Design Your Life on How You Want to Live Instead of Just Earning a Living

One of my ex colleague shared with me today about she wanting to quit her job and start something on her own instead of working for a corporate job. Her main point is that she isn’t happy or excited going to work daily and would love a different sort of challenge. After several follow up questions like whats your plan, whats your business model, how do you vision success, etc. You could conclude that she didn’t think this through as the answers were very vague and she is still in the exploratory mode.

Therefore, I normally cringe when I hear answers like this. This is all good, don’t get me wrong, I always admire people with drive and looking for a new challenge. But I always feel that its easy for people to say that they want to quit their job and start something without thinking of next steps or the next steps plan is very superficial with no real attainable or achievable metric to track performance.

This is very dangerous as if she were to quit without a job to pursue her dreams, without a viable action plan, it could be a waste of time, money or resource and whats worst a demoralizing experience which might stop her from taking the leap of faith in future.

So what I told her after her sharing was to focus on the following

Design Your Life Versus Hoping, Don’t Just Earn a Living.

Before quitting your job and deciding that starting a new company or startup is for you. Please ask yourself, what is my ideal life, what do you define as success in 30 years from now. What must you have to be successful.

Asking this would help you envision what you are looking for in the mid to long term, is quitting your job, starting a new company going to help you achieve the goal. Envisioning your future success self would help you design your life and determine how you like to live it out and not just purely focus on earning a living or deciding that starting something on your own is what you are looking for.

I feel this is very important for everyone, especially middle age individuals who are tired of their job but looking for a change. A change is good, I applaud you for wanting to to it, but all I’m saying is have a plan. Plan your ideal life style then see what you need to achieve it. For all you know, there are other ways to achieve financial freedom.

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