Quit the Day Job? 🤔

In this episode, I'll cover Ken Atchity's book, How to Quit Your Day Job and Live Out Your Dreams: A Guide to Transforming Your Career. 

Sounds great. But... some of his advice seems a little risky to me.

Let's explore the good, the hmm, and the uh-oh. 

Links:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Quit-Your-Live-Dreams/dp/1616086866

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7yr-za_Meo

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Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Her forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will release globally on July 29, 2026. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses Ken Atchity's book "How to Quit Your Day Job and Live Out Your Dreams," rating it 3.5 out of 5. She highlights its mixed reviews, with 3.7 on Goodreads and 4.5 on Amazon. Sara appreciates Ken's advice on self-investment and the importance of pursuing one's true path. She critiques his risky financial advice, such as delaying bill payments and using credit cards. Sara emphasizes the need for responsible decision-making and professional guidance, especially in financial matters. She also shares her personal journey and the importance of living authentically, preferring her unconventional lifestyle to a traditional 9-to-5 job.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Ken's book, career transformation, day job, midlife crisis, Type C personality, financial advice, self-employment, creative freedom, personal investment, career change, risk management, professional judgment, life process, networking, financial stability.

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at Causey consulting llc.com, and now here's your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I want to talk about Ken Atchity's book how to quit your day job and live out your dreams, a guide to transforming your career. I'm tempted to say that's what everybody wants, right? But actually it's not. It might be what most people want, but we can't technically say everybody wants that, because some people are happy, plugged in at a job. They work outside the home for somebody else, and they enjoy it. They don't feel called to go off on some grand Don Quixote adventure somewhere else, they don't feel like the grass is greener. Somewhere else, they're happy with what they're doing. And my feeling is, if that's you, that's great. This book might not be for you. It might not speak to you, but I have the sneaking suspicion that a vast majority of people are going to say, Yeah, I've my hand is in the air. I want to know how to quit the day job and live out my dreams right now, it's running at about a 3.7 out of five on Goodreads and about a four and a half out of five on Amazon, which seems fair to me. If I were rating it on a scale of five, I would probably give it a three and a half. And that's mostly because I find some of his advice to be really interesting and helpful, and then I find some of it to be super risky. There were passages that when I was reading this book for myself, I was like, I wouldn't I definitely don't know that I would recommend some of the things that he says to other people. Now I always say very clearly on any of my podcasts, I opine for your entertainment only, and that's it. I don't tell you what to do or what not to do. You have to be a responsible adult caveat and tour and make decisions for yourself. It's not my responsibility to do that for you, and it's not Ken actually's responsibility either. So if you're reading a book or you're listening to an influencer and your gut reaction to something is, I don't know about that, that feels high risk, that feels like it could be dangerous. In my situation, I think you want to pay attention to that gut instinct. There are times when we can be Chicken Little and we can get into being catastrophic. The sky is falling. The world is against us. Nothing is ever going to be right again. Woe is me. And we know that that's anxiety talking. But there are other times when we have that sensation of this feels uncomfortable. This feels like something that could backfire in my face, and I don't want to end up like Wile E Coyote, getting my face exploded from acne dynamite, as with anything, use your own best judgment before you decide to jump off a cliff. You better be damn sure, in my opinion, that you know your parachute will open. I've been in situations where my parachute didn't and I went splat, and I know how crazy and scary that feels. So any book that seems to me that is recommending that you just say, Screw it, FOMO and Yolo and whatever. I have trepidation about that. Personally. 

Sara's award winning biography of Dag Hammarskjold, Decoding the Unicorn, is available on Amazon. Her forthcoming project Simply Dag will launch globally next summer, to stay in the loop, join her email list. The link is provided in the write up for this episode. And now back to the show. 

