Dear Reader,
On 1st January 2011, when most people around me were making resolutions to lose weight and eat better, I was making up my mind to do something else.
I finally did it on 4th January. I told my boss – “I quit!”
Quitting my job was a tough decision to come by, as I was surrounded by mixed views from all around, including from within me.
“You’re sure you want to quit your job?” asked my father.
“How could you quit when we have spent so many years training you?” asked my boss, forgetting that I had also spent so many years serving the company.
“Hey, please don’t quit!” said my colleagues.
“Yes, you can do it!” said my wife.
“Yes, Papa will be at home to play with me at all times!” exclaimed my seven year old daughter.
Now, here is how my mind was playing tricks with me.
“Vishal, are you mad to quit such a well-paying job?” my mind asked me. “You have the responsibility of a family! Change your decision right away!”
“If not now, never!” my heart told me. “You’ve worked long enough for someone else. It’s now a time to work for yourself, and to live your dreams.”
As I look back to that day almost ten years back, I thank God I went with my heart that pushed me to give my dreams a chance.
Well, it’s wasn’t a decision led 100% by my heart, because my mind had helped me a lot in preparing me for the day I quit my job.
But I must tell you one very important thing – quitting my job was liberating. And it was scary. Very scary!
Well, to be honest, the life I am living now is not something I had dreamt up for a life. I never knew that I wanted to be a full-time blogger until the end of 2010 when I started outlining my plan to get on my own.
I knew I had a passion for writing, and I knew I had to get into helping people learn the art of sensible investing (the latter led by the frustration of seeing people around me losing their life savings on bad investment decisions).
So I realized that I might actually be able to combine both these and create something worthwhile out of that – something that would not only liberate me emotionally, but also financially.
Well, have I really done well financially? See this chart…
Quitting my job and charting my own course has surely given me a better ROI than any of my stock market investments.
Excluding my time and effort (intangible assets), every rupee of tangible investment into my business has earned me 30-times in return, which has not only helped me run my house, keep my wife happy 🙂 , and fund my passion for travel, but also help me add to my savings.
In all, after I quit my job, my income is up more than 7x (between 2010 and 2020), saving is up 20x, and happiness is up 100x (at least).
Buddha said, “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.”
I believe this also holds true for the road to financial freedom – the only two mistakes you can make is not going all the way, and not starting.
Most people I have met over the years have been stuck with the latter – not starting on their road to financial freedom.
The reason for this is simple.
When you really want to walk on the road to financial freedom, you need to first lay out the road yourself.
And for laying out that road, you must be willing to stand up, stand out, and make a ruckus.
Now, while we all have the potential to do great work in life, it requires us to leave our comfort zones. But sadly, we have been brought up in a culture where we constantly remind one another about the dangers of standing up, standing out, and making a ruckus.
And thus, the road to financial freedom remains elusive to most of us.
George Bernard Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
For decades, breaking the four-minute mile was believed to be scientifically impossible. Right up until Roger Banister did it in 1954. Then you know what happened? 16 more people ran sub-four-minutes in the three years to follow.
We’ve been largely conditioned that it’s not possible to build a career around passion. So many people hate their jobs and many of us have decided to accept that as a fact of life.
I did too, right up until I started reading and learning about people who showed me another way.
So here’s the trick – If you want to love your work and live off your passion, the most important thing you need is to surround yourself with people already doing it.
You must reverse the brainwashing. Spend time around enough people living squarely in their dreams, and living off passion not only becomes possible, it becomes probable. That shift in psychology will change your world.
Here is a statistic – A recent study reported that as many as 80% of the people in the workforce globally don’t enjoy their job. And nearly 75% don’t know their true passion.
Is this a coincidence? I don’t think so.
If you can begin building an income around the things that excite you, your work will no longer be something you hate. It will be something you can’t get enough of. It’s only then that, like Warren Buffett, you would tap dance to work every day.
As Confucius wrote, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got. ~ Mark Twain
Now, this stat really interesting – Over 80% of people don’t enjoy their work and nearly 75% don’t know their passion.
Since I started doing this stuff in 2011, I’ve had the chance to literally hear from many people – many of them in terrible pain due to the work they keep doing that they can’t stand. And thankfully from many others, who used to hate their work, but have since successfully made the transition.
Now the question is – Why don’t more people do something about their situation?
I’ve heard every reason under the sun for why their situation is different. Why they are unable to break the chains and do something that actually excites them. The great majority come back to the same few reasons.
I wanted to share them with you to see if perhaps similar things are holding you back.
After all, the first step is identifying the problem. The next step is doing something about it.
With that said, if you have always wanted to do what you love, but haven’t done so, do any of these sound familiar?
- I don’t know what I’m passionate about.
- I don’t know how to make money from my passion.
- The people around me will think I’m crazy.
- Work is just a part of life. It’s not something meant to be enjoyed.
- It’s not possible to do what you love and make a living from it.
- I can’t find the courage to start.
- What if I fail?
- I have a family, loans and obligations to be responsible for.
- I’m not qualified enough. There are plenty of experts in my field with more experience than me.
- Between my current job, my family, trying to stay healthy and all the other things I have to do, I don’t have any time to work on my passion.
- It’s too risky. In this economy I need to keep any job security I can find.
- I’ve never heard of someone who’s been able to make a living off my specific passion.
- I’m too old and waited too long. I wish I had thought about this 5-10 years ago.
- I have to be really savvy with the Internet and I don’t know a lot of the modern tools and technology.
- I’m not creative enough.
I’ll ask again – Do any of these sound familiar?
Take another minute and look back through them. Mark the ones you know you’ve played in your head over and over.
I have news for you. Every one of the above ‘reasons’ is nothing more than an excuse. Remember, everything was impossible until someone did it.
