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I have been here for about a year and a half, listening to the podcast for 2.5 years. It has taken me 2.5 years to be able to emotionally and financially take ebay on full time. I have a little under 2 weeks before my last day working at my office job. I will miss the people there but not the job.
The thing I struggle with is the life part, especially time management. What I want to know, from those who get to decide most movements, any given day, how do you schedule your life?
For the longest time I’ve clung to the Weekday/weekend model, I’m terrified to not have a solid plan going in. (FYI, I have no children, only fur babies).Thank you!
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Congrats. This is a big move so it’s smart that you’ve eased into it. If you’re a moderately organized and self-motivating person, you’ll very quickly wonder why you spent so long working for someone else. You’ll wonder why you were a slave to an alarm clock. It’s so fun to choose what you want to tackle from day to day. We get so much done and the work is rewarding because we reap all the benefits.
(OTOH if you’re disorganized and easily distracted, working for yourself could possibly be a dark hole of all your bad habits unleashed.)
Can you share how you had to adjust emotionally to going full-time eBay? Everyone talks about the money, but I agree that it is an emotional shift to running your own business.
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Hi Jay,
Well When I first started listing to the podcast I had just lost my best friend. My partner and I decided to move immediately after that. I took temp positions to get us back to his home town. After a layoff I decided to start a store. Then I was given an opportunity to work for my current position. When I took this position, my partner, while extremely hardworking, could only bring home $10/hr. I didn’t make enough on unemployment to justify passing up a full time position, complete with benefits. I was also extremely lonely. Up until I got the position, I struggled to set up my shop, and went out specifically to find more items. The position started and my listing took a back seat. I met people I have grown to love, struggled to solved difficult problems, and gotten burned by corporate greed, all in one year. Looking back, if I had not taken the position, I would have been working for myself much sooner, but I wouldn’t have met some amazing people. Now the difference is, I have confidence in my ability to succeed and my partner has a much better position.
In the past I struggled with distractions, but a mental shift has occurred in past year. I have given 50 hours a week to a company that pays me per piece. Between a bad decision on product training by the company, their matrix system, and 40% pay cuts across all accounts, I will not make enough money to justify giving them that kind of time. If I can focus that long for them, I can do it for me, make more money, and be happier.
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No, I spent a year and 4 months adjusting medical claims for an Indian company contracted by our state governments medical plans. It’s tedious. The rules constantly change, the application everything on crashes daily, and your pay is dictated on how many claims you pay. My lowest claim pays 22 cents.
(multiple states)
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The great thing about a bad job is that you’ll hopefully always remember what those days were like. When you have a tough week running your own business, you’ll realize that your worst week on your own is million times better than your best week on that shitty job.
Congrats! Welcome to the life without alarm clocks!
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Congrats Ashana. I am also leaving my job (in 7 weeks at the end of June). I have a pretty solid safety net, so our situations may not be exactly the same, but I can really relate to being frightened by moving into a life that is not organized by other’s agenda.
I am retiring from my job and have told everyone that that is what I am doing and they all look at me like I am crazy. No one asks about the money, but they all want to know what will I do???? I think the failure to imagine a life outside of a 40 hour work week is what keeps many people in jobs that they do not grow in.
I have a few rules I expect to follow myself: (1) wear pants every day (or shorts in the summer) – no hanging out in my underwear. (2) exercise everyday (3) no intoxicants (this has been a rule for me for the last 30 years, so no real change there – but important to state that a lot of people who fail on the self-motivation fail in a dance with one of these. (4) take it seriously – but not too seriously (5) have fun.
Of course, I am allowed to break rules 1, 2 and 4 in pursuit of rule 5. My Day 1 homework: Watch “The Shawshank Redemption” in my underwear. Suggest you watch it too, but first imagine that instead of a prison, Andy Dufresne and his pal Red are workers at a crappy job with an awful boss. Like Red, you have to determine whether life on the outside is going to be like Andy’s or Brooks.
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Your rule #3 is a great rule – I’ve seen so many people spend too much “free time” wasted on getting drunk instead of being productive. It’s a dark road to go down, especially when you make your own schedule.
Not many good decisions are made when intoxicated either. Time is precious!
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Ashana,
I am so happy to hear you will be selling on eBay full time! I’m a little jealous too, I might add. I started listing to the podcast around the same time you did. I was miserable at my job, and not earning enough. My husband wasn’t earning consistently, and we needed the benefits my job offered at a university. We were dealing with depression, which makes financial difficulties so much worse. I finally found the strength to open my eBay store a year ago. I have been selling slowly, but consistently. I am the one who does the research and the business organization side of things. With a full-time job, it is very difficult to keep a steady pace with eBay. A month ago I applied for a different job at my university. While submitting my application, I emailed an friend and former colleague for a reference. I would occasionally do side work for her company. A few days later she called to offer me a job. It was very unexpected! It was more than I had been earning, and it would provide endless learning and development opportunities. I thought about it for a few days, and I accepted it. (The other job I had applied for contacted me too, but now I knew they couldn’t afford me). Miraculously, my husband got a full-time job at the same university, so we will still have their awesome benefits!