I picked up this book because I didn't want to get into a Julia Cameron echo chamber. I really like her works, and I think the artist way is just incredible. As you may well remember, I did a little mini series on it here on this podcast. I just think it's an amazing book. And I have been looking at some of her other books. She has an artist way trilogy. And I've been slowly working on the second book, which is it's called something like walking through this world or walking in the world. I haven't been doing it steadily as a 12 week dedicated program. I've just been picking it up here and there as I have time, but I didn't, I didn't want to get in a situation where it's like, the only person I'm listening to about the arts or following your vocation creatively is Julia. She's great, but she's only one person. And I found this video one of those things, like by coincidence, but not coincidence, from a YouTube channel called film courage, and it's called, quit your day job and live out your dreams, by Dr Ken actually had never heard of him before. Had never heard of this book. I watched the video, which, as of this recording, has more than 2 million views, so a lot of people were in. Interested in the topic, clearly. And I thought, well, I'm interested enough in this premise to check out the book and see what he has to say. If, like me, you'd never heard of Ken actually before. Here's a little bit of backstory. Ken actually had been a college professor, and when he was in his 40s. I think, if I'm remembering correctly, he achieved tenure, and that's the goal. It also hit for me, because I'm in my 40s as well. I was born toward the end of Gen X, and I definitely have noticed a different sensation. It's just things hit differently in your 40s than they did before. I've heard David Bayer explain it this way, and I think it's so savvy. In your 20s, things are chaotic, and they're kind of meant to be chaotic. You're finding yourself. You might be goth and emo one day and then preppy the next, and straight laced and loosey goosey. You might change jobs five different times. You might go in completely different career paths. You might date different people to try to figure out who's your type and who isn't. It's just part of the mess. It's part of being in your 20s. Then in your 30s, you start to dial in, you start to refine. You start doing away with things that didn't work so well for you and focusing on the things that did work. You may pick a career and stick with it. You may pick a job and stick with it. You may get married or boot up with a partner. You may start to have kids. You might buy a home, or in this economy at least, try to find a place you can rent long term and feel nested and stable. You get into your 40s, particularly along about mid to late 40s, and it's like, oh my God, all the things that worked for me before are not working now. As women, we get into perimenopause, or full menopause, which is lovingly called Adult puberty, and you're like, What is even happening to my body? My hormones are crazy. It's like my body is trying to go fallow. But at the same time, I'm having the same problems as a teenage kid. I've got acne again, why? My hair is thinning. I've got wrinkles that weren't there yesterday, and all of a sudden I have a menopausal spare tire that it's taking an act of God to get rid of what is this, Jane, Get me off this crazy thing. That's how you feel, and you realize that the things that worked for you in your 20s and 30s are not going to be the same things that carry you through this next phase of your life. So Ken is in his 40s. He achieves tenure at this university, and his friends and his colleagues are all back slapping and hey, this is great. This is what every academic wants. You've arrived. You don't have to prove yourself anymore. You don't have to work so damn hard. You've arrived, you're safe. That is the draw of it, the notion that unless you really do something egregious, something that's basically criminal, you're not going to be fired unless the university goes totally bankrupt and shuts its doors. You're not going to be out of a job. And for Ken, instead of it feeling liberating, which it does to some people, some people get to that space and they think I can breathe. I was under all this pressure. I felt like I was performing on a high wire, and now I can come down and be back on the ground. For some people, that's liberating, and it feels like getting out of a vice grip. But for Ken, it was the opposite. He felt like he was trapped. Instead of feeling like he'd been liberated, he felt like he was placed into a gilded cage. The Cage might be attractive, but it's still a cage, and his friends were like, well, you've achieved this awesome thing. Just just let it ride. This could be a midlife crisis. Don't blow up your life. Just let it ride. He was interested in becoming what he calls a story merchant, someone who creates ideas and then pitches them to Hollywood to have them made into movies. We could also just simply call it a screenwriter. If we don't want to be quite so highfalutin, we could just call it a screenwriter. And his friends, again, are like, that's cool, but keep your day job. Keep being a professor. Write these screenplays or these novels or whatever on the side. Keep it as a side hustle, but keep your day job, then you've got the stability, and you get the best of both worlds. And one day, who knows, by gum, if you succeed, if you make it in Hollywood, like hitting the lottery, then you can quit. But until you're a millionaire and you've had several successful movies made, you need to just keep on being a professor. And he just couldn't do it. He looked at his schedule, and he was like, oh my god, each year of my life, ad infinitum, is going to be planned out. I'm going to have to live by the syllabus, and the college is going to tell me where I'm going and what I'm doing. In October, you have to speak at this symposium. In February, you have to go to Manhattan and do this and do that, and you have to live. Die by the syllabus. And he thought, I just can't do it. I don't want that kind of structure. And he decided, in his words, to trade the illusion of stability for the illusion of freedom. I feel like he's realistic enough to say it's all an illusion. It's the illusion of stability, it's the illusion of freedom. And he felt like, if I have to make my choice, then I'd rather be free. I don't. I don't want to be trapped in this job.

