How to “Quiet Quit” Your 9-5 Job and Become a Full-Time Boss

Scott:
Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast where we interview Gabrielle Judge and talk about quiet quitting, anti work, TikTok, and leveraging ChatGPT. Hello, hello, hello. My name is Scott Trench, and with me today is Amanda Wolfe from the SHEWOLFEOFWALLSTREET, who is going to be a recurring contributor to the BiggerPockets Money podcast.

Amanda:
Thanks, Scott. I’m excited to join the BP Money Pack.

Scott:
All right. That was good. I love it. Amanda and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else, to introduce you to every money story, because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter where or when you’re starting or what generation you’re a part of.

Amanda:
So whether you want to retire early and travel the world, go on to make big time investments in assets like real estate, or start your own business, we’ll help you reach your financial goals and get money out of the way so you can launch yourself towards your dreams.

Scott:
Well, Amanda, I’m so excited you could join us today. What’s going on in your world?

Amanda:
I’m so excited to be here. I really, really loved our conversation today with Gabrielle, because I, SHEWOLFEOFWALLSTREET, am a content creator as well, and I have a 9-to-5 job in tech too. So there were so many really good parallels in our conversation that I really was able to relate to, and I just really, really loved our conversation, especially around quiet quitting, which I think sometimes tends to raise some eyebrows, but have an open mind here, because I think she just did a really, really great job of framing it.

Scott:
Absolutely. I think that if you’re not part of Gen Z, quiet quitting makes you think, “What? Are these folks going to be lazy? Are they giving up their careers, whatever?” But no, quiet quitting, I think, is just the Gen Z’s parallel to the fire movement, essentially. It’s just spinoff of that, and it’s about the same goal, work-life balance and spending your time the way that you want to. And I think that before you dismiss the term quiet quitting, understand what it means, as Gabrielle who’s a thought leader in this space has defined it, and I think it will open your eyes to, again, just the flavor that Gen Z has put on this age-old concept and the way that they’re pursuing it.

Amanda:
I think we’ll all see that really quiet quitting is the foundation to fire. It’s like they took this age-old concept and just added another layer to it to help us get to that next level and to help us live a life that we have truly dreamed of.

Scott:
We have a new segment of the show called The Money Moments, where we share a money hack tip or trick to help you on your financial journey. Today’s Money Moment is with spring just around the corner, strategize your curb appeal. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on annuals, invest in perennials, which will come up every year and make your house look amazing, and this is particularly true here in Colorado.

Amanda:
All right. Should we bring in Gabrielle?

Scott:
Let’s do it. Gabrielle Judge is a TikTok influencer with over 87,000 followers. She’s been featured in the New York Times and Bloomberg about quiet quitting, and she also has a company called Anti Work Girlboss. Gabrielle, we are so excited to have you today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Gabrielle:
Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Scott and Amanda. I’m super excited to be on.

Scott:
Awesome. Will you tell us a little bit about yourself and your relationship with money growing up?

Gabrielle:
Yeah. So today, I’m a content creator, so I have over 100K followers on TikTok and then my brand, Anti Work Girlboss, so they kind of just coexist together. And so really over there, we debunk tech, money and the future of work in just a very Gen Z filter. Really what inspired that and how my up upbringing really came is I was raised by a single mom. She tried her best, and we definitely had a sometimes lower middle class. It just depended on the year and what was going on. And sometimes middle class, so I got to taste different sides of it all.
When my parents were together, I was in Princeton, New Jersey, and so that was a richer area, and I got to see that. And then slowly, as my mom really took the reins, then I started to live in low-income housing for a second, so I really got to see that aspect of things. So I was raised I think with a little bit more of a scarcity mindset, and I think that that’s just because of the programming that they were exposed to at that time and just my generations before me.
I’m the first generation to go to college as well, so there was some convincing of even explaining what college was and the process and what my degree was going to be with my family and stuff. So that was always quite a challenge and quite a really interesting process, because I got to learn how to advocate for myself, so I’m very grateful for all that experience.
For me, my parents were very blue collar, but they were very entrepreneurial, so they taught me to show up every day for work, and I really got that traditional work ethic from them. So I’m very grateful overall for just the different flavors of my childhood.

Amanda:
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that background. I just have to say I was really excited to discover you, because I think that there’s a lot of parallels in our lives. I also work in tech 9-to-5, and then I’m also a full-time content creator as my second full-time job. I want to know how did you make the jump from corporate America to full-time content creator using that scarcity mindset that you grew up with up until today, because that’s really scary to leave what a, if you can’t see me quoting right now, “secure job.” So how did you make that leap and how did your background influence you to do that?