I have been working at this new job for three weeks and… I don’t think I like it. I will give it some time. I know things are going to be difficult at first, but I am working a remote, salaried position, and I am starting at the beginning of a major project that has my head spinning. I don’t have time to do the things I enjoy. I have a constant stress headache, and I am super stressed out.
I’ve been too busy to list anything, but I’m still selling about one item per day. When I look at my store, I get excited. I am even giddy after buying a dress form to help me take better photos! I will give this new job six months. If I still hate it, I will leave and do eBay full time.
Please, if you think of it, please contact me in six months. Ask me how my job is going. If I am still this stressed, remind me that I said I would leave.
Beorbin.
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Congrats on the change in lifestyle. I will second those above that have said how discipline is a major factor in your success. When I first left my Controller position, I needed some downtime before jumping in to eBay. We had plenty of groceries, the house was clean and the laundry was always done…
After that, I started taking this business seriously and putting in the work. I feel you have to treat this as a real job. Good news is you are the boss. Bad news is that the boss is a jerk. I’m writing this at 3:52am… Why? Because I felt behind in my listings, woke up at 1am, couldn’t stop thinking about being behind, so I got up and worked. I’ll take a nap shortly and then it is Game Day (Yard Sales).
That is somewhat extreme, but that is the mindset I have. Learning to stop not when it is 5pm, but when the job is done. However, there are benefits when you are the boss and decide what you do each day. When we need to visit our son, we go (but…we schedule our work around it and make sure we still get work done). Want to plan a trip? Do it. But you have to still work around that time. There are no paid vacations in this business, and no such thing as sick time.
And not to say that you have to follow our model. The key is finding what you need financially to live on, how many hours a week that it takes for you to earn that, and then execute. And it will take time to get there! Stuff takes time to sell!
Jay and Ryanne have a great low cost of living where they are and they have done a great job of working to have the income stream that will support that. Veronica and I have a higher bar in the Denver area with 2 kids, but we make it work. So find what you need in terms of hours you need to work, then make sure you are doing the work.
And that means listing most of all. Don’t just shop! 🙂
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Thank you all for your input!
To come back to Jay’s original question, How have I changed emotionally?
I’ve had even worse jobs than the one I am leaving. Between feeling the failure to be a successful employee and moving to a new place where I knew no one, I felt it was really important to me to stay in a position for an entire year. Emotionally I needed a job, the community, and interaction. I was really immature ( and might still be in some ways) due to a tumultuous upbringing. I’ve always struggled with human interactions and “what is appropriate”. Emotionally I needed to prove to myself that I could do it, and I did.
Now I have many friends, and I am excited to get more engaged with my local community.
Listing is pretty much the only thing I am allowing myself to do for the next three weeks. Once my death pile is done, then I will go out.
I’m thinking of how to restructure processing items. I plan to immediately/ASAP take photos vs sitting it in a pile and making it a to do list while I go get more.
Most of all, I want to thank Jay and Ryanne. Without you putting in the hard work to produce the podcast, I’m not sure where I would be. I seriously binge listened to every podcast you had done the month following my best friend’s death. I’m pretty sure there isn’t much else I remember from that time. Every week you rekindled the flame for my desire to turn my thrift hobby into a profession. This last Tuesday, I couldn’t take it anymore. After getting restless while listening to the podcast, I made my decision, wrote my resignation down and turned it into my manager. My partner was terrified but supportive! I think this is pretty much the happiest I’ve been in my life so far.
Thank you so much for what you do!
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I feel that during the course of the first years of establishing a business like this, your main focus really has to be on the business (50-60+ hours a week), and you can’t really let your thoughts drift to other ventures. Then, you just reach a point in which you feel you can take it easier and get back to what’s really important in life, and why you left your job in the first place, or make it more difficult on yourself and pile on more work elsewhere.
It is maybe during this transitional time between f/t work and taking it easy that most people go astray. They feel that once they leave their f/t jobs, that life should be easier. They should go immediately from their f/t work to coasting by. In reality, it is not like that.
It is more difficult to work for yourself than for an employer. You have to keep sustained focus and effort on what you are doing with no one breathing down your neck other than yourself. You are only accountable to yourself. Sometimes, it takes more than a year or two to feel settled, if ever.
Hence, why people like Jay & Ryanne will sometimes have a podcast in which they sound panicky because sales were unexpectedly slower that week. Just when you think everything is fine, sometimes it’s momentarily not. That’s when you have to deal with how you deal with your emotions over what is just a normal business blip. When you have been doing this forever, you will still find stuff that will surprise you. Sales, sourcing, customers, you name it. It never gets dull, nor do your reactions to all of it!
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