6 Ways to Quit the Rat Race and Master Your Own Destiny

The term 'rat race' has been with us for some time now. The never ending cycle of too much work and too little money and free time is consuming the soul of our society. Western societies have grown wealthy, but still there seems to be a economical gloom in the media as well as in peoples hearts. One big reason for this gloom is that people are not very independent when it comes to money. Most people are bound to their jobs as their only means of income. Of course one can change jobs but then the same thing repeats itself. This doesn't really give much room to maneuver. So I've created a small list to help people start taking charge of their own financials and thus create more freedom to choose how you want to live your life.

Which one you want to be? (Picture from: tylermctavish.com)

1) Decide for yourself

This is the starting point. If you don't do this is is useless to read further. It is up to you to do the hard decisions that needs to be done. Many people never actually decide anything meaningful in their lives. They just do what's 'smart' or what is expected of them. In the end you have 100% of the votes on how to run the state of you. Many people want to lobby you to this or that direction and many advise might be even good ones. But when it comes down to it you are the one responsible to take charge and set your own course. Whining about circumstances, never getting a good chance or that you were too busy are self made excuses and you know it. You were just too afraid to make the decision so better to face it than hide from it. And no, it's not too late to make it now.

Do not be afraid. Go boldly and see how far the rabbit hole goes!

2) Work for yourself

If you work for a company your upside will always be limited. No matter how much work you do or how well you do it there's a limit on your potential gains. You get your paycheck and maybe some bonuses but that pretty much sums it up. If you work for yourself the sky is the limit. The downside of course is unlimited in both cases. You loose your job or go bankrupt. You can loose it all in both cases. Only the upside is different so why make other people rich and successful when you can do it for yourself.

 

You also need to know the difference between your profession and your business. When businessman Ray Croc, the man who made McDonalds what it is today, asked some MBA students what's his business is all the students chuckled and answered: "There's no one on the planet who doesn't know what your business is. It's hamburgers". Well they were wrong. Mr. Croc has always been in the real estate business. He owns the properties under the franchises in some of the most central places in this planet.

Understand the difference between your profession and your business. What you do every day might not be your business. Your business creates you income even when you're not working actively. You need to manage it from time to time but it's different from your profession. Your business could be real estates, companies you own, forest, stocks or other assets that generate you income.

3) Make money work for yourself

Most people work for money. Rich people make money work for them. That's why the rich get richer and poor and the middle class stay where they are. Most people haven't grasped the difference between asset and liability. They buy a car or a home and call it an asset. It might be but most cases it's not. An asset is something that brings money to your pocket. A liability is something that takes money from your pocket. So if you manage to use your car or home as a tool for money generation then it is an asset. Otherwise it is a liability.

To make it really clear and simple your personal financial statement should look something like this:

Income > Expenses

Yeah bitches do my dirty work!

Assets > Liabilities

But for most people it looks something like this:

Income = Expenses

Assets < Liabilities

Here's the simple truth why the rich get richer:

Income --> Assets --> More income

And what you most likely will do:

Income --> Expenses --> Stay where you are

You should start investing your income to assets that start to passively generate you more income that you can either invest onward or spend as you will since you can invest from your incomes and thus create a positive cycle that will make you wealthy. If you can create your personal cost structure so that you can start investing you'll be in better financial position than most and maybe quit your day job altogether.

4) Become financially savvy

If I only had more money my problems would go away! This is what most people think:              more money = less problems. 

Most people who get a sudden windfall like a lottery winning or an inheritance usually end up spending them in a short run and are financially where they started. What do you need to be rich? Money or assets. What do you need to stay rich? Financial education. Most people can read just fine. It is when it comes to reading numbers they go like: 'Math and accounting are not really my strong suit' or 'Talking about money is so boorish'. Finances and money are not really taught in schools. One needs to learn these things herself. One good trick is to start a investment portfolio with small sums. This way you have an incentive to study financial literacy and become more financially independent.

5) Balance your costs and income

Don't believe everything they say

It's not about earning millions. It's about earning more than you spend. Consumerism is so instilled in our modern society that when the shops close for the holidays we go: 'how are we going to survive now?' We're bombarded with lifestyle choices, ads, new 'can't-live-with-out-products' and dozens of different options to open your wallet and spend, spend, spend! One really needs to set her priorities straight and learn the value of money. Every purchase has an alternative cost. The cost is usually time or opportunities. Because time is money you usually end up working more if you buy more. The other cost is more hidden. Opportunities present themselves to us daily. If we have open mind and enough resources to tap into those opportunities we'll get tremendous boost for our way to become financially independent.

