Freedom

                                               

  I am an economics teacher so I thought I might discuss some real-world implications tied to salary.  When I was working with a corporation, one of my rules was to live two levels below my salary.  What I mean by that is when I was a supervisor of multiple stores I lived off the salary of being a manager of one store. 

Why would I do that?  My thought was that if I was fired I could always go work for another company and get a job two levels below the position I had.  That it allowed me to walk away from the job if I was asked to do something that I did not think was ethical.  It also was a way to make sure that I was doing the job because I loved it not because I was making so much money.

I remember when our owner came back to run the day to day business.  He came back with a strong theory that he was going to cultivate a family atmosphere inside the company and wanted to also make our 15” pizza into a 16” family pizza.  He thought the bigger pizza would feed the family better and work well with his family theme.

My first thought was that no customer was going to be able to tell the difference between the two different pizza sizes.  So that the customer was not going to think they were going to get more pizza and it was only going to cost us more money as we would put more sauce, cheese and items on the pizza.  Each week our owner would call me to ask how the rollout of the family pizza was doing in my region of the country.  This went on for about three weeks with me making up reasons why we did not roll it out, yet. 

Finally, one week the owner lost his patience with me and asked why I had not rolled out the bigger sized pizza.  When I explained my reasoning that I did not think the customer would notice and it would just cost us money, the owner hung up on me.  Never a good sign.  I had to make a business decision and the fact that I was not tied to my salary gave me the freedom to do that.

When the profit statements came in however, my region earned more money than the rest of the company.  My risk paid off.  When I reflect on that decision would of it been different if I needed this high paying job to pay off my bills?  Was it easier to be bold when you knew you could get a job at a lower salary?

To get outlier results you must do things differently than the norm.  I thought living below my means allowed me to make decisions with much less fear and freedom than my colleagues.  That the fact that I did neither worry about job security or wages freed up my mind to focus on solving the problems of the company.

One day I woke up and realized that I did not want to travel around the country anymore being a corporate executive.  I had lost the passion for the job.  So, because I was living below my means it was easy to walk away from this job and find my true passion which is teaching.  Never once as a teacher have I looked back and thought I wish I was still living that corporate life. The students I teach have filled my heart with joy, gratitude and passion to make the world a better place, which more than compensates for the difference in pay.

Love to hear your thoughts.