It's not for everybody, it almost certainly will mess up your chances with 'striking it rich' because inevitably you'll be starting from 0 up again. I've been very lucky in always having the backing of those around me whenever I do this.
I cannot find power in myself to break those chains. How do you trick yourself to get rid of money-addictive soul sucking job?
But here is my take on it: I'd rather be poor and happy than secure any day, and I live my life accordingly.
I take risks, sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, on balance it seems to come out roughly even.
Case in point, a bunch of people in Canada wanted to start their own business, a local gas station was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, I put together a package to be able to buy it, invested a whole bunch of money and turned it over to them.
It failed spectacularly, which is a real pity.
But the flip side of that is that I met some guy in a waiting room somewhere, invested some money in to his business, strong armed some other investors into ponying up and he's well into 6 figure territory now and will probably strike it big.
Security is illusionary, who would you rather be dependent on, your boss or your own wits ?
How about all those people that got laid off in the last year, how secure were they before ?
Right now I'm (almost) 45 and I am not scared of doing this, I trust in my own ability to survive and make myself useful to others, directly or indirectly and I expect to pluck the rewards from that.
The satisfaction from doing this under my own power is so much larger than what a paycheck could get me. Any size paycheck.
There is no net though, maybe one day I'll mess up once too many and land on my butt.
But even that doesn't scare me, maybe it should :)
Fortunately I have been lucky to have ppl back me up too when I turned life upside down. I am much younger but would probably lead a life just like you.
I don't think you know just how right you are...I'm planning to quit my job at the end of the month do some 'hustling.' I trust my ability to innovate WAY more than my boss' ability to make money. I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit.
I actually got up at 4 this morning to plan how I am gonna make some money over the Christmas. Sure they can fail, but they can also succeed. It's 50-50
People always say "Well, it could be worse." I say it could be better.
Carpe Diem!
I think the root value here, however, is that of intentionally pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. This can be done every 5 years, or every day, or somewhere in between. It's something I swear by because it keeps my mind fresh and stimulated. Taking a class unrelated to anything I've ever done is a nice example of something that can be done every few months or so.
Or, since Wear Sunscreen was mentioned here....Do something every day that scares you.
- Are you just a freakish genius,
- or do you not consider the feeling of mastery to be essential to happiness,
- or do you continue to build up existing skills AND turn your life upside-down at the same time?
I'd love to be able to turn my life upside-down, but I'm addicted to getting better at certain things and would hate to stagnate..
It's hard work (make that very hard work) but as you get more basic knowledge it becomes easier to integrate stuff that you are learning.
The only thing I would say I've ever truely 'mastered' is C programming, other than that I have lots of things where I can get by and learn from people that really know their stuff.
It is inevitable that it works like a spotlight, you turn it on an area of interest and go all out to learn what you can about it, then as your return-on-investment in time drops off you can decide to continue or quit, usually I quit when I get to the level where I'd have to go 'full-time' in order to advance.
There is just too much interesting stuff to do, no way to be an expert in more than one field.
One of the most interesting things that I've found is that as you do this you keep running in to domain specific knowledge that can fairly easily be translated in to other domains that haven't picked up on that trick yet.
This is a fairly good way to make a living.
As for doing the turning things upside-down and learning at the same time, usually it coincides, but that is not a necessity.
For me it is just a way to keep living fun.
Change your line of business (I went in to alternative energy for 5 years)
Learn a new trade (for me: metal working, Cad-Cam)
Right now I'm again going through such a phase of change, I have absolutely no idea what it is leading to but so far it has been extremely interesting.
Life is all about the journey.
Security in life is worth absolutely nothing, as soon as you feel that you are becoming 'secure' that's an excellent opportunity to kill that before it becomes a habit.
The flip side of that is of course that the freedom to do as you please (within the limits of the socially acceptable) is just as addictive or even more so.
I disagree about security though. All you need to have an adventure that entirely rocks your world is some peace and quiet.
I am sorry I didn't quote the name of the author at the first place. I couldn't recall where I had read it. I searched around for a while and couldn't find it so I just posted without the author's name but in quotes to show it was from someone other than me.
Thank you for finding the book title, it helped me find the the site where I originally read this.