The Escape Manifesto – Book summary
“The Escape Manifesto – Quit your corporate job, do something different“
I underlined certain quotes and sentences that were most important to me and typed it up:
All our lives we jump through hoops.
Don’t wait for permission.
Life is too short to do work that doesn’t matter to you.
You are capable of more than you realize.
This is no dress rehearsal. Make it count.
There will never be a perfect time.
You cannot underestimate the importance of building genuine relationships with people doing interesting work in areas that interest you.
Develop skills. Stop chasing qualifications.
It is only through making a habit of doing that you will be able to manufacture a transition for yourself.
The more ideas you engage with, the more you are putting yourself in a position to spot new and exciting opportunities.
Why am I working for this organization? Am I crazy if I don’t want to be here?
I don’t want my memories to be like reading compliance manual.
I don’t want my alarm go off at 5:30 anymore.
Constraints of creativity. I can’t think or make decisions without them being suppressed by standard operating procedures.
I’ve been institutionalized into not thinking.
Inevitably, your career will define you, and then you’ll be left to contend with wether you like yourself defined that way or not.
Autonomy. Mastery. Purpose.
Your body isn’t designed for spending all day sitting down, staring at a screen.
The problem in working for a big institution is that it necessarily takes away one’s ability to be impulsive and think freely because the bosses don’t like it. So you have to leave this environment in order to regain your ability to respond spontaneously to your own impulses.
All the way through our educytion we are taught to fit in. Obey rules, follow guidance, do homework, meet deadlines. Be quiet. Sit down. Pass tests. Get grades. Eat your vegetables.
The corporate world is remarkably similar. Most organizations want predictable, repeatable, scalable behavior. They want to tick off points on recruitment checklists. The want someone who meets the spec. Worker bees. They want cogs.
All of us who have trodden the corporate path are people who have learnt how to jump through hoops. This type of traditional education and social conditioning is not helpful if you want to live a life on your own term.
Large-scale education was never developed to motivate kids or to create scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.
What the corporation or institutional world wants you to do is the opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone who can think, but not for himself: who can think instead for the institution.
The prison walls are funny. First you hate’em, then you get used to’em. Enough time passes, gets so you depend on them .That’s institutionalized.
It is important to push the boundaries of your network.
You can learn any role in less than two years.
You can only connect the dots looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Your next job or project just has to tick some of your boxes. You won’t do it forever and you’ll learn something from the experience whether it is positive or negative.
We are so used to jumping through society’s hoops that we didn’t know what to do when the structures of an institution weren’t there to direct us towards our next challenge.
Comfort kills ambition.
If you’re not doing what you want to be doing with your life perhaps you should get equally scared about the passing of time?
We will do almost anything to avoid fear or pain in the short term even if it is something that may massively benefit us in the longer term. A great example of this would be turning down a public speaking invitation because of fear of embarrassment even though you know that it is a great opportunity.
Reasons why we get stuck: choices – the human mind can get paralyzed in indecision. We often ignore information that does not fit into our current narrative.
It’s those of us who are coasting along, neither fulfilled nor absolutely miserable, who most need to beware the “headstuck” trap.
A big career change is scary. You allow your imagination to get out of control. You don’t know what you don’t know. Dreams fade away because we can’t tolerate short-term pain necessary to get to our long-term goal.
We talk ourselves out of decisions.
The secret to happiness is low expectations.
Analysis paralysis.
If you work in the corporate world you are probably relatively analytical. No wonder when it comes to your own life you apply the same level of rigor and risk aversion. Be clear on your decision criteria.
We are short of time and energy. We were just knackered at the end of each workday. We would often spend weekends partying or distracting ourselves from the fact that we weren’t enjoying our jobs.
We found that we only had a limited amount of mental energy and that our job used most of it.
Abraham Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of needs has “self-actualization” at the top.
Worrying about money is the main reasons why people stay in jobs that aren’t right for them.
Genuine responsible behavior would see you address the blockers and begin to hunt for new opportunities.
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
Knowing that you’re not going to settle is the most powerful thing you can do. We began reframing the way we thought about everything.
Often all it takes to shock us out of our comfortable apathy is to read a line that strikes us as being deeply true.
You know it’s up to you what you believe? A moment of truth?
I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
To be nobody but yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
You feel the call. The call to do something totally insane and futile. But you know you have to do it.
You know that if you don’t, a little part of you will be dead forever.
