I don't need much to live on, I just need more time to live!
That's a very profound statement Brock. For years I've chased a dollar through corporate America. I've worked for 4 companies in the past 10 years. Each one in a higher position of pay and responsibility. In the IT world your skills are constantly changing by emerging technologies. If you stay up to date and learn those technologies you become more marketable. For instance if you work at ABC company and they buy a new widget that's an emerging technology, if you go all out and learn it you've just upped your marketability. Raises at a company never keep up with marketability. Usually they're between 2-5%. But learning that new technology just increased your market worth to another company by 15-20%. Because they may buy that technology too and not possess the staffing with the drive to learn it.
The problem is technology runs 24x7x365 not just 9-5. When it breaks you're getting a call, you're on the phone on a conference call, you're on your laptop trying to get it back online. Basically you're always in call. Last week I didn't get home before 9:30 a single day except Friday. It has it's perks. 100 dollar a plate steak dinners, comped trips to vegas, etc. but all of these things take time from my family. The money is good, but nothing pays enough to sacrifice your family.
With Jessica and I about to get married, thinking about kids, and the rest of out lives I need to start planning an exit strategy from corporate America. The system is rigged to where we're never supposed to retire. In the 50's a man could work and the wife didn't have to, they could raise a family, have a house in a nice neighborhood, white picket fence and see the USA in their Chevrolet. That's not the case today, both men and women work, they make ends meet, and spend a fortune on daycare. With our national debt the way it is the government need everyone working for as long as they're alive to keep those taxes rolling in. Retirement, for today's youth is a lie. We're slaves to our economy.
I need an exit strategy. Something that allows me to work and make my own money, and how much I make depends on my effort. I'm tired of working to make someone else rich. I don't need to be rich, but I also don't need to work my ass off to make someone else rich. I've just got to find something I like doing and start a business of doing it. Im tired of the fickle bitch that is technology. I often use the analogy of an arborist. They go to school and learn their career. When they start being an arborist they know what a pin oak is, 30 years from now it's still a damn pin oak. With IT, the crap I new just 2 years ago is today worthless and not in use anymore. I'm no stranger to hard work and adaptability to stay on top. But I want to work to live not live to work.
