Author Topic: Your Money Or Your Life - Is Your Work Fulfilling?  (Read 9853 times)

BTDretire

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Re: Your Money Or Your Life - Is Your Work Fulfilling?
« Reply #50 on: August 03, 2016, 11:25:11 AM »
Short answer, not any more.
 Long answer:
My wife and  I have been self employed for 16 years.
  The job is 3 hrs of work and then the other 8 hrs is intermitent waiting on customers, and a lot of time spent surfing the net, reading MMM, watching TV, listening to radio, or walking ½ mile loop around the business.
 Sounds great!! who wouldn't want the job?
It was exciting in the early years, we could see the sales
grow and our income grow. Everything was new. I had projects
to build and things to do to make the business easier.
 Now, I have answered the same questions thousands of times,
customers can't make a binary decision without checking with their mate out in the car, or making a phone call. Or just stand there thinking and thinking and thinking to finally decide. Btw, I only have one product, usually in two or three sizes. They come to me just for that one product, and then can't decide. Argh!
 This not to say I don't have customers I like and have sit down conversations with, but
it is just getting old and I'm getting jaded.
  In a previous life I would get to this mind set, but then a training seminar would come along and I'd get a refresh, time off and a reset. Now we are open 70 hrs, 7 days, 363 days a year, 10 hrs is the time we are open, there's more work time when you're self empolyed.
   My wife is driven but she's well aware I'm winding down, but she wants to continue
at least another 5 years. I'm 5 years older.
  The good news, we are FI, thanks to the business and Mustachian ways can retire anytime. By Mustachiam standards, 5 or 6 years ago.
  I have told my wife I'm done at the end of this year. I'll be looking for an employe to replace me, it will probably be a relief to both my wife and myself :-)
  Looking forward to bicycleing, swimming and just coffee with the guys in the morning.
  Written from work between customers, man this is an easy job, wish we could do it just 3 or 4 days a week*. :-)
  Sorry, I don't want to identify the type of business.
I don't want this seen as a big complaint, I'm so lucky, the business has made a huge difference in our life and retirement. Just putting a "here is why" to the answer of the question.

 *No, we can't, the competition would start immediately.

PS.
I do get some days off, but always on call, and often work 2 to 4 hrs on my days off.
PSS.
 I wouldn't be surprised after some time off, that I will be back spending "some" hrs
working. I know I'll be doing maintance type projects, and those I really enjoy.

Monkey Uncle

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Re: Your Money Or Your Life - Is Your Work Fulfilling?
« Reply #51 on: August 04, 2016, 04:40:16 AM »
It's complicated.  I consider the field in which I work to be a calling, and I am deeply committed to it.  Likewise, I consider work done by my organization to be vitally important to society and posterity.  But the tasks I do on a daily basis are frustrating, stressful, and draining.  I worked on the technical side of things for years, and I finally reached the point where I could no longer take the impossible workload, lack of resources, constant conflict/competition within and outside of the organization, and the lack of influence over important decisions.

Monkey Uncle, your post really resonated with me. I am a scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, and on a good day, I feel connected to that "mission" or "calling" I started out with: to develop medicines that save lives and improve quality of life for millions of people. But the endless (administrative) meetings, revisiting of decisions, office politics, organizational restructuring, bringing in of consultants (who decide things like access to medical journals is an unnecessary expense)... I just want to do good science! Just let me do it!!!

So it kind of goes in cycles for me: a project I put my heart and soul into will get killed for no rational reason, and I will be crushed, and feel powerless and frustrated and wonder what I'm doing with my life. Then maybe a few months later I will get excited about a new project, and the passion and positivity returns.

I hear you.  Bureaucratic bullshit is a motivation-killer.  I work for a government agency, so I can definitely relate to that frustration.  Add to that the fact that the legislation/regs that govern my agency create multiple competing (and sometimes mutually exclusive) interests, and the perennial lack of funding relative to the work that is expected, and it's enough to totally extinguish whatever motivation I may have had when I started out.

Digital Dogma

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Re: Your Money Or Your Life - Is Your Work Fulfilling?
« Reply #52 on: August 04, 2016, 10:14:04 AM »


Do you come home from your job feeling fulfilled?


Perhaps this is only thrown out there as a spark to motivate people to get out of the work trap, period.  On the other hand, I thought, "Isn't it a bit much to ask our work to be 'fulfilling'?"

Yes, I'm involved in environmental compliance, every time I spot something thats just not right I have an obligation to speak up and alert people. Its a grind, its extremely dangerous, I work in the summer with no A/C and in the winter I'm outdoors in the cold. Rain/sleet/snow. Even when I'm physically not feeling well, I know that I'm doing something positive for the environment, and I value that a lot.

Plus I have a lot of independence and autonomy, that also makes me feel fulfilled because I know I'm going to plan my day how I like without interference.