The Wealthy Worker

When I get calls nowadays requesting help with an integration project, it’s pretty much business as usual. I know what rate I want, how much it will cost for travel, whether I’m qualified to do the project and so on. There’s no fear or insecurity.

During my downtime, I recently started work on a new business idea. To tell you the truth it is really scary for me to think about going from an independent consultant to running a full-fledged business. Some of you who haven’t incorporated or gone on your own probably have similar fears. Can I leave my current job and start consulting? “Do I have enough experience, what if I can’t do the project, or what if the project fails?”, are some questions you may ask.

During this phase of ‘contemplating change’, you need to remind yourself of times when you were afraid of change, but you came out successful. Or maybe it didn’t work out okay, but you learned a lot and were better for it.  I have also been telling myself that if I don’t know something or don’t have experience in a certain area I will get help. I will form a great team of people who can support me. At one point, I considered paying another consultant to help me with a certain challenge during a project. While that may seem strange, spending a bit of your money to ensure success is worth it and something you may not have considered doing.

It’s best to ask empowering questions such as ‘How can I be successful with this change?’, or ‘Who can I get to help me be successful?’ instead of ‘What if I fail?’

I watched this show about Randy Pausch on Primetime last night. Unfortunately he died of pancreatic cancer on July 25. You can check out his lecture on YouTube.

Every once in a while stories like these can make you take stock of your life and whether you are following your passions.

Well, my first month of being on-call is over and it went very well. As I mentioned previously, I had a minimum 20 hour per month clause in the contract and the rate was about 50% higher than normal due to being on-call. They didn’t call me that much and so it was a good idea to have the 20 hours in there! Things were pretty stable after I left and any major development is on hold so there wasn’t that much happening. I was on vacation for 2 weeks so it was nice not to have to answer too many calls. But I was prepared to do what I had to - once or twice I was swimming or lying in the sun when they called, but answering questions on the phone isn’t that taxing!

I’ve decided to only work remotely and there’s a possibility I can get some remote work in a couple months or so when the same client will start ramping up. So for the next couple months I am going to work on another business idea I recently started (online interactive guitar lessons). Not only that but I’m planning to move to the east coast where I have another house which we recenlty bought. I plan to get it set up with furniture and services and do my work from there.

The key point for you to take out of this is to know what you want and figure out a way to get there. It takes some thought to gain clarity on what it is you really want. Do you really want a large business with lots of employees and travelling around the country, or would you like to work from your country home or a tropical resort on a one-man internet business? Would you like to work with one client for months or would you like to have multiple clients for short-term jobs? Do you want/need to work full-time or would you prefer to work part-time on multiple interests? I realized that there are certain things I don’t like about the IT work, but I kept doing the same things expecting a different result (the definition of insanity). So I’m committed to living the dream. I hope you are too.