Welcome to part 2 of the "Work from Home & Lifestyle Design Renegades Series" (part 1 was with lifestyle renegade Chris McCombs).  This second interview is with my friend Dan Clements, who I had the pleasure of interviewing far too long ago.

If you’d like to download the interview and listen to it later then right-click on this link (part 1) and this link (part 2) and click "save as."

Part 1 of the Interview

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Part 2 of the Interview

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A little about Dan. . .

• Dan, along with his wife Tara, are the authors of Escape 101, and amazing book that I highly recommend.  (Incidentally, Escape 101 has appeared such places as The Wall Street Journal, Success Magazine, and The Miami Herald).
• Dan is a writer and speaker on such topics as health, business, and lifestyle design.
• Dan and his wife have spent more time on overseas sabbaticals then just about anyone else I personally know.

In the interview we talk about . . .

QUICK QUESTION: Want to earn $5 billion dollars/month while working 6 seconds each day from home (results may vary)? If so, then click on this link now.

I get lots of questions in my inbox each week. Last week’s best question came from Frans D.

I’ll get to the question and then answer it.  But before I do that, I want to mention that these questions are generally answered in the VIP newsletter and NOT on this blog.  To make sure that you get all Q&A updates, subscribe to the newsletter now by filling in these boxes:

Question:

“Looking at those who succeeded in killing their day job, knowing their stories and combining this with your own knowledge and experience, if you had to start over tomorrow from scratch (day job) to funding your freedom; how would you do it, what would be the most important thing to do and what do you suggest I do to get a jump start?”

Answer:

If I could go back in time and re-murder my day job I would have STARTED with “Lifestyle Design Reverse Engineering.” And I would have started doing it LONG before I quit my day job.

I’ll talk about this reverse engineering nonsense in a second, but before I do that I want to emphasize the importance of . . .

Getting Specific About the Life You Want

Yeah, I know. Everyone says to do this. But bear with me here . . .

Before finding people whose lives you’d like to reverse engineer, first write a definition of the life you want to live. Write down income goals – and how many hours you want to work to achieve them.

Anyone can make $100,000/year by working 24 hours a day for minimum wage (I’m not sure that’s true but let’s just pretend it is because it sounds good), but it takes a bit more planning to make that much while working 3-hour days. So in addition to writing income goals, you should also address these three questions . . .

• How much money do you want to make?
• How many hours do you want to work?
• How do you want to live?

Get specific now, or you’ll waste time working towards goals you don’t want.

Are You Bored Yet?

The copywriter John Carlton once said that “the average person is bored out of their mind.” The average person’s life goes something like this:

He gets out of bed bored, eats a boring breakfast, gets into a boring car, takes a boring commute to a his boring job, works with boring people, eats a boring lunch, takes another boring drive back home, eats a boring dinner, etc and repeats this cycle every single day.

Joe Average wants more than this, of course – but this wanting more is never acted on:

• His hopes, dreams and assumptions aren’t rooted in reality.
• He aspires towards a picture that he’s build from glimpses of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, an imagined perfect life that won’t necessarily work.
• He can’t really picture himself in his new life.

All his friends have boring lives too. Joe doesn’t know anyone who he can use as a model for his new lifestyle, so he tries to follow false assumptions towards a fuzzy goal. No wonder he’ll wake up bored tomorrow, eat a boring breakfast, get into a boring car…

Once you get specific about your goals (how much money do you want to make, how much time do you want to spend, how do you want to live?) then start searching for people living the kind of lifestyle that YOU want.

Lifestyle Reverse Engineering

Find people already living the life that you want. They don’t have to be an exact match – even if just one part of their life is aligned with what you want, then you’ll learn a lot.

Here’s how to find them:

So I have this new project that’s really just “The Growing Life 2.0.”  It’s called Finance Your Freedom, and I’ve talked about it at length here.  I just finished hiring an assistant to help with the site (god, that sounds so “hardcore” even thought it isn’t), and I’ve partnered with a fancy top secret crazy person to help make the site not suck.