A number of people, friends and colleagues, thought he had gone nuts, that he had taken the midlife crisis too far. And that's something else that we encounter in our 40s. If you hit the reset button on life and you say, what I'm doing now is not working for me. I want a career change, or I want to follow my bliss. You will have people that look at you pretty pejoratively and condescendingly. This is a midlife crisis. You're just like the guy who goes bald and he buys a sports car and he wants to start dating women who are only 20 years old. I apologize. I had to go get a throat lozenge. It's like, here in the Midwest, you get to this point in the autumnal season where everything's dying off, and so you get seasonal allergies all over again, and it's like, I'm totally fine, until I sit down. I finally have the time and the ability to record a podcast episode, and I sit down to do it, and suddenly it's like my throat and my voice box decide to be utterly uncooperative. So I apologize, it is what it is. But Ken learned that you'll have people who are friends and then people who are friendly associates. And you know how it is in life, you're going to have more people that are just friendly associates than people that are true blue friends. They're with you through thick and thin. They're emotionally supportive, and they genuinely care about you as a person. They're not in some weird psychological competition with you. They want you to win. They want you to succeed. And so what Ken noticed was that the friendly associates were the type that they might smile to his face and be congenial, but then behind his back, it was like he's having a midlife crisis. He should just go buy a Corvette and get over it. Like this is crazy, trying to go off and make it in Hollywood that is just so stupid. And it's like you have to decide, do you want those people around you? Because if people are going to drag you down and poop all over your dreams. Should they really have access to you? Is that something that you need in your life? I mean, I would argue that it's not. I would rather have a small group of core people around me that I can trust, as opposed to a large group of friendly associates, people that might say nice things to you, but then the minute your back is turned, they've got a knife out. No thanks. So we go through this book, and as I said, it has some interesting concepts. It's not exactly what I was expecting, because when you look at the title and the subtitle. It really feels like it's going to be step by step. Here's how I did it, and how you could possibly do it too. I mean, let's, let's go back and remember it's called how to quit your day job and live out your dreams. A Guide to transforming your career. I'm thinking, okay, a guide, literally, at some point in this book there's going to be A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and if there was, I didn't find it, that's not what I took out of it. Now I want to hit some highlights here, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In my opinion, that's all it is. I'm just I'm just giving you the the world as I see it. One thing that he says that I highlighted and was like, yes, 100% yes. He writes, The Ultimate investment is investing in yourself by designing a life around your unique interests. Okay, hold on just a second. I want to give that a round of applause. You can preach that word all day long. The ultimate investment is investing in yourself. And I think that's going to prove out even truer. He published this book in 2012 that's going to prove out even truer. It's late 2025 now. So we may as well just say in 2026 when we have this advent of AI, I really do think that you're going to see over the next few years, pretty significant job loss. And I'm not saying that people won't find something else to do, or some other place to go. I'm not prepared to go full tilt dystopia. I just think we have to be realistic. We have to understand that some jobs that can be automated by robots and bits of AI programming will be even if it starts out flimsy and unreliable. In the beginning, the technology will improve. We also live in the age of quantum computing. You think about machines that can solve problems that are way too complex for the human mind, just because, and then this is more a topic for my nighttime podcast, but I just I it's, it merits me saying it here. Okay, just because John and Jane Q Public have access to technology that feels clunky to us, we might be having a chat with AI, and we're like, Dude, we talked about this in another tab. How come you don't have better memory? Like we may be frustrated by the limitations of this AI, but you can bet that governments and the military intelligence and military industrial complexes have access to things that would blow our effing minds. It's like how DARPA had access to the internet before we ever even knew such a thing existed. They had it and they used it look it up. That's not a conspiracy theory that's been proven true and admitted. So you can bet there's sophisticated AI that you and I have not even seen yet. You have to invest in yourself. In my opinion, you have to figure out what am I good at? It reminds me a lot of the Judaic concept of teak and olam that there's a you sized hole in the world, otherwise you wouldn't be here. So what is your purpose? What is your raison? Detra, that is an investment. I think that's always worth making. He also quotes from LBJ, who I was like, Oh, I wish somebody else had said it, besides him, because I just not, not my favorite president. But the quote is to hunger for use and to go unused. That is the greatest hunger of all. That's such a savvy point. Such a savvy point, to feel like you have some greater purpose. There's something that's not being tapped into, and then to never explore that is sad. It's like how Wayne Dyer would always say, don't die with your music still in you. Another thing that Ken says that resonates is everyone's first career is an accident. The next career, the child of your choice is your mighty purpose that makes life worth living. Okay, I'm going to do it again. This is like what David bear talks about, your 20s, it's messy, it's chaotic, it's kind of cuckoo. Your 30s, you get a bit more dialed in, but you typically get focused on a career. A lot of times, in our 30s, we get tired of the job hopping. We just want some stability. We want some predictability. I know what my address is, I know what I'm going to come home to. I know what my paycheck is. But once you get into that place, whether it's in midlife for you or it's later in life that next career, as he calls it, the child of your choice, is something that can completely and totally change the game for you. A major concept that he explores in this book that I think is also quite handy is the concept of a Type C personality. A lot of us have heard of type A and type B, as if to say everybody falls into one of these two clearly defined categories. For a great portion of my life, I was clearly type A. I'll never forget I took a cooking class in Seattle, and we were making crepes, and I just remember, like, I want my crepe to be the best crepe you had everybody else, like, kind of messing around, and maybe it was loosey, goosey and messy. And I'm like, I don't remember the chef walked over and she was like, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect. This is just a cooking class. And I was like, no, actually, it does. I'm a type A personality, and it does have to be perfect. Just leave me be and let me do this. And she was like, okay, knock yourself out, pal. And my crepes were the best. Okay, let's just be honest. They were. They look the best, they tasted the best. So my effort was worth it. But I describe myself as a recovering type, a personality, hard, driving fast. I need it now. Can the car go faster? Can we get there faster? It was nuts. There was also a book written about type a behavior in your heart. And so for me, that's another reason why I've had to modify my behavior. I have post heart problems. I wish I didn't, but I do, and that that crap is not good for you, man, if you've got an arrhythmia, if you have issues with your heart, you don't need to be stressed all the time with a white knuckle grip on the steering wheel, literally or metaphorically. Okay, then on the other. Side of the pendulum you have Type B, loosey, goosey, anything goes, Man, hey, kind of like your archetypal hippie, it's all good man, peace and love. I don't got to worry about that. No, it's cool. Or an archetypal pothead.

