---
title: Episode 50 Being Your Own Boss
episode_number: 50
era: early
source_file: Episode 50 Being Your Own Boss.mp3
audio_size_mb: 56.6
duration_sec: 1855.1
duration_min: 30.9
language: en
provider: deepgram
model: nova-3
diarized: true
confidence: 0.998
transcribed_at: 2026-05-28T06:40:21Z---

# Episode 50 Being Your Own Boss

**Speaker 0:** Tom Torero podcast five zero. The big 50. Can you believe it? 50 bloody podcasts. That's almost twenty five hours, maybe a little bit more than twenty five hours of Tom Torero coming in your ears. So congratulations if you've made it here from podcast one, and thank you for sticking with it, for joining at whatever point you started listening. Unless, of course, you've been made to listen to these against your will, perhaps this is being used as some kind of prison torture in Guantanamo Bay. I don't know. But whatever, shit happens. We continue. Thank you very much for your support. And it's March. I'm back in Wales. It's wild and wet as ever. It's just stopped hailing. It's been hailing for about two days solid, and I love it. It's wild. Yesterday, we had Saint David's Day. If you are Welsh or you know about Saint David's Day, it was a nice day of leeks and daffodils being battered by the hail and eating Welsh cakes and watching Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. That was very nice. Very nice to be home after Amsterdam. And what else happened yesterday? Of course, the launch of Street Hustle, my hardback textbook. I'm not gonna go on about it because I've put a YouTube video out and I'm sure you're tired of me talking about my textbook. But just to say that it's out, and I'll put a link below this video and on iTunes. So find out more by checking out the link. What else have I got to say? Well, I'm in The UK for about seven days, I think. I'm doing some training on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday in Central London. So it's gonna be nice to touch base in London. And then I'm off to Central Europe for a few days before flying from there to New York JFK and spending about two weeks in New York. Number one, to film a secret project. Number two, to do some teaching, which is basically sold out. So thank you if you've booked on that and looking forward to it. And number three, to see my aunt, my dad's sister, escaped from Czechoslovakia, when it was Czechoslovakia, to America, whilst my dad escaped from Czechoslovakia to The UK. That was '69. So she's still there. She lives about an hour outside New York, and it's gonna be nice to see her again. She's a great woman. She's very strong. She's a writer. She used to write for the New York Times. She was a journalist both in Prague and because she spoke Russian, she was a correspondent based in Moscow. So she's got some wild espionage stories of seducing Russian politicians to get information. Oh, so many stories. Maybe I can do a podcast with her. She's fantastic. She's a wonderful woman. So looking forward to that. Anyway, today's topic kind of links, I guess, to my aunt, you could say. And today's topic is being your own boss or being a boss. Now I don't mean a guy wearing a suit, being a CEO, having lots of money, living in a penthouse. I don't even mean working for yourself, although we shall talk about working for yourself. I really mean being a boss in life. So making your own decisions in all respects. So manning up, taking control, going your own way, not in that men's rights movement of running off into the hills, burying your head in the sand like an ostrich and pretending women don't exist. I'm seeing saying go your own way in terms of unplugging from the matrix. Yeah? You are a boss of life. You are self directed. So we're gonna give examples of that, and I'm gonna tell you about how I went from working a nine to five job and all the other jobs I've had to working for myself, but also becoming more and more, I would say, grounded, more rooted in what I was doing, knowing who I am, and making all these decisions for myself. So becoming a boss in many areas. We shall talk about that. But let's kick off with a quote from the one, the only boss of life himself, Charles Bukowski. Love him. And he says, how in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 06:30AM by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you make lots of money for somebody else, and you're asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so. That's Bukowski. And it probably reminds you of Fight Club or it reminds me of Trainspotting. And in Torero travels, I took about this quote from Irvin Welsh's train spotting. He says, choose life, choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a fucking big TV, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suit on hire purchased in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish fucked up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life. Ah, so positive. The positive vibes coming out of Tom Torero podcast 50. But you get the message. I've nagged you many times about escaping the matrix. I've made videos on it. I've even made podcasts on it. A podcast I made about becoming your own boss literally was podcast 38, a popular podcast called Financial Freedom, where I talk about escaping the matrix practically. I've just released on YouTube as well Flow Mad part one and Flow Mad part