– Love you, high five.
Alright, kiss and a high five.
And a hug and a kiss and a high five.
(Evan babbling) – [Brendan] I did, I already did him.
Kiss, hug, high five.
Oh yeah.
Alright.
Oh, I'm gonna make it on time.
(keys jingling) (car door slamming) Here we go.
(car door slamming) (jazzy music) Alright.
So let's have a quick little chat about what this new job actually is.
So around April, maybe May, maybe around my birthday, I turned 33.
Decided I didn't want to be a teacher with a side hustle anymore.
Decided that I saw a different path to doing what I wanted to do in life.
And that path included not necessarily going straight from teaching to running my business full time.
And I guess what I mean by that is, I really trust what smart people in my life say.
So I looked at what a guy named Justin Jackson said about this, and he said what he did was he made the transition from being a full time employee to being an employee that was allowed to work remotely sometimes to being a fully remote employee and then he went out on his own.
And that kind of freedom ladderallowed him to get there, you know, over time.
And I thought to myself, that's exactly what I want.
So I started to look for full time positions doing what I was already doing for clients.
Marketing, SEO, et cetera.
And at the beginning of May, I applied for a position ata really cool looking agency.
I didn't know much about them, here in Chicago.
I got some interviews, really met the team, met one of the partners, and I really liked what hehad to say about one thing.
What he said was, there's three ways to look at growing your company.
We can grow the number of employees, the headcount.
You hear a lot of people bragging with their friends about oh, we have this many employees, this is how big our team is, et cetera, oh we're growing our team.
We have 750 employees, 500employees, 20, 100, whatever.
So then there's a second way we can do this where we just focus on growing top line revenue.
You know, we're looking attotal billings, total profit.
The third metric, which isthe one they focus on there, is just doing better work.
And what I thought was super cool was that with doing better work, you grow the other two.
But when you grow revenue or you grow headcount, you don't necessarily do better work.
You probably know I'm a massive fan of Jason Fried and DHH from Basecamp.
And don't fall down the steps.
So being a fan of them means that I don't believe in venture capital.
I don't believe in any of that garbage.
I don't believe in growth for growth and that wasn't going to happen at this company, so it seemed like a fit.
So that's what I did.
I literally stopped teaching on a Friday at the end of a school year, started my new job, my new career, on a Monday.
For the first time in my life, I get to get good at one thing.
I'm not constantly trying to get good at 20 things in teaching and then another 10 things when it comes to SEO andclients and things like that.
I can just do one thing all day, even when I'm working for my own clients at night.
It's just one thing.
It's the same stuff and I get to get really, really good at it, and that feels so nice.
And I wish that for you, too.
If you're trying to break out of your 9 to 5, if that's not what you want, don't romanticize quitting.
Don't, is that thing beeping at me? You don't romanticize quitting your 9 to 5.
Don't romanticize taking the leap.
That's garbage.
It's actually really dangerous and quite stupid.
Taking the leap is what companies do when they take on venture capital.
It's a terrible idea.
I'll link Justin's video below, and you'll be able to seeexactly what I'm talking about.
But just become more and more remote.
Align your entire life, your career, with what you're already doing, what you wanna do.
If you don't think there's away, there's a way, I promise.
In fact, I'll put a challenge to you.
If you don't think there's a way to align your life around whatyou're doing as a side hustle to move it more towards what you're doing as a career and gradually climb thatfreedom ladder, comment below.
I bet I can help.
I'm Brendan Hufford, don't forget to work hard.
Be nice, people, and don't get too lost trying to create something that matters.
(jazzy music) Yes, probably the most fun thing about working down here in Chicago now is that everybody's so ridiculous that I can walk around talking to my camera.
It's not weird.
If I did that in the south side of Chicago or if I did that around my house where I live, everybody'd look at me like I'm nuts, but down here, people just do whatever they want.
So it doesn't even matter.
It's so good.
.
