Are you happy with your job?

I was thrilled to get my first REAL job at 22. But after 10 months, I wanted my freedom.

In this introductory article, I won’t delve too deep into the specifics. Instead, I wish to provide a bird’s eye view of my journey so that you can determine for yourself if my experiences and future writings can be of value to you, provide practical insights, or simply let you know that you’re not alone in your struggles and aspirations.

In future articles, which I plan to publish on a regular (bi)weekly basis, I’ll explore each aspect of my journey in greater detail.

So, stay tuned as an average Joe like me reveals how I quit my job after growing tired of the rat race. If I can do it, there’s no reason you can’t carve your own path too.

Early Years

To be completely honest, I’ve never been a high achiever. In elementary school, all my neighbors would compare their report cards. They were scoring 80%, 90%, even 100%… I’d discreetly avoid these conversations as I was averaging 70%. And that was before the bad days arrived.

By junior high, I had moved to Canada. My English was not strong, and I dressed like a geek (it wasn’t considered cool back then) because I never had a choice of clothing in Taiwan as everyone wore uniforms back home. In the 90s, while most kids were no longer racist towards black people, it was still very acceptable to make fun of the Chinese kid who dressed differently. “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong! I can blindfold you with dental floss!” and, “Don’t sit next to me, sit on the floor and bark like a dog! Woof Woof!”… Life was not gentle to me. I felt picked on and looked down upon by most, at least that’s how it felt. In retrospect, it was probably just a few who were really unkind, but it still significantly affected my school life.

A few years went by and I was in high school. I remember scoring a mere 3% on my mid-term in physics. I immediately walked out of the classroom the moment I saw my test result, knowing it was hopeless. “You see? That’s what happens when you skip class!” Mr. Smith pointed his angry finger at me while shouting that out to the entire classroom. What a character, I hope he’s found happiness these days.

Okay, I’m not writing a novel here, so let’s fast forward… Eventually, I didn’t finish high school, but as a 19-year-old, I was eligible to get into a 2-year college program for computer systems without needing a diploma. It didn’t teach me a lot, but I was always dabbling in computers, so it was a natural choice. It provided me with a certificate to get a job relating to my interest, and for that, I am very thankful.

Let the Rat Race Begin

Shortly after college, I found a job that required me to move to a different province with just four days’ notice. Of course, I jumped at it! I landed a position as a Junior Developer at a small software firm of just five people. It was 2002, right after the Tech-Bubble burst, so I had missed the days when anyone fresh out of college with a computer certificate could easily make over $100k/year. I was offered $20k per year because, as the wife of the firm’s manager told me, “Your marks are not exactly enticing.” Fortunately, the boss felt that this amount was not enough to survive in the most expensive city in Canada and decided to give me $30k instead. I’m grateful for that. I had no idea what was considered good pay or not, as money was not something I’d ever thought about. I figured, hey, as long as I’m not in school anymore, I’m free. Life is good!

My parents very generously helped me with a down payment for an apartment that was listed for $100k. It seemed like a lot to me at the time, but in hindsight, we got a really good deal. Remember, we had just gone through one of the biggest market crashes in history. I paid the mortgage each month, and it should take me 20 years to pay it off. This was the first time in my life I had felt the worry of money. My fear of not having enough money drove me to be very frugal. I guess this is the start of my adulthood.

During my first year of work, I ran into a friend from my high school days. He was into the idea of not having to work for somebody and was trying to sell me the dream. I thought he was nuts! “What are you going to do if you don’t work for somebody?” Ridiculous, I thought. I accepted a book he gave me anyway, “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert T. Kiyosaki. Some of you might have heard of it or even read it.

Day after day, I walked in the wet, gloomy climate of Vancouver, commuting via the SkyTrain for work. Ten months went by, and I started to ask myself, how many years of this do I have to endure? I’m grateful for my job, and I have learned some valuable skills there, but I simply felt trapped and depressed thinking that this is what I spend most of my day doing and that I’ll be doing this forever. What I would like is to not go to work, and work on my own computer-related hobbies. I can go hardcore on my own hobbies for hours, without sleep, and feel happy about it. But they don’t pay the bills.

