Practice Being Broke Before Quitting Your Job — Michelle Khare (transcript)

[See parent full episode fmpWGD1OxDo for context. This 4.5-min excerpt covers Michelle Khare’s “fear-setting in practice” pattern: she spent a full year before quitting her stable job training herself for the worst possible outcome — moving to a small studio with a roommate, cancelling memberships, building both savings and physical/mental stamina, and producing her first videos on nights and weekends. Quit only after she had two months of videos backlogged on her own machine, three months of savings, and a defined first dream-project shoot on the calendar. Ferriss connects this to his fear-setting framework (define / prevent / repair) and to his own decision to start his first company on lunch hours, evenings, and weekends.]

When did you take action towards realizing the dream? Could have been a very small thing, I don’t know, but like what was the kind of defining first step that kind of set you on the actual path to realizing what you laid out?

I took action pretty immediately, but it took me a year to quit my job. And I’ll define what the difference is. I took action immediately by — this might be crazy, this was a Tim Ferriss experiment. I really resonated with what you wrote about coming to terms with the worst possible outcome. And so I decided, I’m going to train myself for the worst possible outcome. So I moved into a studio apartment with a roommate. I financially stripped down — I mean, I didn’t have much anyways, but stripped as much as I could to simulate: if I’m truly failing at this and having to live in a Hollywood apartment with a bunch of roommates, I’m just going to get used to that. I’m going to get used to it right now. I’m going to cancel all of my memberships and figure out how to stay healthy with just myself in this small place.

I am also going to commit to working on my own stories after work on the weekends, because if I can’t do it now with stability, I need to prove to myself that I actually give a [damn] about this really. And I did that for an entire year. Growing a little bit of a personal savings, but also growing mental and physical stamina towards: I’m already in still a place of safety, of course, but I am in a situation where I think I can handle this. I got this. LinkedIn is up to date. Little resume is up to date. I am so ready. I have defined, prevent, and hopefully we don’t got to go to that third column — repair.

And so then a year later exactly, I quit my job. And when I quit, I had two months of videos backlogged ready to go. Also legally, for the record, on my own machine — not company resources. All of that was ready to go. And I knew what my first big project would be: training with the stunt doubles. I had a shoot date ready. I had only had like three months of savings at that point. And I had allocated: this is going to be for the dream project, my first risk on my channel. Nothing will touch that. The rest is for operating daily life expenses. And I said, I got three months to make this work. And like you said, sometimes you got to put your back against the wall and go.

I love this. So a few things. I’ll say number one — to try to, I mean, not that I’m a paragon of self-awareness, but I will say that I for different reasons have a certain hyper-vigilance focus on safety and security, which might sound strange to people listening, but I’m always trying to risk-mitigate, right? I don’t view myself as a big risk-taker. I have done a few things that have ended up with me accumulating injuries that maybe in retrospect shouldn’t have done. But broadly speaking, I’m always trying to mitigate risk, which underscores this entire fear-setting exercise. Because it’s not just about convincing yourself, it’s also in my mind completely intertwined with what you did, which is preparing and training yourself and your circumstances. So when I flash back to starting my first company, it’s like — how did I start the first company? I started my first company during lunch hours, evenings, and weekends basically while still doing my other job and doing my other job well. But I wanted to have a head start so that I wasn’t beginning from scratch after quitting a job.