How To Change Your Life

hi i'm pete and welcome to just a few acres farm small farm sunday edition well the weather has been miserable outside we got the remnants of one hurricane during the week we've got the remnants of another hurricane coming it's just so wet we've been able to do very little outside so i'm going to spend some time inside with you today talking about something that comes up probably more than anything else on this channel many people choose small farming like ours direct to consumer and all that stuff is a second life after their first career and that's the case with me i went through one of those life transitions and i want to reveal kind of the the deeper side of it um both how it works financially when i knew it was time to make a leap how it affected my family how it affected me sort of the whole thing because when i hear about this from most people they're saying well i'm thinking about it and you know there's a lot of fear in making that leap because you're going from something that probably is secure to something that is largely unknown and through my experience maybe i can give you a better sense of what you're getting into if you're contemplating the same oh and while i talk i'll show you some pictures from that period in my life me my farm and my family first thing how do you know it's time a lot of people waffle background say geez i'm unhappy in my job i'm not sure what to do and i think that the fear of making the leap to something else keeps them in their job so i would say they're tolerably unhappy they're unhappy but not so much that they want to put themselves through the stress of a big change in an uncertain future i knew when it was time because in a sense i was pushed off a cliff i was so unbearably unhappy that i had no choice and that made the decision easier in a way didn't didn't make it any less stressful but i really had no choice and i really don't wish the same for you but you'll know when you get there it's kind of like hitting rock bottom that old aaa thing yeah it's like that and that fear that i'm talking about is usually a financial based fear and i had that same fear are you prepared can you uh oh the clocks are all going off financial preparedness i think is the biggest fear in people's mind can i weather this transition do i have enough money to do it will i make enough money after i start farming and the answer is no you won't make enough money farming for quite a few years after you start and you can't plan your farm in your head um you won't know how much your farm is going to make until you actually start growing and selling stuff you can't plan a farm on paper being financially prepared means that you have to have at minimum five years of living expenses saved up that's that's what it took me well it took three years of complete living expenses and then two years tapering off them we were relatively well financially prepared we had some savings not a lot we had some retirement money which i didn't want to dip into but had to we had land to start a farm well i didn't know i was going to farm when i left my job i had no idea and we had almost no debt what do you do if you're not in good financial shape well you don't have any choice and that's a hard thing in this world if if you're unhappy in your job and you don't have the money to weather a change either have to transition into a different job with a paycheck that ensures your family and your well-being or you have to find a way to do what you love part-time and gradually move into it by sort of gradually um you have to gradually come out of your old job and into your new life so that's you know tapering down one while you're tapering up another from job to farm that's the only way i see to do it and i feel really fortunate and and lucky to be in the position we were in but it didn't come without decades worth of hard work and saving and one hard thing for people is that that is difficult compared to what um our culture is telling us now and it's telling us if you want something just get it right you don't have to wait for it with something meaningful like the like the change i'm talking about i'd wait for it i mean i was unhappy in my job in a building fashion for the better part of i would say five to eight years stacking away money and saving you have to do that it's not like ordering something from amazon with instant gratification you have to work toward it but here here this is the biggest impact that i didn't see coming and i suspect a lot of people that talk to me about making a big change like this don't see coming and that's the personal impact and it was devastating when i left my job my life lost all of its structure i was used to getting up and going to work five days a week six days a week i had to rebuild my life from square one and unless you're a disciplined person you can get lost in the weeds really easily so when i first left my job and i didn't know i was going to farm yet it felt like uh an extended vacation and you know it's like on vacation you sleep in you watch tv late at night and if you're not going someplace you just kind of kick around during the day and you have to be careful because you can get lost in that you can get lost in that lack of somebody imposing a structure on your life you have to come up with your own structure i think i was fortunate in this respect because i'm not one to sit around so probably a couple days after i left work actually i started applying a new structure to my days i found projects i remember i was working on clocks i was buying lots of clocks and rebuilding them and refurbishing them i was experimenting with new wine recipes i spent a lot of time making different kinds of wine and eventually this led to learning more about farming and becoming more interested in farming there's two other personal impacts number one i felt i had failed so here i was a classic overachiever type a personality worked my butt off at my old job achieved success shortly after leaving college within uh well seven years i was made a partner worked and worked and worked and worked hit this cliff and felt like i had failed in some way that i couldn't um rise to the challenge and that's a tough feeling to get rid of because you spend so many years kind of working up the ladder and building up who you are which will bring me to my next point but building up who you are and then all that suddenly comes toppling down because you've ended that long climb so my example is i'd become an expert in a particular subset of the field i was working and i was an expert in green and sustainable design kind of the philosophy of design behind it and i left all that that i built to start from the basement of a new endeavor and had no recognition no expertise no respect um nothing in that and losing that sense of self can't be underestimated these things to me are as big as any financial criteria for making that leap and they're the ones we're usually least equipped to deal with all of this changing everything changing job changing the way the life is structured changing how you see what you've accomplished winds up being a loss of who