I started calculating. I figured that even if I lived as frugally as I could, it would still be 40 years of work. I decided to read that book my friend gave me and realized that there’s light at the end of this tunnel. For some context, the book basically taught that most people will always be broke and slaves to their jobs because they either burn their money on useless items or buy things that cost them even more money, like getting a house or a car with a loan. When you have a loan, it costs you extra money every month, more broke! It introduces the idea that if you habitually put your money into assets, things that generate you money, opposite of broke, then you eventually won't have to work for others because the assets will keep pumping money into your pocket. I fully bought into that and lived accordingly. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

I have mentioned earlier that I’ve always dabbled in computers, nothing genius in case you think otherwise. I have never been great at art but I liked making near stickman-quality animations using the computer. I learned how to make a website for the sole purpose of sharing my animations. I kept improving my website obsessively and turned that into a video sharing site, complete with chat and a friend list. Yes, it was the YouTube before YouTube existed. It had a very small user base and never grew much, but that was my passion that I worked on for hours each day after work, and on the weekends. This didn’t directly make me any money, nor was I doing it for money. The idea that a hobby could make money didn’t exist in my mind. But it was my thing and I took pride in it. This hobby made me a pretty good coder, even though I was not even close to the best, but it was enough to make me valuable to my employer, which resulted in higher salaries as the years progressed.

Investing In Assets

I said I’d get back to how I fully bought into the book. I’ll be upfront, it didn’t turn into a story where a young guy could make YouTube videos with headlines like “How I went from $0 to $1M in 2 years!”. It was a long grind and here’s how it went.

Every two weeks when I got my paycheck, I’d congratulate myself that my bank account just got bigger. I remember there was a point in time when a friend had asked me, “How much money do you save each month?”. When I told him “about $2000”, he reacted with disgust, “That’s it? That’s HURTING! How do you live so boring and still save so little?”. He had easy money from apparently engaging in unethical activities. It made me angry that I thought I was doing so well in an honest and disciplined manner and yet, I’d get ridiculed like that. But I used that energy to my advantage. Every opportunity for me to spend that money would be attacked by my logical-self, “Do you want to buy this car so you can spend more money on gas, insurance, maintenance, and drive to and from work for the rest of your life?”, “Do you want to eat this meal every day during lunch break at work, for the rest of your life?”. My answer 95% of the time was, “Screw that! I’m keeping this money for myself, I'm gonna get my freedom!”.

I did this for three years and paid off my apartment. This means I no longer have the biggest expense most people have every month. Meanwhile, my apartment has been going up in value. Now, I used the apartment to take out a Line-of-Credit, which is a form of loan using my apartment as collateral. I used that LOC to purchase another apartment and rented it out. This is not the same as taking out a loan to buy something useless, it actually generated monthly income, therefor it is an asset. This helps increase my networth every single month,

A couple of years go by, it’s now 2004, 2005. Out of fear, from reading all the doom-and-gloomers, I sold the apartment. In retrospect, I should have just kept it, but I had to do what I felt comfortable with. Anyhow, I still sold it at a nice profit. I now have over $100k in my bank account, not bad for a 25-year-old I thought. I’m now looking for ways to invest this money and grow it so I can quit my job for good, tomorrow, I thought!

I had a friend whose parents own a restaurant. They had very bad credit but wanted to invest in a house. I don’t know the details of the deal but the mother asked me if I could lend them $40k, with high interest. I think it was something crazy like 15%-20% interest. I agreed, and they paid me monthly. I was extremely fortunate because it turns out that their real-estate deal was not going well, but my friend paid me back what’s owed to me in full. So I got my money back safely. I thank God and thank her for having the integrity to not let me burn for her parent’s mistakes. I actually didn’t know the details of the deal and thought it all went well. It was not until I was asked again, this time for $100k, again with high interest. This time my friend told me that I should not do it, I don’t recall if she told me the reason.

