Tag: hard work

A job I would like to do

Today I am asked what’s a job I would like to do for just one day?

I got my first job as a teenager, and I’ve pretty much been employed ever since, except for a few years when I was going to college full time under a grant. I still remember the first week at my first job. I hated everything about it. My feet were killing me from being on them all day. I remember going home and asking my mom, is this all there is to life? Just getting up every day and going into a job to earn a paycheck? She said, I guess so. That’s what everyone does. I said to myself that very first week, this place isn’t for me. I’m getting out of here as soon as I possibly can. Years later, I was still there doing the 8 to 5 thing, and barely paying the bills on my meager paycheck. Luckily, I didn’t have too many bills back then and there was family around, or I would have starved to death.

That’s my experience with jobs, so I’m leaning toward there being no job I would like to do for a day. What I would like to do is have no job and still get by, but unfortunately, you have to pay someone to stay alive in this world, which requires a steady source of income. Also, if there was a job I liked doing, I’d probably want to do it everyday, not just for one day. All this considered, there used to be a kind of job I sort of liked.

A few years ago, when I was earning my MBA, I started a corporation for fun, just to figure out how it all worked. I had a plan to launch a hosting business using it. The real fun part though, at least for me, was studying how to set up and run a corporation. It dramatically improved my knowledge of how businesses operated. Unfortunately, the business didn’t take off, so I’ve been filing annual tax paperwork on a company that I will eventually shutdown.

The real objective of this whole endeavor, and maybe even why I pursued an MBA, is because I wanted a particular type of job. I wanted to be a business owner. When you own a business, at first it’s a lot of hard work, but eventually, if it works as planned, you find yourself the CEO of a lucrative company. At that point, your income mostly comes from leadership and exercising your stock options.

Being a CEO seemed like a dream job to me back then, but it never panned out. The thing I learned is you really have to have an incredible product or service to sell, preferably a unique one, so that you can have the first mover advantage. Otherwise, you are going to find yourself in a flooded and highly competitive market.

During this discovery process, I realized the real reason I liked the CEO job, and decided there were other similar jobs. I liked the CEO job because it had the potential of allowing you to exit the rat race. Basically, it is a property ownership job. You invest time and money into a business, it eventually pays it’s own bills, and you start receiving an income from your investment.

Fortunately, there are other jobs based on the property ownership idea, and pretty much all of them are attractive to me. This is another reason why being an author calls to me so strongly. A book is basically a type of property. You own the copyright to it, and every time someone buys a copy, you get some of that purchase in royalties. It’s basically like a kind of mini business. Unfortunately, the book has to sell to a lot of people, and keep selling for years to come. Of course, you can always churn out new books with all the free time you have living off the royalties, but the books really have to be a hit to keep going.

The short answer is, the job I want to do most is property ownership. It is the only true way of escaping the dreaded rat race, so you can actually experience life and start doing your own thing.

What job would you like to do most? What was your first job like? Have you ever started a business? Do you desire to be an author? What other property based incomes can you think of? Do you have experience creating passive income streams? Do you have any advice on how to escape the rat race? What’s the key to living the good life? Let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe!

A year I would relive.

Life is like reading a book. Some books you wish would never end, and others are just a checkmark on your Goodreads booklist. Some you can’t even bear to finish, though that number is pretty low for me. I like to finish things I start unless it becomes absolutely impossible. I just can’t give an accurate review of my experience until that last word is read. I supposed that also goes for the chapters in my book of life, which probably explains why I haven’t jumped off a cliff yet.

When I try to think of a year I would live over, I arrive at a very odd year indeed. I’ve honestly had many good years. They were years of relative peace and tranquility. Nothing catastrophic happened, and my emotions were not constantly stirred. I honestly barely remember those years though, only highlights here and there. They were honestly very boring years. Oddly, the year I would relive was actually a year when my life was in utter chaos.

Back in 2018, I had a job that barely paid the bills, even though the whole place seemed to be running on applications I wrote or maintained. It’s amazing what pride does to the people in charge. They think they are the ones making the organization better, while someone else does all the real work. I’m glad I had that experience though, so I don’t get a big head from being the boss. I know who’s really keeping the lights on.

