Break The System, It’s The Only Thing In Your Way

There is the easy way and then there’s your way. Most people who are part of the “system” tend to take the easy way. The ones that take their own way will end up having full control over their lives and set up their own system, they live life their way.

There are also those that can manipulate the system from within so that they can have the best of both worlds. That’s a whole other discussion.

What is this system I’m talking about?

On average you will probably spend 5 - 10 years looking for the right job, another 35 - 40 years will be spent working as hard as you can making sure that you have enough money for retirement! Can it get any worse than that?

I spent around 2 years working my way up at a restaurant. I started as a waiter, $2.10 per hr+tips, then went on to do sales in the gift shop, $8 per hr, alongwith waiting on tables. I later got promoted to being the Office Manager. Within a few months my General Manager had offered me the chance to go for management training, an all paid 6 weeks course, as the restaurant was growing nationally. I quit after a few months.

There were other personal reasons too, but I quit mostly because I kept dozing off at my home computer. I used to spend my evenings, after I put my kid to bed, from 9 P.M onwards till I fell asleep at the monitor learning all sorts of software to design stuff with. From flash, graphics to HTML. I spent a considerable amount of my time doing that. Simply because I really really enjoyed it.

I remember telling my wife one day, “I’m going to go out and see if I can grab some local clients.” I walked into a nearby tanning salon {no idea why they need tanning salons in Miami!}, introduced myself and made the pitch. Cha-ching! That was the beginning. Ever since then I never looked back.

My adventure with the internet had officially begun, and I was loving every minute off it.

Plan AND Execute

My wife is a fashion major, like me, and after the birth of our son didn’t do much except stay at home and take care of the boy. Rightly so, because he needed it. Day care was just not an inviting option. I decided to make a plan that would enable us to save enough money to get up, get out and start our life afresh. With our own little system.

As I said above, I never went for the management training, I would probably be making like $60K+ and perks a year by now, but I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be part of the “system”. It was not uncommon for managers to be shifted around cities, and away from families if you were needed somewhere.

So I broke out. I worked during the day, I learned whatever I could by night, we saved as much as we could and made the plunge.

When I left the restaurant I remember the then Sales Manager walked up to me and said, “I just love the fact that you can get up, leave and start something new. I wish I could do that“. I told her there’s nothing holding her back. I believe she left the company a few months later as well. Mind you it was a good company and all, but not my type of company.

So here I am blogging about stuff I like, running my own online businesses, planning and starting new ones and doing everything I want to do.

What about you?

Every system has leaks. Either you end up being stuck in place as part of the fix or you end up outside the leak and realize there’s more room here. - Me