Terrible life advice: “Quit your job and follow your passion.” I...

74 views Jul 23, 2025 ~3 min read

Terrible life advice:

“Quit your job and follow your passion.”

I almost fell for it.

Instead, I found an unconventional path to escape my $200k/year Wall Street job.

Here's the full roadmap:🧵

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Since I began writing online in July 2020:

• I made $10k as a ghostwriter
• I quit my job on Wall Street
• I built multiple 7-figure writing businesses

I wish I had these the frameworks when I first got started:

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In this thread, we are going to cover:

• 3 ways to earn money
• The mindset you need to quit your job
• And how you can get started today

Let’s dive in:

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1. How to make money

Money can be earned in 3 ways:

• Jobs
• Careers
• And businesses

Knowing where you are on this ladder is the first step to escaping your 9 to 5:

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I get tons of messages asking me when people should quit their job.

The advice I give:

Wait until you’re at 2x your monthly income.

Here’s why (and how I decided to leave BlackRock):

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2. Mindset

The biggest false belief encouraging you to quit:

Thinking having 10x more time will make you 10x more money.

This is faulty thinking.

Instead, here’s how to use your job to accelerate your business:

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Becoming an entrepreneur is going to take way more effort and intensity than you think.

You have to abandon your current notion of “Work-Life Balance.”

Balance is possible—but you have to think about it differently:

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Stuck in a rut and can’t drag yourself to work on your side hustle?

Here’s how to create *instant* motivation to build your business:

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If you think you have no energy to work on your side hustle, you’re wrong.

You can create energy by being intentional with your actions.

Because, if you don’t, you become trapped in a doom loop:

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3. How to get started today

Before you say yes to an opportunity, you need to assess it.

Here are 3 questions you should ask:

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A trap people fall into when starting something new:

Thinking they need to consume more content.

95% of the time, this is a total waste of energy.

So, every time you sit down to consume something, ask yourself these 2 questions:

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Now, on to a big question:

How do you find your niche in a crowded market?

There are 2 ways to think about it (and how you don’t need a huge audience to sell your services):

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When you’re building a product, you need to get feedback as soon as possible.

By shortening your feedback loop, you quickly:

• Improve your product
• Scale it to more people via word-of-mouth

This is the core of the “Build Until They Tell” framework we use at Ship 30:

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One framework that completely changed my outlook:

Bottleneck thinking.

And it’s how you can improve anything (in your life, business, and relationships):

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Building and scaling a business is all about recognizing new pieces of leverage.

This makes business addictive (and is why I’ll keep playing this infinite game forever):

What business would I start if I had to begin again?

Simple answer—the exact one I started with:

Ghostwriting. This is how I earned my first $10k on the internet.

Here’s a 5-day crash course on how to get started: x.premiumghostwritingblueprint.com/?el=DickieP250…

That’s it!

If you’re thinking about quitting your full-time job to go all in on your business, then I hope this helps.

These clips were taken from my interview with Ali Abdaal.

Watch the full episode here: tapthe.link/R-C_Jicnj

If you enjoyed this:

1. Follow me @dickiebush for more posts on digital business, digital writing, and personal progress.

2. Then like and share this thread so we can get these frameworks out to more people ✊

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Terrible life advice: “Quit your job and follow your passion.” I...

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