That year I had also faced some hard decisions. I had a lot of student loan debt that needed to be repaid, about three years of undergraduate and I was about to finish my masters. I knew I would need to start making payments on the loan after that last class was finished. It wasn’t as huge as you might expect though. I worked fulltime and paid for my own living expenses and textbooks (which are ridiculously overpriced I might add) out of pocket.

The problem was, even though the organization insisted on me having a degree, they wouldn’t pay for the tuition or expenses. What was worse, is they were not going to give me an adequate raise to compensate for all the expenses I would later have to pay back.

This set me up with a major life problem, one that many people in this country face. I was not going to be able to pay all my bills with the added expense of student loan payments. To rectify this problem, I was going to have to sell the home I was buying and toss all the equity on student loans to keep from drowning. That move left me living in a camper trailer.

In the later part of 2018, while sitting alone in this trailer, I met this really amazing person online. We bonded straight away and became the best of friends. For all of 2019, we were in constant communication. We talked, texted, shared life experiences and photos, and read books together. It was a year where my life was at its lowest, but God had somehow granted me this very special person to keep me alive. I now refer to 2019 as her year.

It doesn’t make you very happy to learn that the people you work for are fine with ducking you under water to make themselves look good. I think the writing was on the wall that I was going to leave at that point. Fortunately, due to my hard work studying, I would be able to reenter the job market with two bachelor’s degrees (double major), and I was very close to finishing my master’s, with honors of course.

I stumbled upon a job posting at another place and applied. I think they were impressed with all the things I had under me at the other job and was keeping it all running smoothly. The necessary degrees were also on my resume. They made me an offer straightaway, at about twice my current salary. It was certainly an offer I couldn’t refuse, but I did give my current employer a chance to match it. Of course, they were too stupid (or egotistical?) to do so.

Things took off financially, with zero debt, double the income, and living in a luxury apartment downtown (and not a trailer), but something very important is missing now. I don’t hear from her every day anymore. We also haven’t read any books together lately. She checks in from time to time, but it’s not the same as before. I miss her every day, and often pray for her. It’s odd that the year I wish I could relive is a year when my life was at its lowest point, all because of one person. Thank you, friend, for seeing me through the hardest year of my life. I owe you everything.

Have you ever felt suffocated by debt? Have you ever made hard financial decisions? Have you ever worked at a job that didn’t appreciate you? Did you have student loans? Do you believe in fate? Has there been a time you couldn’t survive without a very special person? Why are even the hard times better when the right person is there? Let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe!

People I think are successful.

When I think of successful, who comes to mind? I guess I would need to sort of define success before I could determine who is successful. Let me think of some things that I think of when I think of the word success first. Here are a few things that come to mind.

  • A successful person has to believe in themselves. To be successful, you need to believe that you can achieve the goal. This requires you to have or develop a level of self confidence in your own abilities.
  • A successful person is able to achieve the desired result. People aim for different objectives, but a successful person has to have the ability and will power to push though and achieve their goal.
  • A successful person is someone who has put in the work. Winning the lottery doesn’t make you a success. It might help spur you toward it, but to be successful, you have to accomplish something on your own.
  • A successful person is someone who didn’t lie, steal, or bully his way to success. There is some degree of honor necessary. You can’t be truly successful if you have sold your soul to get there.
  • A successful person has to have perseverance and patience. Some goals take a long time and you may fail many times and have to put yourself back on track. A successful person has to get back up and keep trying.
  • A successful person has to have the nerve to take risks. There’s a luck factor involved in success. Fortunes were made merely by being in the right place, at the right time, and being prepared and willing to take on the job. Fortune favors the bold.

Based on this definition, I suspect there is no one who is perfectly successful. That being said, I do think a few famous people have achieved enough to be considered a success. I might not agree with what they accomplished, but I do admit they were successful at their objectives. Here are a few people I think might be considered relatively successful.

  • Steve Jobs. He was very successful at starting and leading Apple to the height of it’s position in our society.
  • Elon Musk. He managed to start and lead several successful companies, and is seen as a visionary by some of his fans.
  • Bill Gates. I don’t always agree with him, but I believe he was very successful at getting Microsoft to it’s prominent role in our society.
  • Steven King. He’s on my mind because I’m reading his book On Writing. I wouldn’t say he is my favorite author, but I believe he has been very successful.

