You Don’t Have To Wait

I spoke recently about the need to be patiently unrealistic and to take things easy on yourself as you move toward your Rich and Happy life as success rarely arrives FedEx overnight.

What I didn’t say though was that you will have to wait until you hit middle-age to achieve the life you want to live (unless of course you’re already middle-aged like me, in which case, tough!).

The truly amazing thing with the Rich and Happy formula is that is doesn’t care how old you are. There’s no assessor checking proof of birth, asking for years of credentials and making sure you have the worry lines to prove you’ve served your time, and then if you haven’t, saying:

“Sorry, you’re too young, you need to call back in a couple of decades”

The younger you are when you start the process and adopt the formula, the younger you’ll be when you hit full stride, get it into your unconscious competence and start living the dream.

How To Be Rich and Happy is full of case studies demonstrating that the Rich and Happy cat can be skinned in many different ways (sorry cat lovers for that thoughtless analogy).

One person that didn’t hang around waiting to get old before he took control of his life was Glen Allsopp. Now my guess is unless you’re a blogger or a regular reader of blogs, you’ve never heard of Glen.

He’s one of thousands of people quietly living the Rich and Happy life doing what he want, when he wants.

I first heard of him when he commented on my blog at A Daring Adventure a couple of years ago. Over the following months Glen slowly and surely made his way up the blogging ladder until he became very well known in the self-development blogging circles.

What I didn’t realize at the time though was that Glens forte wasn’t self-development at all. By that I don’t mean he wasn’t good at it, just that his real skill was in online marketing and social media and he was even better known in those industries.

About 4 years prior to that he was working in T K Maxx, (no that isn’t a typo, it’s bizarrely the European name for what we know here as T J Maxx) earning minimum wage putting labels on clothing and avoiding Rich and Happy minutes like the plague.

However, unlike a lot of people in similar situations Glen refused to accept that was his lot in life, and he had a long-term plan that involved lots and lots of travel and of course, lots and lots of Rich and Happy minutes.

In his spare time he started building websites and raising his profile on the social marketing scene determined to be viewed as an expert in his field. And yes I do mean websites (plural) because he had several, all of which were earning him a steady income.

By the time he was 18 he was headhunted to go and live in South Africa for a couple of years and become the Social Media Manager for some rather large brands. You may well have heard of Land Rover, Hewlett Packard and Nissan.

That was almost 3 years ago and in that time he accrued enough money to leave the north-east of England where he had moved back to, to be with family, and spend 6 months traveling including an extended stay in Amsterdam. During his travels The Guardian a very well respected UK broad sheet newspaper, featured him in an article on location independent people.

He’s now back in Cape Town running his Viper Chill website and sharing the knowledge he’s accrued with people that want to make a living online. He intends to stay there at least until the end of 2010 when he plans to set off on his travels again.

So Glen has hit his Rich and Happy life and on the whole doing whatever he wants whenever he wants and that’s the end of that, right?

Wrong.

Glen doesn’t just want the lifestyle for himself, he wants it for his brother and sister too. His latest goal is to earn enough money so that they too can wave goodbye to the rat race and join him, wherever he is.

It doesn’t end there either, because as he said in a recent e-mail to me:

“My big goals now are to open a school in an under-privileged country (probably Vietnam, where I have family) and buy my own nightclub. My goals are big, but life is too short for them to be small.”

Glen demonstrates there really is no need to wait. What you do today is practice for what you do tomorrow, so get practicing the Rich and Happy life sometime right around now.