Ken makes a distinction of the Type C personality. And he says, you can think of it as C for creative or C for crazy, but he makes this construction of type A is the accountant. It's that person in your brain that's going to always be worried about the numbers. How much money is in the bank. What are we going to do? You've got to pay your rent again soon, and where's your next check coming from? And how is this going to work? And then the type B part of your brain is what he calls the visionary, someone that's like, go for it. Just do it, try it out. What's the worst that could really happen? The Type B is more motivational and more visionary. The Type C is the person who tries to integrate those voices in a way that's good for your mental health. So you're not putting anything to the side or trying to ignore anything important. You're simply saying, I will take pieces of both and integrate it into my life. Yes, I understand that the accountant side of my brain has a valid point, but so does the visionary. And in fact, one of the things that he says is like, once they get their heads together, once you can get these two things working in sync, you really have something special that can help to catapult you to new heights. Another thing that he says is that the balanced type C not only has a vision, but also the determination required to pursue that vision. So it's not just peace and love and it'll just happen like I can sit on my couch and watch TV and it'll just all work out, but then also not the hard driving. I gotta do it now, now, now, now, when you get into that balance, as he says, you have the vision, but you also have the oomph, the gumption to get it done. And I love this quote. I highlighted it. We're lucky. Most people live in someone else's dream. We get to live in our own okay? I know that's real. I'm done living somebody else's dream. Okay, done, done. I was thinking about that earlier today, and I was pulling together some notes for this episode. I was like, sometimes it's a bit like being stuffed into a girdle, but like from an early age, like somebody sticks a girdle on you, and it's uncomfortable, but you can still live your life. You can eat, you can breathe, you can sleep, you can move, you can eat, but you don't know how constricting that girdle is until you take it off. You get to that point in midlife where you're like, I am cutting this thing off of my body, if it is the last thing I do, and then you get out of it, you throw it on the ground, and you're like, oh, it's like the psychic sensation of when a woman gets home from town and she takes her bra off and it's like, Ah, I can just let the girls flop freely, and I'm free. It's like that. I'm free. I don't I don't feel constricted and restricted anymore. Another passage that I highlighted is he has this old Cajun saying, If you ain't scared, you ain't doing nothing important, that's true too. Just because you're living in your dream and you feel like the world is full of ripe and beautiful possibilities, it doesn't mean that you're never going to feel scared, because you will. He also points out, kind of on that note, for for something that plagues those of us, in particular, I think, who are recovering Type A's. He talks about how that accountant side of your brain wants you to work at some kind of lucrative job, or some kind of highly predictable job where you're getting a weekly or bi weekly paycheck. You know where the next check is coming from. Or you think you know, because anybody can get laid off, furloughed companies can close down, etc, but you think you know, your brain, your accountant brain, is tricked into thinking that it knows where the next check and the next meal is coming from. And he points out something that is so right on the money. No pun intended, so right on the accountant is never satisfied. He always wants to know where the next one will come from, and the next and the next and the next. The accountant is never satisfied, even secure in the vision. Of 1000s of meals night after night on the same patio at the same grill, until you're ready for retirement, then what will we eat? He wants to know. Yes, that's another reason why I describe myself as being a recovering type A because, damn, you get so sick of that voice in your head, oh, my God. What's next? What's next? What's next. That got drilled into me a lot when I was still doing third party staffing, because that's what it's all about. Last month doesn't matter. Last week doesn't matter. I will never forget a time where I had closed a major deal. It brought in some really good money for the company, and I was not even hero for the day. He wrote for five minutes more like and this guy who was a partner in the company came up, squeezed my shoulder, and he's like, what's next? And I thought, Jesus, Dude, can I not take one victory lap? That's what the industry is like, and that is also what your mental accountant is like, what next? What are you what are you going to do next? Yesterday is gone. You don't get to take that victory lap. What are we going to eat? What are we going to do? And then after that, and then after that. And it's like, oh my god, can you can you maybe stop.