I told this to another friend of mine and was recommended to invest my money with a stock broker instead. I really knew nothing about stocks so I went with the stock broker. I only gave her a few thousand dollars from my savings just to test things out. In the meantime, I tried trading stocks on my own. Again I didn’t know anything, so this is just me testing the waters out, hoping to figure another way to make money.

Now it’s 2008, The Great Financial Crisis has arrived. Honestly, I had never been affected by these events in a negative way because of how frugal I was. But since I now I have some money in stocks, I lost pretty much all of it. I told myself that since I don’t understand stocks, they are no different from gambling. That’s been ingrained in my mind for many years. Spoiler alert, I did change my mind many years later. A topic for another day.

I lost maybe $5000 in total, and my wife (Yes, I just got married a year ago to my Best Friend, perhaps articles for another time.), she lost $3000. It didnt break us. We were still doing ok. It is time to buy more real-estate since the market is crashing, this means properties are on sale and I’m already somewhat familiar with this type of investment. So over the next few years, I invested in a few more condos and rented them out. This means more monthly increases in my networth.

The idea is that in 20-30 years when the tenants have paid off the mortgages for me, I’ll be collecting a few thousand dollars each month for doing nothing. But that was it, I ran out of cash, I couldn’t buy anymore, nor will the banks lend me anymore. I was stuck, I’m left to wait 20-30 years before I could retire. Not really what I was hoping for.

Looking for Adventure

By 2010, my wife and I were so tired of our jobs that we contemplated doing anything from driving a bus, to becoming a locksmith, and even buying a Subway Sandwich location to run. In the end, I decided that I wanted to be a realtor. I bought the course for around $500 and received a couple of books that were 5 inches thick. The only thing I learned was that Canadians don’t own the land even if we bought a landed property, but that the queen actually owns our land. I read 10 pages of that stuff and fell asleep.

I had told you that I was very frugal, so much so that I never even owned a cell phone because it would eat into my monthly savings. No I can’t have that! But now that I planned to be a realtor, I thought to myself that I would need to know how to use a cell phone. You know, for calling all my rich clients…so I bought one.

Still, I couldn’t bring myself to read another page of the book on real-estate law. So, I started distracting myself by learning how to write apps for my cell phone. I LOVED it! It became my new obsession, it gave me such excitement and dopamine, just like a few years ago when I was working on my website and animations. This was just 3 years after the iPhone was invented and app developers had been getting rich overnight. My wife and I thought, this may be our chance! So, we made a little casual game, and hoped to become millionaires too. Nothing really happened.

I thought that we had missed the ride, “it’s too late for apps, everyone is already doing it”, I disclaimed. But I enjoyed doing it anyway, even without money. So I worked really hard on another couple of games. I’d spend hours every night after work. I did the coding myself, and paid an artist for the artwork. None of that made much money. I gave up on the idea to make money with apps, but instead I continued as my hobby.

I started making a new app where users can show off their beauty, socialize, and rate each other. It turned out to earn me $800 a month with ads. At this point, I had honestly thought of this just as my hobby and had forgotten about the idea of quitting my job because I was out of business ideas. But now I’m realizing that this app’s income is almost enough to pay for half of my monthly household expenses! I casually told my wife that if I could make $800 by doing this part-time, I wonder how things would go if I did this full time. She said, “why not just do it then?”

The door to this idea is now open, and we thought to ourselves, what’s the worst that could happen? We came up with a plan to save up $40k and gave myself 1 year to see what would happen. If nothing happens, I’ll just find another job. To make our savings last as long as we could, we moved to another province and lived with my wife’s dad and split the expenses while my wife looked for a job.

Time To Hustle

To keep the story short, I deleted the social app after a month because it didn’t align with my core belief system and religion. People were cheating on spouses, predators were plaguing the community, it was basically a sex-driven app. I felt guilty and I decided to give it up for my God.

