Nine to Five Escape Plan Read online

  If Hanna were an Rat Race person she would have been justified in having a very good excuse for not achieving all she wanted to in life. Thankfully Hanna is as 20% as you can get and she made a decision. She set herself a goal. A goal so outrageous that people laughed at her, took pity on her or outright told her that what she wanted was impossible. Hanna decided to beat the incurable illness and then to teach everyone else who suffered with it how to do the same.

  With the decision made she took action. She completely blew up her diet, dumped all the junk food and started treating her body like a temple. I helped her to stop drinking and she started working out at the gym six days a week. Hanna was as focused as a laser beam on what she wanted. But if you think this is the part of the story where the ‘good luck’ arrived you are wrong.

  For three years Hanna worked on this project without a sniff of interest from anyone. She would come and stay at my villa in Cyprus several times a year and I can’t tell you how many times she expressed her worry and frustration at the crazy amount of work she was doing on her project and not earning a single dollar in income. So many times she felt overwhelmed and defeated by the silence that met her efforts. But she never stopped pushing; she never stopped believing that the goal was coming.

  Today when people look at her on the front of glossy magazines and in the bestsellers lists they call her lucky. I can tell you from first hand experience that Hanna’s success has absolutely nothing to do with luck, chance or any other Rat Race nonsense. She won because she believed in her mission, applied 100% of her potential to the cause and never, ever stopped.

  You are not here to live an average life. Mediocre is an insult to your potential; it is a waste of valuable DNA. You are endowed with the seeds of greatness and success is not a lucky accident for the select few. Success is your fundamental duty as a human being.

  Rat Race Escape Example: Tammy & Chris

  There I was again – standing on the train platform in Bedford, UK, at the godforsaken hour of 6.30am. Because of the rain there was a lot of traffic on my way to the train station, so it took me ages to find a car parking spot. Paying over £100 a month for a parking permit should really enable you to get a decent spot, but it didn’t. The train company helpfully put up a sign saying that if the car park was full, there was another train station 13 miles away. Really! That was their solution to a full car park!

  Anyway, the platform on the train station was already packed and not being able to stand in the first line meant that I would struggle to get a seat for my 45 minute journey to London. So basically I paid £450 a month to stand for the entire train journey. Then came the fun part: trying to squeeze myself onto the Victoria line to get to work. I didn’t get into the first tube, or the second one, as there were just too many people during rush hour. As usual, when I did manage to board, the tube was incredibly hot. You would have thought that they had managed to put aircon in the carriages by now, but London seems to be years behind Russia, Malaysia or Thailand in this regard.

  Meaning my face was going to be pressed against someone’s sweaty armpit for the next 20 minutes. And what was that woman with her massive pram and her two screaming babies thinking, taking a tube during rush hour and taking up all that precious space (I know, a controversial one…)? So finally, nearly two hours since leaving my house, I arrived at work. I have already had enough and it was only 8am.

  This was my life for seven years. Day in, day out. Don’t get me wrong. I loved my government job in London. It was exciting, rewarding and I had awesome colleagues. But I couldn’t go on like this for the rest of my life. I envied people who could walk to work or who were able to go out for a drink or dinner in the evening without falling asleep in their plates. Usually by the time I got home, had a bite to eat, and watched some TV, before I passed out from pure exhaustion by 10pm. I always thought to myself that there must be more to life than that! Then, one day, things changed.

  The government department where my husband worked was offering voluntary redundancies and as I was able to take a sabbatical, we sensed a golden opportunity. We decided to take a break from London and signed up for a 6 month voluntary placement in Cambodia. This step was by no means easy. I had already left behind my friends and family back home in Germany when I moved to England 8 years prior, but it was only an hour’s flight to Germany from England. A flight to Cambodia is over 12 hours with at least one transfer on top of that. We had built a nice little life in England. We had many friends, owned a little terraced house and Chris’ family of course all lived near us.

  When we first started telling people about our plans to take a break, I don’t think they believed that we would actually go ahead with it. Why would anyone leave a comfortable life behind to live in a country where a third of the population lives below the poverty line? To many, people our age should start a family and not travel around the world. As we made things more concrete however, I was surprised by how many people actually supported us. A lot of people said that we are doing what many people only dream about and that we should go ahead. Hearing such encouragement really helped me staying sane actually.

  Almost two years later we are still in Cambodia. After our voluntary placement we both found jobs in NGOs. I couldn’t be happier to have started a career in international development. It has always been my passion and back in the UK I was heavily involved with quite a few charities. Now I am doing what I always dreamed about doing – hands on charity work in the field.

  The Digital Blueprint

  “To continue winning the internet marketing game, your content has to be more that just brilliant, it has to give the people consuming that content the ability to become a better version of themselves”, Michelle Stinson Ross

  We live in exciting times, never has there been more opportunities to thrive and succeed. The Internet opens up a vast global market place. Go back just a couple of decades and your options would have been dramatically reduced.

