I should start this by saying I don’t think there’s anything WRONG with getting a traditional job, I just think that when you break it down, there are much better things you could do.

Not only are there better things to do with your time but better and more effective ways of making money.

Not only making MORE money but making more money without having to spend more TIME doing the work.

This might sound like it’s all too good to be true, but if you currently have a job or are looking for a job, this post will probably change your life. I don’t think that’s too bold to say, but don’t take my word for it. Read to the end, and you might just have some fun while you’re here!

Money is no object

Why most people get jobs

Well, most people do most of the things they do because the people AROUND THEM do those things. For example, if you were raised in a Christian family, you’ll probably grow up going to church and praying.

If you’re raised in a left wing family, you’ll probably adopt strong left wing political views.

If you’re raised in a country like Sudan, you’re likely to grow up being told that you’ll never become rich and successful, and life is just HARD because that’s the way life is

These are all ideas.

They can be disproved or changed or IGNORED thousands of times.

You have no obligation to follow these ideas. You’re free at ANY point to change your beliefs, ideas, and what holds your life together. This means you can essentially do anything with your life, at any point.

And the same thing applies with jobs.

Most of us, growing up, are told that we need to study hard so we can find or get a ‘job’. This job entails usually giving up most of your week to work for someone else’s company, and work for them. Doing the tasks they assign to you, and not asking too many questions along the way.

This ‘job’ will take up about 30-50 years of your life until you’re able to retire, and then you can finally live the life you wanted, right? When you’re old, tired, and in most cases, completely broke. Most of us, especially in America, are completely dependant on someone else for life essential things by the time we’re old enough to retire.

This means that the system is broken.

Not only can you NOT properly enjoy life by the time you’re old enough to retire, but you often don’t even have the money saved or available to enjoy your life then either!

And that’s because jobs among other things, are designed to leave you craving and NEEDING that next paycheck. They’re designed to take up all of your time so you’re too busy to make any real money.

And in return, you get a monthly pay check which is just enough to cover your bills, hence the term ‘Just Over Broke’ (JOB).

But most people get jobs because their family, school, friends, and so on tell them it’s the only thing to do, and the ONLY way to support yourself and make money. But ask yourself, where is this ‘job’?

Who owns the company that you’re going to try and work for?

Surely if people can own companies and make lots of money doing their passions and living their passions, so can you.

The truth about jobs

The truth about jobs and income specifically, is that it’s actually very easy to make money. Money is available everywhere, and it honestly doesn’t take anywhere NEAR as much time as you think to make a salary of about $2K a month.

For example:

Most people spend ALL their time in a job they don’t like, just to make a monthly pay check of $2K. But think about this.. You could for example take on a social media client and manage the social media of a medium sized company.

They could pay you let’s say, $4K a month.

Then with the money they give you, you could hire a social media agency to actually do the work for you for $1K a month. STRAIGHT AWAY, from one move, and one client, you’ve created yourself a completely passive income of $3K per month.

DOING NO WORK.

Meaning, you have all of your time still, to work on yourself, learn things, travel or make new streams of income like this one. This can be done once, twice, a thousand times. There’s no limit to how many of these type of deals and systems you can create for yourself.

Money is everywhere.

With just a bit of common sense, logic and clever planning, you can create deals like this and literally print yourself money out of thin air, with a little bit of setup work and patience.

But most people are BLIND to these opportunities and wouldn’t even dare to think of them let alone try them and see if they work. Money is abundant, and it’s right there for all of us to attain, should we dare to try.

Reasons to never get a job

So we’re going to break down the main reasons you should never get a job now, and why/how there are MANY other, better ways of making money.

You’ll soon see that once you’ve managed to generate an income of about $3K per month or more, you’re FREE to do what you want with your time, and to work on the things that really matter to you.

For me that’s things like traveling, meditating, spending time with my partner, learning things, studying and of course ‘working’. But I never call it work, because I TRULY love what I do. I’m in a place where I can spend my time ONLY working on things I’m super passionate about and I love doing.

So here are the reasons to NEVER get a job, explained one by one.

1: You limit your earning potential

So the amount you can earn is basically linked directly to this:

The impact or effect you have on people, and how many people you impact or effect.

If you’re in a job working on one particular client account, filing one type of paperwork, or serving let’s say 50 customers coffee every day, your impact is LIMITED.

But if you’re the OWNER of a digital online company that reaches and helps hundreds of millions of people every single month, you’re much more likely to be earning a lot more money.

IMPACT becomes INCOME.

Specifically, the closer you can get to large numbers, the more likely you are to earn large money. This means if you’re selling real estate, investments, pensions, or reaching LOTS of people and helping them all in a small way.

