I strive to understand how much my household is burning on expenses - our burn rate. If you know this, you can set a goal to fund a 6 month break from work, a sabbatical. Your break might be funded partially by severance and unemployment. This all depends on how you lose your job. It's not such a bad thing. Right now, I'm pretty comfortable in a job that I enjoy and am challenged by. But who knows what tomorrow will bring in this economy.

There's a parallel universe. I picture a me doing something very different but equally successful to what I'm doing now. Perhaps I'm going back and forth to the Philippines training a team of developers and then traveling the U.S. promoting their services. I actually try to keep at least a few toes into the pool of this parallel universe. I buy books to learn new technologies, I experiment with outsourcing work to my nephew and friend in the Philippines, I set aside extra money for the express purpose of moving some of the ideas faster. I also try to maintain a good reputation and contacts. At times, I've had trouble spreading myself too thin.The answer to that is to stop accepting money for side projects. I make enough money at my real job so I can take on some real projects in the future without pressure or expectations and work out the kinks in my ideas.

A friend from grade school turned me on to the Four Hour Work Week. I'd like to employ some additional virtual assistance to advance a few ideas.

a. ForeignTrainedDentists.Org - create a forum for dental reform and an easier path for foreign trained dentists

b. Some sort of community for amateur movie making

c. A community at my work to promote innovations in the Energy business. Perhaps I'd like an external community for things like recycling and local community borough politics. I also live close to a major energy entity - PJM - I'd like to build up more expertise on them. I've decided my work focus will be on energy so I'm reading up a lot on the subject matter lately. I've given up on e-commerce, medical, and data warehousing.

d. I'd like to spend some time strengthening my programming skills with some of the later technologies iphone development. I also need to build up my microsoft programming skills for work.