If I Could Re-Murder My Day Job . . .

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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:

1. Read online forums – look for places where the people whose lifestyles you want will congregate. Try:

• Self-development forums
• Forums of business owners and internet entrepreneurs
• Professional forums for the field you want to move into

Don’t expect posts saying “I make $100K by working four hours a day.” Read between the lines. Look for posters who are experts in their area, and who write with authority.

2. Many successful people, in a whole range of industries, write blogs. You can learn a lot just reading their posts and following their advice, but you can learn a lot more if you contact them.

Here’s a tip – don’t go for the very famous figures. Aim for excellent but less well known individuals.

Look for ‘About’ pages – these often gives you an insight into what it took for someone to make it.

3. The VERY BEST way to meet people, though, is at conferences. This is where I’ve met the majority my mentors. Invest time and money in attending industry conferences – it will pay off.

DON’T SQUANDER YOUR HARD-EARNED WORK

People living amazing lives usually hang out with others living amazing lives. So once you’ve found someone great, don’t drop the ball there. Ask them if they can put you in touch with 2 or 3 other people living similarly amazing lives. Doing this one key thing can save you HOURS of work and means you’ll usually have to find only one or two people online (and finding the rest of your network can be done offline).

Approach People

When you’ve found someone living a life similar to the one you want, how do you approach them? Many of us stay stuck in our lives, bored out of our minds, just because we’re afraid to reach out to people we consider unreachable.

It’s really easy to make a connection to one of your “Lifestyle Heroes”. Here’s how:

Email someone you think is interesting.  Say something like this, tailoring it to what they do: “It seems you live an awesome life – I really aspire towards what you have. Would you be able to talk to me about how you’ve set up your life?”

Will they send your email straight to the trash? No! People are really flattered to get emails like this. They’ll often welcome to chance to talk to you about their success, and how hard they worked to get there.

Once you get the chance to chat to your Lifestyle Hero, make sure you:

• Treat them as an equal. Don’t be embarrassingly “meek” or over-do the flattery. They were just like you a few years ago.
• Be respectful of their time. Don’t expect them to be your new best friend. If a conversation naturally develops, great, but don’t push it on them.

Here are the questions you should ask:

• “How did you get from where you were to where you are now?”
• “What would you do if you could start over?”
• “What are your biggest fears and frustrations?” (You want to ask this because you could have idealised their lifestyle, ignoring any aspects which don’t suit you. If you find they’re putting in 60 hours a week to keep that successful business running, maybe that’s not what you want after all.)
• “How would you advise me to replicate what you’ve done?”

As you get to know the person, you’ll find yourself filling in the gaps in your own plans and dreams. You’ll start to see how you can shape your future life. These people who’ve already achieved it are your ideas in action.

Stay In Touch

Once you’ve made contact with some people whose lifestyles you aspire towards, spend half an hour a day networking with them.

• Schedule time on a daily basis or add it as a daily task on your to-do list.
• If you find it hard to make time for networking, make it the first thing you do in the day.
• To begin with, try focusing on one person each day.
• Once your network’s established, keep in touch via a quick email on a regular basis.

This is a good rule of thumb for networking in general: devote half an hour a day to it. And don’t just network with people who are like you (driving boring cars in boring cities to boring jobs) – network with people who you want to become.

Once you’ve started talking to successful people about the life you want to live, and as you find new friends and mentors to add to your group, you’ll start to generate a positive feedback loop. Your ideas and preconceptions will shift based on the new facts you learn. Your eyes will be opened to new ways of achieving your goals. And your assumptions about life will start to change…

You Are the Average Of Your Friends

Studies show that most people have an income within 20% of the average of their group of friends. That means if your three best friends make $30,000, $32,500 and $35,000 – you’re unlikely to make more than $39,000.

The same applies to other statistics about your life: your BMI (body mass index), for instance. If all your friends are overweight, you almost certainly are too. Same goes for your health, physical and mental. We tend to associate with people who are like ourselves.

The biggest determinate, statistically, of whether you’re likely to succeed is the type of friends you have. So it’s almost impossible not to succeed if the friends you spend the majority of your time with are super-successful.

What You Should Do Now

So to recap, here’s the Lifestyle Reverse Engineering blueprint:

1. Write down your goals

• How much money do you want to make?
• How many hours do you want to work?
• What sort of lifestyle do you want?

2. Find people who’re living at least one aspect of the life you want

• Look for expert posters on online forums
• Contact the bloggers whose articles you learn a lot from
• Go to industry conferences and introduce yourself to people

3. Make contact with an initial email. Make it:

• Friendly and informal
• Concise (successful people don’t waste their day reading rambling emails)
• To the point: introduce yourself and explain what you’re asking for – a few minutes of their time so they can tell you about their lifestyle

4. Build up your network

• Make sure to ask people with awesomely designed lifestyles to put you in touch with 2-3 others with similarly cool lives
• Stay in touch with the contacts you’ve made
• Spend half an hour networking every day