two that break down all the steps to going your own way in a business sense, escaping the nine to five and not just thinking about it in a kind of eternally rosy happy Tim Ferriss utopian way, but in a practical way from shifting from your nine to five to starting something in the evenings on the weekends and then making that transition, however scary it sounds. Yep. Because I've already said that your biggest thing as a guy is freedom, freedom of time, freedom of money. And the money sinks that I talked about in financial freedom, obviously, mortgage, the effect of being married or long term monogamy with kids, credit card loans, being in one place, being in an expensive city, the commuting to work, all the things, the paraphernalia surrounding work, and like both of those quotes said from Trainspotting and Burkowski, it's just a wheel that you're on and it's very hard to get off, I know, because you're in that job to pay for the place where you're staying, perhaps in London or New York, and you've got to be in that place because you've got to be near your work, so you need to keep your job. And it's just a vicious circle, it's very hard to escape from, especially if you've got debts and loans and a mortgage. But there is a way out. So if you haven't heard podcast 38, go and download it now. If you haven't seen Flowmad, it's on YouTube for free. Go and download it now. I thought I'd tell you a little bit about my employment history Tom Torero's colorful CV and tell you some stories about my shift through the different types of work I've been doing, and then to my day game coaching, and to working with other people, and then working for myself. And then, as I said, being a boss in all senses of the word or at least trying to be, I'm not claiming to be an amazing Schwarzenegger level boss. But I started off when I was about nine years old with a paper round. When I was about 11, I was a gardener going around cutting people's lawns and hedges. When I was about 14 I was the bucket cleaner using toxic levels of bleach in a local florist and the stink of those bleach soap buckets stays with me to this day. Then when I was at university I was working in a pub, I was working in a coffee shop, I was working in a camera shop, all those three were in Oxford. After Oxford I was a receptionist in a hostel, actually in three different backpackers. I was a shelf stacker in a twenty four hour Tesco's. So I did the night shift. It's a bit like the film Nightcrawler. That's that's how I was turning out to be a bit of a psycho in this Tesco's in South Wales stacking shelves. Actually, they put me on the biscuit aisle. I got the lucky roll of the dice, and they put me on the biscuit aisle and the sweet aisle, and I had to unload the sweets and the biscuits from the trolleys. But because it was dead between 1AM and 5AM, I just used to eat loads and loads. That's when I started putting on weight actually. So, yeah, I blame Tesco's. During that period also, I was a temp waiter. So really dodgy agency in Cardiff and I would be a waiter for functions and weddings. I was all this not many people know this actually. I was a very dodgy wedding photographer as well. I've always been into photography and that camera shop in Oxford actually, that was one of my better jobs. That was really good. I learned there weren't digital cameras at the time, so I learned all about SLRs and lenses. I learned about processing and developing at school, old school black and white with enlargers, etcetera. But anyway, after uni, needed some cash, so I I was even hustling back then. I put an advert in a few wedding magazines and just made out that I was a very experienced photojournalist style wedding photographer. And that means you don't need to do the classic cheesy, huge, luscious, glossy, feathered kind of shots. You just have to shoot fast on black and white. And this was before digital. So I was shooting on film, and I had to change the film after every 36 shots. Films used to come in 24 or 36. And I must have done ten, fifteen weddings, fucked up a few. And a funny statistic is that two thirds of the couples that I shot weddings for, they got divorced within a year. Because after a year, I would always call them to see if they wanted any more prints, and they'd pick up the phone in true Welsh style and go, oh no, it's alright, we're divorced now. We got married last week again. So there you go. That was one of my jobs, being a dodgy waiter, like I said, being a busker. Again, not many people know this about me but I play the guitar. I play quite well. I've been playing since I was about eight. And when I needed some money after uni, I would busk both in London and in Oxford, and in Brighton a little bit as well. So I would earn pennies that way. Then I became a summer school teacher, an English language teacher. I was a ski guide for a little bit. That was cool. I was a London tour guide. All these things before becoming a primary school teacher. And I was a primary school teacher in Cardiff, in London, in the Canary Islands. And poor salary, very poor salary. Right? It's just breaking even, especially in London. It all goes on your rent and your food and your commute because the underground is just ridiculous how much you have to spend if you're commuting between zones every day. And I would get to maybe