A really simple example of this is YouTube videos. If you make a video that gets millions of views, that’s a large number. And so the amount of money you’ll make from that video is also large. The more views, the more you earn. 

But if you’re stuck in a job where you’re ONLY allowed to work on a certain specialist and small area, you have no leverage, and you’re not going to be able to earn more, because you have a small impact.

A great example of this is hospitality workers.

If you work in hospitality like I did for a year or two, you’re likely not going to earn more than about $20-30 an hour. It’s never going to be much more than that, because your impact just isn’t bigger than that.

You’re walking drinks or food from the kitchen to the table, and the entire price of their meal is probably about $30-50 anyway. So how could you EVER expect to earn more in that job? It’s impossible.

You’re limited by mathematics.

2: You’re making people above you more money

Often when you have a job (In fact almost ALWAYS) you’re making the people above you far more money than they’re paying you. Let’s say you work in sales. Your salary and commission will be good compared to other jobs, but you’re still giving MOST of your money that you earn the company to your boss.

Or your team leader, or whoever above you in the value chain. To earn more money, you want to be as close to the top as you possibly can.

You want to be the:

  • CEO
  • Owner
  • Founder
  • Manager
  • Investor
  • Lender
  • And so on. You want to be close to the top if you can.

The most profitable place to bets the investor, or owner of a system. Then people like managers can work under you, and manage a team of the lowest earners, the typical employees.

Now, I’m not saying employees never earn big money. In fact, in positions like sales and real estate and marketing, they can earn a lot. But the chances are very high that if you’re earning X amount as a salesman, the owner of your sales company is earning ten times what you’re earning, FROM you.

So once you realise this, you start to think ‘what if I started a sales company myself, and kept ALL the commission from the sale?’.

Start to think bigger, and think about how you can become the owner. How can you get to the top of the company. And I know what you’re thinking ‘I’ll just work my way up through promotions’.

That’s the way we’ve been trained to think that we should work our way up slowly over years and years. But why? There’s no guarantee you’ll EVER get promoted, let alone get promoted to the very top.

In fact, you’ll almost never be the owner, because what business owner in his right mind would give away control and power of his company to you? Instead, focus on how you can start your own thing, and control it, right from the start.

3: You’re taxed the most as an employee

Something most people have no idea about, is that taxes are very flexible and variable.

If you’re an employee, you’re actually paying the HIGHEST rates of tax, compared to the self employed, or the business owner. Did you know that if you’re a business owner, you can claim back almost any expense related to work and remove it from your tax bill?

So all those things you pay for out of your money and time as an employee like:

  • Travel to and from work
  • Food while at work
  • Work clothes
  • Phone/Laptop for work
  • Car for work

They’re all tax deductible for a business owner. But for an employee? You have to shell out for all of those and more, from your own personal money, AFTER having been taxed at the full income tax rate.

In fact in many cases, due to clever tax planning and organisation, the CEOs and owners of big companies personally pay LESS tax than some of their employees, earning 100X LESS than them.

That’s crazy.

But it’s the way the smart people pay less tax, they shift their position in the value chain and move into a place where you can have more tax OPTIONS. The more options you have and the more control you have, the more likely you are to become wealthy.

4: Your TIME is all gone

Probably for me, this is the biggest downside of having a job. You have no TIME, and all of your time in your life is pretty much spent either traveling to and from work, working, or preparing and resting getting ready to work again.

There’s almost no down time. Even once you get home after a long day of work, you’re often way too tired to do anything for yourself. Things like working on your own goals, reading, learning, having sex or doing the things you find fun in your life.

This means there’s a huge disconnect between what you’re doing in your life, and what you WANT to be doing. No wonder that over half of ALL heart attacks in the US happen on Monday morning.

They happen when people get up on Monday morning, and feel so terrible and anxious about having to go to work in a job they hate, that their HEART FUCKING STOPS.

It’s insane to me, but it’s the reality we live in.

5: You have to do what you’re told

One of the saddest things to happen to us, is we lose our ability to say NO.

As a kid, it comes to us naturally. We say no to the things we don’t want to do. We say ‘no I don’t want to eat’ and it’s not angry, there’s no anxiety behind saying no, we just calmly say ’no I don’t want that’.

But over the years, this ability to say NO to things we don’t want is drilled out of us. We learn to say yes to things we don’t want to do, and do it with a lovely fake smile.

And this extends way into our work life. We take jobs we hate, just because we need the money to pay the bills. We say yes to social events we really don’t want to be going to, but we just don’t know how to say no.