you are of having to rebuild who you are in a sense not the core of who you are but everything that society measures what you are and who you are and what your worth is and your internal um recognition of of you know your own value to your family to society um to the place you live in that is huge that that is giant i i can't express this enough how important it is working outward from yourself the next thing to think of is the impact on your family i had three young kids in hillary and if i didn't have strong marriage with hillary i would have survived it's as simple as that and as it was hillary was freaking out i mean she she's pretty good at holding that stuff in but as she told me later it's like i went wandering in the woods me i was gone you know and um left her to hold down the fort with three small kids you know and i was the one bringing in the money because she had left her nursing job to take care of the kids a few years before this all happened and i was supposed to be mr dependable and um she didn't know if i'd ever come out of the woods so you gotta have a solid spouse that's with you in this or at least willing to see it through the tough times now next the impact on kids as i said our kids were really young and we tried to protect them from all this that was going on and and sort of act like it was just you know another day kids can sense this kind of thing and our kids could and um especially for our oldest daughter she carries lasting baggage from us so you know it's one of those things where i'll always carry a certain amount of guilt because i put my kids through something that i wouldn't want to put them through unless i had no choice and there were other implications on our family too our standard of living took a nosedive we slashed our living expenses by two-thirds and that meant everything that was extraneous or considered luxury went right out the window and that's a tough adaptation for especially i think kids to make who are used to having certain things and mom and dad have to say can't afford that anymore what i'm getting at here is that this is a much more complicated thing than people think who are contemplating it and i'm trying to give you a heads up for what to expect if you're in the same boat i was it's not like you leave your job on a friday and you start your farm on monday all told i was in this place in this transition for almost a decade probably five years or five to seven years before i left my job and then at least another three years after i left my job i was going through the financial side i was going through all of that personal stuff dealing with the the the fallout the repercussions with my family this is something that would test anybody's endurance i had to build a new me and the core was still there but all those things that i'd accomplished in architecture became not so meaningful anymore in fact i actually actively turned away from a lot i'd learned as an architect to start all over again and that takes time it takes time for you to build up your self-confidence again to build up a sense that yes i can do this in this new thing that i'm doing and i aged 15 years in three years during that time it was incredibly traumatic all of that personal stuff was much more worrisome than any of the financial stuff and it took a long time to be happy again after making the decision to permanently leave my job to go into farming because there were all these secondary issues floating around about self-image self-worth being a provider that take a while to confirm when you started a new endeavor to become what i would say respected again and and known to be dependable after sort of shedding all that responsibility that i'd had before unless you think that you're going to wake up one day and say i'm over that you never get over it i still have dreams multiple times a week about my old job and most of them are related to failing in some fashion or the the firm moving beyond me and me not knowing what my place was that's still my inner self telling me that the path diverged and maybe i should still be on the old path that's not an easy thing to deal with and the last thing i want to cover some people will brush this under the rug and say oh you're going through a midlife crisis you know i was in my mid early to mid 40s so that's the time for a midlife crisis right this differs substantially from a midlife crisis a midlife crisis is worrying that you miss something from your youth and trying to bring it back into your life right like buying a fast car getting a girlfriend or a boyfriend well it wasn't that this was more like a whoops i took the wrong turn 15 years ago and i need to correct because the longer i go the worse it's going to get that's much more serious than a midlife crisis my message here is this is not a transition that should be taken lightly and there are a lot more dimensions to it than you would normally think i meet a lot of people that are thinking about doing this i meet a lot fewer people that have actually done it and survived and are thriving and my goal with this whole thing is to let you know the depth of what you're considering if you're considering this there's a lot more to it than just the financial concerns i did it because i had no other choice in the end if you have a choice do it differently if you're not prepared financially and you're not at the edge of the cliff like i was feeling like you had no other choice save prepare plan and do it that way it's a much easier road gosh if you're five years from retirement retire and do it uh it's not a journey i would wish on anybody and i don't know how to make it easier if it's an imperative in your life if you've got to make the change now you're going to have a hard time you're going to need family and other support if you can wait if you can do it part time the farm or whatever you want to do do that start to blend some of the good into the life that you're not completely happy with right now when i do a video there's always a summary piece so just like i learned in seventh grade english introduction body summary there is no summary to this this is life it's it's a continuing road me i hope i've given you some signposts or some ideas idea of the map what may be ahead and that's really all i can do that's that's all i can do to help and i wish you all the best of luck the world needs more happiness and sometimes we have to go through a whole lot of hurt to get there that's it that's that's that's what i had to say and i hope you enjoy the rest of your sunday cheer up this is not meant to be a depressing video it's just uh it's just life so thanks for joining me and i'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 84,873

Rating: 4.9622016 out of 5

Keywords: farm, farming, hobby farm, hobby farm guys, hobby farming for profit, homestead, how farms work, just a few acres farm, life on a farm, happiness, life change, career change, finding happiness, I found happiness, small farm sunday, how to change your life, how to change, personal struggle, life leap, midlife crisis

Id: bQs-VviXDzQ

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021