To be financially independent isn't about hogging money and wanting be rich. It's about the freedom that it entails. The freedom to choose for yourself. The freedom to dedicate your time and effort to the things you deem worthy. The freedom live your life as you will.

Oh by the way you need to make the sixth way yourself because every path is different and I can only give you some general tips how to go about it :)

End of work as we know it

This is basically what people do at work. We need bigger screens though.

The new land

"Wait where did our jobs go?"

The landscape of working has been changing very swiftly in the past decades. New job titles, companies and industries are born and decline before most of us even realize it. Formal education is lagging far behind to what is needed or expected in companies. The need for individuals to step up the pace of their own skills development is increasing. If you can't keep up you face the risk of becoming obsolete to the work markets. The learning cycle in companies is speeding up as agile, lean an other managerial processes step in. The mediocre skills, good salary middle class positions are vanishing rapidly and the huge majority of white collar workers find themselves in new terrain. Can you keep up?

All the knowledge of humankind is already packed in a very accessible form that most of us carry in our pockets. It is no longer about the knowledge that one has but the ability to link proper information to the context at hand to make optimal decisions. It is about understanding causalities, correlations and meanings between seemingly separate factors. New theories, methodologies and even paradigms change the way work in being conducted.  Those who know how to tackle this kind of work mentality will prosper. Those who know how to embrace change and sail those winds will prosper. Those who can't will feel left out, detached and maybe even useless.

The world is changing fast. That's a fact and there no use fighting against it. The question here is are you building safety walls or wind turbines against the winds of change? Japan in the 19th century resisted industrialization to upkeep traditional values and their way of living. It took only four ironclad warships to demonstrate their weakness against modern technology. They faced reality as it was and after a brief civil war they set out to become one of the most technologically advanced nations on Earth. We can of course duck down and hold our heads in the bush. Keep our old values and think the world hasn't changed. There are lots of conservative political forces in Europe that want to keep the status quo or even take couple of steps backwards. I understand people that can't cope with the speed of the change want to support this kind of mentality. Change is never easy and change for a conservative, change resistant person is almost down right impossible. This creates lots of tensions in societies as we adopt new and foreign influences that contradict old beliefs. Most metropolitan inhabitants around the world have more in common with each other than they usually have with their country men who live in rural parts of the country. A New Yorker and Hong Konger could shoot the breeze more readily with each other that with their compatriots from the bible belt or Western China. Where does this leave nations as the defining factor of culture?

The new jobscape

The pace of change is especially hard for large govermental bodies that need to adjust education and legislation to suit the new jobscape. What do we need to teach the kids of today if we have no idea about the jobs of tomorrow? How do we speed up the legislation process to serve the population in real time and not 10 years back tracking? How do we educate the legislators to become more tech savvy to even understand the reality of what they need to do? Big questions with lots of speculation of what could be the best answer. 

You seriously would like to screw every bolt yourself?

As the 19th century manufacturing revolution 'put a lot of people out jobs' so will the digitalization and robotization 'put a lot of people out of jobs' in the 21st century. Creative destruction sweeps obsolete jobs, technologies and practices in the dust bin of history and I think it's excellent news. I'm not sure who would be sad that we can't tighten that screw all day long in an assembly line anymore. Or that we don't need to manually do spreadsheets anymore. Lots of old job titles will be swept in to that dust bin and society as whole will win as people are freed from monotonic minimum wage jobs to aspire more interesting careers.

Let's say that all the jobs in the world could be done by machines. Computers and robots. Would we be all poor since we don't have jobs? Or would it free us to do what we desire the most? We could devote our time to our hobbies, social activities, arts, science and so forth. Our needs would be met and the only question remaining would be: "what would you like to spend your time on?" The challenge would be to spread the wealth some what equally amongst the population. This kind of challenges we are facing already since the disparity between the rich and the poor is growing ever wider. The trend, especially in digital industries, is that the winner takes it all and there's no room for second places. If this kind of polarization between the super successful and the rest grows too strong it will cause major disturbances in the society.

The loss of traditional jobs is not only affecting economics of nations but also has major impact in the micro level as well. Individuals that have been displaced by technology might feel that they have been betrayed. By their boss, by their company, by the society. These disgruntled people might be more willing oppose 'progress' than to be grateful of the great advancements in technology that enabled automatization to take his job. In the grand perspective the world took a step forward. From subjective point of view the world can shove it up his as*. The next generation might never find out that there even was such a job as 'taxi driver'. What an old fashioned thought that people would drive cars. It's like hand washing your own clothes.

