About - Breaking Free and Brian Armstrong

Welcome to Breaking Free – a free blog about how to quit your 9-to-5 to build a business and lifestyle you love.

For a live audio introduction Click Here or press play:

My name is Brian Armstrong, and I’m a self-employed business owner who has a rather unique life. I don’t have a boss, I don’t commute through rush hour traffic, and I while I’m always busy I don’t really do very much work (at least it doesn’t feel like work to me).

But things were not always this way. After finishing school, I went out into the working world like everyone else, but I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with my life. I moved around working at several Fortune 500 companies and even a few startups, but almost from day one I knew that I was never going to be passionate about working for someone else.

Sure, I had a “good job” by most people’s estimation: great benefits, lots of travel, opportunities to learn, nice people, etc. But each company I worked for was basically the same, and there were a few fundamental problems:

• I wanted to become wealthy, and while I knew that I could probably become quite well off after twenty years of hard work (and overtime) at a big company, I would never become truly wealthy.
  
  
• I had an overwhelming desire for freedom. I wanted to be my own boss instead of renting my brain out for a salary and doing work that was important to someone else. This freedom was more important to me than job security in the short term.

Despite feeling this way, I languished for quite some time in the 9-to-5 rat race, dreading each Monday morning.

You see, I was scared. I was scared of jumping into the unknown and betting everything on myself. What if I didn’t know what I was doing and my company failed? Everyone would laugh or think I was stupid for leaving such a “good” job. What would my parents, friends, and significant other think? All these fears running around in my head did nothing but hold me back.

A Transformation Took Place

Slowly but surely, things began to change:

• I started spending more time with successful people (instead of my colleagues at work who were stuck in the worker-bee mentality) who convinced me that doing what I really want in life might be scary and might not make other people happy, but that’s ok.
  
  
• I realized that if I tried and failed, that would still be better than waking up in 50 years with the regret of knowing I never tried at all.
  
  
• And finally, I realized that if I did fail in starting my own business and was about to become homeless, I could always get another job and it wouldn’t be the end of the world!

I worked up the courage one afternoon, sent in my resignation, and set about trying to earn a living working for myself. It was the scariest thing I’d ever done.

After a few false starts, my first success was with a company called University Tutor, which provided tutoring to high school students in a number of cities across the U.S., and earned me a comfortable living on about ten hours of work per week.

That gave me a lot of time to keep learning about business, and I also began to manage my investments in real estate and other income generating assets.

The entire experience was so powerful to me, that I decided to write a book about entrepreneurship called Breaking Free, and started this website (another business) to help others do the same.

Too many people today are stuck in jobs they don’t love, because they think it’s the only way to earn a living. My goal is to change that.

Here are some scary statistics:

• 74% of millionaires in the U.S. are self-made, meaning they started their own businesses. Your chances of becoming wealthy in a traditional job (stands for just-over-broke) aren’t good.
  
  
• 80% of people in the U.S. end up flat broke and totally dependent on others in old age. They become a financial burden, bankrupting their children. You can no longer depend on social security to provide for you in old age.

Clearly, the promise of the 9-to-5 rat race is not being fulfilled, and I believe that working for yourself is the answer.

This website is dedicated to helping people break free from the 9-to-5 rat race, to start working for themselves, and to build a lifestyle they love with wealth and freedom.

I keep this website free so it can reach the widest possible audience (although I sell advertising and the book which both earn money).

I still consider myself a student of entrepreneurship and building wealth, and I don’t want to ever stop learning. I often learn as much from the readers of this website as they hopefully do from me, and I consider it much more of a community or discussion than a place for only me to share my ideas.

By reading this website over time, hopefully you’ll start to see what’s possible and be inspired to take action.

Best of luck!
Brian Armstrong