Early Exit #40: Building the life you want

What people who want to retire early can teach us about building a meaningful life.

You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business live your dream life by Nick Lafferty.

• Last time: My last finance update (May 2024)

• Soon: My manifesto on retainer-based pricing models

Thank you to everyone who replied, commented, and texted me after my update last week! Your support means a lot 🤗.

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After spending months agonizing over my decision to quit my job, I finally did it in May 2023.

But I did something embarrassing on day #1 of self-employment.

I applied for another job.

My scarlet letter.

That job at NOtion was interesting for reasons that made sense at the time but now looking back it was a horrible miscalculation.

• I thought it was a good fit for me (it wasn’t: too SEO focused)

• I thought it was the only way to achieve our budding dream of moving to NYC

I was wrong on both counts. The best path for me to achieve my dream was the one I was already on.

A Song of FIRE (hold the ice)

In my very first newsletter I wrote about how the Financial Independence, Retire Early movement (FIRE) drove my money mindset for the first 9 years of my career.

It started at my first job where I took the bus to work in downtown Austin. I’d spend my commute devouring FIRE content on Reddit and dreaming about my financial future. FIRE is all about minimizing your expenses and maximizing your income so you can retire as soon as possible, sometimes as early as 30 years old like the OG FIRE blogger Mr Money Mustache (yes, that is real alias).

But many people who pursue that path make a critical mistake: they’re so focused on leaving their jobs that they forget to live in the moment.

This was poetically coined in a phrase that’s now famous in the FIRE community: Build the life you want, then save for it.

I look back at the past few years of my life and at my bank account and I would gladly give away a hefty chunk of it and work longer if it meant I could have experienced more of the world and found more passions I could have for the rest of my life, especially with someone I had loved so much. I built my savings, but I never built my life.

While I think I did a pretty good job of building my life, I never built the career I actually wanted. I was chasing a Director title full of the work I hated doing: managing people, building presentations, and navigating corporate politics.

That Director title was just a means to accelerating my goals of retiring early, but it took me down a path that was not rewarding or fulfilling.

So while part of my reasons for going solo were based in realizing that I hated the work, it was also based on wanting to build a more fulfilling life.

Retiring, and quitting, towards something

One thing I’ve learned in my nearly 9-year long content binge on Financial Independence is that the happiest retirees are people who retire towards something instead of just retiring from their job to watch TV all day.

My sense is that it’s crucial […] to have some idea of where you’re going to land before you yank the handle on the professional ejector seat. — Wall Street Journal

That quote was taken from an article about retirement but it’s equally as true for anyone who wants to quit their full time job or move to a new city.

In the case of retirement, the absence of work itself is not a path that leads to long-term happiness and fulfillment if your time isn’t filled with something else that provides meaning.

In the case of working, quitting a shitty job by itself is not a happy path either because guess what? There’s a lot of shitty jobs out there.

Sometimes a good job turns into a shitty job when you get a new manager.

Quitting is only half the equation here.

You need a destination.

Quit towards your goal of building a solo marketing agency or that startup idea you’ve been obsessing over.

Retire towards a life where you get breakfast with your friends, play golf, and volunteer at a local garden.

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to wait until you quit something to take action.

Start building the life, and career, you want right now.

Build the life you want by doing the work you want

I am far more successful on my own than I ever was at a corporate job. You’ve all seen the finance updates.

But I am also genuinely happier too. My last ~6 months at Loom were rough. I’d close my laptop and sprint to the gym to workout whatever bullshit happened that day so I could leave my feelings at the gym instead of bringing them home to my family.

Because I’ve built a business around only doing the work I want to, my days are filled with activities that are fun and energizing to me.

I spent the last year networking like crazy which also brings me a lot of joy. Consulting and freelancing is also a cheat code to building your network because every client you have is another VP or Director-level person who gets a first-hand look at your skills and experience.

I’ve met and proven my skills to 10+ Founders & VPs of Marketing in just over a year. Those people are now referring me to other potential clients or bringing me with them when they changed jobs (this has happened once already!).

Doing the work I want to do has enabled me to build the life that I want.

What’s getting in your way?

• Need help finding more clients? Here’s my best secret for doing that.

• Not charging enough? I built a free rate calculator for freelancers.

• Want to niche down? Follow this guide on personal positioning.

Want to make a friend? Reply and say hi 👋

See you all next week,

Nick

Mom and I on a sunny day at the Brooklyn waterfront. Photo courtesy of camera man Dad.

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