  In my own particular case I could not have hoped to have had the success I have without the world of digital marketing and self publishing. Only a handful of my books are published through the traditional method. That being, going through the painful process of submitting a manuscript to a publisher and hoping against hope that they see enough potential in your book to commission a small print run.

  The vast majority of my money is earned through self-published digital products. In that regard I am not unique, I am just one of many thousands of people earning a substantial income from the online marketplace. The great news for anyone with the vision and determination to escape the rat race is, there is a place in the digital revolution for you and your expertise.

  I don’t care what you currently do for a living; there is something that you are already an expert at. It could be what you do for a day job or it could be your hobby. It doesn’t matter how niche a concept it is trust me on this… There are people ready and willing to pay for a piece of your knowledge on the subject.

  I have a friend called Cheridee, her daughter Erin is 15 years old and she is crazy about Guinea Pigs. The whole family have been nuts about animals forever but Erin has been obsessed with these cute furry rodents for as long as anyone can remember.

  Unfortunately none of her family of friends could muster the enough enthusiasm on the subject to talk about Guinea Pigs quite as much as Erin wanted to. So she took her passion online and set up a YouTube channel dedicated 100% to Guinea Pig care. Nobody is going to make money out of one specific type of rodent right?

  Today Erin has over 250,000 subscribers to her channel and she is adding more than 25,000 new members a month. I don’t know if she makes any money out of her channel but give me quarter of a million people interested only in earthworms and I will give you a crazy annual income.

  You see, Erin didn’t set off on this journey to build a business or create a revenue stream. She only wanted to do what she is passionate about, all the time. Most people who approach this from the point of view of making mone
y would have entirely missed the point. Most people would have come up with the idea and then tried to broaden it out to reach more people and ergo make more money. Suddenly you are not talking about what you are passionate about, you are running a YouTube channel about dogs because more people like dogs than Guinea Pigs, right?

  The problem is there are many more people with much more passion about dogs than you. They are going to wipe the floor with you, when it comes to enthusiasm, expertise and commitment.

  There is something in your life right now that you are an expert at. Something that you love doing and you could happily do it everyday for the rest of your life. This is your passion and there is wealth buried inside it… no matter how weird and wonderful it is.

  The Internet gives you the opportunity to market and sell your expertise to a willing audience. There are so many easy to use website building tools available online these days you should have no trouble building a basic site, no matter your level of experience.

  Anyone can make a website, and that’s exactly why I am going to spend virtually no time talking about how you do it. One of the biggest mistakes and assumptions people make is that a website in itself is going to make you money. You could spend $10,000 on an amazing website but unless you generate traffic for it then it will make precisely zero dollars. What you thought was a revenue source has become a liability. It is just another thing that costs you money.

  I will talk briefly about traffic sources here but this is a subject worthy of a whole book. If you go to CraigBeck.com you will find stand alone books on marketing your passion, building a YouTube channel and many more digital marketing guides. This book is really your first step on the journey and concentrates predominately on getting the right mindset to escape the rat race.

  Getting traffic to your website is one of the biggest search terms on Google. Everyone who has a website wants to know how to get more people to see it! This means billions of websites all want billions of people to come visit their amazing website. The math simply doesn’t add up. Not every website is going to fly.

  So how do you get more people looking at your website? The easiest way is to simply buy traffic. There is a huge array of high traffic platforms willing to sell you a share of their audience. Facebook, Google, Bing, YouTube all operated a keyword auction. Basically you bid the maximum you are willing to pay for a targeted visitor to your website.

  This is another area where being in a niche pays dividend. The difference in price for the keyword phrases ‘dog care’ and ‘guinea pig care’ are vast! While it may cost you fifty cents to buy a surfer interested in Guinea Pigs you will pay ten times that amount the get a top listing for canine enthusiasts. If you are thinking of trying to buy keyword marketing for financial products such as car insurance then be prepared to pay upwards of $25 a visitor.

  Be very careful about rushing your product to market and spending a fortune on advertising. There is nothing more soul destroying than to spend thousands of dollars on advertising to not make a single sale. Trust me on this, people better qualified than you and I have learnt some very expensive lessons like this.

  Back in 2001 I was still working for the man but I was running my own Internet business on the side. The web was still a relatively new concept back then and I was keen to expand my knowledge, which up to this point had been 100% self-taught. I took a risk and quit my well-paid job with a radio station and took a position as a lowly regional editor with a new start up web portal called ‘The Click’.

  ‘The Click’ was based in Manchester, England and had been capitalized with one million pounds. When I heard the team talking about their grand plans to take over the world it was hard not to get excited. They assured me that while I would be starting with them, by looking after a small region of the North East of the UK. Within a few years I could realistically expect to move to New York, Amsterdam or well… pretty much anywhere I wanted to live.

