Nine to Five Escape Plan Read online

  Nine to Five Escape Plan: How to Escape the Rat Race

  By Craig Beck

  Copyright Craig Beck Media Limited 2017

  20th April 2017 – Nashville USA

  To Daniela – You Changed My Whole Universe.

  The free companion downloads for this book are available at www.CraigBeck.com

  DISCLAIMER AND TERMS OF USE AGREEMENT

  The author and publisher of this book and the accompanying materials have used their best efforts in preparing this book. The author and publisher make no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy, applicability, fitness, or completeness of the contents of this book.

  The information contained in this book is strictly for educational purposes. Therefore, if you wish to apply ideas contained in this book, you are taking full responsibility for your actions.

  The author and publisher disclaim any warranties (express or implied), merchantability, or fitness for any particular purpose. The author and publisher shall in no event be held liable to any party for any direct, indirect, punitive, special, incidental or other consequential damages arising directly or indirectly from any use of this material, which is provided “as is”, and without warranties.

  As always, the advice of a competent professional should be sought before taking action.

  The author and publisher do not warrant the performance, effectiveness or applicability of any sites listed or linked to in this book.

  All links are for information purposes only and are not warranted for content, accuracy or any other implied or explicit purpose.

  This book is © copyrighted by Craig Beck Media Limited and is protected under the European Copyright law and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws, with ALL rights reserved.

  No part of this may be copied, or changed in any format, sold, or used in any way other than what is outlined within this book under any circumstances without express permission from Craig Beck Media Limited, Cyprus

  Introduction

  Rat Race is a term used to describe a frustrating, hard-to-break financial lifestyle. It is a lifestyle that is lived by countless people, oblivious to the very nature of it, to a degree that even when called upon, vehemently deny it.

  To summarize the Rat Race, It involves subjecting one's self to a time-consuming job, saddling one's self with heavy mortgages/rents, bills, children, and liabilities, forcing the individual to continue busting his or her ass at that same job. The illusion that working at the same job will be better bars off alternatives.

  It is also a misconception that getting more money will solve financial distress, but those who subject themselves most voluntarily to the race, just spend more and more, digging themselves the same hole. "I'm not interested in money." They will say. If they aren't, then why are they thanklessly toiling their lives away and constantly bitching about their financial scarcity?

  It involves a variable combination of self-induced fear of poorness, a lack of choice, horrible spending habits, or the inability to adapt to the new changes in the work force taking place during the time of this definition entry.

  There exists many options for financial gain and exit of the rat race. Remember, the definition of insanity also entails doing the same thing over and over again, in an attempt to make things change.

  I always advise people to get their information from someone who has been there and done it. There is no point asking your morbidly obese doctor how to lose weight because he hasn’t got the first clue. Of course this won’t stop him giving you advice.

  This seems like an obvious point but day in day out intelligent people ask their poor friends for financial advice. They ask their co-workers what they think about escaping the 9 to 5. The advice they get back is 100% proof bull crap but offered with 100% certainty that it is correct.

  There are thousands of books out there about escaping the daily grind, living the life of your dreams and becoming fabulously wealthy. A great deal of them are written by people who are in an equally poor (or even worse) situation as the target audience the book is intended for.

  You can’t be too critical of them because at least they are fighting to get where they want to go. Most people are passengers in life, white knuckling their trip down the river, entirely unaware the oars are just under the seat.

  So here’s why you should listen very carefully to what I have to say in this book. Everything I am going to tell you to do, I have done myself. I have been poor, I have worked a 9 to 5 job that sucked my soul out my ass for 40 hours a week but I have also escaped it and become insanely wealthy as a result.

  If you are serious about finding your passion, living it and then selling this expertise for cash… lots of cash. Then this book is a vital first step on your journey to escaping the rat race.

  About The Author

  My name is Craig Beck. I was born in the seventies to hard working but ambitious parents. My dad grew up with acute poverty and scarcity a part of his every day life. One of seven children who were all cramped into a tiny three bedroom terraced house in the North East of England. Life was tough, it was four kids to a bed, not quite enough food to go around and severe discipline at the slightest transgression.

  All my family on both sides were steel workers in the local foundries and rolling mills. You started work in the factory at the age of 14 and if you were lucky you got to retire on a state pension at 65. Manual, hard labor for very little money was considered a lucky position to be in – hey at least you had a job.