We are no longer kids. Time started going by really fast. Spending time doing work that you don’t want to do, you are wasting valuable time that could be spent discovering new interests and developing skills, contacts and experiences in new areas.
Things will not be like this for long.
It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognize the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognize from day to day.
I am large, I contain multitudes.
The urgency of keeping up with the treadmill of conventional life often means that people forget not “who they are” but “what they enjoy”.
The years we spent in that environment were invaluable because they showed us the importance of spending the rest of your careers striving to do things that mattered to us.
The problem was that we were coasting.
All too often, further education is a massive form of procrastination.
Look up the ladder. I saw uninspired, bland, middle-aged men, drearily pushing their crushed souls
through another long day of the same old slog. We decided to escape when we realized that we didn’t want our boss’s job or their boss’s job.
Our values aren’t aligned with those of our employer.
He decided to escape when time seemed to be passing so slowly that he thought that the clock he could see from his desk on London’s St. Paul’s cathedral was broken.
Every moment we stayed there was a moment that we weren’t building the futures we wanted for ourselves. Our most important realization was that there would never be a perfect time to do something that felt scary or risky.
You don’t have to have “found your calling” in order to do stuff that you enjoy. Once you take away the pressure of asking “is this what I really want to do with my life?” you make it much easier to take on new ideas, opportunities and challenges. If you give yourself a break for not having it figured out yet the whole world can seem like a much more exciting place.
You can resolve to make a big career before knowing what you are escaping towards.
I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it.
Income. Expenses. Investments. Debt.
Invest in yourself, not stuff.
Travel is the only thing you spend money on that makes you richer. Rare is the person who return from a genuinely new and adventurous experience without a fresh perspective on something they took for granted at home.
Learn. Use the library, beg, steal, download and borrow books.
The more scared you are of a kind of work or calling, the surer you can be that you should try and do it.
Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.
Stop reading, start acting.
Expose yourself to new networks. Identify different communities that you might be interested in. Use meetup.com and eventbrite.com to track down events that look interesting to you. Go to these events. Be brave. Take a friend. Engage people in conversation.
Write some articles. Build your own mini-tribe.
Embark on a series of escape experiments.
Take a day of holiday and shadow a friend around their job. Write to five business owners in areas that interest you and ask them whether you can interview them for an article/research project. Volunteer with a local charity or community organization. You should explore many different avenues and pursue those that interest you. The key is to start.
Don’t quit just yet. Do stuff after hours.
The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.
Test your basic assumptions.
Checklist: Are you solving a real problem? Are you in a financial position? Are you willing to sacrifice what most people take for granted to make your business a success? Are you resilient enough?
Surround yourself with people that are interested in the same things as you.
Choose life.
The best way to get approval is not to need it.
Finding an exciting job is a massively subjective process.
The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects.
Which of these matter to you? Where you work. When you work. What you work on. How much you get paid. How much control you have. How much you learn every day. Who you work with.
It is only through valuable skills over time that you can really develop a sense of fulfillment. What useful skills could I offer a prospective employer?
Start wondering what it is you could offer, and then put in the effort required to make yourself relevant and useful.
Developing new skills and reframing existing ones.
Confusion between skills and qualifications.
New employers want proof of commitment far more than they need to see specific skills.
Developing new skills doesn’t require quitting your job and can be a lot of fun.
Your skills are way more transferable than you realize.
Weak ties are especially useful in the modern world.
Don’t wait for a job to be advertised. Your ideal role might not even exist yet, so you may need to make it up. There’s nothing wrong with saying, I’d love to work for you but realize you might not have any jobs. Could I talk to you anyway?”
Cultivate a supplier mindset. What can I offer? You’ll learn more about yourself from a bad situation than a good one. Once you’ve done the hard work of creating new opportunities for yourself just pick one. Don’t analyze too much. Don’t worry that you can’t see around the next corner. It doesn’t have to be forever.
When you start out on a career you have no idea what you are doing. This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not.
Adventures can cause us to think dramatically differently about the world and our place in it. For that reason they are hugely valuable parts of any escape.
Doing something outside your normal routine. We spend so much time seeing ourselves through the eyes of others. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food you are forced into direct experience.
Cruise control. Before we quit our corporate jobs adventures kept us sane. Adventures strip away some of the bullshit from work, society and our peers that was keeping us stuck.
Being fully in charge.
You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you can feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world.
Not living with curiosity or fire. Just plain bored.
