For nearly the entire year of 2011, I had been living the life. I would wake up with the sun, take my 30-stair commute downstairs, have breakfast, and get to work for myself writing and publishing brilliant articles and books and creating excellent web applications. In the down time, I would take a stroll down to my lake and read. And I would always have time for a run, bike, or kayak adventure every day. Friends rightly said that I had the best life ever. I agree, though it was more of a vacation than a normal life.

Of course, there’s a problem with vacations, they always end. After almost a year of living on my schedule, my girlfriend left me because—more or less—I wasn’t in the position to support a family. Ouch! It was true. I had been bringing in a decent salary doing my own thing—enough to support my Spartan lifestyle with two mortgages—but certainly not enough to support a family. For the longest time, I had thought that enjoying the good life was the goal, but that was shortsighted and, I’ll be honest, a little selfish. It’s easy to support yourself and live the life, but unless you’re an outstanding success in the techniques of TAPWATTAY, it’s a very difficult to support anyone else. And contrary to what Timothy Ferris may make it sound like, finding a lucrative “muse” is not as easy as it sounds.

So, I went to look for a job, but compounding the difficult situation was the fact that I hadn’t had a steady source of income in almost a year. In a tough job market, that’s a difficult thing to explain in a job interview. But here’s the point. When you’re living the good life, you’re not just sitting on your tuchus, waiting for the Tooth Fairy to drop money in your bank account, you’re actually producing and creating things by yourself for the good of humanity. In my case, I had been improving the marketable skill of copywriting by working on books and I had my baby, zankrank.com, the top 400k worldwide ranking website to save me in the web development department. In interviews, I simply explained that I had been working on improving and monetizing my own website for the past year but it hadn’t produced the type of income that I had desired. Some employers love this initiative and entrepreneurial spirit even if it fails. In the modern economy, employers don’t necessarily mind if there’s a gap in your employment, but a gap in your resume is unacceptable. The take-home message here is that you should always be producing something worthwhile for its own sake, of course, but also in case you need to impress someone in the future.

I’m not going to act like the Good Life is all peaches and cream unlike some other authors. When you think big and live bigger, there are risks and downsides. Fortunately, if you play your cards right, the downside isn’t permanent and you can always get back into the real world if so desired, even if you have to do it alone.