Resource optimization

The only thing we have in this world is time, energy and resources. Time is the hours in our day as well as the days in our lives. Energy is the thing that moves our bodies, cars and lights our bulbs. Resources are the food we eat, the infrastructure that we use as well as the human effort we can put into the things we hold dear. 'Jobs' can be put to the category of resources as it is put so neatly in to the dehumanized box of 'Human Resources' in so many companies. The way we as a society learn to optimize the use of resources is the most crucial element that will determine the course of our future. 

It's still less risky than getting a bank loan

Capitalism with job titles and money as a tool of trade takes into consideration the human aspects of greed and aspiration to 'be better than others' to create motivation for individuals to excel. This of course creates problems of it's own and is not very sustainable way of doing things. Capitalism has also shown that it's fundamental problem is that most of the wealth accumulates to a small portion of people. The so called 1%. It is of course great to see some people succeed in such manner but it's not very egalitarian way to organize a society. Also it a tremendous waste of resources since this top 1% sits on top of most the wealth created like dragons on a pile of gold. Talk about a bottle neck when it comes to resource optimization.

Our ability to harness human ingenuity and energy to the creation of the society of the tomorrow is the key. How can we educate and empower the large masses to, as Gandhi would say it, become the change you want to see in the world? The society needs to become the image of it's inhabitants. Also those inhabitants need to face some hard facts about the realities of resource scarcity. The world is a very finite place. With soon 9 billion of us here we need to very mindful of each litre of gasoline we use. But with proper system to optimize the use of resources and the distribution of wealth if global warming doesn't kill us of I don't see any reason why the future wouldn't be much more prosperous place than now.

The not so dystopic future

How to live a thousand lives?

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”

-George R. R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons

This quote depicts truly the lives of people who read, do theater, write fiction or play role playing games. The ability to relive the lives of the characters I read or play has been one the most rewarding activities of my life. The feeling of immersion when I delve into the stories of Neil Gaiman or when I jump in to shoes of my 1950's marketing manager, who happens to be a Reaper and a lousy husband, has opened worlds that I couldn't have imagined. Yet I did.

Yes some people do actually read and most people atleast watch movies. Movies, if well made, are a good way to experience small portion of the level of immersion that a good book can achieve. It is still nothing compared to a good theater play and those plays can achieve small portion of the level of immersion that acting or role playing can achieve. The difference is the level of control and participation one has while engaged in these activities. The immersion grows so much stronger when you move from being a passive consumer and become an active player.

The ability to use ones own imagination is one of the greatest strengths and gifts humanity has been given. Yet so few actively use and train their imagination during the course of their lives. They take the "Reality" as it's presented with capital R, immovable and unchangeable, instead of seeing that it's only an subjective illusion and the true Reality is a collective clutter of billions of these subjective realities. Since reality is partially what you make of it, you get the power to influence it. And this is where the magic starts!

The first thing you need to mind is your attitude. Something happens. How do you react to it? Do you take the first impulse that comes from your lizard brain and act accordingly or can you take a mental step back and analyze what just happened and then choose your action? This mental step gives you power over your own emotions and thus strengthens your power over reality. Is your base mindset positive or negative? Through which kind of lens do you look at life? Is it gray, muddy, everyday struggle to keep up with the Joneses or is every moment a gift to cherish and use with the best of your abilities? Probably something in between since it's hard to not compare your own life to those of others and nobody can live every moment like a Steve Jobs on crack. The point is that be aware of your reactions and actions since those are the things that define you after all.

Even when you're not doing any of that artsy stuff mentioned above you can pimp your everyday experiences in variety of ways. First of all if you think how much more interesting the world is inside your head than outside it think also that everyone else also thinks like this. This makes each and every encounter with people so much more interesting since you don't need to take them as they stand there but as the bottomless well of imagination, dreams and hopes that they are.

One thing I also do from time to time is that I adapt a person of interest, true of fictional, and play him for awhile. I think about how one of my heroes would do this or manage that and use his role to overcome my own deficiencies. It's so much cooler to go on about as Richard Branson or maybe even Richard Rahl (Sword of Truth) for the duration of the scene and experience world in different way.

There's dozens of different techniques to help you to unleash your imagination and you just need to explore a little to know what suits you. One thing I can say is that if you do life will never be the same again.

Live a little, play a little!