The default path asks for your healthiest, sharpest decades up front and gives your freedom back at the end, if any is left. This Uncommon Life exists because you can reverse that order when you work for yourself. Own the income first, and where you live, when you work and who you answer to all follow from there.
Stay in one place, get a good job, and trade your most capable decades for a salary and a schedule your employer sets. Then, at around 67, you collect the freedom you were promised.
This path works for plenty of professionals, and for some it is the right call. It also assumes 2 things: that the years in the middle matter less, and that you will still be healthy enough at the end to spend what you saved. Neither one is guaranteed.
The bigger risk is simpler: a salary is 1 customer. That customer sets your rate, your location and your hours, and can end the arrangement in a single meeting. Any other business would treat that as a dangerous amount of concentration.
days of paid vacation a year is the average for US private industry workers after 20 years with the same employer, from the smallest employers to the largest. After 1 year, the average is 10 to 14 days.
US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employee Benefits in the United States, March 2024
is what a salary amounts to. You would never accept that concentration risk in a business, and a career asks you to accept it by default.
The usual order is backwards. You look for the remote job, the digital nomad visa or the cheaper city, and then find that the constraint moved with you. A remote job is still 1 customer, and that customer can still end it by email.
You have several customers instead of 1. You set the rate and carry the risk, and no single meeting can end your income.
You have no staff to manage in a time zone, no inventory to store and no lease. When the work is expertise delivered remotely, geography stops mattering.
This choice follows from a business that does not need you in any particular place.
The model is 1 person selling expertise they already have. That includes consulting, advisory work, fractional roles, independent practice, productized services, small software and niche content. There are no investors, no employees in year 1, no inventory and no lease.
You are the practitioner and the owner. Revenue comes from your judgment and execution, so you raise the ceiling by improving quality and raising your price.
You choose a niche where buyers already spend, price a single offer properly, and build a way to be found that needs no ad budget. Then you set up systems so the business stops running entirely through you.
The product is your judgment, and you have been building it since your twenties. As a senior professional, you start with domain depth, a network you can reach and a track record, which puts you far ahead of a 22 year old with an idea.
Each of these gets mistaken for the model at some point, and each mistake leads somewhere different.
Having several clients counts as ownership, so fractional work, independent practice and consulting all qualify. Selling interchangeable hours at whatever rate the client will pay, then starting over when a project ends, does not qualify.
What matters is whether you chose the market, defined the offer and set the price, or whether you are waiting to be picked. Ownership builds on itself every year you keep at it.
Raising money trades 1 employer for several investors, a board and a growth obligation, which is the same dependence in a different form. Some businesses need capital to exist, and this model does not.
Hiring early turns a freedom project into a payroll obligation before the revenue can carry it. Staff come later, if ever, once the work is already profitable without them.
Inventory, property, franchise fees and build outs tie you to 1 address and 1 balance sheet before you know whether buyers want what you sell.
A remote job is still 1 customer, still revocable by email and still on your employer’s calendar. It can fund the transition, and it does not make you an owner.
The failures below have different causes. Most advice addresses the first and ignores the second.
These are the reasons the move out of your job keeps getting pushed back.
The safest version starts while the salary still pays you. A few consulting projects run alongside the job until they can fund the move.
Without that experience, the date keeps moving, because you cannot yet picture where the first customer comes from.
The choice gets presented as stay or jump. The workable version is a third option: run a program like Plan A alongside your job and leave with a business that is chosen, set up and ready to grow.
Almost every program assumes you already have the idea and teaches execution. That does not help if you cannot yet name what you would sell, which is a common place to be stuck.
A lateral move relieves the discomfort without any risk. Then, 2 years later, the same feeling returns with 2 fewer years of savings.
The title, the team and the company name are real things to give up. Giving them up is often the hardest part, and few professionals say so out loud.
These are the reasons a new business stalls once the salary stops.
You chose it because it was interesting or close to your last job. The first real test comes when your savings are nearly gone.
Work comes in, so it looks like it is working. Yet every month starts at zero, with no chosen market, no repeatable offer and no way of being found.
Corporate professionals learn to solve problems by spending on them. On your own, that habit burns the months you needed to test the offer.
With no system behind it, every new customer adds work only you can do. Growth and exhaustion come together, and year 2 gets harder than year 1.
A decision that used to take a hallway conversation can take weeks of second guessing, because you no longer have a colleague to check your thinking.
A lot of the advice online is excellent, and several of the founders below have taught us things. The gap is narrower: almost none of it is aimed at a senior professional with 15 years of expertise, real obligations and a specific plan to leave.
Justin Welsh and Dan Koe lead the low ticket, self serve lane, which offers useful frameworks for around $150.
