- Well, it happened.
I quit my job to pursue a lifelong dream
of becoming an extra on the next season
of "The Mandalorian."
This is the way.
Just kidding.
I'm a little strange, but I haven't completely
lost my mind yet.
But it does look like I am now a statistic
because I am a millennial
who is a part of this 1/3 that quit his job.
But mine was more by accident,
and I don't really plan on getting another job
anytime soon either.
But even weirder part is that I made good money,
didn't hate my job,
didn't hate the people or the company
that I worked for either.
From a normal person's perspective,
there was no reason to throw all of this away.
I've actually been working really hard for years and years
to get to where I was at.
So then why did I decide to walk away from it all?
I'll explain how this accidentally happened,
the three things that I learned that made me quit my job,
the thought process leading up to it
and give you an idea of what I'll be doing
with my time away from work.
The goal of this video is also to keep it
as woo woo free as possible.
No crystals, horoscopes or manifestations,
as the kids are saying nowadays,
were used throughout my decision
to take an extended period of time off work.
Hey, I'm Jarrad with two As and two Rs.
And on this channel,
we like to talk about investing and financial independence
and sometimes about throwing away a career
that you've worked so hard for.
If you could do me a huge favor and Hulk smash
that thumbs up button, it helps support this channel
and, of course, my dog Little Miss Molly.
I should first say that I am fully aware
that we all look at life a little bit differently
based on personal experiences,
leading up to this point in time.
I almost compare it to looking through a specific lens
that's been curated and customized
to fit each of us individually.
But sometimes we can accidentally become
a little bit blind to our own abilities.
I'm mentioning this because the more people
that found out that I was quitting my job
to take a little mini retirement and not work for a year,
the more people that came up to me
and said that they were jealous,
or said that they wished that they could do
something like that.
I just wanted to grab and shake every single one of them
and say, "You can do this without being a multimillionaire."
I'm not over here splitting atoms or trying to cure cancer.
I'm just taking a freaking year off work.
No, I'm not a multimillionaire yet.
And yes, I'll eventually need to get a job again
at some point,
because I have a mouth to feed
and my bank account can not get any lower than zero.
You know, I always thought that one day
when I eventually left my job,
it would look something like this.
- You, you, you.
You're cool.
You. I'm out.
- But since I left on good terms,
it ended with me sending a nice short email
to a bunch of my ex-coworkers.
When I say that it happened by accident,
I mean that I had no intention of doing this at all.
It's not something that I've been actively planning on doing
for years and years.
Being able to afford to quit my job
actually turned out to be a side effect
of doing certain things with my money
over the past few years,
starting out with paying off $82,000 of bad debt
in three years.
I guess I never really thought about it until now,
but that was the point when everything changed.
And I basically took back control of my life.
I remember at that time feeling like
I had no ownership over my time or money
because these faceless companies that I owed money to
literally owned me.
I took full ownership of agreeing to borrow the money
and promising to pay it back,
but talk about the worst feeling in the world.
It was extremely suffocating.
So it was at that point that I made a promise
to put myself in a position
to where I had more ownership over my time,
what I did and the money that I made.
During that time, I worked three jobs at once
just to get myself back to a net worth of zero
as quickly as possible.
I worked the jobs in corporate America,
at restaurants and had side hustles as well.
I worked about 80 hours per week.
That was pretty much normal for me.
Here's some pictures of me randomly passing out
anywhere and everywhere
because I was absolutely drained and exhausted
by the end of each day.
That was my life,
and to be honest with you, I absolutely loved it.
I mentioned where it started because I think
that most people start at this type of level.
Now, maybe you're not doing the exact same thing as I was,
but you work really, really hard
to hit a certain career or income level.
And once you get there,
things start to get a little bit more safe and comfortable.
In fact, so safe and comfortable
that you don't want to rock the boat too much
to prevent yourself from falling back down
to a level that you might've been at in the past.
Any sort of change starts to look less appealing
because of the unknowns that come along with it.
What that may look like is staying in a career field
or at a job for longer than you should,
that you don't necessarily care for as much as you once did.
For me, I noticed that I started to get
a little comfortable.
I lost that drive a little bit
and started to kind of go with the flow
because none of the work was challenging.
