You don’t have to quit your job to build something that matters.
There’s a certain kind of internet advice that sounds brave. Quit your job. Burn the boats. No backup plan. Jump and grow wings on the way down.
It makes a great poster. It makes a terrible plan for a man with a mortgage, a wife who’d like to keep eating, and a house full of homeschooled kids who think “recess” means “the fridge.”
I work an 8-to-5 job. I teach call centers how to manage their teams. I like it, and it pays the bills. I also write books. Both of those things are true at the same time, and I’ve stopped apologizing for it.
The myth of the clean break
We love the story of the guy who walked out of the cubicle and never looked back. We don’t hear much about the other guys. The ones who walked out, ran out of money in month two, and spent the next five years climbing out of the hole.
The clean break is a highlight reel. Real life is the margins.
What the margins look like
The margins are the 5 a.m. hour before anyone else in the house is awake. The lunch break where you eat at your desk and write 400 words. The Saturday morning after the pancakes and before the yard. The car line. The waiting room.
None of those are glamorous. All of them add up.
Four hundred words a day is a 70,000-word book in about six months. That’s not a fantasy. That’s arithmetic.
I came up with the idea for the Five Minutes series while I was on vacation. My very next thought was that I’d never have time to write it. I honestly doubted it. But I started anyway. A chapter here, an idea there. Next thing I knew, I was cutting chapters from a 42-chapter manuscript because parts of it had gotten too long, too wordy, or just plain unnecessary.
Faithful in little
Jesus told a story about servants who were trusted with a little and then trusted with more. “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much” (Luke 16:10).
I used to read that as a moral lesson about honesty. Now I read it as a production schedule.
God doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to hand people big platforms. He seems a lot more interested in what you do with the fifteen minutes you already have. The margin isn’t the consolation prize. The margin is the audition.
Three rules for building on the side
- Protect one block of time like it’s a meeting with your boss. Because it is. It’s just a different boss.
- Make it small enough to survive a bad week. A goal you can only hit on a perfect day is a goal you’ll quit by Thursday.
- Don’t steal from the people you’re building it for. If the dream eats your family, it isn’t a dream. It’s a hobby with a body count.
The story under the story
Here’s what nobody tells you about the clean-break crowd: a lot of them aren’t running toward something. They’re running away from something. A boss. A sense of being stuck. A fear that life is passing them by.
Building in the margins forces a better question. Not “How do I escape?” but “What am I actually building, and who is it for?”
If you can answer that, you can build it at 5 a.m. with a cup of coffee and a sleeping house. And one day you might look up and realize the margin got wider than the page.
And if it never does? You still built something. That counts.