone says to do this. But bear with me here . . .

Before finding people whose lives you’d like to reverse engineer, first write a definition of the life you want to live. Write down income goals – and how many hours you want to work to achieve them.

Anyone can make $100,000/year by working 24 hours a day for minimum wage (I’m not sure that’s true but let’s just pretend it is because it sounds good), but it takes a bit more planning to make that much while working 3-hour days. So in addition to writing income goals, you should also address these three questions . . .

• How much money do you want to make?
• How many hours do you want to work?
• How do you want to live?

Get specific now, or you’ll waste time working towards goals you don’t want.

Are You Bored Yet?

The copywriter John Carlton once said that “the average person is bored out of their mind.” The average person’s life goes something like this:

He gets out of bed bored, eats a boring breakfast, gets into a boring car, takes a boring commute to a his boring job, works with boring people, eats a boring lunch, takes another boring drive back home, eats a boring dinner, etc and repeats this cycle every single day.

Joe Average wants more than this, of course – but this wanting more is never acted on:

• His hopes, dreams and assumptions aren’t rooted in reality.
• He aspires towards a picture that he’s build from glimpses of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, an imagined perfect life that won’t necessarily work.
• He can’t really picture himself in his new life.

All his friends have boring lives too. Joe doesn’t know anyone who he can use as a model for his new lifestyle, so he tries to follow false assumptions towards a fuzzy goal. No wonder he’ll wake up bored tomorrow, eat a boring breakfast, get into a boring car…

Once you get specific about your goals (how much money do you want to make, how much time do you want to spend, how do you want to live?) then start searching for people living the kind of lifestyle that YOU want.

Lifestyle Reverse Engineering

Find people already living the life that you want. They don’t have to be an exact match – even if just one part of their life is aligned with what you want, then you’ll learn a lot.

Here’s how to find them:

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photo by new wave rh

I should start out by telling you that . . .

I’m Trying to Practice My Ranting Skillz

I suck at ranting. I enjoy reading rants, but I’ve never been very good at writing them. But apparently the rant genre is a sub-genre of the blog genre, and I need to master this shit if I ever want to displace Dooce on technorati.

Cool… I’ll Start With My Rant Right Now

Almost any resource can be a currency governed by economic forces—and the laws of supply and demand. (I probably read that in a fancy book somewhere. Please punch me in the face if I ever write another high falutin’ sentence like that again).

Anyway, money is a currency or whatever. Yeah, we know that.

But so is ego: it is traded, bartered for, bought, sold, etc. I see people participating in the ego economy all the time: new business owners waste thousands of dollars on putting big pictures of themselves on billboards. Social media people and others in the web 2.0 space sacrifice entire days of vacation and family time so they can be mini-internet famous for 1,000 people and make an extra $100/month. And people get into debt buying shit they don’t need trying to impress others or get laid.

So before the internet, money was (often) the primary means by which people participated in the ego economy; the money economy fed into the ego economy. Maybe it’s still this way.

But social media, the internet, and web 2.0 have given people a whole new venue for being vain and wasting their resources in exchange for ego gratification. Now you can broadcast a vlog to 500 people, become a power user on StumbleUpon, or Reddit, or Digg, and start a blog and try to get 1000s of subscribers. You can start and lead your own forum or newsgroup. You can be the leader of your own fiefdom of 400.

I’m Not Saying that All Bloggers are Ego Obsessed or Wasting time. Far from it.

Just hear me out.

I’ve seen a lot of people start blogging because they ultimately want to use blogging income to liberate themselves from their day jobs. That’s cool.

The problem is that – 1 year after starting their blogs – far too many of these people are still spending countless hours on their blogs even though they’re consistently losing money, freedom, and space time for months and months and months. They’ve become addicted to being in the spotlight.  It’s sad.   And many of those people are further away from liberation and more desperate than they were when they started.

The problem is that, although they originally started trying to liberate themselves from their day jobs, they can’t let go of being mini-internet famous.

They are trading ego for freedom.

Here’s the Tragedy

So the tragedy is that so many people who’ve come to the internet and this web 2.0 space to liberate themselves from shitty jobs end up not liberating themselves at all.

