Spending that much of your time stuck in something that doesn’t bring you fulfillment will negatively affect every other area of your life one way or another. The rat race is real and keeps too many people from living the life they desire. Your work consumes your energy and makes you feel helpless when you’re stuck in the rat race. No matter who you are, what you’ve been through, or where you currently are in life, you can escape the rat race. Anyone can live the life they desire with a plan, focused effort, and hunger to escape the rat race.
How to Escape the Rat Rate And Live the Life You Want
Here are five strategies anyone can learn, understand, and utilize to escape the rat race and live the life they desire. Everything you want is possible with focus, consistency, and commitment to become the best version of yourself.
1. Acknowledge Your Current Position
You can’t move forward in life if you’re not clear where you currently are so that you can know how far you are from where you want to go. You can learn how to escape the rat race when you first understand that your current circumstance is not where you have to stay. Are you working a job you hate? Are you building a business in a way that doesn’t feel in alignment for you? Do you dread waking up each morning because your day is going to be filled with other people’s priorities? Be brutally honest with yourself about where you are now. Get clear on:
What you like about what you do for a living; What you dislike about how you spend your working time; How you spend a majority of time each day (do a time audit); What holds your attention; And how much you’re fully present in your life.
2. Map Out the Ideal Elements You Want in Your Life
With clarity on where you are, it’s time to experience what could be the fun part of the process—get clear on what life on the other side of the rat race looks like. If you’re going to escape the rat race, you need to be intentional about the life you desire. Take a piece of paper (or software) and start writing out each element of the life you desire to live. Be specific about:
How you want to spend your time each day; How you want to generate an income; Who gets part of your time and why; What elements of fun do you want to experience more of; Where in the world you’d like to explore; And your challenge goals that may include things such as learning a new language or skill.
You can escape the rat race when you commit to and take action on living a life most people are afraid to pursue. You can live an incredible life when you’re willing to get clarity and map out goals that help you become the best version of yourself in every aspect of your life. With clarity on your current position and a blueprint for what your ideal life looks like, set realistic but ambitious goals. The mapping process provides the overall picture to set specific goals that help you escape the rat race.
3. Cut Out What No Longer Serves You
One of the more challenging parts of escaping the rat race is letting go of people, circumstances, and situations that no longer serve you. The growth process requires the shedding of excess baggage. You should be connected to the people and situations that support the forward direction you’d like to move to. You’ll never learn how to escape the rat race if you have one foot tied to what’s kept you comfortable in the past. You have to let go to move boldly into the life you want to live. Escaping the rat race is a hard enough task on its own. It becomes increasingly more complicated when you allow stress and the limiting beliefs of others to impact your decisions. Let go of what doesn’t serve your forward movement and desire for growth. It’s a freeing feeling to be free of misalignment and surrounded by inspiration. Your circle, relationships, and what you put into your mind will either help or hurt your journey to escape the rat race and live the life you desire.
4. Use Your Expertise, the Internet, and Social Media to Increase Your Value
The Internet, social media, software, and access to information create excellent opportunities whether you’re a lifelong career professional or desire to be an entrepreneur. You spend the majority of your time doing some form of work. You can leverage the opportunities today to make the most money in the best and healthiest way for you. You have knowledge and life experience. The things you know are valuable to companies or other humans. You can take your knowledge and turn it into a fantastic career or build a business around it. Now, no one can make this decision for you. During your mapping out ideal elements phase, you should clarify whether you want a better job, a raise, start a business, or transition your current business. No matter which income model you decide is suitable for you, the use of thought leadership and content can help you increase your value to a company or customers. The idea is to take the knowledge you have, around the topics you’re interested in and can talk about with authority, and create videos, written posts, and or audio content. You educate, demonstrate expertise, and build attention. You don’t have to be a content or social media machine like Gary Vaynerchuk. You create value on your terms and in a way that feels good to you. As you add value online, you get attention from consumers. As your attention grows, so does your following. With a group of people following, you create an asset that can be leveraged for an employer or turned into a consumer base for your business. Income growth follows the value provided. Social media and the Internet offer an outlet to add value by sharing your knowledge, expertise, and experience through content. Leverage the available opportunities to show your company why you deserve a raise, a young man who did just that and showed it on TikTok. He leveraged thought leadership and content to show Walmart his value and has now escaped the rat race. You can also decide to start a business and do so with fewer costs. You can use Squarespace to build a website with tutorials from YouTube (all free). Keep this website simple with information on who you are, what you teach, and what you offer for sale. In this digital information age, you can package your knowledge into digital information products, which require far fewer expenses to create. It is possible to build the foundation of a thriving business for under five hundred dollars. You can bootstrap and go to YouTube university to learn what you don’t know. You can take what you do, enjoy learning and talking about, and turn it into a better working situation or a bonafide business. Use content and thought leadership to grow your revenue if you have a business. With growing revenue, you can decide what elements of the business no longer serve you. It provides options.
5. Consistency, Focus, and Work
You have all the foundational elements to put in the work and live the life you desire. At the end of the day, your level of success will be directly tied to the effort you put into it. One of the reasons why people don’t escape the rat race is because they don’t consistently put in the focused work. You will escape the rat race when you have a hunger to escape—the life you want to live demands it. Focus allows you to not give in to distractions when they arise, and they will. Consistency gets you closer to the ideal elements you mapped out. Everything you desire and the path to escape the rat race are on the other side of consistency.
Final Thoughts
You’ve waited long enough to stop putting every other priority and person before yourself. It’s time to self-prioritize your growth and commit to escaping the rat race in every sense. You deserve to live the life you desire, and you can if you’re willing to work for it. Create more money, abundance, time freedom, and exciting experiences by using these strategies to escape the rat race. Featured photo credit: Amos Bar-Zeev via unsplash.com