(So if you’re interested in my new non-sucking project, go nab an RSS subscription to it before they’re all gone). Or subscribe to the Finance Your Freedom newsletter here:

Anyway, I’ve received over a hundred emails of encouragement (thank you!), but a few people have been suspicious.  I appreciate those emails too.  Here’s my response.

But don’t get too worked up about FYF.  I’m not worked up.  I’m just this guy whose stumbled upon a bunch of ideas and tactics and stuff that’s helped me and some friends to quit our day jobs.  (This stuff might work for you too).

(By the way, as a result of my freedom I’ve been able to move to California for a bit to spend time with my grandfather who’s experiencing the early stages of Alzheimer’s.  Which has been really nice.  I love lifestyle design).

One last thing: sometime really soon (within the next 5 days) your Growing Life subscription will convert to a Finance Your Freedom subscription.

(What comes next for The Growing Life’s domain name isn’t certain right now . . . maybe I’ll delete all my articles and replace them with gross looking ads for casinos and Viagra and then hire a bunch of people to click on them; just kidding).

For articles that suck less than the leading competitor, subscribe to Finance Your Freedom.

 
photo by new wave rh
[Note: The Growing Life will become Finance Your Freedom.  Please go there for the full version of the article, or to leave a comment (I'd love to hear your thoughts on this piece)].

I should start out by telling you that . . .

I’m Trying to Practice My Ranting Skillz

I suck at ranting. I enjoy reading rants, but I’ve never been very good at writing them. But apparently the rant genre is a sub-genre of the blog genre, and I need to master this shit if I ever want to displace Dooce on technorati.

Cool… I’ll Start With My Rant Right Now

Almost any resource can be a currency governed my economic forces—and the laws of supply and demand. (I probably read that in a fancy book somewhere. Please punch me in the face if I ever write another high falutin’ sentence like that again).

Anyway, money is a currency or whatever. Yeah, we know that.

But so is ego: it is traded, bartered for, bought, sold, etc. I see people participating in the ego economy all the time: new business owners waste thousands of dollars on putting big pictures of themselves on billboards. Social media people and others in the web 2.0 space sacrifice entire days of vacation and family time so they can be mini-internet famous for 1,000 people and make an extra $100/month. And people get into debt buying shit they don’t need trying to impress others or get laid.

So before the internet, money was (often) the primary means by which people participated in the ego economy; the money economy fed into the ego economy. Maybe it’s still this way.

But social media, the internet, and web 2.0 have given people a whole new venue for being vein and wasting their resources in exchange for ego gratification. Now you can broadcast a vlog to 500 people, become a power user on StumbleUpon, or Reddit, or Digg, and start a blog and try to get 1000s of subscribers. You can start and lead your own forum or newsgroup. You can be the leader of your own fiefdom of 400.

[Click here to read the rest of this article]

This isn’t a real blog post, but if I were you I’d want me to tell you about the following two things:

Thing #1: Noami and Havi’s Self Promotion for Wimps

I’m kicking myself for not telling you about this sooner.

So my awesome-as-hell friend Naomi and her partner in crime Havi are offering this six-week class called “Self-Promotion For Wimps.”

Note: THIS IS NOT A NONSESE INTERNET-MAKETING BULLSHIT HYPE CLASS. This is a thoughtful program designed to help you start making changes in your life.

Anyway, if you’ve though a lot about starting a business but can’t find the guts to do it then I think you should check it out pronto. Especially given that especially given that the first session was YESTERDAY (Wednesday, September 10^th).

But don’t worry at all. They’re recording all the sessions (so you can still get in on the first) and I just checked with Naomi and you can still get in on all of the last 5 sessions and miss nothing (because the first class was recorded).

Anyway, Naomi sent me this coupon code and apparently you’ll get like $30 off if you type CLAY into a box during the order process. I’m feeling all flattered and stuff because this is the first time someone’s named a coupon code after me.

