Nine to Five Escape Plan

by Craig Beck

  Frustration – Determination – Passion – Success

  This is your strategy for success and just like a recipe for a cake, as long as you follow the directions you can repeat it over and over again. Now you need to just mentally rehearse getting into that state, to apply it to a new part of your life. So, let’s return to our previous example of feeling low in confidence around the opposite sex:

  First start by sitting comfortably with one hand on your lap, palm facing upwards. So if it is your left hand you are using, your little finger will be on the inside and closest too you. Next imagine talking to the opposite sex and feel frustration about the event. See yourself being annoyed at yourself for not being able to be the way you want to be around that hot guy or girl. When you can clearly see, hear and feel all the unpleasant sensations I want you to reach across with your free hand and squeeze your little finger. Hold the image for a few seconds and then let go of your finger and clear the image from your mind. Repeat this process three or four times.

  Now imagine and see yourself in that situation with determination in your body, mind and soul. There is a hot guy or girl and now you are super determined to be the best that you can be. Feel the same intensity of determination that you felt when you succeeded previously in another area of your life. As the feelings reach their peak squeeze the next finger along (4th), let the emotions linger and then subside, as they do release your finger. Again repeat this three or four times.

  Next up comes passion and we do exactly the same exercise with this emotion as the previous but we move along to the next finger to anchor it.

  Finally we see ourselves succeeding with the opposite sex, perhaps you picture your self agreeing to a date, making the other person laugh or getting their number. See it, feel it and hear it all in your imagination and squeeze your index finger as you do so. Repeat several times and relax.

  This is a technique called chaining anchors, if you do this often enough you will create a sub routine in your brain so that when you enter an environment that you are afraid of, the negative emotion you feel automatically leads to the next state in the chain, a bit like knocking over dominos but using emotions rather than small plastic bricks.

  Rat Race Escape Example – Sheralyn & Paul:

  I’ve spent so many nights lying awake at night, wondering if we’re doing the right thing by spending the best years of our lives slaving away at work, away from our kids, away from each other. I kept thinking we must be doing this wrong, that there must be a better way…

  And I’ve gotten to the point where I feel like it’s just too risky to wait until retirement to escape the rate race. It really is.

  The Stories That Totally Freak Me Out

  You’ve heard the stories like this, right?

  A woman whose husband died of a freak heart attack at age 45, or the guy whose wife died of cancer at 50. Or how about the guy who worked hard for over 40 years at his job, only to die a month after he retired? So many unfulfilled hopes and dreams…

  Most people spend the best years of their life working at jobs they hate, hoping to retire in their 60’s, hoping they’ll still be healthy enough to enjoy it.

  But there’s no guarantee we’ll even still BE here at the proper retirement age! And if we are, what kind of shape will we be in?

  “Live Each Day As if it’s Your Last!”

  I’m sure you’ve heard those inspirational speeches telling us to “Live each day as if it’s your last!”

  Well, we haven’t been doing that at all.

  We’ve been living the typical North American family life: our jobs are often thankless, we come home and rush through dinner, we seem to never have enough time to just hang out and relax with our kids, we don’t have enough time to devote to our hobbies, we’re unable to take our precious vacation time as we like… you know how it is, right?

  Surely we can do better than this!

  Am I an Ungrateful Jerk?

  Now I know that to some people, I must sound like a real jerk to be complaining about such seemingly trivial first-world problems. And I KNOW that we are SO lucky to have been born into one of the richest, safest countries in the world. And believe me, I’m grateful for that – VERY grateful.

  But, surely that doesn’t mean we have to stop pursuing our dreams, right?

  Scheming to Escape the Rat Race

  We only get one life, and I didn’t want to waste any more of mine by filling most of my time with stuff that I didn’t want to be doing.

  I want to travel and see the world, before I run out of time. I want to be free to pick up and go where I want, when I want, free of the restrictions that come with being someone else’s employee. I want to do the seemingly impossible – do all this even though we have 2 kids. Some would say my time for these kinds of dreams has passed me by… that I’m too late… that there are too many things tying me down…

  I started to scheme for our great escape from the rat race. It’s time to escape before it’s too late. The time has come to start living each day as if it might be my last. I get that every day won’t be perfect, but surely a better balance can be found.

  Paul once said I spent more time scheming to escape the rat race and travel than a convict planning their escape from a maximum security prison. He’s probably right.

  But you know what? It paid off.

  After years of scheming, planning, crunching numbers and rearranging them every which way, years of making decisions that would inch us towards our goal of freedom to travel, yes, YEARS, I finally came up with a plan that would work.

  Even if things go very wrong financially, it would get us a few years of travel. Not bad. And much better than 2-4 weeks vacation per year.