We are defined by our daily activity and the people in our lives. Change the context and you can change your self-definition. The benefit of spending some time traveling through a vast wilderness or living in a community that is very different from your own is that you are no longer surrounded by people you consider peers or your competition. You are free to assess your life on its merits and based on your own values.
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
Spend nothing. Save and adventure fund.
Re-invent yourself.
Why stuck? Fear of the unknown, of failure and probably giving up my comfortable, safe standard of living.
Make decisions quickly. It is far better to make a decision and get on with the plan than to waste too much time trying to figure out what to do.
Protect yourself. Answer your emails once a day.
Take people with you and ignore other people completely.
Exercise, eat well and get plenty of sleep.
If you want to be successful, you can always start now, with only 1 percent of what you have in your grand vision. It’ll be a humble prototype version of your grand vision, but you’ll be in the game.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
Don’t waste your time. If I have the chance to do something now and do not take it, I may always regret it. Each day I am one day closer to death. There are so many interesting places I would still like to see, so many interesting people to meet, so much to do. And there is so little time. Before I
know it I’ll be dead and what a bloody waste of time that will be if I’ve just been arsing around.
I am happiest when I have a sense of purpose.
Animals being led out of cages and not realizing that the door is open. We are influence by the cages of our existence. The fact that we aren’t immediately aware of them makes them all the more effective.
Learn useful skills, curate a portfolio of projects and contacts and – if at all possible – build something valuable for yourself.
Norms are unhelpful because they provide us with flat-pack definitions of success. Belief systems are so dangerous because, by definition, they require the denial of rejection of alternative ways of thinking. True intelligence involves being brave enough to change your mind.
It can take time to find your principle. The solution: To do, make and learn lots of things. Does this resonate with me? Does this repel me? Do I not care?
Exposure to new opportunities, likeminded people and useful information.
Starting a business or changing careers is a huge emotional, personal and psychological challenge.
Surround yourself with glass-half-full people.
Develop three traits: Inquisitiveness. Bravery. Determination.
Things may come to those who wait, but only things left by those who hustle.
Think differently about your life and your career. Learning, experimenting and networking. Simply doing the scary work of trying new things.
You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing. The product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead.
The most important thing you can do from now on is taking steps in new directions. If you want different outcomes, you need to adopt different behaviors.
Don’t fear the unknown, fear regret.
“The Escape Manifesto – Quit your corporate job, do something different“
I underlined certain quotes and sentences that were most important to me and typed it up:
All our lives we jump through hoops.
Don’t wait for permission.
Life is too short to do work that doesn’t matter to you.
You are capable of more than you realize.
This is no dress rehearsal. Make it count.
There will never be a perfect time.
You cannot underestimate the importance of building genuine relationships with people doing interesting work in areas that interest you.
Develop skills. Stop chasing qualifications.
It is only through making a habit of doing that you will be able to manufacture a transition for yourself.
The more ideas you engage with, the more you are putting yourself in a position to spot new and exciting opportunities.
Why am I working for this organization? Am I crazy if I don’t want to be here?
I don’t want my memories to be like reading compliance manual.
I don’t want my alarm go off at 5:30 anymore.
Constraints of creativity. I can’t think or make decisions without them being suppressed by standard operating procedures.
I’ve been institutionalized into not thinking.
Inevitably, your career will define you, and then you’ll be left to contend with wether you like yourself defined that way or not.
Autonomy. Mastery. Purpose.
Your body isn’t designed for spending all day sitting down, staring at a screen.
The problem in working for a big institution is that it necessarily takes away one’s ability to be impulsive and think freely because the bosses don’t like it. So you have to leave this environment in order to regain your ability to respond spontaneously to your own impulses.
All the way through our educytion we are taught to fit in. Obey rules, follow guidance, do homework, meet deadlines. Be quiet. Sit down. Pass tests. Get grades. Eat your vegetables.
The corporate world is remarkably similar. Most organizations want predictable, repeatable, scalable behavior. They want to tick off points on recruitment checklists. The want someone who meets the spec. Worker bees. They want cogs.
All of us who have trodden the corporate path are people who have learnt how to jump through hoops. This type of traditional education and social conditioning is not helpful if you want to live a life on your own term.
Large-scale education was never developed to motivate kids or to create scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.
What the corporation or institutional world wants you to do is the opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone who can think, but not for himself: who can think instead for the institution.
The prison walls are funny. First you hate’em, then you get used to’em. Enough time passes, gets so you depend on them .That’s institutionalized.
It is important to push the boundaries of your network.
