CHAPTER 1

The Life of Your Dreams

I have a secret to share with you. It’s something that has changed my life—forever. It is a groundbreaking career strategy that is based on freedom, choice, and abundance. No matter what your employment situation is or has been, you can apply this strategy in your everyday life to bring you the work—and the lifestyle—for which you are searching:

• If you are seeking job security that is infallible, this is it.
• If you are seeking freedom of choice regarding where you work, when you work, and who you work with, this is it.
• If you desire the flexibility to sample new occupations regularly in a way that is productive and beneficial to your overall career success, this is it.
• If you simply want to bring balance to your life and know that any special event or important moment in your personal life will not require approval from your boss before you can commit, this is it.

This is it; this is the moment when you first learned that work and time can be yours in abundance. Either your boss can be in complete control of your career, or you can. The 9-to-5 work world is a choice, but it is not the only choice.

Can you imagine a lifestyle other than the infamous 9-to-5 version? Typically we think there are only two choices to toggle between: either the 40-hour workweek or the 0-hour workweek that immediately follows winning the lottery. We dream of abandoning work as we know it and cashing in. What is it about winning the lottery that is so appealing? The money, of course! Right?

Well, I have news about that angle of the argument. Forbes reported that there is “virtually the same level of happiness between the very rich individuals on the Forbes 400 and the Maasai herdsmen of East Africa.”¹ Seriously.

The first time I read that information, I thought to myself, “Yeah, right!” After all, I have gone on those tourist trips to spend a day in the Great Rift Valley with the Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania. The people are beautiful, talented, and kind; the culture is deep, complex, and marvelous; but the reality is that they wear a red woven garment for clothing and sandals made from cowhide, live in mud huts, and are penniless by most American standards. So at first blush, the premise seems outrageous at best: that a nomadic shepherd roaming the land could rival the happiness level of, say, Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the United States, and all that his wealth affords him?

The underlying hypothesis is absolutely shocking and flies in the face of all that the 9-to-5 lifestyle represents. After all, isn’t the 9-to-5 lifestyle characterized by a thirty-year span of “work” with the endgame being the accumulation of “wealth” of some measure? And with that being the case, do we all really work the prime years of our lives in order to be as happy as—or perhaps less happy than—a Kenyan shepherd?

Okay, but what if at this moment you did have in your hands the winning Powerball ticket that could give you a taste of the lifestyle that Bill Gates enjoys? Would you be happier? For a short time perhaps. However, research indicates that within five years of winning the lottery, you would return to your current level of happiness. Think about that for a minute. How happy are you right now? This is about as happy as you would be if you were a multimillionaire, after the initial period of elation. Did you get that? You are as happy right now as your multimillionaire self would be.

At first glance that might be a depressing thought, but I invite you to instead think about it as liberating. To get there, think about it like this: If your happiness doesn’t depend on accumulating excessive amounts of wealth that may be beyond your reach anyway, then this theory of your present self being as happy as your millionaire self brings achievement of a happy lifestyle closer into range, doesn’t it? Furthermore, a medical study at Emory University found that people who actually earned their money were more satisfied with the wealth they accumulated, however great or small, than those who received it through happenstance such as an inheritance or the lottery.² So you see, earning a living can be rewarding.

If you’re not exactly jumping out of bed in the morning on a workday—and trust me, you’re not alone—there is an alternative framework, a “cure” if you will, that I can’t wait to tell you about. It’s the big secret I alluded to right at the start. But before we jump in, let’s look at one more reason why we all dream about the winning lottery ticket.

Let’s take the vision that we all have about winning the lottery one step in another direction. Aside from the unimaginable wealth, what is so attractive about that lifestyle? Do images of sipping a fruity drink at a cabana near the ocean come to mind? Or spending a month in the South of France at a vineyard? Or perhaps touring the country on your Harley-Davidson motorcycle with a riding club? Now, with those visions in your mind of what your lottery lifestyle would be like, can you guess what they all have in common? Freedom! They represent freedom.

Freedom is what winning the lottery really represents to most people. The winning ticket is a ticket, literally, to various freedoms that in traditional terms only great wealth affords you, including the ability to do any and all of the following:

• Create your own schedule
• Associate with people you like
• Disassociate from people who annoy you
• Sample different experiences and lifestyles
• Enjoy extended periods of free time
• Pursue your interests at will
• Get passionate about your life
• Have a lifestyle that others envy
• And more

So what does all of this have to do with you? After all, you haven’t won the lottery—yet. Well, that’s true, and yet it isn’t. Although you haven’t won the lottery officially, I would challenge you to believe me when I tell you that I have good news along those lines. This is some of the best news you might hear all day:

There is a cure for the 9-to-5 lifestyle that can make you feel in many ways like you have won the lottery.

(And it may make you as happy as a nomadic shepherd.)

The 9-to-5 Cure is real. It is tangible. It is a systematic strategy that anyone with any level of education, any skill set, and any work history can apply to his or her own life and enjoy the same freedoms that are traditionally afforded only to lottery winners and the ultra riche. Although excessive wealth may or may not become part of the formula for you depending on a number of factors, the ability to earn a good living, enjoy an abundance of freedom, and know job security as a way of life is a given. If you do the work, you can realize success.

There is a 9-to-5 Cure. This is it.

Endnotes

¹ Matthew Herper, “Now It’s a Fact: Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness,” Forbes, September 23, 2004, http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/invest/forbes/P95294.asp (accessed September 2, 2010).

² The Associated Press, “Are Lottery Winners Really Less Happy?” May 13, 2004, www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4971361 (accessed September 2, 2010).