  And if all goes according to plan, we’ll have a life of permanent travel.

  So I guess this means we’re going to become a couple of vagabonding, homeschooling, semi-retirees, by an average age of 40. I’m so excited!

  You Have To Shoot If You Want To Score

  “If you're trying to be miserable, it's important you don't have any goals. No school goals, personal goals, family goals. Your only objective each day should be to inhale and exhale for sixteen hours before you go to bed again. Don't read anything informative, don't listen to anything useful, don't do anything productive. If you start achieving goals, you might start to feel a sense of excitement, then you might want to set another goal, and then your miserable mornings are through. To maintain your misery, the idea of crossing off your goals should never cross your mind.”, John Bytheway

  I want you to deeply understand why you bought this book. Stating that you want to quit the boring day job and tell the man to feck off is not enough! Why do you want this, what is that going to get you? I need you to be very clear about what your goals are and what you want to achieve at the end of reading this book.

  I love the story that Zig Ziglar tells about Howard Hill, the archer. He tells this story to demonstrate the absolute necessity of setting clearly defined goals. You see, Howard Hill was the world's finest archer; nobody was better with a bow and arrow than Howard. It's said that he never lost a single archery contest that he entered. He could shoot an arrow from 50 feet and hit the bull's-eye dead center. Then he could pull a second arrow out of his quiver and split the first one in half. This guy was amazing, exceptionally talented.

  But I'm going to make you a promise here and now. If you spent 20 minutes alone with me coaching you, I could get you to beat Howard Hill in an archery competition. Oh, but of course we'd have to blindfold Howard first. Oh yes, and spin him around a bit so he didn’t know which way he was facing. Now you're probably thinking, well Craig, that's just stupid. How on earth do you expect Howard to hit a target he can't see? That's a good question. Here's another one. How do you expect to hit a target you don't even have?

  You might be thinking ‘well Craig this all seems a bit pointless, my goal is to do what I am passionate about and earn a living from it – that’s why I bought your book dummy’.
But you see, escaping the rat race is not a goal – it is the byproduct of a goal. In exactly the same way that money is not a goal it is only what happens automatically when a plan comes together with passion and commitment.

  If you examine the top one hundred self-made entrepreneurs in the world you would find virtually none of them had a goal to get as much money as possible and become rich. These people will have become the best or first in their field and committed blood, sweat and tears to their endeavors. While they were busy being passionate about their purpose in life, no matter what they did or how fast they spent it – the money just kept rolling in. I really do believe that old Zig is right when he says you can get everything in life that you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.

  “Escaping the rat race is not a goal, quitting the day job is the byproduct of achieving a goal”

  There is a reason why you haven’t already taken the great leap into the unknown. Most people say they are afraid of what could go wrong. Fear can be useful but you have to understand where it is coming from. If fear is coming from real indications that charging ahead in a certain direction is going to lead to financial ruin then fair enough – sit up and pay attention.

  However, if the fear is being generated by lack of confidence then an entirely different response is required. Confidence can’t be built by setting a goal to be confident. If you came up to me and said ‘Seven, show me how to be more confident’, I would say ‘at what’? Do you want to make killer sales presentations, do you want to speak publically for a living or do you want to attract the woman of your dreams? Your goals need to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely (S.M.A.R.T). For example, I could set a goal that I am going to play professional football for the Niners.

  But lets look and see if that fits In with our rules for goal setting. Sure it’s specific and measurable – I would certainly know if I were out there on the field in the famous red and gold. However, is it achievable? I am a 42 year old British man who has never played football in his life, I won’t leave the house if it is raining and I don’t particularly aspire to move any faster than the speed I get up to while walking my dogs in the Cyprus countryside. I don’t care how passionate I get or how much positive self talk I can muster, the chances of me achieving this goal are somewhere between slim and none. That doesn’t mean it can’t ever be a goal, because I do believe anything is possible if you want it bad enough. But perhaps I need an intermediate goal to bridge the huge gap from where I am now and where I want to be.

  What I would like you to do is just stop reading for ten minutes and grab a pen. Write down, as many goals as you can, there are no rules at this point – it doesn’t matter whether your goals are big, small, crazy, impossible, childish or X-rated. If you want to be an astronaut then write it down, if you want to get the house painted by next summer write it down. But do try to think of things that you think you could do if you only had high enough confidence to do them.

  Next, I want you to go back through your list of goals and give them a timeline. Make up a target date to achieve them by, make this a stretch so that it puts some pressure on you. There is no point having a tiny goal such as ‘say hello to the cute receptionist at work’ and then setting a ridiculous time to achieve this of ‘within the next six months’. As you consider each goal ask yourself ‘what is stopping me doing this right now or tomorrow’?

