Ditch the 9 to 5 and do something truly meaningful with your life.

Before you storm off and claim I am lying or that I am simply trying to sell a fool's dream I want you to just take a second to hear what I have to say.

When I first quit my job and started on a crusade to help others do the same most of those who knew me called me an idiot (if they were feeling kind). Nearly six months later though and more than a few of them have started to ask why I always seem so happy when they see me.

As of today I have to admit I only make about as much as I did before I quit, and that isn't exactly a fortune, but every week my income rises. This isn't about the money though. Hell in my first month or so I made next to nothing but I was still happier than I had been in a long time.

You see for me the money is just a way of ensuring that I get to keep doing what I love and what I love is helping to show people a real alternative to the drudgery and modern day slavery that is working for a wage.

90% of us think that that is just the way it is and that there really is no alternative. We are brought up to think that the only path to a good life is to go to school, do well enough to go to university and then to find a job. Even after we have a job we know we have to work harder and better than those around us to slowly climb the ladder.

By the time we are somewhere we feel comfortable most of us have, without even noticing, grown old and tired. Society though no longer needs to be like that. Sure we still need people to get that factory job, to be our lawyer and to serve us coffee but what we also need is more people with vision and with dreams. People willing to take a chance and to build a business all of their own.

While everyone else fights to hold onto their job in an ever more competitive market digital entrepreneurs are crying out for people to come and join them. So why is it that such a wonderful opportunity is being so badly ignored that many of us find ourselves begging our friends and relatives to ditch the desk and get online?

For me the reason I hear time and time again is disbelief and mistrust. So many people when I explain what I do look at me like I am one step from being a criminal. Like I am doing something morally wrong. It is a hard stereotype to get past. Don't get me wrong I am all too aware aware that there are a million and one scams on the net but if I am going to be honest the net is really no worse than what goes on on most high streets.

All I can really say though is do your homework. Don't give money to a Nigerian prince and make sure you get a money back guarantee. Always look for reputable sites and if in doubt Google or Youtube the company or person in question. Remember too that if your gut says t feels wrong you may just be right.

All that being said I stick to what I said in the beginning I am proud that I deliver people an education not a job. That I help them get the freedom of a self-controlled life and that I never have to put my morals to one side just to earn a living.

If you want to join the crusade and you want to be free from the 9 to 5 come and see what we can offer, after all what harm can looking do?

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Wander Misfit: Part 10 ... the local team

     After my conference with Summer it was time for a more formal meet and greet. So off Tony and I went to meet the T.A.s (local Chinese teachers) and the teacher who was going to be giving me my training.

     Meeting the T.A.s was an interesting situation to be in, some of them regarded me as just another nuisance while others seemed pretty excited about chatting. At that point all of our T.A.s were women (although they preferred to be called girls) with most of them only a year or two out of university. For the most part their majors were in English although some of them must surely have just scraped in with a pass.

     One thing that immediately hit me about them was that they used English names, either names they had chosen or names given to them by former teachers. The use of English names rather than their actual Chinese names in fact was so prevalent that even after 3 years I knew only a handful of them by their real names. They also tended to use their English names when chatting with each other even when the rest of the sentence was in Chinese.

     After a flurry of questions about where I was from, how old I was and whether I was married or had kids I settled down to trying to work out who was who. Trying to explain that I have dual nationality was an interesting task. All in all though I was pleasantly surprised by how open and friendly the girls were, especially compared to Summer and Tony.

     The next stop was a visit to Darcy. As one of the two senior teachers he would be giving me my ongoing training. I am not even today quite sure how to describe Darcy. Instead I feel it might be best just to tell you my initial impressions and work from there. Darcy was (and still is I presume) a real Australian. What I mean by that is that he had carried both his accent and his love of Aus deep into the heart of China.

     The one big thing that hit me almost instantly about him though was the speed at which he spoke. Later I realised that the slowness was a trait developed by talking to children in their second language for a long time. At the moment I met him though it just seemed to make conversations mildly irritating as I waited for him to finish.

