Five Tips for Ditching the 9-5 and Taking Control of Your Career

If you find it hard to envision yourself in a conventional career forever, it might be because traditional career paths are not for you. The 9-5 is not for everybody, and that’s only natural. Is it realistic to expect every individual to be productive, creative and fulfilled within the same predefined constraints that have long represented a traditional career?

Considering a career that is designed on your own terms is not far-fetched; it is a possibility that’s becoming increasingly widespread today. There’s an advantage to building your career today: we have a great number of tools and resources at our disposal that allow us to create careers that did not exist ten or even five years ago.

My own career journey was unconventional and not one that I could have predicted a few years ago. I started my company while I was at university, at the age of 20. Today, it is my full-time job and it allows me to do work that excites me, while at the same time giving me the privilege of enjoying my everyday life by having freedom and flexibility thanks to working for myself and designing my career with these priorities in mind.

If you are in a position where you’re aiming to take control of your career and design it in your own way, here are five tips I can share to offer some clarity based on everything I have learned in my own journey:

1. Harness the digital native advantage

I’m a firm advocate for being as resourceful as possible. We live at a time where we have unprecedented access to tools and resources that allow us to upskill, learn anything in the world, connect with anyone and achieve a lot more, a lot more easily.

The barrier to things like entrepreneurship, networking, personal branding and accessing big opportunities is lower than it has ever been. For Gen Z, also referred to as digital natives, I consider this ‘the digital native advantage’: growing up during this time of unprecedented access. I highly recommend harnessing the digital native advantage to design your career on your own terms.

The most practical use case I can think of is understanding that your career does not have to fit into any predefined box. You can learn whatever you want, often for free, and put yourself in a completely different category and journey than you have been so far. Get comfortable thinking outside the box, because the tools that will help you break through those walls are all readily available.

2. Make sure you know what success means to you

As obvious as it may sound, this is an incredibly important exercise. You might think you have the answer, only to realize upon more reflection that it is not as clear as you expected. Success is a very personal notion and one we tend to follow blindly; is success always more money, higher positions, more milestones? What is the end goal?

Most people follow a vague societal notion of success and build their careers around that, without stopping to fully consider what would make them happy. For some people, fulfilment comes from impact. They know they will be happiest when their job allows them to make a big difference or impact the world, so they design their career around something like this. For others, the priority is freedom. No amount of impact or money would fulfil them without the option to work flexibly, have control over their time, be able to choose where and how they work. Other people favour building wealth, in which case they might sacrifice elements like freedom and flexibility, to build careers with long hours, more pressure and higher financial rewards.

There is no right answer. Success is personal to you, and only you know what makes you feel most fulfilled on a daily basis. Figuring that out will help you design a career around the right priorities, so you go about it a lot more intentionally.

3. Talk to people with unconventional career paths

A useful tip if you are thinking of ditching the 9-5, is having conversations with people in different paths than yours. Approach them with curiosity and an open mind, and it will enable you to see multiple sides of the various career paths that are available out there. Ask about the good, the bad, the harsh truths and the unexpected benefits. Get to know how people who are happy with their current career got to where they are; often the journey is different than you’d assume. Don’t assume anything, but ask and discuss instead.

I’ve seen this first hand in my own career through people assuming that I was able to follow my current career path because I came from a different background than theirs, so entrepreneurship wouldn’t be a possibility for them. The truth is different: I did not study entrepreneurship or business at university, I did not raise investment to be able to scale my company faster, nor did I have my family paying my rent. Instead, I found ways to build my own venture while working different jobs, and for the first six months of running my business, my ‘team’ was just me. Sharing my experience and everything I learned along the way with other aspiring entrepreneurs still at university, helped them see that they did not have to drop out of university or raise millions to be able to start something of their own.

Talking to people who will openly share the steps they followed in their career path with you can be very informative and helpful because it broadens the scope of what you think is possible and what steps you could take to get there.

4. Learn about different career formats

Taking control over your career and ditching the 9-5 doesn’t have to look one way. You can be a freelancer working with different clients and building up your personal brand, you can be a founder and CEO growing a company and a team, or a dozen other things in between.

If you are not very entrepreneurial, there are still paths you can follow that allow for greater flexibility, freedom and ownership over your time. You can work at a startup to support someone else’s vision and be a part of their team, in a structure different to a traditional 9-5. I used to work at a fast-growing startup that allowed everyone to work their own hours, from anywhere in the world, with a great salary and a list of thoughtful benefits. That still granted me a lot more freedom than a traditional job

would, and it showed me just how many different shapes your career can take when you explore the opportunities that are out there.

Each career format comes with its own benefits and drawbacks. Some will naturally be a better fit for you than others, so it is important to be informed about the options you have.

5. Invest time into your personal brand

Personal branding is an incredibly powerful tool, especially if you’re building a career that falls outside of traditional 9-5 work. In other paths, personal branding is what will put you in contact with life-changing connections and opportunities. Building a personal brand takes time and effort, but it is one of the most impactful investments you can make in your career.

It requires you to intentionally position yourself in the fields where you want to succeed and make it harder for you to be ignored. When building your own company, applying to work for others, or offering a service as a freelancer, having a strong personal brand is what will allow you to stand out among everyone who’s doing the same. Use social media to your advantage and study those who have mastered it. A strong personal brand will create associations between you and the things you’re interested in, so people think of you when relevant opportunities come up.

Spending some time reflecting and acting upon every one of these tips will help you navigate the start of your career or a pivot away from the 9-5, and steer it towards a direction that is the best fit for you. We can’t keep looking at careers as a one-size-fits-all template that everyone’s ambitions have to fit into. The above points should provide a helpful frame for you to build a career that is aligned with what you want, and offer some clarity inspiring you to take action.