the twentieth of each month. And I mean, I can't believe this was only 2009, perhaps. Yeah. 2008, 2009. I'd get to the end of the month and I'd be lining up my one piece, two piece, five piece, 10 piece, 20 piece on my windowsill because that's how broke I was. I, like I said, spent everything on rent and also on my daygame shenanigans, on going out for drinks and dating. So money was just gone. And at the end of the month, I'd be living on white bread, beans, pot noodles, just for those ten days and then I'd get my salary and I'd splurge. So that's how I was living and I thought that's how I would stay living. I was working for somebody else. All those jobs I was working for somebody else and I always, always resented that. There's something in my character that has always been a lone wolf or a black sheep, as I say. My dad was like this too. My granddad was like this too. I never liked people telling me what to do. Even at primary school, when the teacher would say, Okay, today we're going to work in pairs, here is your buddy. I would hate it because I had my ideas, I wanted to do it my way, I always thought that as other person was just sponging off my time and energy. So that there was nothing I liked more than when the teacher said, personal project. You've got whatever four weeks to do a scrapbook project or to make a model. I was always beavering away on my own. And you could say loner, introvert, but now, you know, I have the last laugh. I see it as a big strength. This this desire to focus on projects. Now it's making videos and writing books and giving talks and coming up with little creative projects. But when I was young, used to think it was a bit weird that I was so obsessive about making things, doing things, coming up with little radio shows, drawing little comics. I was always doing things on my own. And when I had to compromise an idea and go along with somebody else or even worse with a lot of those later jobs, people giving me tasks that I knew were just time fillers. I knew the world didn't really need me to make those folders or fill in those graphs and reports. When I was a primary school teacher, you had to do all these ridiculous tasks and if you didn't do them, obviously you would be disciplined. And many times I was just focused on teaching kids and I wasn't doing these portfolios and these charts which really don't benefit five, six year old kids, but it's part of government initiatives and endless revamps and school policies. Anyway, not moaning, I'm just illustrating the point that I always went against the grain. I was always the black sheep, which is this year's theme. Last year it was below the belt. This year my talks are all based around this concept of being the black sheep or even the wolf in sheep's clothing. But we'll come back to that on another podcast. Anyway, where was I? Yes. I always had this streak in me. So now I see it as a strength in that I am a one person organization. I have no office, I have no employees, I have very minimal overheads. And for a lot of people it would be a weird, tough, kind of lonely road. They need at least a business partner or they need to be in a team. So I'm not saying you have to be me. I'm just pointing out that this is how I've always worked. This is how I like working. And this is when I'm at my best. Like I say in FLOMAD, you're not meant to be alone forever. You shouldn't be alone forever. You've got to be social. Daygame is my huge social activity, dating, meeting other daygamers, meeting my friends, spending time with family. Do not be alone. That's a myth. Okay? Look at the film Into the Wild. And it's great that he sells everything and goes off Into the Wild based on a true story. But he realizes at the end that happiness is to be found with other people and it is. But I'm talking about my work strength, so maybe that applies to you. I'm sure this podcast is self selecting in that a lot of introverted people or people with this streak gravitate towards day game or the night game and this kind of lifestyle more than office or corporate culture or even trying to climb a city ladder, like trying to be a consultant or a CEO of a shiny building in Canary Wharf. You are a minimalist like me, and you believe it is not the money, but it's what money can get you, which is freedom to do what the fuck you want, to be your own boss, to be a boss, freedom of time. Yeah? There's another great quote here from Nasim Talib. You might remember that name from Black Swan. And he says, the three most harmful addictions in life are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. Right? Why the monthly salary? Because it's the comfort trap. Comfort is your enemy, Of course, in daygame, mister nice guy, but also in life. Because that monthly salary gets you on the hamster wheel, you've got to have your job to pay that monthly salary, but it's also it's also somehow nice that you know that whatever happens you're gonna get that monthly salary. It's predictable, you don't have to think that it's low risk, maybe you're paying into a pension, everything's gonna be okay. And even though you hate hate hate your job or you hate your commute or you hate the people you work with, and I'm talking about when I was a teacher and also all the teachers I used to work with, you think, Well, it's the safe option. Yeah, I'm