How To Escape The Rat Race And Still Make Money

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

You ever had this thought run through your mind How do I escape the rat race?

You’re not the only one, it happened to me in June 1994. I was sat at my desk at work, up until that moment I was happy in my career, I was a Senior Quality Engineer in the Automotive Industry.

Sounds like a great title, briefly it entailed flying all over Europe to car manufacturing plants of all the big names, names like Ford, Nissan, GM, and Saab. I was sitting in meetings planning the next facelift of the car that would be European Car of the year.

I got to see the prototypes first before people and I got to either laugh at them or stand there in awe, appreciating the beauty of the designs and the lines. It was pretty awesome really.

But back to the topic on hand, in that moment I talked about earlier, I was sat there and the thought popped into my mind that I had to do this for the next 35 years.

In the automotive world a manufacturer updates or launches a new car every three years and the development process takes around 18 months from the day that the design is released to its suppliers. This meant that I had at least another 25 cycles to do before I could retire at the age of 65.

Thirty five years, 25 cycles, what on earth am I doing here I thought, I’ve got to do this stuff for the next 35 years.

What I really wanted to do was to go live in the sun and see the world. Know what I mean? I wanted to do these things now and not wait until I was 65. So my thoughts started to wonder about how to escape this rat race I was in, but how could I still make money if I escaped.

Do you ever think the same? I’m sure you do because you wouldn’t be reading this article if you were not.

Let me cut a long story short and say that it’s really not the hardest thing to find a way to live your dream, what is hard to do is to believe that you can leave the rat race, that you can quit the 9 to 5 habit. Because that’s really all it is it’s a habit that has been drummed into us since the day we are born.

Go to school, get a good education, get a good job, work for 40 years and then retire and do the things you want to do, go enjoy your final years.

The really hard thing to do is to make the decision that you will leave the rat race, making that decision is the biggest hurdle for anyone, how do I know this, well because it was for me too.

When your friends and family look at you and say you go to be mad, you can’t leave your job, you can’t go off and live in the sun, especially not on a sailing yacht, no way, go back to your job and stop complaining.

But if, and only if you’re serious you’ll do it and now with technology as it is it’s possible to get out much easier. 18 years ago the choices were not so good for making money say from a Yacht, or making money whilst living in another country, say Costa Rica, or Belize or even Bora Bora. Well perhaps not Bora Bora, not sure what Internet access is like from there.

But now with mobile internet connectivity getting better and better it’s literally possible to make money from anywhere in the world.

That’s what I have been doing for a while now, initially my wife and I had to develop a royalty type income that paid us every month on the work we did ten years ago. But this took 5 years of dedicated work to achieve.

Now some people will be happy enough to wait that long before they go and live their dream, they are happy to work a business part time for a couple of years and then head off.

It’s not really necessary these days, there are ways to create an online business in a fraction of the time it takes to grow a business like the one my wife and I have developed all those years ago.

The key really is to find a business model that can be learnt quickly and easily part time alongside a traditional job. Three hours a day would be a good starting point but the model must be proven and totally scalable.

By proven I mean that there must be a mathematical formula that converts every Dollar, Pound or Euro that is spent on marketing the business you should get at least five back.

And by scalable I mean that once you have consistently achieved that ratio you can now scale up your marketing by increasing the marketing budget, knowing that if you put more in you’ll get at lest five times that amount out.

This is absolutely the most important element of an online business that will get you out of the rat race and into living your dream. Most of the advice you will find online is geared towards hooking you into another type of habit and that is to shower you with more and more ‘easy ways’ to create money online so that every month, week or even day you’ll buy another course on online marketing, or another hot opportunity that will surely create more wealth instantly.

I know I’m rambling a bit now, you already know that these things are all a load of rubbish, but people who are new to the online world can be tempted to follow this path.

My advice is to search out people who have done it, who have worked out how to escape the rat race, who are already living their dream, because these people have obviously found a proven business model already.

Image Credit: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net