Thing #2: The Best SEO Course on the Planet is Now Free

There’s this company called StomperNET that makes what is – in my opinion – the most thorough, effective, well-researched, and amazing SEO course available on the internet today. And I’ve tried a few.

Anyway, they’re giving away the latest version of their $500 DVD SEO course for free. Because they’re crazy like that (actually, they have good reasons that won’t harm you).

Anyway, if you’ve ever thought about doing anything on the internet that might, perhaps, maybe promote your business or make you money someday, then I’d check out this course. Because search engine optimization (SEO) is the absolute foundation of internet marketing.

(By the way, Andy and Brad at StomperNET are offering a lot more than the course for free, but if I gave you the whole scoop it would sound so ridiculous that I’d sound completely full of shit and lose credibility).

 
photo by new wave rh

I should start out by telling you that . . .

I’m Trying to Practice My Ranting Skillz

I suck at ranting. I enjoy reading rants, but I’ve never been very good at writing them. But apparently the rant genre is a sub-genre of the blog genre, and I need to master this shit if I ever want to displace Dooce on technorati.

Cool… I’ll Start With My Rant Right Now

Almost any resource can be a currency governed by economic forces—and the laws of supply and demand. (I probably read that in a fancy book somewhere. Please punch me in the face if I ever write another high falutin’ sentence like that again).

Anyway, money is a currency or whatever. Yeah, we know that.

But so is ego: it is traded, bartered for, bought, sold, etc. I see people participating in the ego economy all the time: new business owners waste thousands of dollars on putting big pictures of themselves on billboards. Social media people and others in the web 2.0 space sacrifice entire days of vacation and family time so they can be mini-internet famous for 1,000 people and make an extra $100/month. And people get into debt buying shit they don’t need trying to impress others or get laid.

So before the internet, money was (often) the primary means by which people participated in the ego economy; the money economy fed into the ego economy. Maybe it’s still this way.

But social media, the internet, and web 2.0 have given people a whole new venue for being vain and wasting their resources in exchange for ego gratification. Now you can broadcast a vlog to 500 people, become a power user on StumbleUpon, or Reddit, or Digg, and start a blog and try to get 1000s of subscribers. You can start and lead your own forum or newsgroup. You can be the leader of your own fiefdom of 400.

I’m Not Saying that All Bloggers are Ego Obsessed or Wasting time. Far from it.

Just hear me out.

I’ve seen a lot of people start blogging because they ultimately want to use blogging income to liberate themselves from their day jobs. That’s cool.

The problem is that – 1 year after starting their blogs – far too many of these people are still spending countless hours on their blogs even though they’re consistently losing money, freedom, and space time for months and months and months. They’ve become addicted to being in the spotlight.  It’s sad.   And many of those people are further away from liberation and more desperate than they were when they started.

The problem is that, although they originally started trying to liberate themselves from their day jobs, they can’t let go of being mini-internet famous.

They are trading ego for freedom.

Here’s the Tragedy

So the tragedy is that so many people who’ve come to the internet and this web 2.0 space to liberate themselves from shitty jobs end up not liberating themselves at all.

Instead, they end up self-medicating the shitty feeling they have at work with the ego-attention they get through their social media positions, subscriber bases, their statuses as influencers, or whatever, and as a result they end up sacrificing true liberation.

photo by Laura Jeanne
I received an email yesterday from someone who told me that, with Finance Your Freedom, I had somehow decided that “money is the most important thing in life.” The email author stated that my view now seems to be that “we can’t live without money, so why not make as much as possible?”

So I Want to Set the Record Straight on Two Points

• First Point: I have nothing against anyone who makes tons of money. If you’re filthy rich and you’ve done it ethically, then good for you. I also have nothing against you if you’re dirt poor, or middle class, or anything in between. Money is a non-issue to me because it’s not a currency that I care about.

Which brings me to my second point . . .