How to Escape the 40 Hour Work Week

I’ve been thinking about a dirty word lately. Yes, I hate to admit it, but I’ve been thinking about that “JOB” word. Now, don’t get me wrong. I certainly don’t want a Job.

But it has definitely been on my mind with the thousands of students who have just recently graduated college, many of whom now assume that it’s time to go out and get a job.

For any recent college graduate who is reading this, I would like to encourage you to stop and give your life a bit more thought. There are far better ways to make a living than committing yourself to a life of cubicle slavery.

As Robert Frost once said, “By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.”

Here are five reasons why you should avoid getting a job at all costs.

1. Trading time for money.

Early humans were hunters and gatherers who worked 12 to 16 hours per day gathering enough food to stay alive. Their lives were focused on existence.

The nineteenth century work schedule was comprised of twelve to sixteen hour days, working six to seven days per week.

Some people might think that we’ve come a long way since then. Unfortunately, not really all that much.

According to a study by the National Sleep Foundation, the average employed American works a 46-hour work week. 38% of the respondents in their study worked more than 50 hours per week.

To this day, we are still overworking ourselves. This is especially true for industries like investment banking, where a forty hour workweek is considered “slacker” behavior that may result in a job loss.

Europe is doing a little bit better. France, adopted a 35-hour workweek in 2000 by law.

Somewhere in the course of our lives, most of us have been brainwashed to think that we can only earn income while working. Wrong…

In today’s world of technology, you can get paid while sleeping, playing, and spending time with the family.

Smart people build systems that continually generate passive income 24/7, regardless of when they are actually working in the business.

With an online business, you can set up an automated system to sell your product on autopilot. Other passive income streams include real estate, investing, and blogging.

Of course it takes some time to get everything up and running, but once you’ve set up a proper system, you have an asset that could quite possibly bring you a passive revenue for the rest of your life.

Our education system funnels us into the workforce like an obedient ant force.

I was never offered a class in entrepreneurship in high school and I think this is one of the greatest tragedies of public education.

We’re teaching our kids to be obedient cubicle slaves instead of leaders, entrepreneurs, and innovators.

Whether you are just graduating college or already working in a job, I would encourage you to look at all of your options. Life has a buffet of choices, don’t limit yourself to the cubicle.

2. Mobility and Lifestyle Design

By working online, you are given a freedom that most employees only dream about. It doesn’t matter whether you live in Canada or Spain. Working online gives you the freedom of mobility. You are free to work in your hometown one week and do everything from your laptop on a beach in Hawaii the next.

However, I wouldn’t suggest that you spend too terribly much time in Hawaii. The cost of living is outrageous there.

Instead, you can make your money go much further by living in a city like Buenos Aires.

(The following figures and statistics come from Tim Ferriss’ excellent book, “The 4-Hour Workweek“. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to escape the 40 hour work week.)

Here you can live like a king or queen on about $1425 per month. If you’re not necessarily looking for a life of luxury, then you can get by on much less than that.

Housing in Buenos Aires costs approximately $550 U.S. per month. This includes house cleaners, personal security guards, phone, utilities, and high-speed Internet.

Four or five-start restaurant meals twice daily will only cost you about $300 U.S. per month.

Learn Spanish in a flash with daily two-hour sessions of private lessons for just $200 U.S. per month.

Learn to tango with professional dancers for just $333.20. That’s 2 hours a day at $8.33 per hour to learn from the best in the world.

Transportation is just $75 per month.

Best of all, there are creative legal setups, such as form 2555-EX, that can provide up to $80,000 dollars of income exemption if you spend at least 330 of a consecutive 365 days outside of the U.S. The key to taking advantage of this is to get a good accountant.

3. Outsource Your Life

You may have heard of Fortune 500 companies outsourcing their work to other countries such as India and China. However, I’m here to tell you that outsourcing isn’t just for big companies.

Outsourcing is a revolution that can impact your life in ways you may have never thought possible.

In today’s global economy we can outsource everything from our accounting, book writing, product creation, customer service and marketing to house cleaning, scheduling meetings, and online purchases.

Many small businesses fail because the owner tries to do it all. This is especially true for an online entrepreneur who tries to be the marketing director, the content creator, the customer support staff, and the distributors.

You just can’t do it all. And who would want to?

Let’s say that you’re worth $25 - $30 an hour. If you spend your time doing something that someone else will do for $10 an hour, you are wasting your most precious resource: time.

With outsourcing, you can multiply yourself as many times as you want.

Here are just a few of the companies that will help you outsource your everyday tasks:

Getfriday.com
elance.com
guru.com
scriptlancle.com

4. Automate Your Income

Doing business on the Internet allows you to completely remove yourself from the business and automate every step in the sales process.

Unlike offline businesses, an online business allows you to quickly test the potential demand for your product through eBay auctions, Google Adwords and other PPC search engines.

Once you have ensured that your product has plenty of demand, you can then rollout your campaign and outsource your marketing to online marketing firms such as…

http://www.iprospect.com
http://www.pepperjamsearch.com
http://www.redflymarketing.com/
http://www.marketingexperiments.com
http://www.did-it.com
http://www.click2customers.com
http://www.workingplanet.com

All of your customer support can be outsourced as well. For customer support, I highly recommend the Professional Support Network. Check them out at
http://www.pro-support-ntwk.com

And lastly, you can use a fulfillment company to handle product fulfillment, order processing, product creation, warehousing, and returns.

If you are looking for a highly professional fulfillment company, check out http://www.disk.com.

To become truly successful online, you must remove yourself as much as possible from the business.

5. Pursue Your Passions

By creating an online business, you are free to pursue your passions and focus on your strengths. Everyone has something that they do best. These are the things you should focus on. Everything else can be outsourced.

I’ve seen too many people working jobs they hate just waiting for retirement. We only get one ticket to this thing called life. There is absolutely no reason to waste the best years of our life doing something we don’t enjoy.

What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

What would make you most excited to wake up in the morning?

How can you turn your passions into a full time income?

How can you contribute the best of yourself?

These are the questions you must ask yourself to live a life of passion and purpose.

Remember the wise words of Ralph Waldo Emerson,

“Life is a journey, not a destination.”

The timing will never be “just right” to pursue what you truly love in life. Sometimes you just have to jump.