You can learn any role in less than two years.
You can only connect the dots looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Your next job or project just has to tick some of your boxes. You won’t do it forever and you’ll learn something from the experience whether it is positive or negative.
We are so used to jumping through society’s hoops that we didn’t know what to do when the structures of an institution weren’t there to direct us towards our next challenge.
Comfort kills ambition.
If you’re not doing what you want to be doing with your life perhaps you should get equally scared about the passing of time?
We will do almost anything to avoid fear or pain in the short term even if it is something that may massively benefit us in the longer term. A great example of this would be turning down a public speaking invitation because of fear of embarrassment even though you know that it is a great opportunity.
Reasons why we get stuck: choices – the human mind can get paralyzed in indecision. We often ignore information that does not fit into our current narrative.
It’s those of us who are coasting along, neither fulfilled nor absolutely miserable, who most need to beware the “headstuck” trap.
A big career change is scary. You allow your imagination to get out of control. You don’t know what you don’t know. Dreams fade away because we can’t tolerate short-term pain necessary to get to our long-term goal.
We talk ourselves out of decisions.
The secret to happiness is low expectations.
Analysis paralysis.
If you work in the corporate world you are probably relatively analytical. No wonder when it comes to your own life you apply the same level of rigor and risk aversion. Be clear on your decision criteria.
We are short of time and energy. We were just knackered at the end of each workday. We would often spend weekends partying or distracting ourselves from the fact that we weren’t enjoying our jobs.
We found that we only had a limited amount of mental energy and that our job used most of it.
Abraham Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of needs has “self-actualization” at the top.
Worrying about money is the main reasons why people stay in jobs that aren’t right for them.
Genuine responsible behavior would see you address the blockers and begin to hunt for new opportunities.
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
Knowing that you’re not going to settle is the most powerful thing you can do. We began reframing the way we thought about everything.
Often all it takes to shock us out of our comfortable apathy is to read a line that strikes us as being deeply true.
You know it’s up to you what you believe? A moment of truth?
I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
To be nobody but yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
You feel the call. The call to do something totally insane and futile. But you know you have to do it.
You know that if you don’t, a little part of you will be dead forever.
We are no longer kids. Time started going by really fast. Spending time doing work that you don’t want to do, you are wasting valuable time that could be spent discovering new interests and developing skills, contacts and experiences in new areas.
Things will not be like this for long.
It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognize the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognize from day to day.
I am large, I contain multitudes.
The urgency of keeping up with the treadmill of conventional life often means that people forget not “who they are” but “what they enjoy”.
The years we spent in that environment were invaluable because they showed us the importance of spending the rest of your careers striving to do things that mattered to us.
The problem was that we were coasting.
All too often, further education is a massive form of procrastination.
Look up the ladder. I saw uninspired, bland, middle-aged men, drearily pushing their crushed souls
through another long day of the same old slog. We decided to escape when we realized that we didn’t want our boss’s job or their boss’s job.
Our values aren’t aligned with those of our employer.
He decided to escape when time seemed to be passing so slowly that he thought that the clock he could see from his desk on London’s St. Paul’s cathedral was broken.
Every moment we stayed there was a moment that we weren’t building the futures we wanted for ourselves. Our most important realization was that there would never be a perfect time to do something that felt scary or risky.
You don’t have to have “found your calling” in order to do stuff that you enjoy. Once you take away the pressure of asking “is this what I really want to do with my life?” you make it much easier to take on new ideas, opportunities and challenges. If you give yourself a break for not having it figured out yet the whole world can seem like a much more exciting place.
You can resolve to make a big career before knowing what you are escaping towards.
I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it.
Income. Expenses. Investments. Debt.
Invest in yourself, not stuff.
Travel is the only thing you spend money on that makes you richer. Rare is the person who return from a genuinely new and adventurous experience without a fresh perspective on something they took for granted at home.
Learn. Use the library, beg, steal, download and borrow books.
The more scared you are of a kind of work or calling, the surer you can be that you should try and do it.
Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.
Stop reading, start acting.
Expose yourself to new networks. Identify different communities that you might be interested in. Use meetup.com and eventbrite.com to track down events that look interesting to you. Go to these events. Be brave. Take a friend. Engage people in conversation.
Write some articles. Build your own mini-tribe.
Embark on a series of escape experiments.
Take a day of holiday and shadow a friend around their job. Write to five business owners in areas that interest you and ask them whether you can interview them for an article/research project. Volunteer with a local charity or community organization. You should explore many different avenues and pursue those that interest you. The key is to start.
