How I broke free from my Corporate Gig

Now that we're moving into a "Gig Economy", I love calling my jobs before 2015 "My Corporate Gigs."

These last 13 months have been both exciting and frightening at the same time. Last June 6th 2015, I left my corporate gig to start my own online guitar lessons business, Patrick Gallagher Blues Guitar Lessons. I guess you could call that a gig too! Except as I found the definition for this term "Gig Economy", which is "an environment in which temporary positions are common and organizations contract with independent workers for short-term engagements" then I guess you could say that my use of the term for my ex-corporate job and for my own Guitar Lessons Biz is really a misnomer. (http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/gig-economy) I am going to keep calling my ex-corporate job "My Corporate Gig" as a term of derision and perhaps some humor. I think it is somewhat funny but then my sense of humor may not come across as funny in my writing but I promise to work on it.

I probably should start further back in my life to explain why leaving my job to start my own business was the course I had decided to take but for now I will only say I had been researching for about 2 years on the idea of starting my own guitar lessons business and this included listening to Podcasts on iTunes every day in 2015. This is really what I want to write about here on Steemit. I'd like to reveal to others the lessons I learned from going it on my own.

I should add, when I gave my notice to my former employer, I had reflected on doing this for a whole year and when I did it, I didn't tell any of my closest friends or family members what I was doing. The reason for not telling them? I thought if I told them what my plans were they would try to talk me out of my decision. When I did eventually tell them about 6 months later and even though one of my friends said "Good for you!", every one else sent me Help Wanted Ads from the internet from time to time. The message I got was that I should go back to a corporate day job and keep working this Guitar Lesson idea on the side. Actually, the real reason I decided I needed to cut the ties with my company and go it on my own was because I had tried to build my website and do all the things I felt I needed to do to help get new students interested in my services for that last year while I was still working for them. I spent my nights and weekends working on my plans and my site. The problem I felt I was having however was this part time endeavor had not reaped any results such as interest from others in my services and I felt I really needed to free myself up so I could give full-time attention to it .

My other interests

When I left my corporate gig, I thought at the time all I wanted to do was to build my guitar lessons website and practice my guitar and in addition, create lesson plans for my guitar students as they found me online. I had taken $12,000 out of my 401k and so I figured I had 4 months of expenses covered and could just concentrate on my business creation. I figured if (and I did realize at the time this was a big IF) I could get 5 students by the end of the second month then I could earn $250 per week if they paid $50/half hour one time per week and if I could get another 5 students for a total of now 10 students yielding me $500 per week of income then in the next few months after this time I might be able to double it to $1,000 per week. This I reasoned was a definite pay raise from my corporate gig and I would be playing my guitar doing it.

Before I go into more details about all of my plans for how much money I could earn and how, the real thing to know was that I had an idea of how I wanted to live my life and for those first 2 months of my 4 months, I lived it exactly as I planned it. Except with no guitar students.

The vision I had of my perfect day went like this: Every morning when I awake, I will get a cup of coffee and meditate concentrating on my in-breaths and out-breaths for 2 hours. Then a one hour - 3 Mile meditative walk. Then after a shower and getting dressed I will start working on my website and practice for an hour on the songs I will be teaching my guitar students that day. Then practice my own songs for my repertoire and then have 4 half hour lessons over the next 4 hours. This gives me a half hour between lessons to make notes and send each student an email on what we covered as well as my recommendations for how they should practice and play the next week. Then record a video lesson for my free video series and then record a video lesson for my "Pay to Access" videos. Write for my blog. Read and then Meditate before bed.

Like I said, right now for the most part I am living my days like this except I still do not have 20 guitar students. I do have one student and I have been enjoying (luckily enough) driving and earning enough to live on for Uber and Lyft in Boston. Through all of this I found out that my other interests wouldn't leave me alone. Such as my interest in the Life of the Buddha and his teachings on how to meditate. I like to read books and listen to Audible about Buddhist teachings as well as reflect on the meaning of life.

I'll have more to say in future posts here on Steemit regarding how I escaped my corporate gig and how things unfolded but really, for now, I just wanted to say hi to everyone here and give a brief introduction.