Then one day, I looked up and said to myself,
"What the are you doing?
You don't hate your job.
You don't love your job,
but you don't necessarily enjoy the work."
It was like, I was just going through the motions.
In my mind, this is an extremely dangerous place to be
for too long.
Basically just running in place on a treadmill.
Yeah, you're putting an effort,
but you're not going anywhere.
At least if you love your job,
then you know that you want to stay.
At least if you hate your job,
then you know you need to find a new one.
But to just be indifferent about your job?
Holy smokes, now that feeling really scares me
more than anything,
because there's not an obvious reason to stay or go.
If anything, the work just became more annoying
than enjoyable or even tolerable.
Too many times, I would be sitting there doing work
and I would think to myself, this is so stupid.
That's when I realized that I've outgrown the work.
So I started to look for other positions
inside and outside the company.
And nothing sounded even slightly interesting.
I don't know about you,
but when I come to points like this in my life,
I like to think out into the future
in five, 10 and 20 year time periods
to get an idea of what life would look like
if I continue down my current path.
And what I saw, I was not a huge fan of.
It looked pretty miserable.
Then I started toying with the idea in my head
of just taking a year off work from the corporate world
to kind of spend some time doing things
that I actually enjoy,
that I know will challenge me a lot more.
At that point, of course,
the doubt and questioning of this insane thought
started to enter into this little brain of mine.
I started to think to myself,
who do you think you are to be able to not earn
any income for a year?
Why would you leave a safe,
stable job that pays the bills?
If you stick with the current plan,
then you can retire early in no time.
What if you fail?
What if you run out of money?
The question of "What if you fail?" really got to me.
I spent quite a bit of time working through this in my head,
which I'll share with you in a minute
because I've kind of shifted my thinking about this
over the past couple of years.
When all of those questions started to come up,
that's when I remembered two things.
Now, the first is something that I read from Seneca,
who was one of my favorite stoic philosophers.
He said that we suffer more in imagination than in reality.
None of these initial thoughts that I had were even real.
They of course felt very, very real in my head,
but they weren't.
They were just these stupid stories
my imagination came up with
to keep me doing the same things,
because it's safe, comfortable,
and meant that I wouldn't have to go out of my comfort zone.
The brain is funny like that.
It's always looking for shortcuts
and the path of least resistance.
While not always a bad thing necessarily,
I think it has a negative long-term effect
on certain decisions that we make in our lives.
Next thing you know, we're 20 years into the future
and your life hasn't played out exactly
how you would have liked.
Regret sets in and there is not enough time
to correct course.
The second is something that I heard Jeff Bezos say
years ago that I'm always trying to implement
into different areas of my own life.
He called it the regret minimization framework.
- So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80.
And so, okay, now I'm looking back on my life.
I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.
I was not going to regret having tried this.
I knew that if I failed, I wouldn't regret that.
But I knew the one thing I might regret
is not ever having tried.
And I knew that that would haunt me every day.
- So I thought to myself, at age 80,
what will I regret more,
not at least attempting to take one year off work
or will I regret continuing to work at a job
that I don't really enjoy?
It's pretty insane how reframing the question
like that makes your decision extremely obvious.
Now, fortunately, I had been doing the right things
with my money for years.
So I was able to take advantage of this opportunity
as quickly as possible.
When you were thinking about leaving
a safe and comfortable job,
the fear of failure or a negative outcome
due to that decision starts to become something
that you really have to grapple with in your own head.
What if things don't turn out the way you'd like them to?
What if you end up having to go back
to the same type of job that you just left?
And what if the next job that you take
turns out to be an absolute nightmare?
If any of those things do happen,
then the automatic thought would be
that leaving your job was a terrible decision,
the worst decision that you've ever made.
While these are all valid possible negative outcomes,
I don't necessarily look at them like that
or base the quality of my decision on that either.
I've dealt with, quote unquote, negative outcomes
in my life a lot over the past few years.
So I've had to learn how to deal with them
in a more healthy way so I don't make myself
literally go crazy and become depressed.
What I've come to learn through studying and practice
is that the quality of your decision
shouldn't be determined by the outcome.
If you made as sound a decision
based on all of the information
that you had available to you at that time
and it was well thought out,
then how was it a bad decision?
