The Online Investing AI Blog

We all tend to think of the boss as the man or woman in the corner office, or cube, who controls our lives for at least eight hours a day. Usually more.

After work, you carry the boss home and spend the remaining hours of the day discussing, kvetching, and bitching about him or her.

For most, this is when the idea of financial freedom becomes so appealing. The line of thinking is: if you have money to escape the job, you’ll have money to escape the boss.

It’s good thinking. But look closely. Who really is your boss?

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Pic by mamamusings @ Flickr

Most employees are bound by a strict code. To keep employed, they’re expected to be loyal, dependable, perform tricks on demand, and subvert their own will to the will of the organization.

If this description sounds vaguely familiar, it should. This is basically the description of both a good employee–and a good dog.

In most workplaces, employees are cogs in the inevitable means-to-an-end. And that’s the way they’re treated.

The problem is that most people want to be good employees. It’s tied in with the work ethic that makes these workers feel like they are both a bad employee and a bad person if they don’t offer anything but their best work. On the other hand, they don’t want to be treated like a faithful hound, either.

There are ways, though, that you can be a bad employee, but remain a good person. It starts with the novel idea that no matter who signs your checks, you are always working for yourself.

Here are a couple tips:

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fotographix @ Flickr Creative Commons

Not everyone was meant to be a 9-to-5′er. For a variety of reasons:

Offices can drain you of your energy. Routine tasks can burden and bore you. Compensation may not equal effort. Like family, you rarely can choose your co-workers and the shifts of personnel and supervisors can drastically change your fortunes.

But the employee lifestyle is deeply ingrained into our society. And it takes some help to escape this career trajectory.

The process is referred to as lifestyle design and it encompasses a lot of tools, techniques, and tips to master. They include: debt control, automation, income and investing optimization, freelance and consulting gigs, residual income source, and increased productivity.

Here are some of the best blogs and sites to serve as a escape pod to the 9-to-5.

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You have to wonder sometimes: do you think the guy who tests rides at Disney World wakes up and says, “Crap… It’s Monday… I have to ride the friggin’ roller coaster.”?

Does the staff photographer at Playboy say, “Stupid 8 a.m. photo shoots,” when his alarm clock rings?

Wonder if the buyer for Macy’s gets up on Monday and thinks to herself, “I can’t believe I have to buy all those purses.”

It wouldn’t surprise me.

The bureaucracy and office politics of the workplace can suck the fun out of the most creative, most meaningful work, turning it into… a job. And jobs are full of micromanagers, non-existent managers, backstabbers, risk averters, and the ilk who seek to commoditize inspiration and who turn the thing you were born to do into the thing you are bored to do.

Fortunately, technology and new business models offer us radical options. The world can be your workplace. You can even keep your current job while you experiment with some of the following options, designed to refresh your inspiration and give you an opportunity to transform your job back into your passion.

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Each generation of workers bring their own cultural insights and values to the workforce. Eventually, the new generation–and its values and insights–replaces the former. During that succession process, there is tension between the younger and older generations.

“How things are done” vies for “how things can be done.”

In the past these executive torch passes have been relatively benign and the younger generation has borne the brunt of the battle. The younger workers had to learn hard lessons on how to adjust to the concrete jungle.

But things are changing. Because the exponential growth of technology our next generation of workers are more connected, more tech savvy, and more determined to approach employment on their own terms.

This revolution in technology and the drastic changes in attitude are quickly turning bosses into dinosaurs and threatening companies with extinction. Here are just a few ways to determine if your boss is a dinosaur.

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