Jake Desyllas Quotes

“A healthy business is not dependent on any single customer to survive.”

“A job-free life is a realistic option for everyone, including you.”

“A job-free life is possible and you have options about how to achieve it. When you understand the options, you can choose a path that best suits your talents and preferences.”

“A supportive spouse or partner gives you protection against the pressures of conformity.”

“As I interviewed job-free people on my podcast, I began to spot a pattern I had not seen described before. Each person’s route to freedom was unique, but they all seemed to fit one of four essential strategies.

Strategy 1: Save your way to a job-free life.
Strategy 2: Earn money outside a regular job, doing what you love.
Strategy 3: Create a business that supports your lifestyle.
Strategy 4: Build a business to achieve financial independence.”

“As you earn more money, continue to live like a student.”

“As you progress in your career, don’t increase your consumption.”

“Become more customer focused. Understand what people need. Obtain rare and valuable skills.”

“Being financially free is not necessarily the same as being 'rich' (whatever that means to you). In particular, it’s not about having a high-consumption lifestyle. Instead, I define financial freedom in terms of the length of time you have ahead of you before you have to work in a job that you don’t enjoy.”

“Even if you are still an employee, it is much easier to stand up for what you believe in if you are working towards job freedom. Employees who focus on saving for financial independence don’t live paycheck to paycheck.”

“Every teacher that I ever encountered in school or university was a lifelong employee. Those teachers conveyed their own assumptions about work to me over more than a decade of indoctrination. I bet your teachers gave you the same messages. It’s time to unlearn your many years of employee conditioning.”

“Extreme saving involves a six-point strategy:
1. Get a decently paid job.

2. Adopt frugality as a central part of your lifestyle to enable you to save the majority of your income (aim for 75 percent).

3. Begin investing your savings as soon as possible, to allow maximum time for compound interest and capital accumulation to work in your benefit.

4. Minimize investment costs by managing your money yourself and using low-cost investment vehicles. The lower your expenses, the higher your investment returns (and the more to compound).

5. Minimize taxes by using tax-deferred accounts (and any other legitimate minimization techniques). Minimizing taxes also gives more chance for compounding to work.

6. When you reach the point of financial independence, quit your job and live from your investments.”

“Financial independence is a great basis for a job-free life, but not the only basis. You don’t have to be financially independent in order to live job free.”

“Having a job is the default lifestyle.”

“Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you choose from different strategies for quitting the rat race and becoming job free:

- How frugally are you willing to live?
- How long are you willing to wait?
- How important is it for you to be your own boss?
- What is your level of risk tolerance?
- How marketable are your expertise and connections?”

“I achieved financial independence at the age of 35. I was able to do so because I sold my business to a large engineering company.”

“I can only be as free as I choose to make myself.”

“I describe my experience with extracting myself from operations. The ongoing, iterative approach I suggest is threefold:

1. Standardize your product or service, so you are not reinventing the wheel each time you fulfill an order for a customer.
2. Proceduralize your operations, so that all workflows are well-defined and can be easily repeated and controlled for quality.
3. Optimize your procedures, using mechanization and automation to make them as efficient as you can.”

“I don’t believe jobs are evil. It is just far more fulfilling to be your own boss and work for your dream, rather than have a boss and work for someone else’s dream.”

“I wanted the freedom to do creative things with my time and not to spend all my time managing my money.”

“If he had pursued a more traditional Wall Street career, he might have spent his remaining 28 years amassing a bigger and bigger fortune and spending it on the momentary pleasures of a consumption-oriented lifestyle.”

“If you have multiple income streams as a freelancer, you will have more flexibility to decline work from any single source.”

“If you prefer not to answer to anyone, you may be better oriented to a lifestyle business than a startup. This kind of business is suitable if you don’t want to build a team or create a company culture, both of which involve accountability. Because many lifestyle entrepreneurs don’t want the hassle of accountability to others, they are often solopreneurs—small businesses centered around one person.”

“If you run your own business, you set your own standards.”

“If you think of yourself as a lifelong employee, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As long as you see yourself as an employee, you will remain one. You don’t have to be.”

“If you’re not dependent on someone else for a salary, it’s easier to stand up for what you believe in.”

“If your job does not inspire you, striking out on your own can provide a great opportunity to live a more purposeful life.”

“In the end, your freedom is directly proportional to the value you can provide to others. Whichever path you choose, your success in life will be directly related to how valuable your skills and contributions are in your chosen field of work.”

“In the vast, unthinking universe, we are so lucky to have consciousness. We have the choice of what to make of our lives. We can choose to free ourselves from jobs. We owe it to ourselves to take advantage of the amazing opportunity.”

“It is easy to imagine that you will find a time in the future to do epic things. But your time is going to run out. The fact that we are all going to die is a wonderful motivation to get on with living life to the fullest while we can. The pursuit of a job-free life will enable you to live your highest purpose.”

“It is harder to stand up for your principles if you live paycheck to paycheck.”

“Jobs provide a ready-made social life. They give you a social network. When you share struggles and achievements with coworkers, it creates a bond. Job-free lifestyles, in contrast, require you to take a more active role in creating a community for yourself.”

“Lifestyle entrepreneurs view their businesses as a means to an end. They develop a business in order to make money efficiently. They want to maximize their time outside the business.”

“Making more money will not increase your wealth at all if you simply spend it on more consumption items.”

“Many people are unaware of the power that compounding interest has for increasing your savings.”