  Now, take a separate piece of paper and write down the seven goals that are most achievable in the shortest period of time.

  Example:

  Join a gym and start getting fit – 1 Day

  Start planning my escape from the Rat Race – 3 Days

  Get to know Julia and ask her for a date – 2 weeks

  Lose 10lbs – 6 weeks

  Establish two new recurring revenue streams – 7 weeks

  Raise money for charity skydive – 2 months

  Do my first skydive – 3 months

  Put this list somewhere where you will see it at least several times a day. I keep mine taped to the side of my computer monitor but you could have it in the car, on your desk at work or even taped to the bathroom mirror. Make this a living-breathing document, as you achieve one goal replace it with another. I am reasonably confident that you could be alive for a thousand years and never struggle to find seven things you want to achieve. On my list at the moment are things like ‘Take my son to watch the Forty-Niners play in the Levi Stadium, San Francisco – 6 months’ and visit the ‘World War II museums of Munich, Germany – 3 months’. Visit Australia for the first time.

  The strange thing is, I have been doing this so long now that I am at the point where if I write it on the list I know it is going to happen. This makes writing something on the list almost as exciting as the day it comes true.

  But remember a piece of paper in and of itself is powerless. If you write a list of goals and do nothing then guess what will happen, that’s right – nothing, zip, zero, nada! As Henry Ford said ‘Nothing happens until something moves’. Even the biggest multinational companies such as Microsoft and Toyota started with the actions of just one man. One man or woman having an idea and deciding to take action forced companies that now employ hundreds of thousands of people around the world into reality. I firmly believe that everything happens for a reason and you ignore your intuition at your peril. Those little ‘Eureka’ moments that burst into your consciousness apparently from nowhere are little gifts of opportunity from the universe and if you don’t take action and accept the gift it will be given to someone else. It is almost like the universe knows what it wants done and it really wants you to have the opportunity but if you don’t take it and run with it then it will pass the baton to someone else.

  Let me give you an example from my own life where I didn’t listen to this voice of opportunity. In 1998 the Internet was in its infancy but I woke up one morning with an idea for a website. Back in the nineties people were still using the Yellow Pages to find tradesmen and services. If you are too much younger than me you might never have even heard of the Yellow Pages. Who doesn’t just tap a few words into Google when they want something done these days? Hell, you don’t even have to type the full sentence anymore. We are now so lazy that you only have to type three letters and Google says ‘hey buddy don’t bother typing anymore – I know what you are looking for’, but that is an entirely different subject.

  My idea was for a tradesman’s directory with a rating and reviews section that can’t be edited by the business. This would have given people a genuine source of reliable professionals and take away the risk of just picking a builder, plumber or carpenter out of the phone directory and hoping they know what they are doing. Of course today when I describe this it doesn’t sound in the slightest bit unique or groundbreaking. Trust me, back in 1998 this was something that didn’t exist. Sure there were review sites but all the tradesmen suspiciously had straight 5 stars reviews. Not a single company listed had EVER had anything less than a 100% happy review; you could smell the bullshit from miles away. This idea floated around in my mind for a few weeks and I even did a little research and brainstorming with my wife and friends. Eventually I let people persuade me that it was too difficult and took it no further.

  Fast forward ten years to 2008 and I am sitting watching television with my wife and kids and in the middle of the X-Factor, they were into their twentieth commercial break (or so it felt) and up pops an advertisement for my tradesman review website. Not just my idea but the name I came up with and even the exact domain name that I had registered and allowed to lapse many years previous. What struck me was this concept was being promoted slap bang in the middle of prime time television – the marketing budget alone must have been into the tens of millions.

  You don’t need me to explain the moral of this story because it is obvious. What it gives you right here and now is an option with some leverage attached to it. You can skip on to the next chapter or you can go back and do the goal setting exerci
se that you didn’t go earlier. You see I know the stats on this, over eighty percent of the people who listened to me explain how to set a goals list said to themselves ‘I will do it later’ and eighty percent of those people never will.

  It’s important to mention at this point that having goals does not mean that everything has to go according to the plan in order for you to claim success. There really is no such thing as perfect and you should free yourself of the instance that failure must be avoided at all costs.

  If your goal is to get capital investment for your project and every bank you approach says no. That does not mean you have failed – it simply means you have successfully found one route to financing that doesn’t work. Get used to being told no, it’s going to happen a lot. Getting knocked down is inevitable. Getting back up again is the choice.

  Have an expectation to succeed but dump the illusion that failure is risk. You would probably agree with me that Wayne Rooney is a very confident and successful soccer player, Colin Keapernick is a very talented football player and Victor Marteniz is a superb baseball star of the MLB. But what do we mean by confident and why are they considered to be so much more worthy of the label than we give ourselves?