In chapter six, which is titled A Day in the Type C life, he writes, I recognize that I preferred my lifestyle to that of the non weird. I do too. I do too, and my life objectively speaking, if you looked at it as a non artist, if you looked at it from the outside, it would be like, What have you done? I don't know. I just went with the flow. Man, it's almost like what was done to me and what was done for me. I never planned any of this. I never had any idea that I would would really and truly wind up being a writer, an illustrator, an artist, a biographer of dag hammers. For years, I never even knew who dag was. Wouldn't have cared. Life can take some very intriguing twists and turns, and I agree with Ken, I prefer my lifestyle to that of the non weird. If I had to make a choice between going back and sitting in a cubicle under fluorescent lighting and wearing a business suit or like right now I'm still in pajamas, and I I have on my pajamas. Have like, unicorns and stars all over them, appropriately enough, given the title of some of my books, but like, I can't even imagine it. I cannot imagine wadding myself into a cubicle under fluorescent lighting and sitting in an uncomfortable business suit. I prefer this to that of the non weird.

Something else that he writes in chapter seven, which is money mania, that I do agree with is Tom Bergen used to write me to encouragingly say, Don't worry about money. Money always comes. I used to find it exceedingly difficult to trust this advice, thanks to my accountant father and money conscious family, but I found that it's true. Somehow there always seems to be enough for what's important. I agree, but disclaimer here, your results may vary, because I have been in situations where I didn't feel like I had enough and I panicked my first iteration of self employment that failed, I was miserable all the time. I was miserable over money, miserable over a lack of money, and miserable because it felt like nobody wanted or needed what I had to offer. I felt like one grain of sand on a giant beach, and I just could not get traction. Try as I might, I could not get traction. He points out in the book The American accountant is especially strong because of our pervasive Puritan heritage, our national love affair with practicality and immediate security. That's true too. It really is. And so it is difficult in some respects for those of us living in the States to overcome all of the corporate programming that we've had. It's like how Rockefeller said, I don't want good students and thinkers, I want good employees. For years, that's what we've been trained to do, to be a cog in the machine. And it can be really damn difficult sometimes to overcome that programming and do what you want to do. But as I said, I think about putting on a business suit and sitting in a cubicle. I mean, don't send help or anything, but that kind of makes me want to die. That's how strongly I feel about it. I don't, I don't want to do that. Oh, I have a visceral, sickening reaction to that. Also in chapter seven, money mania, he writes, The Entrepreneur's goal is not to make money, but to earn his living doing something he loves to do. And I. Would say that yes, yes. But entrepreneurship can also be morphed into another version of hustle and grind. It can be you hustle and grind for yourself and for your freelance clients instead of hustle and grinding for one employer, it can absolutely turn into same poop different day. And we, we just want to be careful that self employment, if that's what you choose to do, doesn't turn into another trap. It can be just like what Ken is saying about how he perceived being a tenured professor. It was a cage. It was it was a gilded cage, but it was still a cage. That's what can happen to entrepreneurship and self employment if you're not careful. I also highlighted from chapter eight, which is your mind body asset base. Remember that success is in process. It's not in product or in result. He talks about taking care of yourself. When you're an artist, you are your best asset, your mind, your creativity, so take good care of your mind and your body. I feel that that's true too. Julia Cameron, in the artist way, talks about having an artist date, having times where you consume the content of others. You do something fun for you. You're not always producing, and that can be tough again, coming from that puritanical type a mindset, I need to be productive. I need to be doing, doing, doing going, going, going going, stopping and