The ways that hard work makes you feel fulfilled.

I’m not sure that hard work makes me feel fulfilled unless the work has great meaning, provided you are talking about hard physical labor. I grew up in a small town and there was ample opportunity for hard physical labor, but the most it seemed to accomplish was putting a few bucks in your pocket. The pay was the fulfilling part.

When faced with hard work, I tend to be the type who suggests working smarter, not harder. As a programmer, that was also my goal. I would take a difficult task, break it down into steps, program it into a computer, and let the machine do all the hard work. It’s called automation. Automation releases us from boring monotonous jobs so we can work on things that are more meaningful and fulfilling. I think in a few years, we will close the loop on that and have a completely autonomous civilization.

I suppose hard work could be fulfilling in that it can be meditative, especially if it’s a boring task that doesn’t require you to think. Entering a state of mind where you zone out and focus on a task might help you forget your problems for a while. It might also be fulfilling if you get lots of exercise from the work, because your health and body composition would improve.

Does hard work make you feel fulfilled? What’s the hardest work you have done? Does a job need to be meaningful to feel fulfilling? Do you like or hate automation? Do you like zoning out on monotonous tasks? Do you meditate? What do you think will happen when AI and robots do everything for us? Discuss any of these questions if you like, or comment on something else. Thanks for reading, and please remember to like, share, and subscribe!

My life in an alternate universe.

In an alternate universe, I’m living a very different life than this one. In that universe, the right choices were presented to me at the right time, and I made the best decisions. I was born to a wealthy family, but they were still great parents and found time for their kids. I live close to a thriving city with a university and great career opportunities. I didn’t have to work full time and pay my way through college like in this reality, nor did I have school loans that I had to pay back. I did graduate summa cum laude and went on to finish grad school in that reality, just like I did in this one, but I was able to finish at a much younger age and launch an awesome career. I also made tons of great friends along the way, and everyone I met thought I was a great guy. Having status, wealth, youth, and good looks on my side, I managed to find the girl of my dreams and fall in love. I met her in the last year of grad school. We got married, had adorable children, and lived happily ever after.

This was a fun story about a person who didn’t have to struggle that hard to find absolute success. I found considerable success in my life also, but it was hard won. I used to say I had to work twice as hard to get half as much. I still think that’s a true statement about the life I have lived. I do sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had been presented with the right choices at the right time. I guess I will never know.

Discussion Prompts

  1. Ever dream about living a different life?
  2. What would be the perfect life for you?
  3. Do you believe you were given great opportunities?
  4. Did you have to work hard for what you have?
  5. Do you believe alternative or parallel universes exist?

See you in the comments! Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe!

What does having it all mean?

The phrase having it all means something different to everyone. I think most people would think of it as being the state where you have achieved all your life goals. This might mean you have the dream career, earn the money needed to satisfy all your wants, have met and married your soulmate, live in the neighborhood and house where you want, and are surrounded by awesome friends and family who support and love you.

I have attained quite a few life goals already. Honest truth is they didn’t give me the kind of long term fulfillment that I assumed they would. I was always after the next thing. I accomplished them one by one and then just moved on to the next goal. The state of living really means that you keep moving. As they often say, life is not a destination, it’s a journey.

For the normal sort of life goals that a person may set, I’d say they are pretty attainable in our society. I was born to a poor family and lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere for half my life. There were no surrounding jobs that paid anything and the nearest college was many miles away. I’m honestly surprised they had running water. They did, but it tasted awful some days. I eventually managed to escape, get all the college I wanted, move to a thriving city, and make enough money to support a decent lifestyle. It can be done, but its a lot of hard work.

Unfortunately, there were some obstacles in life that I was not able to overcome because it would require supernatural powers. I lost some people that I desperately needed and didn’t want to lose. If I truly had it all, they would still be here to share it with me. In order to live the perfect life, I would need to become immortal and gain power over the fates, so those people could abide with me forever, and that is unattainable.

I’ve also heard other phrases that come close to this sentiment, like he’s living the dream, or she’s living her best life. Would you say you are living your best life now? What’s your plan on achieving your dream? Let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to like and subscribe.