So what if those negative things happen
as a result of you doing something
you know deep down inside that you should do.
You're only determining that it was a bad decision
because you now know the outcome.
But you didn't know what the result would be
when you made that decision.
Most positive and negative outcomes in life
have way more luck involved than we give credit.
The psychology world refers to this as outcome bias
or I've also heard it referred to as resulting.
There's always three sides to every decision.
You leave your job and everything turns out perfectly.
Was it a good or bad decision?
You leave your job and everything turns out to be
a fricking mess.
Was it a good or bad decision?
You leave your job, and the unpredictable,
that you 100% could not plan for, happens,
sometimes referred to as a black swan event.
Was it a good or bad decision?
Nothing changed in either scenario except the outcome.
So then why let the outcome determine
that you made a bad decision?
You shouldn't, because the outcome tells us nothing
about the quality of your decision.
There's a cost to everything that we choose to do
and choose not to do.
The cost of something that we choose to do
is usually pretty easy to figure out.
If I choose to go sky diving,
then I know the costs associated
with jumping out of an airplane.
But the sneaky cost we pay is one that is not so obvious.
And that is the price we pay for inaction.
In a recent interview, I heard Jordan Peterson
explained this perfectly.
- You have to contemplate the price you pay for inaction.
Well, I don't want to change jobs.
Well, no wonder!
It's like, you have to go put yourself out
to be interviewed.
You have to send out 500 resumes.
You have to be rejected 499 times,
and maybe you won't find a better job.
It's like, no wonder you're afraid of that.
Okay, you're in this job you hate,
and it's 10 years from now.
How does that look? Think about that.
You already know you're in a little,
you know perfectly well it's gonna get worse.
Which is more frightening: action or inaction?
Well, the thing about inaction is you're blind to it, hey,
so you can hide from it.
Do not make the assumption that inaction has no price.
And so then you think, "I'm terrified of this,
but I'm even more terrified of that."
- The price of inaction for me
was hitting 65 and wondering,
what if I would have taken that year off work?
What would have happened?
What would I have been able to do?
Who are the types of people that I would have met?
How would that have changed me as a person?
What would I have been able to learn during that time
that isn't possible since a certain amount of my time
is filled up with a job that I'm not a huge fan of?
I think there's a lot of things out there for us
to learn about or get involved in
that we don't even know exist right now
because of the current box each of us live our lives inside.
The plan over the next year is pretty simple.
Do more things that I want to with zero restrictions.
Lucky for me, I'm a pretty simple person
who doesn't need a lot of money to do those things.
Right now, I have some trips planned around the U.S.
to visit family and friends.
I also have a bunch of concerts that I'm going to
because I absolutely love live music.
And I also plan on doing some hiking and camping trips
as well as some volunteering.
On top of that, there's a few hobbies
that I've always wanted to try,
that I'm going to pursue during this time.
This might not be as obvious,
but I'm still gonna be making YouTube videos as well.
Not because I have to,
since I don't need any of the money to live off,
but because I enjoy the work
and I enjoy talking about money in general.
I also know myself well enough that productivity
is extremely important.
If I have YouTube things to work on here and there,
then I'll be able to enjoy the other parts
of this mini routines a lot more.
Look, I am not recommending that you quit your job today,
tomorrow or in a week from now.
But what I am suggesting is that you reevaluate
your current choices and direction.
And if you see a need for a change,
then don't be afraid to make that change.
Most of our hangups and fears are all in our head
where we tend to blow things way out of proportion
and turn them into something bigger than they actually are.
You don't want to get 10 or 20 years down the line
and wish that you would have done something
about those thoughts or feelings that you had in the past,
because you were scared to, quote unquote,
throw away the comfortable life that you were living
to try to do something different.
No one is giving out awards for making safe
and comfortable decisions.
I think it's always important to reevaluate
what you're doing and why you're doing it.
And if you put yourself in a good financial position
leading up to that point,
then you'll actually be able to do something about it.
Doing financially smart things with your money
isn't just to set yourself up for when you're old
and ready to retire,
but it's also to give you the ability
to make changes throughout life when you need to.
It gives you what everyone strives for
in this life, freedom.
Hulk smash that thumbs up button before you go.
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I'll see you in the next one, friends. Done.