For Better or Worse: I'm out on my own :)

One of the biggest questions each entrepreneur will ask himself/herself in their entire life is... When do I quit my full time job... it's a question I've been struggling for a long time. Some people will argue, quit as soon as you can so you can lead a happy life sooner, and I agree yet I'm a cautious person... I belie in balance and getting to your goals slowly but surely. One of the biggest things that kept pushing me to quit was thinking that I was building a business on the side working 2-3 hours a day and weekends and I was making some decent money and how much faster I could expand if I focused on it 40 hours a week. There is a few reasons why I didn't take the plunge:

Not enough savings

My sites weren't bringing in a full salary

We've just bought a condo, last year and one just a month ago

Scared Shitless ;)

Well, ready or not.. I'm happy to announce that as of Jun 30th, 2008 I am self-employed. My company where I worked got bought out and we were handed a package, not a minute too soon since I was not enjoying working full time for someone else. Funny enough the same day we were told we were out of jobs I was signing my mortgage papers for a 3rd property we just purchased, now if that doesn't give you enough motivation I don't know what will :) It's now 3rd week of my self employment and I'm doing great, I'll be posting more posts about how I got to the point I'm at now and my strategies for the future. And this time, yes I am going to be posting much more often then in the past. I know it's been a very long time since my last post and I want to apologize, when you're busy working 9-5 and building a business on the side things slide and time flies.

My Roadmap to Freedom – Do you have one?

I find myself often asking this question... when will I quit my fulltime job and work for myself... And by working for myself I don't mean find projects to work on for other people (at least not entirely). The problem is we spend the most amount of our time working for someone else. It's a vicious cycle that I hope when broken will reap major benefits.

I've been working for seven years right out of school and only for the past year I've really started looking at how to make money online, by using your own projects.

Saw Donal Trump Live

Well this was the weekend... the weekend where I got to see Donald Trump live... and let me tell you I was not disappointed. The guy is a great entertainer, even if he doesn't consider himself one to be, he is. For those of you who missed it, well that's too bad you can wait till next year but for now here are some thoughts I had about The Learning Annex.

We got there Saturday nice and early at 8am... the Toronto Convention Center was already packed and buzzing with entrepreneurs from all over Toronto. I promptly proceeded to get my schedule for the weekend which wasn't included prior to the event. One of the first things I noticed was that all the "Big Shots" aka Trump, Bach, Branson weren't there till Sunday... however Tony Robbins was going to be there. Having listened to his CDs before I thought that might be interesting.

We got to one of our first workshops and the place was buzzing, there was about 10 different speakers that had their own workshops and every single one of them was trying to sell you "The System". Ohh man let me tell you it's was damn frustrating as hell. Each session was about an hour and a half and I kid you not they spend about 80% of the time pushing their products... here is the scoop of what you get... :

• Do you want to be rich? People clap and cheer...
• Are you sure you want to be rich I didn't hear you... people scream louder... this happens about 100 times in each session...
• Here are some pictures of cheques I get every week and how I became a multi millionaire
• Here are some pictures of my family and houses I live in... you can just be like me
• This is the only way you will get rich, join right now and you'll be rich in a few months... some say you can be rich next week...
• Here is how you get rich, buy my binders and cds and you will be rich, do you want to be rich?
• Here is a deal our cds cost $10,000 but just for today and just for 29 people today we will be giving it away for free... well almost $995 (which looks like what the agreed number seemed to be between all of them)

Anyway you get the idea... every single class was like this... you had to really read between the lines to get any useful information out of them.... and let me tell you there was a lot of NAIVE & DESPERATE people there... jumping up and down with their credit cards going further into debt trying to get rich quick...

So you get used to this pretty quick... we then got to see Tony Robbins, I've never seen him live but man he had about 30,000 people in the main keynote hall jumping up and down, hugging people next to them and acting very very crazy. A few times he had 30,000 people jumping up and down and I swear the entire convention floor shook. The guy was good.

The next day the same thing continued but I got to see David Bach, Harry Saxton ( Condo King ) and obviously Trump. Those were the highlights for me I got really inspired by all of them... and by far Harry Saxton and Trump were the best speakers... they told you how it was... no bullshit and you actually got to learn from them.

Donald was just amazing I'm so glad I was there, he's a really funny character if you haven't noticed. I got most of his speech recorded so I'll see if I can get it posted in the next little while.

All in all, the $60 I spent for the weekend was absolutely worth it... I'm pumped up and I can start getting some of my projects going again... if you missed the chance this year make sure you go next year, you won't regret it.