  I assumed that by joining a full time, professional Internet Company I would learn exponentially from the people around me. I was excited that my tin pot collection of coding skills was about to get seriously ramped up. However, you know what they say about assuming… it makes an Ass of U and Me!

  What I quickly discovered was this young, vibrant team had passion and enthusiasm by the bucket load. But what they didn’t have any of was talent or experience. Instead of standing at the feet of giants and learning from their vast knowledge I found that I knew more about the internet than anyone there, including my bosses.

  This was nothing to feel proud about; I had given up a good job to take a huge risk. I wanted to learn and if I was to make up the drop in pay I had accepted, I needed to learn quickly. It was going to be impossible to learn very much if I was busy teaching other people what I already knew.

  By the time I arrived at the company they had already spent 250,000 pounds on web design! Even today I don’t really know how you spend that much money on a website. But they didn’t have a bloody clue what they were doing and expensive London based design agencies were milking the big fat cow that was ‘The Click’.

  With the website launched they implemented a vast marketing campaign. Taxi’s were wrapped in the website colors, huge billboards were bought along all the highways, radio and TV commercials commissioned. Hundreds of thousands of pounds invested in marketing the product. Creativity was encouraged at the expense at everything else, including common sense.

  I remember one day sitting in a brainstorm meeting for a client who wanted to run a competition on our website. Dewer’s Jam had launched a new line of Raspberry Jelly and wanted to give away, to one lucky person, a year’s supply. A years supply of anything sounds like a lot but seriously ask yourself how much jelly you go through in a year? This prize was really just a dozen jars of raspberry jam, worth about 2 pounds each.

  Under the company mantra of ‘no idea is a bad idea’ the crazy gang of tech newbies came up with the most ridiculous concept I have ever heard. They decided to run a competition on the website whereby people would register to attend a huge event at a local mall the following Saturday. Once the lucky ‘winner’ had spent more in gas than the jam is worth by travelling to the mall to attend a vague event. Two people would be selected at random to compete in a wrestling match in a paddling pool full of jam. The winner of the wrestling match would win the year’s supply of Dewer’s Raspberry Jam.

  I sat there with my jaw hanging open in silent shock. I remained there on my own as the team noisily whooped and screamed before high fiving each other and leaving the meeting room. I sat with my head in my hands – we were fucked!

  It doesn’t matter how amazing you think your product is. If it doesn’t serve a valuable purpose to other human beings than you are living in cloud cuckoo land. Nobody needs jam so much that they are will to humiliate themselves to get some. Just because we spent a quarter of a million pounds on advertising didn’t mean we were laughing all the way to the bank. Just because we had creativity didn’t mean we had a business.

  Another area where ‘The Click’ fell down was because it didn’t have a clear concept. I would repeatedly say to the directors ‘If I want to book a flight I go to the British Airways website. If I want to search the Internet I go to Google. Tell me, why would I EVER need to go to our website?’. I couldn’t answer that question and neither could they.

  Can you imagine friends chatting over coffee saying ‘hey, do you know anywhere I could wrestle in jam’?

  ‘The Click’ folded one year later; thankfully I managed to jump ship one month before it collapsed. I learnt a crazy amount during that one year with the internet start up. However, it wasn’t the sort of knowledge that I expected! The key learning is this, be passionate about what you are passionate about. Don’t try and be all things to all people. Your triumph is earned through the constant application of this passion. It is not bought through advertising or any other apparent short cuts to success.

  We all want to take the easy path in life but let me te
ll you ‘the easy path’ is the rat race. Most people leave school and get a job because that’s the easiest way to pay the bills. Anything that is easy is not worth having! Seriously, think about it! Do you want the guy or girl who is easy to get? Do you want to drive the car that everyone can afford? The secret to carving your own piece of the digital pie is through blood, sweat and hard work. However, if you are passionately in love with your subject matter then none of this will really feel like work at all.

  The Ten Actions of Successful Entrepreneurs

  “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful”, Albert Schweitzer

  We have a crazy situation at the moment in the world, especially in the United States. Donald Trump won the election preaching an anti-immigration message. Does it not seem bizarre that a nation built on immigration would choose to demonize and vote against immigrants? We have the same problem in the United Kingdom, with particular anger being vented in the direction of the Polish people who have arrived in large numbers. Over the past few decades’ employers of manual labor in the UK have had a problem, they couldn’t find enough people willing to get their hands dirty and do the work. Unbelievably, long term unemployed folk, living hand to mouth on state benefits consider manual labor beneath them! Such is the sense of entitlement that we have created, that they would rather live in poverty and spend their energy looking for someone to blame for their situation than they would just roll up their sleeves and take action.