Everything I love about being unemployed

Video Transcript

It has been 2 weeks since I left formal employment and I wanted to give a very vulnerable, very honest, very raw update on what that 2 weeks has been like, what I've learned, what things I'm struggling with, and what challenges I've had. The very first thing that I realized when I woke up on my first day not being employed was how anxious and stressed I was at the idea of the routine of waking up. So, waking up at a time to be at a certain place at a certain time every single day, 5 days a week for the whole year, my constitution just rebels against that. We made up these hours.

Time is a made up construct and we adhere to this because the Industrial Revolution wanted us to work harder, faster, and for longer. So, I have bucked the trend of time. I don't really adhere to a routine for the last 2 weeks just because I'm trying to figure out how I measure it, how I like it, how I respond to it, what parts of my day and what times of my day am I most inspired, most motivated, most interested, most engaged because it isn't the same all the time every day. I I don't feel motivated when I wake up at 9:00 a.m.

But, when I start work at 9:00 a.m., who wakes up at 9:00 a.m.? When I start work at 9:00 a.m. or end work at 5:00 p.m., those aren't really my most engaged and motivated hours. So, I've been observing myself to see when that is and sometimes it's at 11:00 p.m.

when I'm high and I want to edit a video. Sometimes at 6:00 a.m. when I wake up and I can't help myself but record a video because it's been in my brain while I've been and then other times I feel totally unmotivated and uninspired at the middle of the day. So, I just get up and go to the movies.

I've seen Disclosure Day. I've seen Mandalorian in the middle of the day when there's nobody else around in a really lovely cinema so that I can be quiet and not have people shouting at the at the screen. It's magic. My time is my own.

It also means that I I don't work 5 days a week. I work whenever I feel like I want to work. Sometimes that's on a Saturday morning, sometimes that's on a Sunday night, sometimes I don't want to work on a Tuesday. And that's totally fine.

And this concept of time leads me into the second major thing that I have noticed leaving employment, which is meetings are not my job. Meetings are not work. And they might be for some people, and I'm really sorry if that's your life, but in the last year of being employed, I realized that most of the people, their job is meetings. Meeting other people to align, meeting other people to talk about strategy, meeting other people to talk about a meeting, meeting other people to have any number of conversations that waste any number of hours in any number of days.

And the more high up you go, the more meetings you seem to be in. To the point where for the last 3 and 1/2 years of my employment, I specifically said that I have no interest in being promoted in a managerial path, because then that just means more meetings, more one-on-ones, more checking in, more backstabbing. Meetings are not my job. Now, meetings are my choice.

And I get to have fun meetings that are engaging and create opportunity, but that are short. I mean, I've even changed my Google Calendar default meeting length to 25 minutes instead of 60 minutes, because why should I meet with anybody for 60 minutes if I don't want to? The default is now 25. Meetings are not my job, and that has helped me free up so much of my time to figure out what my work actually is.

One of the things that I noticed is there are a lot of meetings set up in a very recurring way to report on metrics. Not to achieve the metrics, to report on the metrics. And very often, management doesn't care when you have time to do the work to achieve the metrics that you set out in the beginning of the year. They just care that you're reporting on them sufficiently that they can report them up to the board.

And I just don't care about reporting on metrics. I care about achieving metrics, making needles move, not reporting how much the needle moved. I mean, this all just goes into the concept of whether employment is for you or not. And obviously, you can tell that 2 weeks out of employment, it's clearly not for me.

Now, once I started thinking about time and then observing how I wanted to have meetings and then focusing on the metrics that I wanted to work on to grow and move, I started to to figure out that motivation also changes when you're not employed. When you're employed, your motivation is isn't necessarily intrinsic. It's not natural, either. Your motivation is pushed by the amount of hours you have to work.

So, between the hours of 9:00 to 5:00, whether you are motivated in those hours or not, you are sitting at a desk and you're doing work. And sure, an employer might say to you that they don't care as long as your outcomes are achieved, but the ultimate truth is that's not real because they do care because you have meetings for alignment, to check boxes, to report upwards, to go to the board, to make sure everybody's online with a Q1, Q2, H1 H2. All of these things that become more important than just doing the [ __ ] work. So, my motivation waned a little bit.