They are self serve, so your work never gets reviewed or corrected, and they are written for a younger audience carrying a very different level of risk.
Daniel Vassallo’s Small Bets is the closest philosophical relative to how we think.
It is aimed at engineers shipping products, while you sell expertise. It also has no method, no vetting and no standard you are held to.
Codie Sanchez and the acquisition lane offer a real path, and a good one for some founders.
It is a different thesis. It needs capital up front, and it buys you an operating business with staff and a location, which ties you to one place.
Tim Ferriss reshaped how a generation thought about this, and his influence is everywhere.
The book came out in 2007, and it was never rewritten for a senior professional selling a service today, with obligations, a visa to consider and a career worth protecting.
Y Combinator and Techstars and the free institutional programs below them are excellent at what they do.
They exist for venture scale, equity funded startups with teams, and they measure success with a pitch. A profitable 1 person business is a poor venture investment by design.
Coaches are the direct paid alternative, and the option we get mistaken for most often.
A coach sells hours on a calendar and takes any client who pays. We sell a fixed scope with a standard you have to reach to graduate, and we turn applicants away.
All 4 can be true while no buyer has ever offered you money. When an accelerator funds you, it also takes a stake in your company, and that stake stays with it as your business grows.
That means a market chosen, an offer defined and priced, real buyers spoken to, and the system that runs it. You leave with the business itself, so everything after that is growth.
We promise the process and measure the outcome. We make no income claims, and we do not use screenshots or countdown clocks. Prices, the refund scale and the ways this can fail are all published.
The transition asks you to choose the idea, leave the job, find the first customer, keep the business lean and sustainable, and avoid doing it alone. Each part of the ecosystem exists because one of those goes wrong at a predictable point, and each is ready when you reach that point.
Plan A is an 8 week program for professionals with real expertise, with or without a business idea. Most founders in it are still in a 9 to 5, and it works the same way if you were laid off or you freelance. If you have an idea, we test it and narrow it. If you do not, we dig through your career history, your domain depth and the problems you have already been paid to solve.
Uncommon Mentorship is 1:1 mentoring for the months after launch, with mentors who run profitable solo businesses.
The toolkits are operating documents for the things every solo business has to get right: the expertise model, the niche, marketing without ads, social media content, closing, and staying lean and sustainable. You work from them step by step.
These happen in person, on purpose. Uncommon Salons are recurring story nights in cities around the world, featuring guests living uncommon lives. Uncommon Summit is the annual gathering, and Uncommon Retreats are themed working retreats for solo founders, held several times a year.
At age 18, I moved across the world from my native country of China, on a full scholarship, to the US with 3 suitcases, on my own, and started a wild journey of immigration, climbing the corporate ladder, and achieving success in the traditional textbook way before burning it all down and starting over from 0 at age 30.
I was making over 6 figures in my Fortune 500 corporate job in New York City, walking through high-end offices in shiny skyscrapers in the “greatest city in the world.” I became a homeowner in my mid 20s, when most are still struggling to pay rent with several roommates. I was winning in life, or so it seemed.
Deep down, I was screaming. I was deeply unhappy that months of my hard work could suddenly get killed by an executive in a bad mood; that endless meetings that could have been an email took up whole days; that colleague after colleague suddenly lost their job and livelihood to office politics. More importantly, I knew I didn't come this far to only come this far, building someone else's dream in a cubicle. I wanted to build my own dream. Like they say in the movies:
“I want a big life. I want to experience everything.”
After being told that the company didn't care enough to help me with my immigration issue, I knew that was my last straw. Life is short - I had no time for “not a yes and not a no.”
I gathered evidence of my professional achievements and successfully self-petitioned the notoriously difficult EB-1A green card to become a permanent resident of the US. I started planning my business during lunch breaks. After 9-5, it was 5-9 for me.
Within months, I had built enough momentum to quit my job, move across the country in an RV and start a profitable-from-Day-1 education tech company as a first-time solo founder. A few years later, it unexpectedly allowed me to start traveling the world full-time while working on my business.
Since then, I have started several more solo expertise businesses, all running at the same time on systems I have perfected over the years. After many 1:1 business consultation sessions with aspiring founders, I realized my biggest passion is helping people gain the freedom to live and work however and wherever they want with their expertise, the thing my younger self wished existed. That's when This Uncommon Life was born.
If you have a Plan B, Plan A will never work. Let's build that successful solo business during your lunch breaks, so you never have to ask for anyone's permission to take a vacation again.
You do not have to decide right now whether to work for yourself, and finding out should not cost you anything. Start with the free tools.
Plan A is 8 weeks of coaching for you if you have real expertise and nothing earning from it yet. You leave with a direction you are sure of and a business you can run from anywhere.
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