And don’t get me started on social and peer pressure to do things we know are bad for us. Or the pressure to conform and do what everyone else is doing and ignore what we feel inside. We lost our ability to say no, and this haunts us for our entire lives.

So what you need to learn, and what you will learn by working for yourself is how to say no to things you don’t want. In a job, if you don’t want to do something, you either have to put your head down and do it, or find another job.

If you own the company however, and you don’t want to do something, you can just.. NOT do it.

Or hire someone else to do it, or change your business model or anything else.

If I don’t want to write about a particular topic, I can just not write about that topic. If I don’t want to accept a certain brand partnership, or deal with a particular customer, I can just refund them or choose not to work with them.

I have complete control over what I do and I can say NO to anything that doesn’t feel right. And I carry no regrets or anxieties about saying no to things I don’t want or like.

Compare that to the employee who HAS to say yes to things they don’t like, and so they develop chronic stress. I’m sure you’ve been in a situation where you’re told to do something at work in a certain way, but you can see a better way of doing it..

So you tell your boss the better way, they don’t agree, and they force you to do it their way. You have to say ‘yes’ to them. Over time, you start to resent them, and feel angry that you can’t say no to them.

And what happens in many cases, is you become stressed, and you start being ‘passive aggressive’. Passive aggressive is where you really want to say no, but you can’t, so you reject the idea in other ways to try and make yourself feel better.

You write notes in a sarcastic or snappy tone, you gossip about your boss, you fantasise about leaving, but you’re still not saying no. You’re still bending over and letting it happen! Until you stand up and say no from the depths of your body, you’ll be unhappy in one way or another, forever.

And there’s no easy way of doing it. If yo’ve not practiced saying no for a few years, it might come across as angry, to the people around you. It might come across as you being rude, but it doesn’t have to. Here’s what I do.

When I’m faced with a situation, idea or a command/request that I don’t like or don’t want to do, I’ll simply look the person dead in the eye, and calmly say ‘no I don’t want that’, or ‘no I don’t feel comfortable with that’.

There’s no anger, there’s no raising of my voice. It’s a calm and simple statement.

No.

When you say no, you should really focus on being grounded so that you don’t come across as unhinged, rude or annoyed. Feel your feet on the ground, feel your body, and breathe deeply. Say it as if you’re just ‘letting them know’.

You’re not expecting a reaction, and you aren’t going to have a debate, you’re just letting the person know that your response is no.

Big move, and VERY important to learn in life. I learned this probably years too late but there’s no better time than now. Learn to say no, and you’ll always be able to follow your heart and move towards the things that feel natural and right to you.

6: It’s hard to change career

Once you’ve been in a job for a while, you’ll start to get into a rut. This rut might be a physical one where you just can’t imagine doing anything else, or it might be a mental one.

This is why unions exist, because often people train themselves to such a high level in one particular field, that they’d be HELPLESS if they lost their job. A union really, is a group of people coming together and saying ‘I’m completely dependant on X company for my income, life and happiness’.

I have strong opinions on why unions are usually a bad idea, but that’s a topic for another blog post. The point here is that it’s often hard to change career if you have a job. If you’re an investment banker, it’s hard to suddenly go and start being a writer.

Or a physical trainer.

Because you’re trained specifically for that field, and you won’t be able to get the references you need for the new, different job. If you work for yourself however you don’t need references, because you’re essentially creating a job for yourself and giving it to yourself.

7: You have to beg for what you want

  • Want a bigger desk?
  • A promotion?
  • More responsibility and control?
  • In a job, you’ll usually have to beg for those things.

Beg is a strong word, but in this context I mean you’ll have to suck up to your boss. You’ll have to make them extra coffees, finish their paperwork faster, and be extra nice to them..

You have to please your MASTERS, in order to get thrown a slightly bigger bone.

This means you’re always at the mercy of the people above you. When you’re at the mercy of the people above you, it’s very hard to feel grounded and secure in your job.

You know what I do, if I want a bigger desk as a business owner?

I buy one.

It arrives the next day.

I want a bigger income? I work harder and more, knowing that the increase of income will almost all go directly to my bank account.

8: It’s MASSIVELY risky

Having a job is probably THE most risky form of earning income. But it’s almost always referred to as the ‘safe path’ or the strong stable future income.

Here’s why that’s simply not true:

  • If you have ONE job with ONE income, what happens if you get sick?
  • Or get fired
  • Or break your leg, so you can’t work
  • Or fall out with your boss
  • Or want to travel for longer than your allotted 4 weeks per year off

Well, the income stops, that’s what happens.

