Have you ever wanted to tell your boss to fuck off?
What about your co-workers? Clients? Customers?
When you have a job, even a job you like, part of the deal involves being agreeable and making concessions even when you don’t feel like it.
If you’ve spent any time in corporate America, you can almost see the passive-aggressive energy wafting through the air. If you’ve worked retail or food service (I have), there’s a ten thousand percent chance you’ve wanted to tell someone to fuck off.
When you don’t have enough resources, you simply have to do certain things you don’t want to do.
Each little concession isn’t all that bad — you take that meeting with the super obnoxious yet highly important client and skip your kid’s ball game because the company needs you, you laugh at your boss’s shitty joke, you go to that networking dinner that’s not mandatory but is definitely mandatory, you pick up an extra shift because you know your boss will screw you on next week’s schedule if you don’t.
And, eventually, all these tiny concessions turn you into a spineless wimp.
Too harsh?
If you’re in an environment where you have to do things you don’t want to do in order to appease the person who tells you what to do, all because you’re afraid to lose the shitty thing you do for a living, you’re going to create a subconscious form of helplessness.
You see it happen to people. Their confidence is shot. They’re domesticated. No risk-taking energy. No boldness. Soft. The light in their eyes literally disappears.
This doesn’t mean these people are bad. The opposite. Good people fall prey to learn helplessness and it’s sad to watch.
What is the antidote to the problem?
Get rich enough to tell people to fuck off.
The End to the Means
You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that’s your base, get me? That’s your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of fuck you. Somebody wants you to do something, fuck you. Boss pisses you off, fuck you! Own your house. Have a couple bucks in the bank. Don’t drink. That’s all I have to say to anybody on any social level. – John Goodman. The Gambler.
Some people tell me I’m too materialistic, I focus too much on success, and I care too much about money.
They don’t properly understand my motivation. Sure, I like nice things. We all do. Part of my plan to continue building wealth over time does include some toys, but that’s a minor part of the equation.
I always wanted money and freedom because I hated being told what to do.
Creating wealth gives you the opportunity to exercise your right to tell people to fuck off. It’s not that you go out of your way to be rude or mean. You rarely will literally tell people to fuck off, but you’ll have the option too, which will come across in your behavior. This goes deep. People can smell how needy you are. Your boss has an intuitive sense of how much you need your job and will treat you accordingly — from the benign and annoying to the dangerous and scary, e.g., powerful men abusing boxed-in women.
Without fuck you money, you have to live your life in a psychological box.
How free do you feel, right now?
Do you feel like you’re in charge of what happens in your life or do you feel subject to the whims of our institutions and will of petty tyrants?
The people who say they don’t ‘care about money’ often tend to care about it the most. Why? Because how else could you explain doing things you don’t like in order to get the money? “I have to pay my bills.” Oh…you mean those bills that cost money? If you’re in this position, you both care about money and don’t have enough of it.
Why not admit you want money, get more of it, and have the flexibility you want in your life? See, when you do what you hate to make money, you’re less honorable than a ‘greedy’ person because you’re selling your soul for pennies on the dollar.
Where is the root of your issues with money coming from? Maybe you were raised to be “modest.” Maybe you fell prey to the media propaganda — millionaire politicians who tell you millionaires are evil. Money has so many negative associations — guilt, shame, lust, greed, etc.
You won’t make more money until you have a positive attitude toward it. Money is simply a means to an end, that end being your personal sovereignty and overall sanity.
How to Build Your Fuck You Fund
“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts… Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day, at the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.” – Charlie Munger
Let’s obliterate his false dichotomy nonsense binary thinking right now.
You don’t have to risk your livelihood, abandon your family, and exhaust yourself to build a profitable side hustle and turn it into a vehicle to create wealth.
This is a lie you’ve been told and a lie you tell yourself. I worked on my writing for five years, on the side, for an hour or two a day, without ever having to take financial risks that put me at risk of going bust.
If you’re looking for timelines, some helpful guidelines are:
- The 90-day sprint – Find something you’re good at that also has the potential to be a profitable skill (I have a guide below that shows you how to find this skill) and relentlessly work on this skill for 90 days. You can take breaks on weekends, but this should be a 5 day per week strategy. Minimum.
- 18-month measurements with quarterly intervals – I learned this goal setting technique from Peter Drucker. This timeline gives you enough room to aim for long-term objectives but isn’t too long either, which can lead to faulty projections.
- The five-year rule – Many smart people say it takes about five years to build a profitable business, reinvent yourself, and reach the kind of goals that blow your mind. It took me roughly five years to reach this point in my life. It doesn’t have to take five years, but long-term goals take time, period.
I’ve used these timelines in many blog posts now. I love the framework and I’m going to burn it into people’s minds until they get started.
So start. You can’t think your way into a profitable side hustle.
I get emails all the time and I’m reluctant to answer them because I know my answer will often push people away from their goal. I could give them a very detailed answer that would help, but the very nature of their questions betray their future selves.
Why? Because if you ask questions before you’ve taken any action on your own, you’re not serious about your own success.
Does this mean you should never reach out to people? No. But doing things like asking questions you could just Google or wanting to pick the brain of a mentor before you’ve taken any steps comes from that same helpless headspace that got you stuck in the first place.
Follow these loose guidelines, get your project off the ground, be patient, it’ll make money eventually. Here’s what do to next.
Make the Right Choice When You Reach the Fork in the Road
“People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.” Naval Ravikant.
If you can both resist the urge to live below your means mentally and physically, you’ll be well on the way to having a permanent fuck you fund.
See, financial prosperity comes in stages. First, there’s financial flexibility. That’s where I’m at right now. I’m free from having to do things I don’t enjoy for a living, but I still have to work.
I’m not financially free yet. Financial freedom means you can stop working altogether because you’ll have enough money to last your entire life. This seems daunting, but it’s inevitable if you do things the right way.
The key to reaching the ultimate level of fuck you? Don’t upgrade your lifestyle right away.
That’s the physical part. It’s hard. You’re psychologically wired to start spending more money as soon as you make more. I try to save about 30 to 40 percent of my income, but still, as I’ve made more money, all a sudden my bills are higher — higher than I could ever have afforded years ago.
You won’t be perfect, but if you can avoid ‘balling out of control’ for a while so you can take the money you have and invest it into other projects, you’ll put yourself in a position to be free forever.
Second, learn to mentally live below your means. Once you start reaching a certain level of success, your ego will grow. After I finally quit my job, I thought I had made it, but then snapped out and realized I still have a long way to go. Not just because I wanted to grow my financial situation, but because I wanted to grow my mental and spiritual situation, too.
The goal of making more money isn’t to become a hot-shot. It’s to have the ability to further explore interesting parts of your life — new projects, spiritual growth, health, experiences. All of which is predicated on you being able to tell people to fuck off so you can focus on those things.
If you can get a little bit of success and double, triple, quadruple down in, then you’ll reach that point where you have a total alleviation about money altogether.
You make money so you don’t have to think and fret about money. When you don’t have to think and fret about money, you don’t have to sell little bits of your soul to make it.
If you need motivation, focus on the retention of your soul.
If you don’t live your life on your terms, you will lose your soul. Will you be miserable? No, but you’ll be broken down to the point where that fire in your eyes is just gone.
This isn’t about what you do. You can have fuck you money and still have a job. It’s about having options.
Until you have options, everything you do will come from a place of necessity. Even if you like what you do, that’s not a healthy headspace to come from.
So build your fuck you fund — not for money, for status, or for your ego.
But for your soul.
Set your soul free