     Rory McDonald is an online marketer and digital entrepreneur, co-founder of the Online Business Expert and passionate blogger.

Wandering Misfit: Part 7 ... enter the other misfits

     I am still, to this day, not really sure what I was expecting when it came time to meet my fellow wanderers and misfits. I think somewhere I had the impression of them as people who just wanted to do something different. That maybe they would be tied together by the bond of choosing uncertainty and adventure over calm certainty.

     In some ways I was disappointed but in others I was pleasantly surprised. Nowhere to be seen, at least in that initial meeting, was the drive to see the world differently I had in some naive way hoped for. Instead what I found was a general joyous abandon. Also at this first dinner I saw some of the gluing together of people who under other circumstances would not have given each other the time of day.

     An odd bunch indeed. It is strange to recount that this was less than 5 years ago, but even so recently China was a different place, especially in a backwater like Dongying. This was before Chairman Xi came and started his war on corruption, before the real drive began to make it more difficult for foreigners to enter the country. I say that it has become more difficult because it has but perhaps suggesting that it has been made that way is wrong. Instead I should say that all of the little loopholes have been closed and all the blind eyes turned now stare unblinking.

     Going back to that I myself had at this time not come into the country on a work visa but instead a tourist one. Admittedly I never worked illegally on that visa but to be honest you aren't supposed to, and can't now, have these visas changed over in country. There was a brief stage where people would duck off to Hong Kong or even Thailand to get it changed but even that now has gone by the wayside as in a later tale I am sure I will complain bitterly about.

     I digress however. This veritable mix of humanity sitting before me were to be my new colleagues, friends and only "real" contact with the world for the foreseeable future.

      Rory McDonald is an online marketer and digital entrepreneur, co-founder of the Online Business Expert and passionate blogger.

Wandering Misfit: Part 5 ... and there was lunch

     There I was standing outside this "hole in the wall" restaurant after a journey that had at this point taken around 24 hours. Even though it was lunchtime locally and in fact was only mid afternoon in Australia I was feeling pretty washed out.

     Food and then a good sleep seemed like a great idea so in I wandered to find the by now almost mythical Tony. After sitting me down at a table in the back Tony proceeded to order what seemed like half the menu. Now I have eaten "Chinese" food in a few different countries but nothing quite prepared me for this. It took me a long time to find out most of the food available at restaurants in the west is not only southern style, which makes it very different from the food in the north, but that it is also changed to appeal to more western palates.

     Most of the dishes brought out were pretty good albeit slightly on the greasy side. Insects featured in one dish and a whole chicken, head still intact in another but I had eaten far worse and despite being stared at by a decapitated hen I was thoroughly enjoying myself.

     The discussion was kept light and Tony seemed to at least realize I was too worn out to care about getting down to business. Towards the end of the meal though he called the waitress over and ordered one more item. Now Baijiu (literally white alcohol) has a well deserved reputation amongst foreigners in China. I am sure at some point I will have an entire episode devoted to just that topic but for now just let me say that I will never, ever drink Baijiu again.

     In fact I have even gone so far as to tell people in China that I am allergic to alcohol just to avoid having to share a drink of the local brew. Perhaps this is the point too where I should state that if you don't drink or smoke, and you are a man, life can get complicated in China. On the other hand if you do and you are a woman it can be even worse.

     Needless to say I drank the stuff I was offered, a fact I would later regret. The fact that between us we managed to down an entire bottle of what turned out to be 40% alcohol (with no mixer) seemed to amuse Tony.

     Shortly after he took me across the street to the hotel I would be temporarily living out of until they found me an apartment. Grateful as I was I was still a little edgy about the place it wasn't for another couple of years that I would realize why. Only about 18 months after i stayed there the place was condemned and ripped down glad I was only there for a couple of days.

       Rory McDonald is an online marketer and digital entrepreneur, co-founder of the Online Business Expert and passionate blogger.