saying, No, I don't I can take a day off. I can rest. I can go into my little reading nook and read for pleasure to Not tonight, not for research, but for pleasure. Or I can stretch out on the couch with the dogs and watch a movie, not because I intend to cover it for a podcast episode. Or I intend to look at the plot and try to get something academic out of it, but I just want to enjoy it for a couple of hours. You're allowed to do those things. Chapter Nine is titled dealing with people, ah, and he calls out family, spouses, best friends, ex friends, associates, winners, losers, saviors, naysayers, white knights, Black Knights, Clay gods of the little red hen. One of the things he writes is the friends. And he's put friends in air quotes here the friends that you had their affection getting strained. Replace those hoops with elastic bands. Be only with people with whom you can be yourself put differently. What we're saying here is some of the people that supported you when you were a cubicle drone. Are not going to support you when you decide to be something else, whether that's a self employed entrepreneur, a business owner, an artist, a writer, a sculptor, whatever, they're going to look at that and say, Nope, I think you're crazy. It boils down so often to jealousy. You are doing something that I am too scared to do, or I feel too trapped. You're freer than I am. You don't have the responsibilities, you don't have this, you don't have that. And it's like everybody has their own set of advantages and disadvantages. You have to figure out how to work with what you've got, instead of fighting everything all the time. I also highlighted a passage that says synchronicity always happens when you're pursuing your true path. I believe that to be true. I also highlighted networking with the wrong people is worse than not networking at all. I'd much rather read a book. Oh yes, King, I can remember so many times when I was in staffing where it was like, You should go to this happy hour. You should go to this networking brunch. You should go to this breakfast. And it's like, no. The only thing that happens at a lot of those networking events is it's other sales people. Everybody in there is desperate, and they're all trying to hand out their business cards. They think a client or a consumer is going to show up to some networking breakfast, and they don't. So I totally understand what he's saying, even from just a practical sales point of view, but obviously we can stretch that out to say if you're hanging out with bad company, if you're hanging out with people that put you down and make you feel like crap, then hanging out with those people is worse than being by yourself. Go read a book that would be better than being with people that are going to poop all over your parade. And I also have highlighted people who are regularly deified don't like it. It's dehumanizing to be a god. I highlighted that really, because of the work that I do for Dag hammarsk. You know the idea of him in some circles, he's a saint. He's a secular saint. He's not allowed to be human. Like, yeah, he he was human. He was a person in a flesh soup. He's not now. He's a spirit. But he was a human in a flesh suit. He didn't always get everything right, and it is very annoying. It is so flattening, and it becomes a caricature. To either make somebody you're a secular saint, a God amongst mere mortals, or you're the devil. We see that particularly. I would say in JFK scholarship, he either becomes a liberal hero who is going to save the world, or he's the worst devil, a sex crazed pervert who was just the worst human being that ever lived on the planet. And it's like, um, this feels extremely hyperbolic to me, just saying now for some of the things that gave me like a sensation when I was reading this book. He talks about bankruptcy in a what I would personally call a fairly flippant way, way more flippant than I would be comfortable talking about it, because he has this attitude of, like, look, we're in America, okay, we're not in the Soviet Union. This is not a bygone era where Stalin is going to throw you in the Gulag. So in a worst case scenario, if you run up a lot of debt, or you have to live on credit cards, and then your ship doesn't come in, you can always just declare bankruptcy, you can always start over, and it's not that big of a deal, and it's like, Ah, I don't know about that. I I personally feel that that's risky advice. That's not something that I personally would recommend, that somebody