– Love you, high five. Alright, kiss and a high five. And a hug and a
kiss and a high five. (Evan babbling) – [Brendan] I did, I already did him. Kiss, hug, high five. Oh yeah. Alright. Oh, I'm gonna make it on time. (keys jingling) (car door slamming) Here we go. (car door slamming) (jazzy music) Alright. So let's have a quick little chat about what this
new job actually is. So around April, maybe May, maybe around my birthday,
I turned 33. Decided I didn't
want to be a teacher with a side hustle anymore. Decided that I saw
a different path to doing what I
wanted to do in life. And that path
included not necessarily going straight from teaching to running my
business full time.

And I guess what
I mean by that is, I really trust what
smart people in my life say. So I looked at what a guy named Justin Jackson
said about this, and he said what he did
was he made the transition from being a full time
employee to being an employee that was allowed to
work remotely sometimes to being a fully remote employee and then he went out on his own. And that kind of freedom ladder
allowed him to get there, you know, over time. And I thought to myself,
that's exactly what I want. So I started to look
for full time positions doing what I was
already doing for clients. Marketing, SEO, et cetera. And at the beginning of May, I applied for a position at
a really cool looking agency. I didn't know much about them,
here in Chicago. I got some interviews,
really met the team, met one of the partners, and I really liked what he
had to say about one thing.

What he said was,
there's three ways to look at growing your company. We can grow the number
of employees, the headcount. You hear a lot of people
bragging with their friends about oh, we have
this many employees, this is how big
our team is, et cetera, oh we're growing our team. We have 750 employees, 500
employees, 20, 100, whatever. So then there's a
second way we can do this where we just focus on
growing top line revenue. You know, we're looking at
total billings, total profit. The third metric, which is
the one they focus on there, is just doing better work. And what I thought
was super cool was that with doing better work,
you grow the other two.

But when you grow
revenue or you grow headcount, you don't necessarily
do better work. You probably know I'm a
massive fan of Jason Fried and DHH from Basecamp. And don't fall down the steps. So being a fan of them means that I don't believe
in venture capital. I don't believe in
any of that garbage. I don't believe
in growth for growth and that wasn't going
to happen at this company, so it seemed like a fit. So that's what I did. I literally stopped
teaching on a Friday at the end of a school year,
started my new job, my new career, on a Monday.
For the first time in my life, I get to get good at one thing. I'm not constantly
trying to get good at 20 things in teaching and
then another 10 things when it comes to SEO and
clients and things like that. I can just do one thing all day, even when I'm working
for my own clients at night.

It's just one thing. It's the same stuff and I get to get really,
really good at it, and that feels so nice.
And I wish that for you, too. If you're trying to
break out of your 9 to 5, if that's not what you want,
don't romanticize quitting. Don't, is that thing beeping at me? You don't romanticize
quitting your 9 to 5. Don't romanticize
taking the leap. That's garbage. It's actually really
dangerous and quite stupid. Taking the leap
is what companies do when they take
on venture capital. It's a terrible idea. I'll link Justin's video below, and you'll be able to see
exactly what I'm talking about. But just become
more and more remote.

Align your entire life,
your career, with what you're already doing,
what you wanna do. If you don't think there's a
way, there's a way, I promise. In fact, I'll put
a challenge to you. If you don't think there's a way to align your life around what
you're doing as a side hustle to move it more towards
what you're doing as a career and gradually climb that
freedom ladder, comment below.

I bet I can help. I'm Brendan Hufford,
don't forget to work hard. Be nice, people,
and don't get too lost trying to create
something that matters. (jazzy music) Yes, probably the most fun thing about working down
here in Chicago now is that
everybody's so ridiculous that I can walk
around talking to my camera. It's not weird. If I did that in the
south side of Chicago or if I did that
around my house where I live, everybody'd look
at me like I'm nuts, but down here, people
just do whatever they want. So it doesn't even matter. It's so good..

As found on YouTube