doing the right thing. My family used to say, Well then Tom, you're still a primary school teacher. It's amazing you're doing the right thing. You've unquote manned up or you've taken responsibility and that's blessing and a curse because you're stuck in the one place, you're not moving forwards, you might not be moving backwards but nothing's happening, you interrupt. So, like I said in podcast 38, read things like four hour work week. Yeah. It's utopian, but it gives you some good ideas. Watch flow mad. Start thinking about how you can set something up on the side in the evenings, on the weekend based on your passion. So choose the thing that you love. I know that's a stupid cliche. But work out what you are really good at, what you've been doing since you were a kid. That old thing about if money was no option, what would you be doing? What skill have you already got that you might be teaching people? What can you monetize? And not cynically, as a a web marketer with clickbait and SEO and buying banner ads and traffic and all that rubbish, all that spammy stuff, not becoming a cheesy Internet marketer, but just capitalizing on what you're good at. So work out what you're good at, much harder than it sounds, I know, and then start content marketing. So I've said all this before. Give, give, give, give. Right? For every 10 things you produce, nine things of them should be giving. How can you give? Well, we're not talking about weird sexual fetishes here, we're talking about a blog doesn't cost you anything to set up. Right? A vlog on YouTube doesn't really cost you anything because you can shoot videos on your mobile phone or your webcam, Not those kind of videos, gentlemen. Well, maybe you could if you've got a very big personality. Anyway, you get what I mean. Give away content. Make podcasts. I'm recording this on my iPhone. Right? You don't need to buy expensive podcast equipment. Write film, give away tidbits, give away advice, reply to comments, start self promoting not in an egotistical selfie way, but in spreading the word. So using social media. Thank God for the Internet. Yeah? The Internet has changed everything. None of what I'm talking about today, except being a general boss of life, I suppose a bit like Frank Sinatra, but none of the practical stuff I'm talking today would have been possible before I was at university when the web didn't exist. So things like Facebook, things like Twitter, things like Instagram, the beauty of WordPress, get on a WordPress blog for free. The beauty of iTunes, you know, the beauty of Lulu, how I've managed to self publish these books. The amazing genius of Skype. I do so much of my coaching on Skype and I talk to so many of my friends and when I'm travelling I talk to my family. It's the same with FaceTime on an iPhone. Absolutely amazing. I remember when I would dream as a kid of being able to somehow send video across time and space or when they first had video phones. I thought that was amazing. Or a tiny pocket TV one year, I saved up for the whole year, and I think it was my Christmas present as well, to get a battery powered portable TV with four channels. It was like a brick, but I was just amazed that you could watch TV in the palm of your hand. That was amazing for me. Anyway, I digress. The beauty, the joy, the wonder of sites like Upwork used to be called Elance and that's where I got all my editors and illustrators and coders and people that have helped me when I've outsourced things in very Tim Ferriss style. That's how I made that textbook. That's how I did many things on my WordPress website. That's how you get motion graphics. So, yeah, being a one man band, but also realizing that you don't need to be a master at HTML or you don't need to be a watercolor artist or you don't need to come up with a logo because you can have the idea but then you can delegate. So that's one of the skills I've learned. We'll come on to that, delegating. But being a one man band, using those things to, like I said, give away, give, give, give, give, give. And then when you do give, a bit like the film A Wonderful Life, even though it has those communist socialist leanings, let's not get political, but when you give, you will receive. Okay? So it took me a two, three, four years. I started putting out content, I guess, two thousand and nine, actually, as soon as I started daygaming, I was on a geeky London seduction forum writing lay reports and coming up with models and ideas. And then I was making videos from about 2,010, putting out in fields, giving talks from 2,010, and then making products 2011, first book 2012. So I've been doing it for a while, but you get a following. And for most people with a YouTube channel or a blog, it takes a couple of years. But once you get that following, all you have to do is sell to your fans. And not in a cynical way again with the clickbait and the crappy products and those cheesy pickup PDFs. But I'm saying really sell something of worth to your followers and they will buy it because they've already seen the content that you are putting out for free. That's content marketing. Very few overheads. Right? You need a laptop. You need a mobile phone. You could get a cheap pocket camera. It's not the equipment that matters. Right? I've said this many times. It's the it's the content. It's