And that can be very annoying, of course. But if you own the show, you get paid no matter what. Especially if you’ve developed your business to be a passive income based business, you get paid whether you’re:

  • Working
  • Not working
  • Swimming
  • Sleeping
  • Eating strawberries off your partners stomach

And so on. The money comes to you passively. But in a job, you’ll ONLY get paid for the exact time you’re working. It’s a very bad trade, because time is limited, whereas money isn’t. You can always have more money but you can NEVER buy more time.

But let’s say you have an online business and 5 streams of income. If one income stream stops you have 4 more.

You could build as many income streams as you possibly want. It’s much more secure than a job, because if you stop working on your own business, you still have a business!

Stop working on a job and you have nothing.

Imagine spending 40 years of your life working for a company, and then if you stop working one day after 40 years, you have NOTHING to show for it.

No residual income, nothing that you’ve built up over time, just whatever money you managed to scrap and save over the years.

9: Once you stop working, you stop earning

Just to expand on this a bit more, let’s say if you’re working hard one week. Then the next week, you get sick. You’ll stop getting paid! You might get a few days of sick pay, but most companies really don’t like it.

I’ve spoken to several of my friends who said that they’re not ‘allowed’ to be sick any more. Companies have physical defined limited on how many days per year you’re allowed to be sick before you get FIRED.

Does that sound secure and safe to you?

10: You can’t enact your vision

I speak about vision on this blog and it’s very important. My vision for example, is to help millions of people all around the world become the best person they can be, and to inspire them to live their best lives.

When you have a job however, the vision is often ignored. Working in a cafe serving coffee isn’t really many peoples ‘vision’ for their ultimate life. That’s often not what you want to be remembered for.

What’s worse, is it your vision for the future is completely different to what your bosses vision looks like. This makes it hard to agree on things, and you’ll often feel cognitive dissonance, on a daily basis.

11: You often have to work in a particular location

I’ve spoken before about being a digital nomad and working from anywhere, but it’s a very big trend and it will only get bigger.

Actually, I think more and more companies will become more flexible with where you have to work.

But most companies NOW are still locked in the past. You have to clock in at a certain office for certain hours, every week.

You can’t work from the road, from your hotel, or from the beach.

But why not? Surely, if your job is performed on a computer, you should be able and free to work on that job from anywhere in the world, as long as you have an internet connection?

But traditionally, you can’t. This will change over time, but right now, most jobs don’t like you working from the road, or from the pool.

They should though, because it’s been shown to help make people more engaged, inspired and motivated to work.

Being able to choose WHERE you work from gives you a huge sense of freedom and motivation.

Trust me, you’re much more likely to be excited to work if you can do it from anywhere. We’re not meant to be caged in cubicles in a dimly lit room for most of our lives.

12: You have no leverage

Leverage means how you’re able to use one thing to get another bigger thing.

An example would be you own a company and you want to get an interview with the owner of a slightly bigger company. Maybe you want to talk about working together, partnering, or them investing in you.

You’re more likely to get that interview if you OWN the website or company. If you are just an employee, it’s very unlikely you’re going to be able to use the company to get leverage or create something new.

13: More and more is asked of you

Often in a job, you have a set salary. This is a set fixed amount that you earn per month, or per year. But what happens is that when you’re settled in and used to that salary, your boss will start asking more of you.

It will start with little things like ‘Oh just finish this report before you go’ or ‘Can you just come in on Saturday to help with this thing’.

And it’s almost always unpaid extra work. And this goes unnoticed by people because they assume it’s still worth it because they’re on a salary.

People have a big obsession with salaries, and it makes no sense. Why is it a good thing to get paid the same no matter how hard you work?

Where’s the motivation to work your BEST or put in extra hours? You’ll get paid the same as the slacker. I love knowing that if I work more or harder on my business, I’ll earn more. It’s a direct transaction in most cases.

14: You have to work with people you don’t like

This links back to saying no to what you don’t like. If you’re in a job and you meet someone in the company you really don’t like, you’ll have no choice but to force yourself to be friends with them or talk to them.

This leads to stress, passive-aggressive behavior, and discomfort. You’ll start dreading going to work because you’ll meet your boss that you don’t like.

I actually used to hate going to work so much because I didn’t get on with my boss, that I would get tipsy before going in, to take the edge off.

Bad and dark times, but that’s what it took! I’m now super grateful that I’ve been 100% happy and motivated to work on my business with no fear of doing things I don’t like.

There’s no one I don’t like working in my company because I work mainly with freelancers.

I have a great team, but if I don’t get on with one of the members, they can be replaced. I have no obligation to work with people I don’t like, or that don’t support and move my vision forward.

