12 months ago I was stuck in something which was decidedly not my dream job. It wasn’t a bad job, so much as not the one I wanted. At all. Even a little bit.

So, 10 months ago I decided to change some things. My first step was to set a goal in terms of when I could quit my current job. My first goal was, quite literally, to do whatever it took to leave the position I was in. In order to make that decision, I had to figure out what my family required to live. For us, that was 2500$/month. I figured that if I could probably pull in 1000$/month doing odd jobs and whatnot, so what I needed to do was to consistently earn at least 1500$/month for 3 months in order to plug the gap between what we needed and what I felt I could do in odd jobs.

My first step, then, was to start earning 1500$/month.

K. W. Musante asked, on our “Ask the Wealthy Bloggers” post:

What are some simple ways of leveraging your existing skills to generate at least subsistence income when you’re… how shall I say it… between jobs?

This is basically what I had to figure out how to do… While working a full-time job.

My talents lie in a large number of areas, but I felt the following ones could be monetized most quickly:

• Writing
• Programming
• Graphic & Web Design
• Blogging
• Selling Advertising

Each of these is an area that I not only have experience in, but they are also activities I could do around my existing job, and areas where I felt I could earn money.

I began to look for writing and blogging jobs immediately. Within a month, I had signed contracts that’d provide me with 1500$/month in income. The catch was that it would require me to do 4-6 hours a day of writing and blogging. But, I figured I had to do what I had to do. I also figured that I was basically at the bottom of the writing totem pole, and it could only go up from there.

A month later, I dumped some of the higher-volume contracts for lower-volume ones with other companies, but which paid more. Now I was doing 3-4 hours of writing and blogging a day, so I began to take on some odd jobs. My income quickly approached 2000$/month.

At this point, though, I decided to stop and take stock of where I was at. Was I going to quit my job? When was I going to do that? How much money should we have saved up so that it was safe to quit my job (ie: if things didn’t work out, I wanted a cushion)?

We decided that I needed at least 3 months worth of expenses in the bank in order to actually quit my job. At the current income levels that looked doable.

Thanks to a great marketing move (archived here), I was able to not only plug the income gap, but also to create a new business. The business didn’t last forever, but it got me to the point where I’m at now: balancing book and article writing, blogging, speaking at conferences and doing seminars and consulting work.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing more details about exactly how I went from my worst job to my dream job in less than 6 months. Some of this will be tips and tricks types of things, some will be job search, some will be personal fulfillment.

Being rich isn’t about money, but having a job you like certainly helps you see the important things in life, because having a job you hate consumes you and makes it nearly impossible to see what’s actually important.

This won’t be a normal series of Wealthy Blogger posts, but it will look at one of the questions I’m sure most people have: “how do I find my dream job?”

This entry was posted on Monday, July 4th, 2005 and is filed under Job & Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.