About

Hi, my name is Yasuo Long and welcome to the site.

This is where I share my thoughts and ideas on just about anything related to ideal  living and escaping the 9-to-5 permanently

I try to write honestly without being boring, so if you’re still reading, I’ll take it as a compliment.

Please take off your shoes, have a cup of tea and make yourself comfortable.

The only thing you need to remember here is that there is no spoon, cookies make you feel better and nobody ever makes the first jump.

You think that’s air you’re breathing? Think again.

The reason this site exists

I have 4 main goals in life and they are to:

1. Create time to live, reflect on life and discover and pursue passions by first escaping the confines of a 9-to-5 job
2. Maximize life fulfillment by overcoming negative habits and limiting beliefs
3. Maximize quality of life by minimizing negative stress and maximizing physical health and strength
4. Doing things that I believe help to improve the lives of the people around me

This site exists to allow me to share my thoughts and beliefs with anyone who might benefit from reading about them.

An Important Question: Why aren’t you working from home yet?

If you hate the office and would prefer to repeatedly smash your head against the wall than endure another soul sucking 9-to-5, why are you still there?

Chances are, it’s because you simply do not know what your options are.

Either that, or you know what your options are, but you are too afraid to take action.

Why this Blog is different

I write about escaping the office from the standpoint of an employee who understands all the fears and hang ups employees might have when it comes to escaping your office cubicle.

I used to work in a 6×6 foot box with no windows. Now I work in my home office with a huge window.

Simple pleasures, but they make a huge difference.

I am driven to live the best life I know how to, and I’m willing to break the rules of conventional wisdom to do it.

Methods - Telecommuting, Freelancing or Online Business – Which is the best way out of the office??

The route you choose to take out of the office will depend on the type of person you are.

Do you enjoy the comfort and certainty of a paycheck and don’t want to deal with logistics, but still want more flexibility and freedom in your day to day life?  Then you should probably be a telecommuter or teleworker.

Do you crave variety, want to have the freedom to set your own hours and rates, have the ability to live wherever you want and be the master of your own destiny in general?

Then you should either pursue freelancing or online business.

Not everyone wants to be a globe trotter working from cafes in Paris and not everyone is satisfied with simply being able to not have to commute to work each day.

Deciding what level of freedom and flexibility you want will determine which is the best way out of the office for you.

More About Me (In case you were curious)

As I mentioned earlier, my name is Yasuo Long (<– my pen name) and I founded this site with the help of a friend.

I use a pen name for creative freedom and also to protect parties who may not find some of what I write entirely flattering.

I work as the lead technical writer and training support specialist of an international engineering design company and I’ve been telecommuting full-time for the last 2 years.

This is my entire story of attempting to escape the office which started way back in 2005 (you better get comfortable snore…zzz)

I started my first experiments in online business back in early 2005. Google had just gone public a few months before, Youtube was still being run from the upstairs of a pizza restaurant and I was in my third year university overseas studying engineering. My original idea had been to create a passive source of income that I could rely on if I ever decided to take a break from engineering or to just take time off the career path to pursue hobbies and dream jobs.

It seemed so easy in theory and after buying 2 online marketing courses (spending way too much money in the process) and going through all the material, I was sure I could start making money in no time flat.

The first sites I ever created were blogs on martial arts. I started out with the plan to make money from the traffic to my sites with Google Ads, and I had barely begun to make some money until I got Google slapped.

The next thing I tried was to sell affiliate products, but nobody was interested and that was another dud.

Hitting wall after wall I soon began to get desperate and got sucked into marketing scams promising instant wealth and success.

This cost me a lot financially, though I learned a valuable lesson on the wrong way to start an online business.

I soon realized that starting an online business was going to be more work than I thought and required more attention and money than I had at the time.

Setting it aside, I focused all my attention on my studies while in the mean time looking for reliable sources of information to further my education in online business and generating passive income.

One of the most useful resources I found was the Internet Business Mastery podcast. These guys were different from the online business guru’s of the time because they took a more personal approach to teaching.

They were  basically just 2 guys talking about their experience in trying to build their internet business’s and it helped alot to hear their personal stories on how they got to where they were.

Upon graduating from University, I was ready to face the world as a fresh grad and start work in any engineering firm that would hire me. Like online business, I soon realized that this was going to be harder than I thought.

Rejection after rejection and the money in my bank account slowly dwindling away, I relied on low paying contract labor work to support myself. After months of moving from job to job and getting constantly yelled at by power hungry ego-maniacal floor managers, I decided to call it quits and to try and find work as a freelancer.

Having had zero experience in freelancing before then, my first stop was Elance. I had heard about it while researching online business and it was the recommended place to find work online as a freelancer.

Being a university grad who had studied engineering, I felt I had basically 2 skills that I thought I could use for freelancing : writing and 3d modelling.

The software I needed to do 3d modelling was way out of my budget so I stuck to looking for writing jobs instead.

Pretty soon I landed my first project writing a martial arts instruction manual. They paid me $1500 dollars for 1 month of work and I was a happy camper.

Having nothing else to put on my work resume at the time, I used my accumulated freelance experience as work experience.

Shortly after, I got called in for an interview for a job as a writer at an Engineering Design company. They thought I was perfect for the position and I got hired by the end of the week.

The first few months were great as I had the opportunity to do field work and get my hands dirty while learning how to operate and install the products they sold.

Along with that, I got to hone my skills in procedural writing and organizing complex information into simple language.

A couple of months into work, I remembered my original aspiration to start an online business that would help me generate passive income.

I was earning a stable income in a field relating to my degree, so I felt this was as good a time as any to jump start my efforts once again.

This was when I faced a new problem. I didn’t have the time to work on building an online business.

Having a 9-to-5 job was great in the sense that I had income, but now I didn’t have the time to do anything other than work.

I had to face facts that there simply were not enough hours in the day for me to work on my business while having a full-time job.

Sure, I could spend less time with my partner, exercise less and alienate all my friends to make time, but that really wasn’t an option I was willing to take.

Instead, I turned to an idea I had read about in Timothy Ferriss’s book The Four Hour Work Week. The idea was how people who were in full time jobs could have the same global mobility and time freedom as effective freelancers and online business owners.

While I wasn’t aiming for global mobility, the strategies he outlines became the basis of how I eventually managed to escape the office as a full time teleworker. The exact method I used to negotiate my teleworking agreement is available here on the blog for whoever is interested in doing the same.

Once out of the office, I spent a couple of months enjoying my new found freedom by getting myself back into shape and organizing my work schedule around my life rather than the other way round.

I continued to read books, took courses and started networking more with people who had achieved the freedom I was aiming for, all while fulfilling my obligations to the company I was working for and leading a full life spending time with friends and doing the things I enjoy.

I created this site to share everything I have learned in the past five years at also to share the things I continue to learn that help me.

It also helps to write as it helps remind me of the things I’ve learned over the years and I believe its good to record what you learn.

For those of you who feel stuck and don’t know what to do but feel deep in yourself that there is something else you would rather be doing right now with your life, I hope what I share on this site will help you gain a clearer idea on how to achieve your goals.