If you work a typical job, much of your time is spoken for. By most people’s definition, you’re not free. In most cases, you have to arrive on time, for a set number of hours per week, fulfil your role and request your holidays. You likely have a boss, or several. You have prospects to impress, clients to appease and team members to get on with. Your time is sold for money and therefore how you spend your time is up to someone else. Flexible and remote working perks give you illusions of autonomy.
Perhaps your work for yourself. This means you have freedom over how you spend your time, right? But being self-employed doesn’t automatically solve the problem of freedom. You still have clients and customers, a team to manage, maybe shareholders and investors. You may be responsible for aspects of your business and be responsible for their success. There’s more.
Many self-employed people act like they have a job. They create themselves a role and then they diligently do it, forgetting that they are the master of their destiny. They commute to work in traffic, clock in and clock out, and they spend their days following the customs that a job dictates; schedule, location and all. Having originally taken the steps to create huge career and life potential, many entrepreneurs plateau and never truly create the freedom they’re capable of. There is a solution.
Entrepreneurs must question their work and life choices
Despite taking the leap to start a business, they don’t take the leap to question their reality. Do I need to do this task? Who else could do it? How do I want to spend my time? How do I create a self-sufficient team? They forget that progression in their role involves asking themselves the tough questions; they don’t have a boss to do it for them every quarter.
“We can all access insane freedom and autonomy in our work and lives,” explained Jodie Cook, author of Ten Year Career, “but you have to design your life, not live it by default. The default for your work is that it takes up 9am – 5pm on weekdays. The default for your career is that you retire in your sixties. There is another way.”
Ten Year Career has the subtitle “Reimagine business, design your life, fast track your freedom” and is a book designed set you free. Cook began her career at 22, going on to sell her business at 32 and was free of the need to work again and ready to begin a new chapter. After analysing her journey and those of others who had achieved similar, she created the Ten Year Career framework and companion course, to help business owners achieve more in a shorter timeframe.
Now is the time to make a change
“How much longer are you going to wait before you start to demand the best for yourself?” asked Stoic philosopher Epictetus. Will you wait until 5pm, until the next public holiday, or perhaps until your next appraisal? “This isn’t a dress rehearsal. Our time is finite and so many of us are wasting it,” says Cook, who wants you to start now.
The book begins by unpacking how we are conditioned along certain routes, starting with schooling, before asking the question, “What are you capable of?” and finding out what might be possible. Methods of managing your mind are shared, followed by the Ten Year Career framework and a blueprint for progressing along from execute to systemize to scrutinize to exit. It covers strategies for meeting people, playing the giving game, designing your life and being intentional about your endgame, so you can make it happen.
You have the capability to make work a choice within ten years. You can reimagine business, define what freedom means to you and start living your dream life straight away. The book holds the key: it will give you the tools, but the rest is up to you. Entrepreneur Derek Sivers, who sold his business CD Baby for $22 million, said that, “every future millionaire needs this wise perspective,” about Ten Year Career. Are you a future millionaire? If so, this might be the book that gets you there.
Find Ten Year Career on Amazon and everywhere that sells books. Available to preorder now. For more information visit tenyearcareer.com
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