“Many people would love to live a job-free life, but they have difficulty seeing how this could be a practical option for them. This difficulty is not surprising when you consider how we all learned about the working world.”

“Money can buy freedom rather than comforts. You can use money to change your life, rather than let it control your life. Money can be a tool of personal liberation.”

“My aim is to spend time only on activities and projects that inspire my wildest enthusiasm.”

“My goal is to spend every precious moment of life in ways that I find fulfilling and that are aligned with my values.”

“Nobody learns how to live a job-free life in school or college. We are all taught to be employees.
”

“Nobody shows you how to take advantage of all the opportunities for creating a lifestyle where you don’t need a job.”

“One of my motivations for becoming an entrepreneur was that I wanted financial freedom. I wanted to do many things with my life, not just run one particular business. I saw the business as a major life project. I knew it was a commitment that would last for many years. But I also wanted to do something else afterward. Now that I have sold my business, I am writing, podcasting, and traveling the world.”

“One of the most self-limiting beliefs is to classify yourself as an employee. If you think of yourself as part of an employee class, then you will believe your advancement is largely at the mercy of an employer class. This is only true if you make it so. The reality is that economic roles can be far more fluid. There are many ways of making a living outside a pure employee role.”

“Peter knew that it was up to him to create a great life for himself, regardless of his background. He saw it as his responsibility to realize the full potential of his character and to make the circumstances of his birth irrelevant. This attitude inspired me.”

“Peter told me that his goal was to become a millionaire and retire early. He intended to work extremely hard, create a profitable business, and make his fortune. As he spoke, I was impressed by his seriousness. He wasn’t just dreaming about becoming a millionaire; he was planning it. I had never heard anyone admit to having such an ambitious life plan.”

“Quitting the rat race to live job free is a life-changing, long-term project. It is incredibly challenging psychologically.”

“Selling a startup is like extreme saving compressed into one payout.”

“Since I sold my business, my priority in life has been freedom. I have arranged my consumption habits and financial life around the goal of giving myself the freedom to do whatever I want with my day. I treasure never having to work on anything that I don’t want to. I now live from passive investments as a private investor. I spend my time only on projects and activities that I feel enthusiastic about.”

“Some early retirees take a 'just in case' approach and choose to live even more frugally than the four percent rule suggests. They withdraw three percent of their portfolios instead, leaving some leeway in case they have lower than expected investment returns. The lower withdrawal rate allows their portfolios to compound more in good years, making it even safer.”

“Sometimes a single conversation can change your life, by opening your mind to possibilities never dreamed of.”

“The active investing approach assumes that it is possible to predict investment price movements in advance, using superior insights. Active investors aim to earn above average returns, based on predictions that are more accurate than those of the majority of market participants.”

“The cultural conditioning towards employment is so strong that people tend to be oblivious to the possibility of designing their own working life. Redesigning your working life for maximum fulfillment leads you to make choices outside traditional career paths. The unquestioned norm is a career comprised of employee positions; most people don’t think about the alternatives open to them.”

“The focus of the entire education system is employee conditioning.”

“The goal is freedom, not money.”

“The more time you have, the freer you are to do whatever you want with your life.”

“The passive investing approach does not attempt to predict price movements. Instead, passive investors create a “set it and forget it” strategy that they stick to, regardless of what happens to the market. Passive investors believe that it is easier to make money by identifying a simple strategy and sticking to it, than by trying to predict trends.”

“The people I have interviewed have diverse lifestyles, but there is a common theme: they have all chosen different ways to live without a job. A job-free lifestyle means no longer having to work for anyone else.”

“The simplest way to describe the benefit of a job-free life is this: you don’t have to put up with any bullshit.”

“The strategy for achieving financial independence by building and selling a startup can be summarized in five points:
1. Start a scalable business (one that is capable of significant growth).
2. Grow the business to the size and profitability level that makes it sellable.
3. Find a buyer.
4. Negotiate a sale.
5. Invest the proceeds from your sale and live from your investments.”

“There are two questions facing you if you want to live from your investments:
- How much money will you need to save first?
- Once you have saved enough, how much money can you sustainably withdraw from your portfolio each year?”

“There is a dignity in the very effort to save with a worthy purpose. It produces a well-regulated mind; it gives prudence a triumph over extravagance; it gives virtue the mastery over vice; it puts the passions under control; it drives away care; it secures comfort. Saved money, however little, will serve to dry up many a tear — will ward off many sorrows and heartburnings, which otherwise might prey upon.”

“There is nothing inherently exploitative about jobs. In fact, your job can serve to help build for a job-free future.”

“There is nothing inherently wrong with having a job. Periods of employment can even serve an important role in the process of achieving a job-free lifestyle. The problem is that many people “would rather live a life free of jobs, but they don’t know how to make that dream a reality.”

“We are all masters of our own lives.”

“We live in such a high-consumption culture that there are always opportunities to be more frugal. Many saving measures will have no impact on your happiness. We could all save more money and still have a fulfilled and enjoyable life because the predominant lifestyle is so financially inefficient.”

“We need allies in order to break free from the tribe.”

“You can increase savings both by increasing your income and by reducing your expenses. The easy wins for savers usually come from reducing expenses.”

“Your financial freedom is nobody else’s problem and nobody else’s business. Why should anyone else care what you want from your life? Why should anyone else help you achieve your goals? People will help you if you help them first.”