the quality. It's the creative quality. It's the usefulness of what you're putting out. And we're doing all this not to get the money, not to get the status. Don't think of it like Wolf of Wall Street or, even Ocean's 11 or of trying to get that, suit and flash car and penthouse suite. Yeah. It's cool. Yeah. It makes a great movie. But all those movies point to the fact that, of course, the truism is that that's not what makes you happy. What has made me happy is this freedom of time. I am so grateful. I practice gratitude even though I don't believe in that cheesy life coaching technique because I'm not sure who we have to be grateful to. But I'm just grateful in the sense of not having to stand on a tube platform, not having to get up at 6AM and put on a tie, not having to do those stupid little jobs that have no benefit to children in the teaching world, not having to be tied to one place, waiting for that salary and waiting for my pension when I'm 65. Being able to wake up like I'm gonna wake up tomorrow morning and be my own fucking boss. So decide when I get up, decide where I'm gonna take my laptop to work, decide what project I'm gonna work on, decide which clients I'm going to work with, decide which city I'm going to work in, decide what my next big project is, decide when I shoot a video, decide what the video is about, decide when I make a podcast. All these things I was doing as a kid, making radio shows and then with a cine camera making little goofy travel films and films. I still do all that stuff but now it has become my job. So daygame was something I used to do and now it's something that I am, however motivational that sounds. And I don't take it for granted. Honestly, every day when I'm sitting there in a coffee shop with my laptop and jotting down ideas or everyday I'm walking around a beautiful city with a client teaching daygame. I do not take it for granted. Now, let's talk about it in terms of being a boss in the wider sense. Yeah? It's the one man band. Yeah? It's the Hemingway. It's the Burkowski. It's the sticking it to the man. This is why I like Dylan Thomas. Sticking it to the man, you know? And it's going your own way, not, as I said, by burying your head in the sand and saying, you know, I hate the world, I hate capitalism, I hate items and objects, I'm gonna run away to Tibet and become a Buddhist monk and rise above the shallowness of hedonism and sex. No. No. No. No. No. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about standing tall, making your own decisions, wearing what you wanna wear, being unapologetic. Alright? Not being the nice guy, supplicating, pleasing, but calling things out. So when you like something, you say it. When you don't like something, you say it. So you approach the women you want to approach. You lead. You don't hide your dick. You escalate. You've heard me say all this a million times. You are not part of the herd. You are not a sheep. You are not in a pen. You are, gentlemen, that black sheep that goes its own way, does what the fuck it wants to do. Not because it hates all the other sheep, but it's just seen a different path. It's unplugged like in Fight Club, and it's going its own way. The twist in the tail is that really that black sheep is the wolf in sheep's clothing. You could say it's the wolf of Wall Street, but really, you know, we're an urban warrior in terms of daygame. You look like a nice simple sheep, but underneath that woolly exterior, you've got claws. Yeah. You've got teeth, and you go for things. You grab life by the horns. What a cool saying that is. Imagine if that was my tagline. You go for what you want. You grab life by the horns, and you live with that fire in your belly and you walk around life thinking, yeah, boss. Yeah, and other people look at you and think, boss. And again, they're not talking about a flash car and a suit, they're talking about the way you put your chin up. They're talking about that twinkle in your eye, that cocky smile. And it's not hating life, it's loving life. So when I say stick it to the man, I'm talking about the drudgery, marks of weakness, marks of woe. Do you know who said that? Leave a comment actually. Do you know that line? I see Mark in every face I meet. Marks of weakness, marks of woe. I said it in a Welsh accent but actually it was an Englishman. I might give away a little prize if you can identify that quote. But anyway, if you can escape that drudgery, rise above it and realize that you're on a planet spinning through time and space, nobody knows what the fuck this means. But you're standing there with a big smile on your face because you're not standing on that tube platform. You haven't woken up at 06:30. You haven't battled the traffic to make lots of money for somebody else, as Bukowski said, having to pretend that you are grateful for the opportunity to do so. So quite wide and existential, this podcast, going way beyond daygame, going way beyond employment. Alright? Boss level mindset and outward behaviors carried through to all aspects of your life. We're gonna leave it there. I think we're about half an hour. I hope you like that when it came out a little bit weird. But there we go. That was podcast 50. The next podcast is gonna be from Middle Europe. I can't say where. Let's just say Middle Europe. Anyway, over and out.