Excuses are not facts. They are not set in stone. They’re anything but. They are a figment of our imagination. Just thoughts – nothing more.
But they are the most dangerous thoughts in the world. Believing them can kill a dream in a heartbeat. But disproving them is what changes the world.
First, let me make one thing absolutely clear.
Most people who have achieved financial freedom will tell you that they took some gamble that paid off big for them.
I don’t recommend taking any such risk. Being a disciple of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, I recommend taking calculated risks – those backed by adequate margin of safety.
Life is all about playing the odds in your favour. Figure out the ROI in every risk and compare it to the possibility of failure. If you find out an investment has a 50% chance to fail but can make 3x the original investment, it’s a risk but calculations show it’s worthwhile.
The same holds true for creating a small online business that combines your passion with your abilities.
Here’s broadly how I have charted my path to financial freedom while incorporating an adequate margin of safety at each step…
- After much thought, I identified my passion in life – writing to help people in their financial decision making.
- I assessed whether this was a skill people would pay for (the answer was “yes”).
- I asked whether I wanted to have a plan-B (the answer was “no,” because I realized that any plan-B would not let me focus on plan-A).
- I developed the right skills required to succeed in my plans – learning writing, basic technology, and the art of persuasion – while working extra time before and after my job timings.
- I gradually built up my savings to repay the only financial liability I had – my home loan (margin of safety, you see).
- My practice of minimalism – which my wife supported whole-heartedly – helped me rebuild savings after paying off the loan.
- I quit my job after I closed my home loan and had also built up savings to meet my basic needs of around 2-3 years in case I failed to earn any income from my business (again, margin of safety).
- I launched myself!
- I gradually built up my small business – working all alone and painstakingly at it (I had no plan-B to turn back to).
- My tribe – you – found me and I got lucky.
Money, as I have realized has never been the driving factor for me. It comes, as I have experienced, if you have a simple, honest idea and take it seriously.
In all, things have worked out pretty fine for me…and I thank my stars and my family – and especially my wife – for standing by my side through thick and thin.
Now, this should be obvious, but I’ll stress it here – what has worked for me may not necessarily work for any other human being on this planet.
But, as I just said, if you have a simple idea and you take it seriously, you can definitely chart your road to financial freedom at full throttle.
You don’t have to have it all together when you start on your journey to turning your passion into a paycheque.
You start from where you are, and – this point is critical – you get a few things right.
The fear of failing rarely goes away forever, but you have to find a way to separate it from your ability to make progress. You create the right product or service. You find a market of people, even a small one, which wants to pay for it.
I always tell people who are beginning a creative career to go back and look at the early work of people they admire. If you come across a successful blogger, designer, or artist, especially one who’s been able to generate a full-time income from their creative work, it’s easy to be intimidated.
That’s why you should go back to the beginning – see where they started, and see how it all began.
When you do that, you’ll be able to see the progress along the way, most likely including a few mistakes.
In my case, the compass points are my desire for “independence” and “gratitude”. Much of what I do now has been built on the idea of being “self-employed for life” and answering to no one.
In Napoleon Hill’s amazing book “Think and Grow Rich”, he shared a story of Edwin Barnes – a man who desired to become a business associate of Thomas Edison.
According to Hill, “Barnes desire was not a hope! It was not a wish! It was a keen, pulsating DESIRE, which transcended everything else. It was DEFINITE.”
Barnes described his desire as such…
There is but ONE thing in this world that I am determined to have, and that is a business association with Thomas A. Edison. I will burn all bridges behind me, and stake my ENTIRE FUTURE on my ability to get what I want.
So, if you have the desire to stake your future on your ability to get what you want, I will help you chart a roadmap for laying out that road – creating a small online business – which would connect to your road to financial freedom.
This I will help you do through this special course – Passion to Paycheque.
The lessons in this course would revolve around answering your big questions like…
- How do I identify my passion(s) in life?
- What steps do I take to make money from my passion?
- What key steps do I take before launching my small online business?
- How do I create an online platform – a simple, beautiful website – to run my business?
- How do I learn to write well to engage my website visitors?
- How do I convert my website visitors into paying customers?
- What mistakes I must avoid in my road to creative freedom?
- How do I go from fear to freedom, one step at a time?
- What if I fail?
In short, Passion to Paycheque is a course where I will guide you to discover your passion so that you can transform your career, and reconstruct your life…the way you want to live it.
I know it’s sometimes scary being self-employed. I am my own boss, and I can do whatever I want. Failure and success are dependent completely on me.
Scary, yes…but amazingly liberating!
To quote the noted French poet and novelis Anatole France –
To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
Before I end, here is a message for you from Steve Jobs, which he gave in 2005 at Stanford University –
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
That’s exactly my message to you as I invite you to start on this wonderful journey – Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Warren Buffett, one of the smartest and most successful men of our time – and the world’s best investor ever – was once asked what he considered to be the best investment anyone could make.
His answer was quick and simple – “The most important investment you can make is in yourself.”
That could very well be the best advice Mr. Buffett has ever offered.
There has never been a better time to put your future squarely in your own hands – and master a valuable skill like building a side income doing work you love that will help you forever…now and right through your retirement years.
And that’s exactly what Passion to Paycheque could help you with.
And I will be there, working hard to help you succeed.
Passion to Paycheque, with all its invaluable benefits as mentioned above, is priced at Rs 9,500/- (plus 18% tax). But as an introductory offer, I am offering the course at Rs 7,500 (plus tax) for the first 100 subscribers.
Now, if you are interested to reinvent how you work and live with complete freedom, click below to subscribe to Passion to Paycheque right away.
The knowledge you’ll get here will be your great asset. It wouldn’t be stolen or confiscated. It would set your mind free. And that’s what true independence that you deserve is all about.
With respect,
Vishal Khandelwal