  As soon as my father got the opportunity he set about creating a life free of that sense of fear and scarcity. He started his own business, and to ensure its success for over forty years he toiled at it from 5 o’clock in the morning until late evening, seven days a week. His goal was to ensure that his children would never experience the harshness of life that he endured growing up. Solid as a rock, he is a man who is firmly rooted in the real world, a student and graduate of the school of hard knocks. A solid believer that nothing in life is for free, and everything is achieved through hard work and hard work alone.

  To this day my father still doesn’t quite understand how my life works. The fact that I don’t ever go to work, travel around the world for fun (I am writing this in the lounge at Nashville airport en-route to Orlando for a few days) and live on a sun drenched island in the Med is a complete mystery to him. The problem is my situation is in complete disagreement with everything he believes. For my bank balance to make sense to him he should be able to say ‘my son works bloody hard’. But I don’t… I work bloody smart and a long time ago I said Fuck ‘The Man’ and Fuck ‘The System’.

  That sounds all very lovely but don’t go thinking I always had this thing worked out. For two decades I worked for the man. The first ten years were okay, I was young enough to tolerate, perhaps even enjoy the system. I was working for radio stations and having fun. Before I knew what was happening I had cranked up some credit card debit and a car loan. Then came kids and what do you I am now firmly in the trap. The job I have doesn’t really interest me any more, I spend most of the week waiting for the weekend and I spend most of the weekend cursing how quickly Monday is coming around.

  We don’t really have enough money to take an annual family vacation but I argue that we god damn deserve a break and so every year we slam it on a credit card. Along with birthday treats, Christmas presents for the children and an assortment of other things that we in the western world feel entitled to.

  Before you know it I am nudging thirty years old in a job that bores the pants off me, working for a guy I wouldn’t trust to find his asshole with both hands (oh and by the way he knows exactly what I think of him). I have a huge interest only mortgage and appro
aching thirty thousand pounds in credit card and personal loan debt. The job that I am repeatedly told I should be eternally grateful for is making me miserable, tired and broke. But despite all that I can’t leave – I need the paycheck too much. Does this sound familiar?

  This is the trap of modern life, this is ‘the man’. For ten years I bitched and moaned about working for the man. I wanted to break free and do what I felt passionate about but all the time people were telling me to shut up, keep my head down and stay under the radar. ‘You have a good job’ I was told. ‘You could do your job in your sleep Craig’, others tried to sell me. Seriously, is this the goal? To get paid for not really doing anything that much? So you get to the end of your life and look back and say ‘I did absolutely nothing worthwhile and the suckers paid me for it’?

  How depressing!

  Guess what happens when you wake up every morning shit scared of losing a job you hate? Yeah, that’s right eventually you get fired. That’s exactly what happened – the boss man, who had always hated me as much as I hated him saw a window of opportunity. He sat me down and explained how terrible he felt about letting me go. I shrugged and said I didn’t care and walked out with my head held high.

  I drove home whistling as though I had been given a day off. I parked up on the driveway to our home, hung my car keys on the usual hook, sat down on the bottom rung of the stairs and cried my eyes out. Man, I howled like a wounded animal. It felt like the end of the world, there was no possible way I was coming back from this. I had thousands going out every month and my decent paycheck wasn’t even covering it as it was. The only future I could see was one of losing the house, getting a minimum wage job, losing my family and being nothing but a crushing disappointment to my children.

  Things were bad, but thankfully they never got as dark as my predictions. I got a new job (on much less money) and managed to struggle through for a few years. But something had changed. The ‘man’ had thrown me under the bus. He didn’t care that I had a family and children looking to me. He didn’t care how much I needed that job and he didn’t care what happened to me next. This was the day I said Fuck ‘The Man’.

  If you have family and dependents then (despite what some authors claim) you can’t just quit your job and go sell your watercolors on eBay… or whatever your big dream is. However, what you can do is draw a line in the sand and set an intention. I decided that I would spend the next 12 months preparing to quit. I rearranged my office at work so the desk faced the door. This way I could work on my own projects and people passing or walking in would have no idea that I was doing pretty much nothing for the company.

  I wasn’t a total asshole; I would get into work an hour early to work on my own stuff. I would also work through lunch and stay late after I was supposed to finish. It looked like I was the hardest working guy in there but in reality my focus had changed. I was all in on giving a one-fingered salute in twelve months time.

  For the first six months I still couldn’t see how I was going to make this work. I didn’t need to replace my salary but I needed to believe that I had the potential to do that. I was building small revenue streams online, as many as possible, hoping that a few would catch on and start making some decent money.

