A stern wakeup call to anyone “working from home”
Okay, how was your long weekend?
Have fun? Go anywhere interesting?
Nope. Of course you didn’t. In fact, by and large, Aussies did a very good job of staying home.
And I’ve gotta say, I’m proud of us. We’ve shown that we can be responsible. We’ve shown that we don’t need dog collars and location monitoring. We can do the right thing when we need to.
We deserve the freedoms we have.
And that is something to be proud of.
Well done Australia.
Now, every crisis is an opportunity, and every crisis is a learning opportunity.
And right now, you are learning what it’s like to be me!
Because I’ve been working from home for decades now. Out here on the farm, it can get pretty isolating. I’m my own boss, and I’ve got no one to answer to.
If I spend the whole day in pyjamas, and spend more time on Netflix then I do on the work computer, no one is going to bust me.
That’s awesome, but it means I’ve got no one standing over me cracking a whip. I’ve got to come up with my own discipline and drive.
And because I genuinely love what I do, and work doesn’t really feel like work, the line between my personal and professional lives get pretty blurry.
I think this is probably a pretty common experience for successful people – for people who are living life on their own terms.
Once you break free of the structures that the world builds around you, you have to come up with your own structures – your own methods for maintaining your productivity and your sanity.
There’s billions of people around the world right now waking up to this reality.
“Gee-whiz, this working from home thing is hard.”
And yeah, it is.
It is hard. You can’t rely on your boss to tell you what to do oh what time to get up or when to put on your pants.
You’ve got to be your own task master.
And you can’t rely on the bus ride home to create a clear separation between your work life and home life – between your productive hours and your leisure hours.
You’ve got to come up with your own systems to stop them bleeding into each other.
It’s why I never like to see my students receive a handout. Part of the journey towards being a successful property investor involves developing the systems that support autonomous living.
And they’re the same systems that make the free life enjoyable.
And I know that right now a lot of you are being asked to develop those systems on the hop. There will probably be a few teething problems.
But that’s okay. The systems that support autonomous living are worth learning anyway.
In every crisis there is always an opportunity for growth.
DB