CLASIFICACIÓN DE ESTADOS FINANCIEROS PRO FORMA

My grandfather had a music store where he sold instruments. He also played banjo in a small “band.” But once he started having kids he decided to get a job in the corporate world. To get the safety that corporate America promised him. He got that safety to a large extent. He worked for 40 hard years. He literally got a gold watch when he retired. It was the American dream.

I won’t get into the particulars of his job but because of the job he developed cataracts in his eyes (he had to handle heating equip-ment close to his eyes) and, for all practical purposes, went blind in his old age. After the 40 years of safety, all he could do was sit at home and listen to the radio. One time I had to pick him up at the hospital when he was having problems. He was in his pajamas.

Crap was dropping out of them as I walked him out of the hospital and into my car.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it Grandpa,” I said.

Life is hard. Old age is hard. Your job might last for 40 years and then what are you left with to pick up the pieces of the life you left behind. My grandfather loved playing the banjo. That was over for him in 1940. A young man, still in his prime.

And now the myth has gotten even worse. The ocean of safety we thought we had has disappeared. It’s time to turn it upside down and reject the people who beg us not to. The tide has come in. We have to understand how the world has changed, and the tools we now have at our disposal to deal with those changes.

The other day I met a guy who had worked for 38 years at GM. He wasn’t in the union and he wasn’t a high level executive. So conse-quently, when the rock of corporate safety in America over the past century went bankrupt he got nothing. No pension, no insurance, no savings. The unions got their money. The high level executives got their golden parachutes. The 30,000 in the middle got nothing.

“I thought it was safe,” he told me. “I thought nothing could touch me.”

The American religion wants you to believe that corporate safety is here, that it’s going to protect you and your white picket fence and your framed college degree. But it’s a lie. The government doesn’t care about you. Your bosses don’t care about you. And when the desert that rises up to claim you back into it’s dust, you’ll disap-pear and nobody will wonder about your accomplishments and the things you are most proud of.

Most people need to begin their exit strategy right now.

Below I give some reasons. But the real key is, everyone needs a bit of freedom in their lives. Freedom to spend time with people they love, freedom to go after spiritual pursuits, freedom to find happi-ness. It’s possible to find these things in the office, but I personally think it’s harder. That said, there are also the practical reasons I list below and in the stories above.

So here are the 10 reasons you need to quit your job right now. And below that I have the methods for doing it. And, by the way, even if you love your job, it always helps to both have a Plan B (nothing is safe) and to also think of yourself as a one-person en-trepreneurial business even within the context of your job. It will make the job, more fun, meaningful, and successful.

1. Safety. We used to think you get a corporate job, you rise up, you get promoted maybe you move horizontally to another divi-sion or a similar company, you get promoted again, and eventu-ally you retire with enough savings in your IRA. That’s all gone.

That myth disappeared in 2008. It really never existed but now we know it’s a myth. Corporate CEOs kept their billion dollar salaries and laid off about 20 million people and sent the jobs to China. Fine, don’t complain or blame other people. But your job is not safe.

2. Home. Everyone thinks they need a safe job so they can save up to buy a home and also qualify for a mortgage. Mortgage lenders at the banks like people who are like them – other peo-ple locked in cubicle prison. Well now you don’t need to worry about that. We have already discussed why you should never own a home in the first place. Save yourself the stress.

3. College. Everyone thinks they need to save up to send their kids to college. Depending on how many kids you have and where you want them to go to college it could cost millions.

Well now we know you don’t need to send your kid to college.

So you don’t need to stress about that money anymore.

4. Their boss. Most people don’t like their boss. It’s like any rela-tionship only one of the parts has more power from the get-go.

Most of the time you get into a relationship for the wrong rea-sons anyway. Eventually you’re unhappy. And if you don’t get out, you become miserable and scarred for life.

5. Their coworkers. See above.

6. Fear. We have such a high unemployment rate, people are afraid if they leave the job they are miserable at, they won’t be able to get a job. This is true if you just walk into your boss’s

office and pee on his desk and get fired. But it’s not true if you prepare well. More on that in a bit.

7. The Work. Most people don’t like the work they do. They spend 4 years going to college, another few years in graduate school,

and then they think they have to use that law degree, business degree, architecture degree and then guess what? They hate it. But they don’t want to admit it. They feel guilty. They are in debt. No problem. Read on.

8. Bad things happen. Stress, anxiety, bad health, etc all start to happen. You get caught up in the politics and it’s only downhill.

And it gets worse and worse. You don’t want to look back at your life and say, “man, those were the worst 45 years of my life.”

That wouldn’t feel good.

9. The economy is about to boom. I don’t care if you believe this or not. Stop reading the newspaper so much. They are try-ing to scare you. Bernanke just printed up a trillion dollars and airlifted it onto the US economy. Who is going to scoop that up.

You in your cubicle? Think.

10. Your job has clamped your creativity. You do the same thing every day. You want to be jolted, refreshed, and rejuve-nated.

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So: Henry and Aaron asked a good question: you still need to sup-port yourself, you still need to supsup-port your family, you can’t just walk into your boss’s office and quit.

Good point. You need to prepare. It’s like training for the Olympics if you feel now is the time to move on from your job. You need to be physically ready, emotionally (don’t quit your job and get divorced on the same day for instance), mentally (get your idea muscle in shape) and spiritually all ready.

I get a lot of criticisms from anonymous people in the Yahoo mes-sage boards. My wife Claudia begs me, “Don’t look at the mesmes-sage boards unless you talk to me first.” Because she knows I’m an addict.

I tell her “ok” but I know I’m going to look. Because that’s what addicts do.

I don’t mind when people critique me when they’ve lost, quit, or have been fired from as many jobs as I have. Or lost a home. Tried to raise two kids with almost nothing. Been as desperately unhappy as sometimes I’ve been. This doesn’t qualify me for anything, of course. Maybe it disqualifies me. Who cares? A lot of people have had much worse than me. And I’ve been very blessed as well.

Sometimes you can build back up. And sometimes you just think,

“How the hell did this happen to me again?” You can criticize me on Yahoo message boards. My goal in these chapters is to help people maybe think for a split second they can reduce some stress in their lives, they don’t have to go through what I went through, they can throw themselves into experience and still come back alive, and at the end of the day, they can use some of these ideas to live a better and more fulfilling life. I’ve had that experience and I like to write about it.

Much of self-help either deals with the spiritual aspects (how to achieve some sort of happiness through a process they might call

“enlightenment”) or through physical aspects (“how to make more money,” “how to advance in your career,” etc.).

But the reality is that we all live on the planet, with families, with aspirations and goals. We don’t live in caves and stare at the third eye all day. We can’t afford to. We need money to live. We need money for freedom. Understanding how to get that freedom on the outside while we are simultaneously trying to get that freedom on the inside is the true path to happiness.

Getting grounded in our own internal compass and dealing realis-tically with the world, or as the saying goes: “being in the world but not of it” is what leads us to being fulfilled beings capable of being wealthy, abundant, healthy, and of service to others.

When we get clear about where we individually come from, out-side from all brain-washing then we can make decisions that come from wisdom, center, and clear-cut discernment. Then we become humans again.

Phew, this was a hard chapter to write. I did love my job. And it was hard leaving it. But ultimately you outgrow your job and your career can take many directions. I’m tired now. I’m going to force my two kids to watch “Star Wars” whether they like it or not.

What You Need to do if You Were