More Fun. Less Stress. The Life.

Does having more free time to do what you want and when you want sound good to you? Don’t look back on your life 20, 30, or 40+ years from now just to discover that you’ve been stuck in the same dead-end career for most of your life.

I’ve already taken a step out of the “rat-race” door of what most people mistake for a life. The sad truth is that instead of a life most people we know are just struggling to make a living – physically, emotionally, financially, all-of-the-above.

This is my first of several posts that will focus on my blog’s tagline, “More Fun. Less Stress. The Life.” I know that everyone generally wants to be happy and enjoy life. It’s also safe to say that being able to minimize those things that stress us (more specifically “distress” us) will help us be happier. For many people, the drudgery of their work/professional lives is the biggest stress. Instead, wouldn’t it be great if your biggest stress was trying to decide between lounging around in Maldives or Seychelles for a month? Now that’s the life!

The fastest way to get a more enjoyable and profitable lifestyle is to do your own thing. In other words, create your own wealth as opposed to helping build it for your boss(es) or owners of the company you work for. I’m sure they’re extremely thankful for all your dedication and hard-work…their bank accounts are thankful too. So why are you going to slow-bleed years of your life (that you’ll never get back) making your boss(es) wealthy? Wouldn’t you rather spend time doing it for yourself? That’s the realization I came to and the pain of not trying was more painful to me than not taking a chance at something better.

Still with me? You now need to figure out what you will be doing for “your own thing”. Spend a few days thinking about this if you don’t already know because this is what will eventually help you break away from your 9-to-5 grind. What thing or things are you passionate about? What do you love doing or talking about with friends and family? Is there an area of knowledge for which you know more about than the average person? One, some, or all of these things are what you should dwell on to help you come up with a list. From this list you will then choose the one thing (though it might be a couple of things but no more) that will become the basis of what you will monetize to help you begin building wealth for yourself.

My personal preference and advice would be to focus on an item from your list that could best leverage the Internet. The reason being is that building a presence on the Internet nowadays is so incredibly affordable and relatively easy that it is clearly the fastest method for pursuing our goal of doing our own thing. Also, it allows one to be mobile and do business from almost anywhere. For example, my passion is the intellectual challenge of trading. I’ve traded equities, futures, and the FX market over the course of 12+ years and I never stop learning/adapting so this helps keep me interested. Nowadays, I almost entirely trade just FX as a personal preference. The beauty of technology and the Internet today that didn’t exist more than 10+ years ago is the sheer range of connectivity with brokerages/market makers. Years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to trade strictly through the Internet…online services were lacking, connectivity was unreliable, and the telecommunications infrastructure around the world was fragmented (before cellular became common place). Today, these are not things one necessarily has to worry about when operating online.

In my next related post, I’ll discuss the next steps to take after you’ve figured out “your own thing”.

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