Perseverance of the Enslaved

How many hours a week does your rat race job take you away from your home and family? Including drive time I'm currently clocking in at 55 hours. Add on top of that errands to run and a house to maintain and suddenly there isn't much time left to pursue the things that I hope would some day allow me to get out of the rat race. I sometimes catch myself thinking that it would just be so easy to not care and resign myself to a life of meaningless work and look forward to coming home each day and simply relaxing with my family. Not always striving for more...maybe there isn't anything more that I'm supposed to have? It's times like these that I have to remind myself that the potential reward for my perseverance far out ways the inconvenience of the efforts put in at this very moment.

In some ways this brings us back to what I wrote in my article entitled Trimming the Fat, Even if it Hurts. When society has already placed such a premium on your free time how do you determine if the things you are spending your time on are leading you towards your goals or are just another distraction? That's a tough one. I started this blog simply to chronicle my journey towards self-employment and self-sufficiency. Along the way though I learned some different things about promoting and monetizing websites so I decided that if I was going to make the website anyway I might as well try and make a little bit of money with it. So now I'm writing about three articles a week for this website and I have to admit that there are times that I question the time spent on it. For all the writing I've done during my lunch breaks on this blog I could be about 1/3 of the way finished writing a novel. With the time I've spent at home developing and promoting the website I could certainly have gotten some recording work done on my music.

So should I kill this blog simply because it is not taking me directly to the goals I desire? No, sometimes you need things that can lead you to where you want to go in a round about way. If a truly miraculous thing would happen and this website would start to generate some income, well then I am partly on my way towards self-employment and in the process I have put many hours of practice into my writing skills. Running I'm Not A Rat also forces me to sometimes try things that I wouldn't other wise put the effort into. So I'm also learning and becoming a more well rounded person thanks to this website.

Let me give you one more example. When I started my new job a few months back there was another guy that started at the same time as me. From the very beginning it was clear that he wasn't a good fit for the company we both worked for. He revealed to me that what he really wanted to do was own a tanning salon. After two weeks of complaining about the company he came back from a long weekend and told me that he had purchased carpet cleaning equipment for a couple grand, incorporated a business, and secured several large contracts for cleaning apartments after people move out. In one weekend he created a business with enough income generation to get himself out of the rat race. He had big plans for this cleaning business too. Within two months he hoped to have his operation large enough to hire a couple of employees and soon after that have enough saved to start that tanning salon that he dreamed about.

My former co-worker was willing to put in the effort in a big way to achieve his dreams even if that meant deferring them for a while so that he could develop another business as a means to an end. These kind of stories inspire me to push on and stay the course even when all I want to do is relax. I don't advocate pursuing your dreams at all costs to time spent with family. I've seen other authors that would seem to suggest just that. The point of all this in the end is to spend more time with my family not less, so it would seem contradictory to spend no time with them now. Incidentally I got up early in the morning to get this typed before the rest of my family work up. I see them little enough thanks to my job, I don't need to ignore them when they are awake too.


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Using Time Unwisely

I have a brother inlaw that rides a bike to work 13 miles each way. After working all day and 26 total miles of biking he comes home occupies his time around the house doing whatever work he can. He is affectionately referred to as the Energizer Bunny because he never stops working.

Admittedly, I am nothing like my brother inlaw. I drive to work and I work hard at work but when I get home I typically don't want to do anything but rest and relax. There are always a big pile of things around the home that I know I should be doing but things always seem to take forever to get done because I just don't do them.
This sort of approach to life is fine if you have no intention of ever doing anything beyond what you are currently doing. But I do have other hopes and dreams beyond working at a meaningless job. I love spending time at home with my family when I get home from work but at the same time, if I'm not doing anything to improve our living conditions at home then I'm not doing my job as a husband and father.

One of the first steps toward self-employment: Using your time wisely ALL the time!

Self-Sufficiency

An area that I've been looking at more and more lately is the idea of self-sufficiency. Before global trade became so readily available, nations were forced to be self-sufficient. Now everything is outsourced to someone else. America depends on terrorist nations for oil and communist nations for food and goods. And look at the messes it makes?

The same concept applies to individuals and families. If you depend on other people for all of your goods and services then you are at the mercy of whatever the market conditions are. I don't plan on being able to be entirely self-sufficient but getting away from being TOTALLY dependent is a good goal to have I think.

Something that we are getting into is growing our own fruits and vegetables as much as possible. And from that making our own jellies and preserves. This past year we made enough jelly to not have to buy any for a year. We did have to buy some of the fruit from local growers though because our own production hasnt matured enough yet. I say if it tastes better, is better for you, and is cheaper, why not do it? If you have kids it can also be a great thing to teach them agricultural principles.

Another way I've been pushing a little more towards self-sufficiency is doing minor car repairs. I've done some minor stuff in the last year or so that didn't take very long to do and cost a lot less than taking my car to a mechanic.The flip side to this issue is how much of your time is all this taking up? And could that time be better put to use elsewhere? These are questions that the individual needs to answer for themselves. Timothy Ferriss, the author of The 4 Hour Work Week, advocates outsourcing everything to better free up your time. And this idea does have some merit but if you can do more for yourself at less cost than having people do things for you then you don't need as much income to support yourself.

Take for example someone who is making $40,000 a year working 50 hours a week for some big corporation. Now what if that person took a job making $30,000 a year at 40 hours a week but spent ten hours a week doing things for himself that he previously paid someone else to do? It could be growing some food yourself, walking your own dog instead of paying someone, your own home and car repairs, or any number of things that you pay someone else to do because you simply don't have the time. I submit to you that taking care of your own life instead of expecting someone else to take care of it for you is much more fulfilling than working yourself to death in order to make millions for someone else.

Job Training

As I said in my previous entry there was a secondary reason why I hadn't been around for quite some time. With my new job I was in a different state for a month doing job training. After searching for and applying to and interviewing for new jobs for an entire year I finally got hired. I had been trying to get a promotion in the company I was working for for quite some time and the lousy district manager kept promoting guys that were younger than me, single and still living with their parents. Apparently being in your mid-twenties and having a family to feed didn't fit into their idea of a manager. Oh well...

The new company I'm working for is a bit smaller but it is in the same industry as the previous one. I am actually enjoying it quite a bit more, though I still long for the day when I can just work from home.

So this doesn't exactly help me in my pursuit of self-employment because now I am working more hours. But on the other hand I am also making a bit more money so I can fund other projects better and I have an hour lunch now so I'm planning on ways to be productive during that hour. We shall see.