The job of which I speak?

The “maybe I’ll leave my job someday” job.

It was a full time job of mine for most of my 20s. Didn’t matter if I was opening my laptop at 9am on a sunny Wednesday morning, taking a lunchtime stroll to pick up a scotch egg or chatting with friends or colleagues in the pub after work.

The thought “maybe I’ll leave someday” was always there, dancing merrily around my head.

Then I found a copy of Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Work Week and things got a whole lot worse.

That book lit a flame that stoked my “maybe I’ll leave my job someday” fire even further. I wasn’t convinced that Tim’s ideas to start a drop-shipping empire or work from a beach in Thailand were all that practical. But it was the spirit of the book that woke up something in me. Every page was full of possibility and opened a door into a world I didn’t even know existed.

A world which said the 9 to 5 was just one way of many!

Of course, the next day I strolled back into the office and a few hours later that 4 Hour Work Week buzz had vanished under a pile of credit papers. And once it had, that “maybe I’ll leave my job someday” thought bubbled straight back up. But this time it was deeper. It was much harder to ignore. I didn’t just have the “maybe I’ll leave my job someday” thought to contend with now. I also knew I was burying something in me that wanted to be let out.

But I kept going with the one foot in, one foot out mental juggling act.

Some days I’d even spend more time wondering if banking was right for me than actually doing the banking itself.

If I could rewind the clock and have a cheeky word with Tom from 10 or 15 years ago, I’d tell him he doesn’t need to quit his actual day job. All he needs to quit is his “maybe I’ll leave my job someday” job. 

The funny thing about doing this?

When you quit the full time job of wondering whether you should quit, you might still end up quitting your day job. Or you might not. But either way, when we stop going to war with our jobs and start to see them for what they actually are, we get to find out if our job is a genuine fit or not.

Of course, quitting the “maybe I’ll quit my job one day” job isn’t always easy. Dropping long-held thoughts like these isn’t like dropping a hot potato.

But there are ways.

The Subtraction Method is one of them.

When it comes to making decisions about your career, the tried and tested route is doing more. More pros & cons lists, more vision boards, more five step plans, more research, more noise and more thinking. 

The Subtraction Method doesn't just tell you to stop doing all that. 

It helps make all of it unnecessary.

To find out more:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com

To fulfilment,

Tom