3 routes to happiness

Today I want to talk about the three routes we can take to build the life we want. 

This is going to be a very practical newsletter, so let’s buckle up. 

Just before we start, I created a completely free guide on how to land a work from home job in 2024. 

It’s a 30 mins video guide that will show you all the strategies and tactics that works right now in 2024 to land a well paid work from home job.

With that said let's look at the life that we want.

The life that we want: 

• Maximum freedom (movement, money, mind)
• Space for us and the people we love
• Quiet and peace

If we have these 3 things we are doing pretty good. 

So how do we get it? 

If we reverse engineer the process, i.e we start from where we want to be and we rewind up to where we are now…

For most of us the big blocker is the place where we live. 

You cannot underestimate the impact of this. 

It impacts our entire self. It touches on our soul. 

It’s my friend Felix who first told me about this. 

Felix used to be an organist. 

Yes that’s right, he used to play the organ in churches during mass and also for concerts. 

He is a very smart guy and when he realised that playing the organ was not giving him the life he wanted, he dropped 18 years of study and a lifetime vocation to start working in digital marketing. 

Fast forward to today Félix lives in Cluj, Romania.

This is where he has found his corner of happiness. 

One day we were talking about this guy Félix works for, name is Antoine. 

And Antoine had just taken a rental apartment in Paris.  

It was above 15K a month. 

What on earth can justify such an extravagant rent? 

“After the people around you, the space in which you live and spend time is the number 1 factor that influences your mood and your spirit.”

This is what Félix told me and I will never forget this. 

Because it is so true. 

Nothing impacts us more than the space we are in, apart from the people around us. 

I personally consider three layers of space: 

• My immediate space which is made of the rooms I like to be in, my house as a whole and the outside space around my house.
• My secondary space which is made of the immediate surroundings of my house - think about a 5 mins drive away from the house, or a 30 mins walk. The secondary space is extremely important because it “comes with the house’. I cannot avoid it. 
• My tertiary spaces and here I use the plural because it is made of the places that I like to go to in a 30-45 mins radius from my house. This is where I shop, where I exercise, it’s also the beach I like to go, forest I walk to, etc. 

The tertiary space I can choose where I go and also if I go. 

The primary and secondary spaces - I cannot choose to avoid it. It is there - every single day.

And it impacts the way I feel and therefore the way I think. Every single day. 

So with that in mind. 

Where we live is usually the number one problem with our lifestyle. 

That is because we live where we need to be. 

Not where we want to be. 

Remember our newsletter about my trip to Camares… 

“Crowded places where no one wants to live 

but everyone needs to live - are very expensive. 

Quiet places where everyone wants to live 

but no one can live - are very cheap.”

So it’s simple, right? 

We want to move!

Now what is stopping us from moving? 

The job of course. 

But more generally…

Our source of income. 

This is why we opened this newsletter with the 3 routes to happiness. 

Because we have three ways of creating an income that enables us to move to our place of choice. 

We have: 

• Creating a business 
• Getting a work from home job
• And getting a local job, in the area we want to move in.

To me the easiest, most straightforward in order to get us to move quickly is getting a work from home job. 

The local job option can also be quick but it comes with 3 major problems: 

1. It’s usually not very well paid
2. It’s almost as hard to get as a work from home job 
3. It’s usually a low-level job with very little scope to develop and progress

I know 2) can seem counter-intuitive. 

But if you live even 2 hours away from the place where you want to live, just going to interviews is going to be challenging. 

Let alone explaining why you want to relocate… 

A lot of local employers are going to doubt your project. 

What about starting a business? 

It depends what sort of business we want to start. 

Sadly a lot of people get confused with the end goal. 

They want to create an independent income, independent from their current location, in order to move to a cheaper and better place to live. 

But they get sucked in to make millions of dollars. 

It’s great if you make a few millions. 

But it is not the initial goal. 

The initial goal is to create a work from home income in order to create and live the life we want. 

The consequence of this is that finding a well paid work from home job is the single simplest and easiest way to live the life we want. 

The minute we land this well paid work from home job… 

We can give our notice and get moving! 

For me it’s near the sea. 

And for you… Where will it be? 

To Your Success!

Julien