Wandering Misfit: Part 4 ... a journey into the unknown

     So there I was, I had wanted to get far away from my life in Australia a goal I think I had pretty much covered, despite possibly jumping in too far down the deep end.

     China is not, as many of my friends have since said, a completely different world but it really is unlike anywhere I had been before. Having done a fair amount of travel (I believe China was my 42nd country), I very quickly understood I had really gone out on a limb this time.

     If I had headed off to Beijing or Shanghai, or even along the southern coast I think the differences would have been mostly cosmetic. Instead I had chosen a "town" off the beaten track in Shandong in northern China. Now Dongying where I chose to live is not small, not by western standards anyway. In fact it is a bustling oil town of around two and a half million people. The thing to consider though is that not only is Shandong one of the oldest and most traditional of Chinese provinces but that Dongying itself had been a mere fishing village 20 years ago and to be honest in many ways it still is.

     Getting on a bus from Beijing to Dongying was, in a word, an experience. At this point I was surrounded by people who didn't speak a single word of English (beyond the ubiquitous "Hello"). To make matters just a little more stressful I had no contact with the outside world, no idea where I was and had not heard from Tony who was supposed to be picking me up.

     After a somewhat bewildering 6 hours or so I was dropped off at a dingy looking depot in a dirty looking city only to be picked up by a guy who's only real communication was "Tony tell me bring you". So, and I realize only now as I write this how stupid it sounds, I jumped in the back of his van and took my first real trip on inner city Chinese roads.

     Even being half asleep as I was at this point I believe I spent most of the trip white knuckled and sweating. Many people will tell you that the Chinese are scary drivers. As a nation though I have to say they are not that bad, they are very unpredictable but road rage seems basically non-existent beyond gratuitous use of horns and as a general rule they drive slower than many other countries.

     The guy I was unlucky enough to be picked up by though seemed to think he was on a racetrack somewhere not a crowded city street. Fortunately he did seem to know his stuff and after around 10, miraculously incident free, minutes he dropped me off outside a restaurant on a little side street off one of the main roads through town.

      Rory McDonald is an online marketer and digital entrepreneur, co-founder of the Online Business Expert and passionate blogger.

Give a man a marshmallow....

Recently a colleague of mine asked a very interesting question:

If you were offered a 30 day money back test drive of your dream car for just $30 would you take it? 

Of course I would was the obvious answer. Telling me, unsurprisingly, that everyone she had asked had leapt at the opportunity she then asked me if I would feel the same way about an educational program.

Unsure what she meant I asked her to explain. When discussing food, fast cars or fashion almost everyone she asked had wanted to try it out but when she posed the same question about education people started to hesitate.

Why is it she asked that when given an opportunity to improve yourself and your life, do people seem to be far less excited? Consider for a moment an opportunity to change the way you think about the world and even better an opportunity to step away from your 9-5 and start running your own life on your own schedule.

If you were given the opportunity to test for 30 days, with the money back guarantee still in place, a system that has the ability to free you from your desk why would any sane person hesitate? It seems the answer lies in the fact that all too many of us want instant gratification.

We all know about retail therapy having that shiny new car in your drive or pretty new dress in your closet makes you feel good. That rush though is short lived. The chance to work your way into a position where you can feel that glow for the rest of your life just doesn't have the same immediacy.

If however you can avoid the desperate need for that passing pleasure in the now, you can set yourself up to have as much of it as you want in the future. Remembering a famous Psych test done on adults and kids alike, involving marshmallows, I had to agree with her.

People were left in a room with a plate of marshmallows and were told that the researcher would be right back and they'd bring more marshmallows the subjects were asked not to touch the plate. Somewhat amazingly many of the subjects just couldn't help themselves they had to get their sugar fix right now even if it meant less pleasure in the long run.

That is why we are looking for the ones with self control, the people who can see past the little pile of marshmallows to the life supply of sugary treats on the other side. So I want to ask you again. Would you be prepared to spend $30 on a 30 day money back opportunity to change your life?