In the last 2 weeks, I've been trying to just observe when I feel motivated and responding accordingly. And when I fall into the habit of, "Oh, it's 9:00, I should be sitting at my desk. I should be motivated when I'm not." I just try and take a step back and leave it like that. If I'm not motivated to work, I don't sit at my desk and force myself to work.

That might not last forever because I do believe that routine leads to motivation. Um there was a relatively famous story about, I think, Akon going to work with Eminem on a song. And Akon arrived at like 10:05 p.m. or 10:06 or something like that in the evening, and Eminem was leaving.

And he said to him like, "What's up, dude? We're We're going to go record now. What are you What are you doing?" And Eminem was like, "No, it's 5:00 p.m. My work day is over." Because he believes that you show up and do the work and then motivation arrives.

So, he treats his his recording as a a day job, which totally totally fine. He's the boss, he gets to do it. That's how his routine works. But, when I'm employed, it's somebody else's routine for me, and that just doesn't work.

My motivation sometimes isn't as intrinsic as I want it to be. And so, for the last 2 weeks, I've just been responding. Working when I feel like working, not working when I don't feel like working, not putting pressure on myself for that, and trying to figure out what works for me. Then, management and managing is uh another thing that I don't miss and don't do and hope to never do for a long time.

I dislike managing and the idea of managing so much that even while I was employed, I asked multiple times to never be promoted in a management path because I don't want to be promoted to my next level of management incompetence. Uh that's the Peter Principle, by the way. I've no interest in really becoming a manager of 60 people or 80 people or even 10 people, to be honest. I have an interest in working with people who can manage themselves, who are at the best at what they do, and can go forth and do their jobs.

That's kind of where I am now. I'm building a one-person company. I'm working with partners and individuals, um who are excellent at the things that they do and don't need to be managed that much. They need to be directed and pointed in a direction and then let free.

But, working at a place of employment that isn't yours, that you don't own, you don't get to pick who you work with. You don't get to pick the teams or the hiring or the firing. You get to work with whoever you get to work with. Um, that's not really what I'm looking for.

I don't want to manage stories and narratives upwards, and I don't want to manage and expectations downwards. I just want to build stuff. And this has been one of the greatest unlocks for me is if I find my motivation on a day and I know what I'm working on, I can spend 6 hours just building and never having to report upwards or downwards on what I'm doing, just getting stuff done. And just doing the work with people that I really enjoy working with has been uh fascinating and memorable experience I'm going to carry forward into the next while that I build stuff.

And the final thing that I want to comment on is the re-emergence of my confidence. Being employed is great for the first 2 years for me. I achieved a lot with a team of really smart people, um, and my confidence grew. But then the company around me changed and the people around me changed, and micromanagement became the order of the day, um, politics became the order of the day.

And when you are being micromanaged as somebody who's got 20 years experience, lots of agency, and deep curiosity, basically you're being undermined. And micromanagement from senior people who pay you a lot of money to do a job that they won't let you do destroys your confidence. And over 3 years, my confidence was slowly whittled away, chipped at, and destroyed. You eventually start thinking that nobody trusts the work that you do.

Even if they do, what they're really doing is just micromanaging you so they can manage upwards. And it even gets to the level where you get to the senior most senior level, they've got to report to the board. So, I totally understand why it happens. It's just something that I I don't align with.

And now being out of the micromanagement loop for 2 weeks, it's incredible how quickly that confidence bounces back. And while you get into doing the work, not managing all of the things, you realize that you do like the work. And I do know how to build stuff, and I do have an opinion on this that is the right opinion whether somebody agrees with me or not. And I just don't have to justify that to anybody and manage the politics up and down.

These are the things that I've been experiencing. I'm not saying I'll experience them all indefinitely, but 2 weeks out of full-time employment, if you are considering your own employment and whether you should stay or go, I would urge you to look at the variables aside from just money. Cuz money is one of the things that a job gives you. It's one of the things that kept me in my job, but ultimately, I don't think it's the thing that keeps you in a job because I know lots of people in jobs that pay them a lot of money who hate 8 hours of their day every day 5 days a week.

I'm not willing to live a life like that, and I don't think anybody should.