Instead, they end up self-medicating the shitty feeling they have at work with the ego-attention they get through their social media positions, subscriber bases, their statuses as influencers, or whatever, and as a result they end up sacrificing true liberation.

|Read the Rest of the Entry…

photo by Laura Jeanne
I received an email yesterday from someone who told me that, with Finance Your Freedom, I had somehow decided that “money is the most important thing in life.” The email author stated that my view now seems to be that “we can’t live without money, so why not make as much as possible?”

So I Want to Set the Record Straight on Two Points

• First Point: I have nothing against anyone who makes tons of money. If you’re filthy rich and you’ve done it ethically, then good for you. I also have nothing against you if you’re dirt poor, or middle class, or anything in between. Money is a non-issue to me because it’s not a currency that I care about.

Which brings me to my second point . . .

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Welcome to the "Work from Home & Lifestyle Design Renegades Series."  This inaugural interview is with my friend Chris McCombs, who I had the pleasure of interviewing last Friday.

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If you’d like to download the interview and listen to it later then right-click on this link and click "save as."

A little about Chris . . .

• It takes Chris between 1/2 hour and 2 hours each day to run his immensely successful Orange County personal training company.
• Chris is a married father of two girls, an Orange County personal trainer, and a fitness marketing blogger.
• In a past life, Chris was a marijuana trafficker and has (at various times) been both homeless & incarcerated.
• Chris is an amazing person and one of the best lifestyle designers I know.

In the interview we talk about . . .

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Announcement #1: The Finance Your Freedom blog is now in pre-launch mode.  See here for a sneak peak (see here for more information about Finance Your Freedom).

Announcement #2: Next week I’ll be interviewing my friend Chris, who does what he loves and makes mucho dinero. And get this: it only takes him 2 hours per day to run his fitness business. I wouldn’t believe it either if I didn’t actually KNOW this guy. Check back soon for that interview.]

Announcement #3: This week in the VERY FIRST Finance Your Freedom newsletter, I’ll be answering a questions by Frans D. who asks “If you had to start over tomorrow from scratch (day job) to funding your freedom; how would you do it, what would be the most important thing to do and what do you suggest I do to get a jump start?”  Sign up here to see my response:

Most people can work from home and make a living if they’re determined and don’t mind working their asses off. That part’s doable. Working at home and actually loving it, however, is a different story: it can be hard as hell.

It’s Hard as Hell Because of . . .

The blue circle represents things you really like to do. Something doesn’t have to be ostensibly important, significant, worthwhile, or respectable to fall in this circle. If you really like to dance, go camping, cook, or play with your children, then those things go inside this circle (something tells me you know what’s in your blue circle, but read this if you don’t).

The green circle represents the realm of things you can do IN THE VERY NEAR FUTURE to earn money, support your family, and live comfortably. Your green circle isn’t just determined by you: it’s also determined by market forces, supply and demand, the global and local economy, etc.

For many people, there’s very little overlap between the things we really enjoy doing, and the things we can to do make a healthy living in the very near future. That’s part of the reason why so many people hate their jobs: they just can’t get paid for doing things they like to do.

By the way, I know plenty of people who work from home AND hate their jobs: working from home or owning your own business doesn’t necessarily fix your problems (it often makes them worse).

The Three-Percent Problem

The Three-Percent Problem is the reality that — for a hell of a lot of people — there’s only a 3% overlap (i.e. a VERY SMALL overlap) between the things we love to do and the things that pay the bills (as illustrated by the circles above). 3% is arbitrary. The point is that the overlap is small.

In fact, the overlap is so small that most people don’t even see that such an overlap exists at all.

At any rate, the Three-Percent Problem lies at the root of . . .

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photo by Leo London

About two months ago I wrote about how I’d quit my job and was going for broke. I’m happy to report that since then, things are going better than ever. I’m making more than I ever have before, I have unprecedented levels of free time and flexibility, and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.

But I’ve talked to enough people going through similar situations to know that I’ve had some really lucky breaks, and that some of my circumstances aren’t easily repeatable. So I’ve written this post to address some of the most frequent problems people face when trying to fund their freedom and liberate themselves from traditional work environments.

Let’s get started.

One of the most damaging myths perpetuated by our society is . . .

The Myth that if You Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow

There is this insane myth in our culture that if you do what you love, the money will naturally follow. It’s one of those deceptive half truths that often leads to humiliation.

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