Falling in Like With a Job You Don’t Love. In the past, I was obsessed over quitting my job. Later on, people encouraged me to quit because of my dreams. Quitting your day job is not fulfilling the American dream. People assume your dream is more lucrative. However, writing doesn’t pay well. Dreams rarely pay well at the start. Your dream needs time to incubate. It takes very long indeed. Without incubation time, it will die. Keeping at a day job allowed my dream to have incubation time. What you do in one area of your life will affect the other areas too. Your work attitude tends to follow you home too. Remember why you work. I work to support my family. When you chase your dreams, sometimes you become selfish in your ways. Look for parallels. Starbucks is going to teach you accounting, marketing etc. You can learn from any job you have. Learn to start small and work from there. Look for purpose. Ask how can your day job benefit your dream job and vice versa. How can your chase for your dream job positively affect your day job? People was my purpose. Every dream involves people. You can definitely find purpose in your day job. Do not ever steal from work. This means working on your personal goals while at work. You are supposed to do work in your job description. One way to overcome this is to work very hard in your weekday evenings on your dream so you won’t feel pressed for time. Another way is to take on more assignments at work. Your employers didn’t pay you to work on your dream during working hours. Be honest and diligent with your day job hours. Think of your job as your adversary, not your advocate is a screwed up way of thinking. Protect the way you look at your boss and your company. The next wrong way is to demand that your job meet the needs of your dream. You are not entitled to anything.
The truth is, we need to learn to fall in like with a job we don’t live because it’s actually the best way to set up your dream for success. – Jon Acuff
Bad employees make horrible dreamers. You can’t loaf on your day job all week and then expect to magically throw the switch on the weekend and hustle on your dream. The things you do on your day job tend to follow you home. – Jon Acuff
We get really focused on our own stuff and our own dreams and we lose sight of the many, many reasons it is critical that you do great work at your day job. – Jon Acuff
The romantic way too look at it is that my dream job bled over into my day job. The candid way to look at it is that I was stealing from work. When you do your dream on work time, that’s stealing from your employer. – Jon Acuff
Wait on the Main Stage. We have to get on the main stage. It can be very nervous to speak on the main stage. To many, speaking at a lab is a failure. However, we all need to speak on the side before moving to the main stage. Plans are important, however, do not plan too much. Plans always change and they are fluid. The problem are that plans are too vague and no detailed steps are necessary. It’s like soccer, you can’t plan for everything as every moment is different. There are too many variables in life. You will not be able to script every detail. You do not need a plan. You need passion to drive you forward. The second thing you need is practice. You must show up every day and make it a habit. Just keep practising and practising. The conditions of your dream will change all the time. We like to see the underdog defeat the best. It is like David and Goliath. When you are small, nobody likes and respects you. Developing our dream job is more about hard work rather than grand moments in life. Start small and go along the way. We all need the gift of invisibility at the start. It’s harder to take risks when many people are watching you. Anonymity is the best because you have nothing to lose. You are a free man. Cherish it while it is still around.
Focus on your passion first. Your passion will always fuel your plan. Rarely will a plan fuel a passion. It will contribute. It will shape it. It will most certainly help it. – Jon Acuff
There Will Be Hustle. I have never taken blogging seriously. Things worked out because I hustled. Our desire to complicate matters is because we are lazy and fearful. Hustle is not hard. Sometimes, you will have to do the things you don’t enjoy. Dreams start in the morning. When you wake up, this is the best time to hustle. You don’t have excuses in the morning. One tends to have less excuses in the morning. When you start on your dreams in the morning, it will leave you happier throughout the day. As you grow older, you waste less time. It will force you to prioritize. The clue is to do more of the things you love and less of the things you like. Chasing your dreams isn’t all rosy and shit. The more you practice, the better you become. There is a lot of practice involved. Put quantity before quality. You have to learn 3 things about people. They won’t pay for what they can get for free. You will have to differentiate the product before they will pay. You have to weigh the long-term benefits of doing something for free. If there is a bigger gain from you not charging at speaking events, then don’t charge. Free pays dividends towards expertise. Doing stuff for free improves your exposure. Competition can be a big motivator but it is not a good measurement tool. If you feel you are better than your competitor, then you will get complacent. If you realize how much your opponent is better than you, you will get discouraged. Try not to measure your dream against someone else’s dream. Blog stats could be one potential measure. Your message must stay true to yourself. The best measure is the amount of work you have put in. This is the factor which you can control. Measure the number of days which you woke up early.
I love the title Quitter but still think that a core element holding this entire book together is a need to hustle. To push harder than the other person. To dream further. To work longer and faster. – Jon Acuff
Hustle is not hard. If you write your blog every day, at the end of the year you will have more readers than when you started. If you get up early and work on your dream two hours more than somebody else, your dream will progress faster. – Jon Acuff
The reality is that when you get busy doing the things that matter to you, you actually have more time to do the things you love and less time to do the things you like. – Jon Acuff
Learn to Be Successful at Success. You do not become an overnight celebrity. Do not misinterpret what success looked like for a dream. Success is the Bermuda Triangle of dreams. There are challenges associated with success too. Another problem is that we get arrogant. Overconfidence is scary. Do not let success kill your dream. Learn to define what is ‘enough’. You can send future emails to yourself. Write yourself a letter in the future. Success will often tell you that it is never enough and that you should strive even more. Define your enough. It is important not to burn out. You must always invest in relationships or they will die. Burn your dream bright but do not burnout. Please understand that the land of later is a myth. Kids do not believe in later. There will always be trade-offs. It is important to spend time with your family and kids too. Don’t turn your platform into a prison. Learn to have multi-generation dreams. Build a legacy that is bigger than individuals’ lives and actions. If you have a dream, share it with others. Do not take on opportunities which are not linked to your dream. Avoid saying yes to the wrong things.
Quit Your Day Job. I left my day job. My boss expected it. How do you know you’re really ready to leave? Learn to fill up this scorecard. 1) You have worked hard on your dream for more than a month/ a few months. Please understand that not everyone needs to quit their day job. The author had 6 reasons for quitting his day job. They are 1) He had somewhere to land. Next, the opportunity fit our opportunity filter. The author tested the dream before he quit. It is important to practice what you want to do with your life. I had a support network. We could afford to move. God seemed cool with our dream. It is important to establish some important ground rules. Share the rules and others hold you accountable. Make a list of risks that might appear after you leave your day job. Friendships might take long to form. In addition, you might be required to travel more. Money could be an issue too. You might need to pay rent for a home. We really can’t have two different versions of ourselves ‘work me’ and ‘life me’. To some extent, your work defines you. You think your job just funds the rest of your life. This cheapens the value of work. Some people think work is never meant to be fulfilling. There will always be hard and difficult moments at work. However, you have to do things you don’t necessarily enjoy at times. However, work can be fun sometimes. A menial task has meaning too.
You can’t spend 40 hours a week doing something and think it won’t impact you. You can’t spend half of your waking hours somewhere and think it doesn’t affect you. You can’t make a perfectly clean break between your life inside and outside work. – Jon Acuff
You can fake that you love your job for months, maybe even years, convincing everyone you work with that you care about the company, the business or the job. But your apathy for a job always comes out eventually. – Jon Acuff
If you quit your job without understanding why you’re quitting, you’ll just jump from job to job to job. You’ll become a serial quitter like I was. The things you didn’t like at the job before will show up in your next job. And the next. The common denominator in every bad job you’ve quit is you. – Jon Acuff