do. I'm always much more conservative, and my feeling is more so like, yeah, credit is there for you to use it when you need to. But I, I Personally, myself, would never just throw caution to the wind and say, Screw it. I'm going to run up a bunch of credit cards and hope for the best. For one thing, I've already had that experience. My first iteration of self employment, I relied on credit a lot. And yeah, I mean, technically, it got me through, but if it came with a price tag, oh, the interest rates and watching my credit score dip, it was awful. And he makes the point in this book. He says, your credit rating is important, but it's not all important. And I'm like, Well, yeah, it's not all important. It's not what defines you as a human being, or anything like that. But I'm thinking of Bill Hicks, if you think you live in a free society, try going somewhere without money and see how far you get. I personally would not feel comfortable telling anybody, screw your credit report, screw your credit rating, like do whatever with it and see what happens that that doesn't feel safe to me. So he has this whole section called Creative money management. And yeah, it's creative. One thing he says is to reduce your overhead. Okay, that makes sense. I personally prefer what Dan lock says about if you feel like you don't have enough to make ends meet, you have an income problem. You really don't have a savings problem, you have an income problem, and you'll be happier solving the income problem. It's kind of like boomers who say that millennials could buy a house if they stop buying coffee and they stop eating avocado toast. And it's like, Do you have any idea how much a house is now? It's not a wonder. They can't afford it, putting $5 into a savings account every day, the amount of money, the amount of time that it would take, like it is, to me, it's a ridiculous suggestion. Okay, so reduce your overhead only goes so far. In my mind. To me, you don't want to be wasting money on frivolous nonsense, but trying to do this routine of, I'm going to suffer and live an ascetic lifestyle, because I think saving $5 a day is going to make some dramatic difference. I mean, maybe, sorry, my voice is trying to go again, maybe if you bought stock at the right time, if you took that savings and you bought stock on the ground floor of something that exploded, it might pay off, but it wouldn't be because you squirreled the money away and put it in savings. It would be because you invested it in a lucky break. So to me, the reduce your overhead argument is like, maybe he also writes, you don't have to pay all your bills on time again. That's a little bit like, know about that? I don't, I don't know that. I I don't know that that's the advice that I give somebody. You don't have to pay everything that's due each time. Imperfect credit is so normal that it's not even worth worrying about. And I'm like, uh, also risky advice. In my opinion, your credit rating is important, not all important. No, it doesn't define who you are as a person. As a soul, but it can make your life really freaking hard if you have a low credit score, improvise, okay, sure, think on your feet. Juggle money every two weeks, not every day. That also has some merit. He talks about, worry about the first and the 15th of each month, but don't worry about every single day and and I honestly, from a psychological point of view, I think that's that's decent advice. If you have this constant scarcity loop going on in the back of your mind, you know what you're going to get more scarcity. Write your checks on time, but send them out on your time, which basically means, like, write the check, but then put it in the mail whenever you feel like it again. Kind of risky. Rob Peter to pay. Paul. Have done that before, during that first iteration of self employment, I don't personally recommend it. Make them beg a little make bill collectors come to you. Or if somebody has loaned you money and you don't have it, make them beg to get it back. I don't know that I would do that. Tell people that check is in the mail. Take advantage of the obvious. And one of the things he writes is that credit cards have fund funded a number of career changes. Yeah, yeah, that's true, but you you have to know what you're doing with credit cards. Rich people do use credit cards. They absolutely do. You just have to know how to use them to your benefit, not in such a way that you get foisted on your own petard, he also writes, not to be afraid of the IRS.

