Lessons from a Man that Quit His Job

“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired . . . was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.” -Steve Jobs

Photo courtesy of Refracted Moments

Reality

These are hard times. Optimistic projections predict a rebound in the economy by the end of 2009. Pessimistic ones predict the self destruction of the United States. Lovely, right? The bad predictions wouldn’t be so scary if they weren’t supplemented with statistics showing a drastic rise in gun and ammunition sales. What are people thinking? Are people planning to threaten their way into a job with something like: “Give me a job or I’ll shoot you”? Weird.

For most of us, a wage earning job is our primary source of income. We never give much thought to it because it puts food on the table, puts clothes over our backs, and sends our kids to school. Why should we question financial stability?

Truth is, even qualified people are getting laid off. And we’ve learned that not only is the unemployment rate scarily high, but the overall sense of job security is ridiculously low. Loyal employees are terrified of the companies where they’ve devoted years of service. For those of you that select a career solely for the purpose of job stability, your most fundamental reason for working has been violently uprooted. It is now time to ask yourself: why do you work where you work?

Three Lessons from an Unemployed Man

A good friend of mine recently quit his job as a programmer. His parents and friends – myself included – thought this was a terrible idea. We told him, “at the very least, make sure you have something lined up so when you quit this job, so you can begin work right away.” He didn’t listen. He quit his job, and we all thought he was an idiot.

But is he an idiot? No. I learned a couple lessons from his willingness to quit.

First, he saved a lot of money over the past few years. Instead of living beyond his means, he lived within his means and put the rest of his money into a savings account. As a result, he knew that he could last a long time (over a year) without a source of income. How many of us can say that we can last over a year with no income? Not many. I read some survey that said most Americans can’t go more than 2 months without pay. Considering how rough the job market is, that’s plain scary. It means that even a short term disruption in work can drastically change your life.

So lesson 1 : Don’t live beyond your means and save money so you can go for a while without a job.

Additionally, he’s frugal. He buys stuff that he needs from pawn shops and looks for good deals when he can. If he can’t find a good price on something, he just waits. He doesn’t cave in and buy it, he waits until he can get it for a good deal, or he decides that it’s not something he needs.

Consumers today take a different, more expensive approach. We want everything to be new, and when we want something, we want it NOW. This approach is perfectly fine if you’re a millionaire, but for normal folks concerned about their jobs, it’s silly. It whittles away at your savings and makes you more and more reliant on the fact that you need a job.

A great example is the iPod. I ride a bus to school everyday, and I’m always surprised by how many people have iPods. Everyone has one. It’s a great device, but it’s strange that the iPods I see are always the newest model. As new models come out, people are constantly upgrading. Maybe the old ones are breaking, but if they are, we need to rethink the habit of buying this $200 toy every year, especially if you have concerns about job security.

If I want something, I usually do some comparison shopping online at http://pricegrabber.com or I check for a deal at http://slickdeals.net. Often, I can save quite a lot of money by doing some quick research at these sites.

Sure, everyone needs a job because everyone needs to make money, but in a time of economic uncertainty, the more we reduce our dependency on money, the better.

Lesson 2 : Buy things cheaply or don’t decide that you don’t need them. (I know this is really a variation on “don’t live beyond your means,” but we’re talking about money here, so I’m just trying to hammer home the point that the less we depend on money, the more independently we can live from economic turbulance)

So why did my friend quit his day job? He was miserable. He could see the next 5 years of his life, and he wasn’t happy with that vision. He was ready for something else.

In the quote at the top of this post, Jobs says that getting fired was the best thing that happened to him. You’re probably thinking “well, that’s Steve Jobs, not Joe Blow from down the street.” But I can’t help but wonder if more Steve Jobses are out there. And maybe the only reason that they’re not coming forward is because they’re tied to a safe and secure job that they’re too afraid to live without.

Living without a job gives you some freedom to decide what you really want to do, and it also makes you fully vested in your pursuits. That is, if you try something new, you’re going to give it 110% because you know that all your eggs are in one basket. If you had a job at the same time, you’d probably take a more half-assed approach.

I won’t know the outcome for my friend for several years, but he’s reassessed his life and decided that something is missing that cannot be fulfilled by his current job. I can’t say that I would do the same thing in his shoes, but I respect that he didn’t like where his life was headed and did something about it.

Lesson 3 : Figure out what’s really important to you in a job and go after it with all your heart.

We need to admit that many of us take a job because it’s safe and secure, not because it’s really what we want to do with our lives. But we’re at a point in time where with many jobs, safety and security are rare perks, not expectations. Since job stability is at an all-time low, maybe we should re-evaluate our criteria in looking for a job. Maybe we should even explore creative ways to exploit our skills to make money outside the context of a 9-to-5 job. It is our skills that make us useful and valuable, not the fact that we show up every day at 9am.

A lousy job market is depressing. We are scared because foreclosure and drastic changes in our lives inch closer to us every day. Daily costs like groceries, gas, rent, mortgage payments, health insurance, and dental care are becoming financial poison. It’s getting harder and harder to sustain our standard of living. This just means that we need to (quickly) reconfigure our way of living to make ourselves more adaptable to a volatile economy. Because if you don’t swim, you’re going to sink.