Day 77: Entrepreneurial Excitement

(I feel pretty vulnerable writing this, so please be nice with your comments.)

I'm not as thrilled about life as I used to be. I've discovered that this whole American way of living isn't going to bring me the kind of enjoyment that I want out of life--especially now, while I'm young.

A story:
One of my co-workers recently came into work with this idea that she would stand up every hour and do something. When I asked her why she was doing this, she said it was because people who have desk jobs (like myself) have an 80% higher chance of diabetes and other life-threatening illnesses, even if they work out for an hour a day afterwards. Her approach was to stand up once an hour to combat this. My natural reaction was to think of any non-sedentary job in that I could do to get out from behind a desk.

It also made me think of all the other things I could do if I wasn't working at a desk. Some days, I come into work and my only task is to check my e-mail. After that, I have to stay at work for 8 hours and I just waste the day on the internet. I have literally wasted weeks of my life behind a desk.

What also frustrates me is that according to everything I've been taught about life and money, I need to save every stinking penny that I can so that when I'm 75, I can finally retire (or older, depending on how our economy pans out). Then, and only then, am I allowed to fully explore my passions, launch myself into my favorite hobby, travel how I want to, etc.

And until then, I work. I'll get two weeks a year of vacation, not nearly enough to travel in a way that makes my heart sing. I'll work hard for someone else's bottom-line profit in order to get more money in an attempt to whittle away years from that retirement date. I'll sit behind a desk, fully aware that it's detrimental to my health.

Maybe this is part of my quarter-life crisis and I'm just a rebellious youth looking for an alternative, that soon I'll accept this as just how life is, but right now this picture seams so bleak to me. This is not the way I want to live if I can help it.

To inspire me to break out of this, I've recently been reading blogs about lifestyle design and entrepreneurship. There are people who travel the world and make money off of website advertising, people who work at night when they are most productive and read their favorite books during the day, business consultants who work over Skype, and more. These blogs have allowed me to dream about things I could do to allow me to live a life I find meaningful.

On Day 77, I finally took action towards this goal and bought a whole slew of e-books about how to make money from entrepreneurial, freelance and online ventures. You can check it out here if you're interested.

Now, I'm not quitting my job just yet, nor am I throwing caution to the wind and investing thousands of dollars into products to sell or a website to maintain. I'm simply taking the first step on a path I find more attractive than the one I'm on. I may fail, in fact, I'll likely fail a couple of times before I get it right. But, at the end of the day, I'd rather fail a couple of times at something that will give me the opportunity to live the life I want, than be successful at keeping a job that enslaves me to a path that I don't want to be on.