I would be. I would be, yeah, that's also, in my mind, risky advice. And finally, he has, How bad would it be to get a job or keep your present job, which I think is just his way of saying, if all of this sounds scary AF to you, maybe you do just need to stay in a day job for a while, until something else hits. And maybe you do, I don't know. I can't tell you what to do or what not to do in that situation. The point I'm making for this recording is he has what I would call some pretty risky financial advice in there, and it's not advice that I follow or that I would recommend anybody else to follow, as always, if you're thinking about making some kind of major life decision in that direction, talk to a financial planner, a credit counselor, etc, get with a professional who can give you legitimate financial advice. It will no pun intended, pay dividends to know what you're doing on the front end, as opposed to listening to some rando in a book or on the internet. So always use good judgment and caveat emptor. So my review basically, is this, as I said, I give it a three and a half out of five stars. I think there's some excellent information in there, but it's not what I was expecting. It's not, it's not really in my mind. A, how to an, a, b, c, d, e, f, g, on how to quit your day job and live the life of your dreams. It's almost more like a collection of sporadic advice, some of which is good, and some of which, in my opinion, is incredibly risky, and it's not advice that I would follow. The book overall is still worth checking out. I would still recommend it. I would, just as Tim Gunn likes to say, use your editing eye, think critically and decide what works for you, what makes sense for you and what doesn't. Stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode.

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