15: Most people don’t enjoy it after a while

The best-case scenario is that you’ll find a job that pays well and it’s fairly easy but you just don’t enjoy it. It doesn’t bring you JOY. And people will say their pre-programmed response which is:

Work isn’t meant to be fun, it’s just meant to pay the bills

What!?

That’s brainwashing at the highest level.

You’re telling me that the thing we are going to spend the majority of our time on earth doing isn’t meant to be fun? That we’re supposed to intentionally and consciously spend our time doing things we don’t like?

When you’re aware, awake and fully conscious, nothing can trap your mind like this.

What to do instead of getting a job

So you might be wondering okay, I get that jobs are bad news, but what can I do instead?

There are actually lots of ways to make money without a job, they just require a little imagination.

Firstly, if you have a skill that you use in your job, start by doing that for yourself as a freelancer.

If you’re a writer, for example, look at sites like Upwork or Freelancer.

There, you get to set your own rates, choose who you write for what you write about, and how often you work. It gives you a much higher level of freedom and it’s a step in the right direction.

Then read my post about how to make more money online. This will open your eyes to new ways of making money from your skills that aren’t actually that hard to set up and get the ball rolling on. Also, look at my post about passive income, because passive income should be the goal.

You don’t want your TIME to be tied to your INCOME. You want to be earning money while you work, sleep, eat, or whatever else. Here’s the deal:

95% of people when they leave college or university will search for jobs online and start applying. But how many people search for things like:

  • How to earn money
  • How to start a business
  • How to make money while I sleep
  • How to earn passive income
  • How to work from anywhere

I would guess less than 10% of people search for those things.

It’s all programming. We’ve been taught that getting a job is the only way, but trust me, it’s not. So begin to mentally place yourself in the 10% of people who DO search those things.

Read, learn, and attain the skills you need to earn money yourself, without a job, and without a boss. Your life will never be the same I promise you. I can’t imagine getting a job now and I’ve not looked back once.

Finding fulfillment without working

An interesting point I want to make here is one about fulfillment.

When you go to work, what are you doing, really? What good are you doing for the world? Now this of course entirely depends on what your job is and what level of impact you have on the world as a whole.

Say you serve sandwiches in a cafe, your impact is low. That job could be done by a robot and in Japan, it IS done by robots.

Or let’s say you are a checkout person checking items through the till and bagging up shopping.

That job is now already being done by robots and self-service checkouts are just the beginning.

Even 5 years ago, retail shops had lines of checkouts each with a member of staff behind them, scanning objects through the till.

Each of those members of staff probably thought their job was ‘safe and secure’ but now what do you see?

You see maybe ONE member of staff, operating 20-30 self-service checkout tills at a time.

Imagine the future in 5 years from now. Imagine if the self-service machines never malfunctioned or mis-scanned things.

That’s the future, and soon there won’t be those types of jobs. Robots and automation are coming, and they’re coming fast.

So don’t be left behind, work for yourself, and create REAL value in the world. Scanning items through checkout is not creating value, it’s not a big vision, and it’s frankly, uninspiring.

This might make you angry, especially if you ARE a checkout worker right now, and it should. You should be thinking right now ‘Wait a second, why AM I doing this?’.

Surely, there’s another way?

And there indeed is. Learn about money, business, and purpose.

NOTHING can imprison an educated mind.

What if we all had unlimited money?

I’ll end on this note.

We often work for money, right? But what if we all suddenly had unlimited money, starting now?

Well, you wouldn’t need to go and file paperwork, or serve coffees, so what would you do?

What would you spend your TIME doing?

Well, you’d look at the things you love doing. Your hobbies, skills, passions, and core values.

Maybe you’d play your guitar more, or sing. Maybe you’d learn languages more, or spend more time with your partner.

But you’d do something more, and you’d be more in line with your true self and values. So now I’ll tell you a secret which if you really understand it, will change your life forever.

Forget the money.

It’s never been about the money.

The money is just a side effect of the value you’re giving to the world.

If you always do the same thing and give the same value (serving coffees, filing paperwork) you’ll always get the same side effect, the same amount of money.

If you follow your passions and do what you love, you’ll only ever earn more and more money as you go through life.

The more you learn about something and share that thing with the world, the more you’ll be able to earn and the happier you’ll be.

But you won’t be happier because you’re earning more money! The money is a SIDE EFFECT of you doing the thing.

It’s irrelevant.

What really matters is that you’re acting with your passion, following your heart, and listening to your true life purpose.

You’re acting in line with your higher self. Open your eyes and please, don’t focus on just how to earn money.

Remember, NOTHING can imprison an educated mind.