Impossible Dream?

The end of the year fast approaches and as my thoughts turn to 2012 I’m working harder than ever at getting myself in a position to really move forward with the build.

As I look back on the two years since I quit my full-time job on the corporate hamster wheel I can take some satisfaction in the fact that I’ve survived, just. But at the same time I’m nowhere near where I want to be in terms of income and lifestyle. I knew it would be tough but I underestimated how tough. There have been many times when I started to think I’d made a terrible mistake, one that was going to mean that ‘Gleda’ would never be finished and I’d never achieve my goal of freedom to live life as I please, but thankfully those times have been few and far between and now more than ever I’m absolutely convinced that I made the right choice. Apart from which I’m probably unemployable now!

Over the past two years I’ve learned many lessons and made many mistakes and I’m still learning, but these mistakes have left me far better placed to move forward and create the life I want. My biggest mistake was to focus entirely on my ‘business’ and failing to recognise that I was just re-creating a ‘job’. All those years of conditioning left me blind to the fact that I needed to get away from having a life separated into ‘work’ i.e. the stuff I ‘had’ to do to earn an income and ‘play’ i.e. All the things I do for pleasure and because I want to, to realise in-fact that the only way to be really successful is to merge the two and in effect get paid to play. That’s where the title of this blog post comes in because that’s an impossible dream right?

Well I don’t think so, it’s taken a while to sink in but now I can see clearly that the world has changed. When I entered the world of work in the late 60’s there really were far fewer opportunities, our paths were dictated to a great extent by outside factors beyond our control, our family background, place of birth, education etc. Today all that has changed, the power if the internet means that we can all educate ourselves on any subject we wish and more importantly communicate with large numbers of people without social or geographic boundaries. It’s unprecedented, it’s a Revolution as historic as the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions that have gone before. We really can be who we want to be, we really can do what we want to do, we just need to shake off the shackles of traditional work practice and start again.

I’ll be sharing what I’m doing to make this happen in later posts but for now I’ll leave it to my favorite sage Seth Godin to sum up:

“When exactly were you brainwashed into believing that the best way to earn a living is to have a job?”

 

“…Acknowledge to yourself that the factory job is dead.
Having a factory job is not a natural state. It wasn’t at the heart of being human until very recently. We’ve been culturally brainwashed”

 

“You have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself”