Listen to this episode on iTunes
I’m not here to tell you to go ahead and quit your job. This would be impossible, and that’s too generic a thing for me to say. However, if you consider the specifics, there are options of which you could quit your job. So let’s just consider what’s out there.
Here are some famous people who actually quit their jobs and became famous. There was a disc jockey called Calvin Harris. He tried the first time back when it was more difficult a game than going online and putting things out there. But he tried to do something, and out of that something, it ended no good for him. He believed that he would find better somewhere else. He went to London, and that’s where he started working, stocking shelves. He was hoping that he would be able to get his big break while he was in London, but the living costs in the meantime were just ridiculous. He failed. He went back then to his parents house in Scotland. He worked on the sales floor in a warehouse on the tills. Still, he never gave up. He kept plugging away kept doing what he felt he needed to do, because he was ambitious. He used cheap equipment and uploaded on to MySpace, and he tried to attract the industry to him and get some interest going. He was literally on the shop floor and got a call from EMI records. They offered him 30,000 pounds for three years. Now at that time, he was earning twenty thousand British pounds a year so he reckoned he should leave. He then went on to sell eight million singles and 1 million albums in the United Kingdom alone.
Another wonderful person who became big, and needs little if any introduction to the world of music, is Madonna. Believe it or not, Madonna was not always a success you see. She too was in a nine-to-five job grinding way just like Harris. She wanted to leave to do something different, but she was doing this nine to five job well before she was considered the queen of pop music. She got a talented student scholarship here at the University of Michigan School of music dance and theater. By 1978, she had grown tired of just studying and she just quit. She went to pursue her dreams because she felt stardom beckoned her. She went from there to New York where she joined modern dance troupes and then got a gig at a doughnut chain. She had her first band right off the back of that.
So you can leave – whether you’re male or female, in one place or another, you can leave and you can just try something else. Weigh what you’re earning as opposed to what you could be getting. Be realistic. Whatever your dream is, you have to be realistic, because from there you can then pursue exactly what you want to do. It might take a couple of years of extra study, it might take moving like Madonna did, but either way you are the controller of this. You can make that decision.
You must make that decision factoring in everything. You have to be logical about what you’re trying to achieve here. So when you’re doing something like that, you need to actually ask yourself a couple of questions. Where am I right now? What is paying the bills? Will the bills be paid tomorrow and next week if I actually change this job? Is it money that I want to change for? If you are trying to change for money, is that the best motivator to change? Is this decision just for me or is it for other people around me? What is the overall plan? Is now the best time or has the best time gone?
The old saying “sleep on it” is very pertinent right here. Sleep on it. Think a lot and then make that decision. If the opportunity is there, you need to grasp it. Trust yourself.