  This has to be your mentality because honestly you never can predict where your break is coming from. One of the projects I started online was joining a small affiliate program. I honestly didn’t think it would make me more than $100 a month, and I was right. For the first six months that’s exactly what I got, and I forgot about it. Then out of the blue I noticed a $500 deposit in my account and went investigating where it had come from. Today (many years later) that same project makes me $10,000 a month without me doing anything at all. Seriously, I could take a one-month trip to the Bahamas and I would still get $8K to $10K at the end of the month.

  Anyway, back to the story!

  It took ten months before I was confident that I had a chance. I didn’t know for sure that my plan was going to work but I believed I had done enough to give myself six to twelve months of space to try. It was a powerfully liberating feeling to be going into planning meetings at work, talking about the challenges and obstacles of the new year secretly knowing they wouldn’t have anything to do with you – they would all be someone else’s problem.

  On New Years day I typed up my resignation letter, then I re-typed it and took out all the stuff I wanted to say but wasn’t necessary – no point burning bridges right? On the first day back into work after the festive break at 9am I took the stairs up to the managing directors suite. I said good morning to Sarah, his secretary and walked into his office and placed the envelope on his desk. Of course we all dream of raising the middle finger and saying ‘take your job and stick it up your ass’, but the reality is your boss is really just another guy working for the man. He is not the enemy; he is just another cog in the wheel.

  So I politely resigned and served my notice period. I pretty sure everyone thought I had been fired and was just saving face, claiming I had quit. I mean who resigns from a great job to go and do something vague online, right?

  For a couple of years it was tough, I won’t lie to you. For twenty years I had gotten used to the same amount of money being deposited in my bank account on the same date every month. Out there on my own, doing what I was passionate about. Writing, recording and creating content, some months I would earn thousands – crazy amounts of money. Then other months I would earn nothing at all. The worst period was the back end of the first year. When from September to December I didn’t earn a cent – literally nothing.

  However, even when I was scared and panicking I knew in my heart and soul that I had made the right decision. I was watching my friends on Facebook complaining about it being fucking Monday again and I didn’t even know it was Monday. Everyday had become Saturday! Seriously, people in the street would ask me if I had a good weekend and I wouldn’t know what to say because I didn’t even know it had been the weekend.

  Fast forward to today. I am a 42 year old rich guy who never goes to work. Travels around the world first class whenever and wherever he wants. I live on a beautiful sun drenched island off the coast of Greece with the woman of my dreams. I am the most annoyingly happy person you will ever meet; you certainly don’t want me as your friend on Facebook because it will just piss you off.

  I will remind you at this point that I am not boasting, and here’s the reason why! Everything I have and everything I have done is entirely replicable. There is nothing usual or lucky about me, everything I have done has come from pure passion, belief and determination. I don’t care what your background, gender, race or sexual inclination. You can do the same. However, the truth is it’s not easy – if it was everyone would do it, and trust me most people are too scared to even get started.

  This commitment to yourself will have to become a part of your DNA. The system is designed to keep you trapped inside it. It’s so good at what it does it successfully manages to keep billions of people much more intelligent than you or I imprisoned for their entire lives. If that doesn’t scare you then you don’t quite understand how much of your life force and energy you are going to have to throw at this.

  At the same time everyone around you will think you are crazy. The people who love you will worry about you and think you are making a terrible mistake and at times you will panic and wonder what the hell you are doing.

  Escaping the rat race is like climbing Mount Everest. Nearly everyone you know would not even stop long enough to consider it. It’s dangerous, risky, painful, lonely and difficult and so far out of your comfort-zone that you probably won’t ever find the way back. But you know what, every year a handful of people look at that mountain and say ‘fuck it, I am climbing it’.

  Most people live at the bottom of the mountain. Down there it’s crowded and there is not quite enough to go around. Right now, I would like to invite you to join me at the top. The climb will be the challenge of your life but let me tell you; up
here there is hardly anyone to spoil the view. From up here you can see all the opportunities of life for miles around, the air is pure and clean, there is plenty of everything and nothing is impossible.

  So You Want To Escape?

  “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved”, Helen Keller

  Fuck 'The Man'

  Verb

  {fuhk_thuh_man}

  To defy authority; usually a government entity or employer. However, any person, organization, group, etc. that oppresses someone may be considered "The Man."

  So you want to be free of the daily grind?

  Really?

  How badly do you want it?

  Think hard about this and say out loud a score out of one hundred. Lets say that zero is ‘I have no desire at all to become a free of the 9 to 5’ and one hundred is ‘I will do whatever it takes, I will work eighty hours a week on my passion, I will give up drinking with the boys/girls, I will give up taking vacations for the next five years, I will go without sex if you say that’s what is required… I don’t care what it takes I am doing it’.