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.”