Don't Ask How To Quit Your Job: Ask This

When someone tells me they are quitting a job I congratulate them. I can’t help it. For almost everyone, the prospect of starving to death from striking out on our own poses far less danger than the effects of endless frustration and boredom we might feel when we’re employed.

If that sounds flippant I promise you: I’m being life-and-death serious.

Quitting is a sign you paid attention to your own disappointment with your direction and that you expected more from yourself, enough to feel justified in moving beyond the path of least resistance.

Working a job you hate can be handy. It can be the thorn in your side that focuses you and pushes you to take action. View it as a stepping stone and it might actually become that.

Here’s the irony though: “I’m quitting my job!” shouldn’t be your rallying cry. Post-employment might be a big part of a better life you envision for yourself, but that doesn’t tell you the specific steps you must take to get started.

Anyone can jump. You want to make a spectacular exit.

You want to make employment and your employer so clearly redundant to your own agenda that the question of how to quit becomes an afterthought.

I’m assuming you have an agenda involving hopes for more, vague though they might now be.

In 2022 creating online revenue streams are a terrific way to start building a post-employment career, and they are what Wagefreedom.com advocates.

Here are three reasons why they are so attractive. Having a job doesn’t prevent you from aggressively making use of them:

• Low expenses: no office to rent, no employees to hire, at least initially.

• Another reason online income is attractive is that in pursuing it you leverage knowledge towards success, rather than a bank loan or connections, or other factors you don’t control directly. With infinite online learning resources —many of them free—it’s really only your own level of determination that’s holding you back from professional redefinition.

• A third reason to create income online is it allows you flexibility as to when you work on your new revenue stream or business. Read entrepreneur success stories and you’ll see how successful people were masters of time management well before they created success, working around family time and employment.

Start something new, in yourself as well as online. Building or buying Affiliate or Adsense websites, or becoming an Upwork service provider are a few low-friction entries into what might be a new world for you.

While still employed, you will lay the groundwork for being a creator of information or a solution provider for businesses or individuals. Be a participant, thinking of yourself as a maker instead of just a consumer of information others create. It is vital to have this mindset, no matter what direction you go.

Make an online revenue stream. Make one dollar, one Euro. You will never look at your job the same way again.

Today you can test different strategies for making money online long before you quit, and you must.

When you’re still employed you have the funds to fail a few times—maybe many times—while you’re learning. Failure is inseparable from success, and if you have a job it’s a way to ensure your lifestyle isn’t threatened by the learning process.

The catch-22 you must avoid is thinking you can’t get started down a better path until you quit, and that you can’t quit until you have an alternate income.

This is the fast track to getting stuck, or going broke if you leave before you’re prepared. It can keep you from ever starting and become an excuse for laziness.

Please don’t think I’m suggesting it will be easy to create. I’m amplifying the distinction between impossible and possible, because it might be the only hope you have.

But it is enough.

Again: only your level of determination is holding you back.

Your job is not holding you back.

You may never quit your job. Most people don’t, for various reasons. But if you are determined to do so, the goal is to be taking as little risk as possible when you finally do leave.

I promised to tell you the question you’ll ask which will tell you the time is right to quit.

Here’s the right question, the one you’ll ask yourself that will signal that you’re getting close:

‘What if I had an extra 40+ hrs/week to put toward my revenue stream(s)?’