28. How badly do you want it?

AI generated transcript: How badly do you want it?

How badly do you want to be a self-employed English teacher?

I think if you answer that honestly, if the answer is very badly, or very much, I think that will be a marker of your success.

Or put it this way, how much do you detest the situation that you're in right now?

Are you in a lot of pain?

Do you absolutely detest your work?

Do you detest the life that you've found yourself leading because of the nonsense that you have to put up with at work?

I'm not sure I, well I guess I was at a pain point.

For me it was, I was in the world of newspapers in England and

I couldn't really see a way forward to earning enough money to live the life that we wanted for ourselves.

So that was quite a strong motivating factor.

And also we needed to come back to Japan for various reasons.

And the only way I could really see having a job or working in Japan was doing it for myself as an English teacher.

That was the one skill that I had that people would be happy to pay me money for.

I could do journalism and stuff but that was clearly a dying industry and I'm not sure as much as I enjoy it.

I didn't want to go back into that, cap in hand, asking the boss for favours and all that stuff.

So, anyway, I was chatting to a chap at the weekend who's an English teacher and he was expressing interest in working for himself.

So that got me thinking, well, you know, how can you transition away from working for the man to working for yourself?

For me it was a lot of going cold turkey basically.

I made an enormous change of coming to Japan with no job and it was a matter of survival.

I guess my pain point was very high and therefore the chance of success.

I don't know if it's a chance or what.

The probability of success was

Well, it was helped by the fact I didn't really have a choice.

Or at least I felt I didn't have a choice.

There wasn't really an alternative.

I had to make this damn thing work or else everything could fall apart.

And so, you know, it worked.

So ultimately, I mean you could, in fact I wrote about this on Wednesday, the number 28 bulletin

It's about how to transition away from full-time employment to being self-employed.

Just a couple of ideas there, but ultimately I think it comes down to how badly do you want it?

How bad is the pain right now?

If it's bad enough, use that as the motivating factor to sort yourself out.

And I think you have every chance to be successful.

If it's not that much pain and you're doing alright, well, I don't know, that might not be enough motivation to make it work because there will be times when you think, oh my god, am I doing the right thing?

Oh, this is harder than I thought.

Why am I staying up late working on lesson plans?

All that kind of stuff.

There will be times when you think, oh, is this the right thing to do?

And it might be at that moment that if you have a quote-unquote easier option you might take it.

And then I think that would be a shame because yeah there will be pain points that you have to go through as a self-employed teacher or self-employed anything.

But I'm 16 years into it now and I think

I can safely say I wouldn't have it any other way and I'm so glad that I went through those pain points.

So, do you hate your job?

Are you having a really miserable time?

Good!

That's a good sign that you'll be successful as a self-employed person.

So have at it.

Okay, that's all I've got to say.

Have a good weekend and I'll talk to you again.

Next week.

Good luck if you're trying to get out of a crappy job.

I'm with you.

I've been there.

You can do it.

OK, see you next time.