The Value of a Few Days Off
(Things are starting to happen in my life, and I’m going to be starting a new HBenjaminPetrie blog soon to tell you all about them and offer practical advice based on my own experiences of trying new things. I just haven’t set it up yet. So in the mean-time, so I’m not posting a whole bunch of stuff to it at once, I’m going to be putting a few posts on this blog. Stick around and let me know what you think)
I don’t have a particularly difficult job, but it is very draining, sitting in an office for eight hours a day, five days a week, dealing with computer systems that don’t really work. I haven’t written a word of prose fiction since I started this job in October and, despite all the other great things about my life, I haven’t been very happy about that fact.
Sure I could force myself to write, maybe get up earlier or go to bed later, or give up something else, but as it has been, by the time I’ve gotten home from work, showered, made and eaten dinner, all I want, or have the energy to do, is play a video-game or spend some time with my girlfriend. Same with weekends, my two free days a week. I might get some blogging done, but the rest of the time I’m either spending time with my girlfriend or consuming entertainment.
It’s not all bad of course, I have fun, I do enjoyable things, but I just don’t get any writing done, and that feels like a betrayal of who I am, after I’ve studied to become a writer for three years, and practised for much longer, to sit in a dead-end office job and not do any writing.
The thing is, I, like all people in developed nations, need money to live, to pay for food and bills etc. Unlike many people my age, I’m in a very fortunate position in that I live in a nice house for very low rent and have a fairly low cost of living, despite my gaming obsession. I’ve perhaps become a little more frivolous in buying premium foods at the supermarket since my job started, but generally I don’t need much money to be happy, at least right now. In fact, I have more than enough money to be happy for right now. And yet, in my work life, and my writing life, I am not happy right now.
There’s two questions I feel are worth asking right now, and maybe you, reader, should ask them of yourself:
1.Am I happy?
2.What is my happiness worth to me?
Being comfortable is not the same is being happy. It’s very easy to get comfortable in a job, to adjust to it, to become a part of it. There’s people my age doing the same job as me, who’ve been doing it for longer than me, and there’s people I work with doing the same job as me, pulling in maybe slightly more money (I’m hired through a recruitment agency, while they’re permanent members of staff), who have been doing this job for a long, long time.
I don’t mean to suggest that there’s anything wrong with that, or that I think anything less of those people. They’re nice people. But have you ever imagined yourself doing the same job, week in, week out until you retire or die, and never shooting for promotion or taking any risks? What did you dream about doing when you were at school or university and dreaming was free, before the mortgage / rent bills came along? If you’re not doing that now, what’s really stopped you?
Like I say, it’s very easy to get comfortable in a job. You start out, you get to know how the place works, you get to know the people around you, you come in each day, five days a week, and that’s how it is. It’s a routine now. You know there’s other jobs out there, but this is your job, this is what you do. It’s comfortable like a bath that’s very slowly cooled to blood temperature. You feel like you’re not good enough for those jobs, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing this one, and you’ve forgotten what it was like to take a risk, to go for something you wanted rather than something familiar. And the longer you stay somewhere, the harder it is to get out.
What do I know about all this though, right? I’m just a kid. Yeah, I don’t have much experience of this, but I feel this job taking a hold after only a few months, and I see the people around me. You choose between a safe-bet low- to medium-earning job or a few big risks, and it’s a lot easier to take big risks when you’re young, so that’s what I intend to do, it’s what I’ve been intending to do ever since New Year’s Eve, but now that my twenty-second birthday has just passed more than ever.
What’s brought about this change? What’s stirred up this fire in me? A few things really. Here’s the main ones, in chronological order: watching the Apprentice towards the end of last year, seeing people my age and slightly over starting their own businesses from nothing, with no formal business education, sometimes even with very little school education; reading a book my uncle gave me for Christmas called “How to Drive a Tank and Other Everyday Tips for the Modern Gentleman”, a book in which the author, Frank Coles, does a whole range of exciting things, and then tells you how you could do or learn to do them, and where to go next if you want to; reading a book recommended by the previous book, “The 4-Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferriss, something I very recommend you read as soon as possible (he makes some bold claims, some parts of his advice is more useful than others, but, more than anything, that book will inspire you to go out and do something to improve your life); realising that you don’t have to be a genius to start a business and that people less intelligent and less resourceful than me have done it before and become millionaires; and throughout this all, knowing that I have parents and a girlfriend who believe in me, and that I believe in myself.
So what am I saying? Well, it was my birthday last Friday, and it’s my girlfriend’s birthday today, so I took a few days off work to make this a five-day weekend. All that previous stuff has been going on in my head for weeks, but over these last few days, it’s all beginning to crystallise in my mind, it’s like I’ve reconnected with myself. I haven’t done any fiction writing over this time, but I’ve decided how I’m going to find time to do it: I’m going to quit my job.
Right at the start of the year I set myself a deadline to have a plan to do something better with my life than sit in an office by March, and to be ready to quit my job by April. Yesterday, my girlfriend and I between us had an idea for a business we could start, an evolution of something we’ve been looking into for a while, and today I had another idea for an income source. Watch this space.
It’s easy for me because, like I say, I’m young, I don’t have dependants and I don’t have a high cost of living. I’m not saying you should quit your job, because maybe you even like your job, or maybe it pays well enough to compensate for sucking your soul and your life away. What I am suggesting is firstly, order ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’, you might not agree with everything in it, but it will get you thinking. Secondly, maybe even more importantly, take a couple of days off work without a plan. Just be. And think about what you used to want and what you really want and how, if you want it so much, you could get it, what you’d be willing to give up or change.
I’ve had some of my best ideas over these last couple of non-work days, and I’ve felt more creative and more motivated than I have in months. I can barely wait to make that one last point-of-no-return decision and quit my easy, convenient, low-paid, too-many-hours job and pour my energies into new ventures.
One more tip: post-it notes. They stick to your walls (mostly) without leaving any marks. Find a clear wall, preferably near your desk. Write a few quotes that motivate you on one or two of them to get you started. I’ve chosen as one of mine a line from a T. S. Eliot poem “Time for you and time for me / And time yet for a hundred decisions / And for a hundred visions and revisions / Before the taking of a toast and tea” as a paradoxical reminder that there’s both plenty of time in which to achieve things, and that time should not be wasted and allowed to slip away. Then write a goal for yourself on a post-it and, if you want to, include why you want to achieve that below it. Then what you do, is go horizontally for further goals, and vertically for how you’re going about achieving them, or just further notes on them. So for example you could have “Goal 1: start a business selling custom socks” and then below that a note saying “look into material wholesalers and sock manufacturing”. I haven’t had chance to test the system much, but so far it’s been a great visual aid at a) tracking my progress on my goals and b) reminding me constantly what I want to achieve so that, rather than sitting at my computer on facebook because I’m bored, I can look at what I actually want to do and what the next step is in doing it.
Try it and let me know how you get on.
Tags: 4 Hour Work Week, business, days off, Timothy Ferriss, writing