I decided to start working on a new game. This game would be a multiplayer game and would be the dream game I had in mind. However, when it’s time to start, I just sat there, and I simply froze. I didn’t even know where to begin. I had only made some casual games recently, and one app ever. To take on a multiplayer game of my dreams would simply be too far-fetched. The type of game I planned to create was called an MMORPG(Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing-Game). On all the developers forums everyone would say that an MMORPG requires millions of dollars, and a whole team to build. I told myself perhaps I should tone it down a little and start with something smaller.

I decided to learn 3D art myself and applied the years of coding experience I gained from my work and hobbies for the game logic. I started making a game about a nerd who got bullied in school and how the nerd would fight back. I took advantage of the hurtful experiences and emotions I had from my school life, and I imagined how I would deal with the bullies as a cartoon character. I exaggerated the stories to make the game funny. I would do this first thing in the morning after breakfast, and only stopped for lunch, dinner, and bedtime.

When I think back, I am surprised at how during the period since I started that game, I had managed to shut down any thoughts of failure. It was never part of the thought process during the game development phase. I believe the reason is because we had already decided that I have 1 year, and the worst that can happen is that I’ll find a job if I failed. It’s not the end of the world. The backup plan was already in place. There’s nothing else to worry about but to deeply immerse myself into making this game. Turns out this way of thinking is an actual technique used by highly effective people. An article for another day.

The Grind Paid Off!

Four months later, I launched the game. It received 6000 downloads on the first day and started earning some money. That gave me the confidence and money to make the dream game I had previously failed to start. Six more months later, I launched the new MMORPG! That game quickly grew to earn us $100k for the next year. My wife quit her job and took over the 3D art, and it grew into a game that earns us $25k a month on average.

Wow, I made it? Just like that! It seemed like the most important part of my journey which allowed me to truly quit my job only took around 1 year. In reality, it took me 10 years from the start of my first job, to quitting my last job. I would never have been able to create a game that could replace job’s income 5 times without my boring job and all the time I spent on my hobbies. The effort put into those things helped build up my skills which enabled me to succeed. The real-estate I had bought helped double my net worth, giving me extra security to further explore my next steps.

I Made It?

Another 10 years go by, it’s now 2024. The game business is still running, although I’m contemplating to move on to my next journey. My real-estate portfolio has done OK, with large portions paid off by the tenants. I had given the stock market another shot, this time surviving the 2020 and 2022 market crash and ended up building another stream of income, thanks to some nice people for teaching me the ways. I guess I’ve achieved what I set out to do - to do what I enjoy on my own terms.

While there are many others who managed to quit their day job in 1-2 years, it was a longer journey for me. But I am truly thankful and the grind was worth it. I have learned so much. One of the coolest things I’ve realized is that average people can achieve a lot. There’s no need to compare myself with others. What’s important is that I’m getting what I am happy with.

In hindsight, I realize that I had made several mistakes. If I had known better, I could have been more effective. But that’s the path I was given, and I have learned from it to make better decisions for the future. Every mistake is a stepping stone towards the next level.

What’s Next?

I often hear of how unhappy people are with their life or job and think they can’t change it because they’re not like Elon Musk or born with special talents. By sharing my experiences, I hope to show that if an ordinary person like me can walk away from a day job, you can too, IF you wish and choose to. You don’t have to be born talented to do this. Many other ordinary people have done it! You just need to be willing to build up your skills and talents that enables the changes that you desire.

In my upcoming articles, I’ll delve deeper into the topics I’ve touched upon here. I’ll discuss how I executed the actual implementation and perhaps reflect on what I could have done better. I’ll also share other aspects of life and personal growth based on my experiences. While some of these may not directly relate to finances, I believe all aspects of life are interconnected and hold their own importance.

So, if you’re interested in hearing more from an average Joe navigating his way through life, feel free to follow along. I don’t claim to be an expert, but that is exactly what I’m trying to tell people. You don’t need to be an expert to build substantial wealth and live the life that you want. Stay tuned for more!