Jonathan Fields - Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love

IT'S FUNNY HOW THE CORPORATE grind gets hold of you.

By the time you graduate college or grad school, a mountain of debt keeps you locked into a quest to earn as much as possible and pay off your loans. With each year, you earn more and fight your way up the ladder. But, then, an odd thing happens.

You don't ever get free.

At some point, it dawns on you that the corporate ladder is really more of a treadmill. You run faster, work harder, climb higher, sweat more blood, and push through stifling fatigue. But, in the end, all too often, you're no freer or happier than the day you began. In fact, for many, as your lifestyle expands to gobble up nearly every dollar you make, it's quite the opposite.

The day-to-day stress, relentless posturing, politics, negotiating, and hours spent on minutiae increasingly suck the life out of you. Body, mind, and spirit, slowly and methodically being sucked dry.

Maybe it would be more tolerable if you actually cared about what you did, if you earned your living doing something you truly loved. But, like millions of others, you're likely less than inspired by the culture and content of the one thing that consumes half of your waking hours. You've got that same job, different day itch, where personal fulfillment, passion, and mission have long ago taken a backseat to the mad dash for cash.

And, you begin to wonder if there's a different way.

What if you could actually do what you love for a living without leaving your life behind? What if that mad passion that everyone says can't make money, done differently, could allow you to make a great living? What if no matter how entrenched you are in the life you're leading, it was possible, very possible, to extract yourself from a misery-drenched, life-sucking job and grow a future defined not by your ability to endure suffering, but by taking the opportunity to love what you do, enjoy life today, and create an equally secure tomorrow?

What if you could really pull this off without blowing apart everything you've worked so hard to create?

Would you want in?

Yes?

Then, here's something you should know

It's entirely possible.

How do I know? Because, I've done it. I went from six-figure, Law Review, SEC, mega-firm Manhattan attorney to serial lifestyle entrepreneur, speaker, writer, marketing gun, yoga innovator, artist, and author. Along the way, I've made a lot of great calls and a lot of big, fat, stupid mistakes that I like to call learning experiences.

I've built a string of health and fitness companies that have changed the lives of tens of thousands of people, helped create multimillion-dollar brands, written articles and stories and contributed to books and national magazines, trained CEOs, taught yoga to movie stars, cultivated a nice six-figure living, and carved out time to be with my wife and pick up my daughter from school.

I've created business innovations that led to appearances in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur.com, MSNBC, SmartMoneyTV, Forbes.com, Fine Living, the New York Post, the Daily News, Vogue, Elle, Self, Fitness, Outside, More, and thousands of other publications, websites, and blogs.

Why do you care? Because, not too long ago, I was you. And the single greatest thing that stopped me from doing what I loved was the fear that I'd either end up poor or a failureor both. What a load of life-stifling crap.

It's been a dozen years since I made the jump. I began as an enforcement attorney at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in New York, then jumped to a top New York law firm as a securities/hedge-fund lawyer, before my body literally rejected my career.

I'd been working nearly seventy-two hours straight, each one more excruciating than the one before. But, missing the deadline meant losing $100 million for our client, so I pressed on until we finally closed the deal. I staggered into a cab, passed out for a few hours, then headed straight to my doctor's office.

His face turned ghostly white as he grabbed my hand, whisked me through a team of specialists, and sent me straight to the hospital for emergency surgery.

Weeks of relentless hours had literally collapsed my immune system, allowing a softball-sized infection to ravage my intestines and eat a whole through them from the outside in. Within hours, I was in the OR. Thankfully, I made it through, battered, but on the way to a full recovery. I had plenty of time to sit around and think while I was healing. Talk about a wake-up call!

I needed to find another way. There had to be something more.

Two weeks later, I sat in my office desperately scribbling on a legal pad with a mile-wide smile on my face. I couldn't write fast enough.

What spilled forth was not legal jargon but rather a quickly growing list of things I thought would be insanely cool to do for a livingactivities that, at various points in my life, I had developed a deep interest in or mad passion for but relegated to the level of hobby because everyone else told me I'd never make money doing them.