Don’t quit just yet. Do stuff after hours.
The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.
Test your basic assumptions.
Checklist: Are you solving a real problem? Are you in a financial position? Are you willing to sacrifice what most people take for granted to make your business a success? Are you resilient enough?
Surround yourself with people that are interested in the same things as you.
Choose life.
The best way to get approval is not to need it.
Finding an exciting job is a massively subjective process.
The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects.
Which of these matter to you? Where you work. When you work. What you work on. How much you get paid. How much control you have. How much you learn every day. Who you work with.
It is only through valuable skills over time that you can really develop a sense of fulfillment. What useful skills could I offer a prospective employer?
Start wondering what it is you could offer, and then put in the effort required to make yourself relevant and useful.
Developing new skills and reframing existing ones.
Confusion between skills and qualifications.
New employers want proof of commitment far more than they need to see specific skills.
Developing new skills doesn’t require quitting your job and can be a lot of fun.
Your skills are way more transferable than you realize.
Weak ties are especially useful in the modern world.
Don’t wait for a job to be advertised. Your ideal role might not even exist yet, so you may need to make it up. There’s nothing wrong with saying, I’d love to work for you but realize you might not have any jobs. Could I talk to you anyway?”
Cultivate a supplier mindset. What can I offer? You’ll learn more about yourself from a bad situation than a good one. Once you’ve done the hard work of creating new opportunities for yourself just pick one. Don’t analyze too much. Don’t worry that you can’t see around the next corner. It doesn’t have to be forever.
When you start out on a career you have no idea what you are doing. This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not.
Adventures can cause us to think dramatically differently about the world and our place in it. For that reason they are hugely valuable parts of any escape.
Doing something outside your normal routine. We spend so much time seeing ourselves through the eyes of others. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food you are forced into direct experience.
Cruise control. Before we quit our corporate jobs adventures kept us sane. Adventures strip away some of the bullshit from work, society and our peers that was keeping us stuck.
Being fully in charge.
You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you can feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world.
Not living with curiosity or fire. Just plain bored.
We are defined by our daily activity and the people in our lives. Change the context and you can change your self-definition. The benefit of spending some time traveling through a vast wilderness or living in a community that is very different from your own is that you are no longer surrounded by people you consider peers or your competition. You are free to assess your life on its merits and based on your own values.
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
Spend nothing. Save and adventure fund.
Re-invent yourself.
Why stuck? Fear of the unknown, of failure and probably giving up my comfortable, safe standard of living.
Make decisions quickly. It is far better to make a decision and get on with the plan than to waste too much time trying to figure out what to do.
Protect yourself. Answer your emails once a day.
Take people with you and ignore other people completely.
Exercise, eat well and get plenty of sleep.
If you want to be successful, you can always start now, with only 1 percent of what you have in your grand vision. It’ll be a humble prototype version of your grand vision, but you’ll be in the game.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
Don’t waste your time. If I have the chance to do something now and do not take it, I may always regret it. Each day I am one day closer to death. There are so many interesting places I would still like to see, so many interesting people to meet, so much to do. And there is so little time. Before I
know it I’ll be dead and what a bloody waste of time that will be if I’ve just been arsing around.
I am happiest when I have a sense of purpose.
Animals being led out of cages and not realizing that the door is open. We are influence by the cages of our existence. The fact that we aren’t immediately aware of them makes them all the more effective.
Learn useful skills, curate a portfolio of projects and contacts and – if at all possible – build something valuable for yourself.
Norms are unhelpful because they provide us with flat-pack definitions of success. Belief systems are so dangerous because, by definition, they require the denial of rejection of alternative ways of thinking. True intelligence involves being brave enough to change your mind.
It can take time to find your principle. The solution: To do, make and learn lots of things. Does this resonate with me? Does this repel me? Do I not care?
Exposure to new opportunities, likeminded people and useful information.
Starting a business or changing careers is a huge emotional, personal and psychological challenge.
Surround yourself with glass-half-full people.
Develop three traits: Inquisitiveness. Bravery. Determination.
Things may come to those who wait, but only things left by those who hustle.
Think differently about your life and your career. Learning, experimenting and networking. Simply doing the scary work of trying new things.
You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing. The product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead.
The most important thing you can do from now on is taking steps in new directions. If you want different outcomes, you need to adopt different behaviors.
Don’t fear the unknown, fear regret.