Making money has been a goal of mine ever since I was about 12, when I made my own business cards on powerpoint for my new dog walking business. Then at 14, I began tie dying shirts, which was more successful and I made my first real amount of money.
I never wanted to work at McDonald’s or any other typical job a young teenager works because I heard my friends complaining about poor pay and long hours, and I think this sentiment has endured for me. To this day I still don’t want to have to go into work 5 days a week, I want to have flexibility. Moreover I want to be doing something I love and I don’t think you can love having to go into work every day.
So I don’t want to have to work full-time, great, but how do I achieve that? It’s not like I can say oh yeah I’ll just work part-time for the rest of my life, unless I happen to marry rich (fingers crossed!). I need a strategy to make up the lost income which comes from not working full-time.
I’m yet to figure out how I will make up that lost income, with many ideas but no action so far. I was listening to a podcast with Austin Kleon (the author of Show your work!) and he said “you may have several passions and by doing all of them you may not have a career, but you’ll have a good life.” This really resonated with me because I feel that if I went into a full-time job I would strive to progress in that, jumping on the hamster wheel like everyone else to continue to get pay rises and jostle for positions. I don’t want that. I want time to focus on what I really enjoy doing, writing, learning new things, having ideas, teaching people, having in depth discussions and exercising.
I’ve noticed since I’ve been at my placement 4 days a week and studying the rest that the time I spend doing these things has reduced significantly. So I don’t yet have a solution on how to recoup the income gap between part time work and a full-time career, maybe it is something I don’t even know exists yet. I trust that if I keep my options open, and continue to work hard, opportunities will present themselves to me. Maybe that belief is naive, maybe I do have to work full-time, but I don’t think it is.
This also raises a thought reminiscent of ‘The Four-Hour Work Week,‘ how much money do you really need to be happy and live the life you want, but that’s a conversation for another blog post.
I feel like this is something unique to me, this whole desire to not work full-time, but at the same time I feel it should be universal, so I’m interested to hear others thoughts on this and start a conversation about work and why we actually do it.
Aside: To challenge myself to continue writing and doing things I love I’ve set myself a challenge, 50 days, 50 blog posts. There are 50 days left in the year, and I want to write more, so I’m going to set aside some time every day to sit down and write, something, anything.
Harrison Hansford 