Gabrielle:
I think that my answer to that will also mature with time. It’s still just … So everyone that’s listening, my last day was March 31st of this year, so it’s quite raw, it’s quite new. Really for me, as I started, I worked at a bigger public tech company that we’ve all heard before. I worked there until March 31st. And so as I was starting that job in March 2021 is when I started to cultivate a following. I probably had 30K or 40K followers. So I always told myself when this employer gets in the way with the other stuff, that’s when I make the jump. That was just my promise. That was kind of my metric of when to leave, because no one’s going to tell you. So there was tons of games that I’d play with myself of, “Well, maybe I’ll get laid off today,” and that comes with so much privilege, but I was looking for someone to just tell me to leave and go do it, and it just doesn’t work that way.
So as an entrepreneur, I was like, “Okay.” So I created that permission for myself, and there was moments where recently this year, I mean you probably understand this in the big tech world, you have to think of yourself as a business at the end of the day. I try to really think of that when it comes to my followers and what they’re listening to and when I’m articulating with them. There has to be an ROI for the job. And so for me, I wasn’t really growing anymore. There wasn’t any room for any raises, but they were asking for more work this year, and I was just, “It’s just not a good fit.” And so I felt there was so many subtle messages for me to take the leap and do it. Just I was getting in the way of myself.
As I’m cultivating a lot of my content for this month, I’m also trying to be really transparent and thoughtful with that, because I still get in the way of myself, and there’s so many people that look up to me, and where can I tell that story and still try to be a mentor for people who may want to do the same thing, or something that I do either intrigue them, stuff like that.

Amanda:
Yeah, I love that. And I have to ask, so obviously it’s a big scary decision to leave a full-time job, go into content creation, but for a while, you are kind of doing, not kind of doing two full-time jobs, you are doing two full-time jobs. So how did that affect you from a mental health perspective or a burnout perspective?

Gabrielle:
Such a good question. I got management in October, I got talent management, and so that was I guess probably the best thing that happened to me, and I’m very grateful for my team and stuff that I’ve had.

Scott:
Can you define what “got talent management” means?

Gabrielle:
Yes, yes. That’s a very good emphasis. So talent management, it looks different for any type of creator or Internet persona or creative as a whole. But for me, I have talent management, meaning I have someone that owns the whole business side of things. So I have a business background, and I’m very comfortable owning my sponsorships. For those who don’t know, sponsorships is a huge way that creators get paid so that we don’t have to always constantly sell stuff to you or think of different ways to make money. It’s a great way to really create a win-win, because we can find partnerships where their message or their offering is such a gift for our community, and we really want to put that stamp of approval on it and leverage our audience.
And so for me, the back and forth of the Brandos, having the business side of things, having the creative side of things and having my 9-to-5, trying to be a normal 20, I just turned 26, so a 25-year-old or whatever, it was a mess, and I would say that there were certain moments that were really hard. And there was a lot of moments that I felt alienated, because there’s not a lot of people doing this, if that makes sense. So it would just be very hard to articulate what was going on, but it really pushed me to create a community of creators.
I think anytime that I see an up and coming creator or someone who’s interested in becoming a creator, I’m always like, “Find 10 people. You need those types of people to understand the ups and downs. You need those people to understand your creative process. You need people to understand just the work it is. Sometimes we stay up to midnight making content or doing emails or whatever, and then we have work in the morning that we still get to show up and be our best selves for.”
So it was never a, “Oh, I had everything perfect all the time,” but it’s just such a plug-and-play of learning how to delegate, learning how to create space for yourself and take care of yourself. One thing that I always preach, too, is I can’t make a doppelganger of myself, and it’s me at the end of the day. So if I’m not feeding this machine and caring for myself, loving myself, it shows. Literally sometimes, I get comments of, “Are you okay right now, or what’s going on?” People know. They can see it.

Scott:
I’m always interested when folks leave their job to pursue these types of ventures in what your personal financial position looks like and how that influences. For example, someone with more cash and a little bit of passive income or promising start to their side hustle might feel very comfortable leaving the job, and someone without that buffer, maybe with a lot of credit card debt, might feel much less comfortable with that. Would you give us an overview of how you would self-assess your personal financial position and how that may or may not have contributed to your leaving your corporate job?

Gabrielle:
Yes. Okay. So that is such a good question. It’s not a one-size-fits-all, and prior to this, I thought it was. So I thought it was this check checklist of save nine months or whatever it’s going to be, save this, do this, and then one day someone’s going to anoint you with a wand and be, “You can now leave.” And that’s just not how it works. So for me, mine looks a little bit different.
So to be transparent, I don’t keep tons and tons of money in a savings account, and I’ll go into why. So I don’t have that big lump sum. Obviously, there’s things that can be liquidated and stuff like that, but I don’t have this big lump lump sum that I think that we’re taught to quit. I also have debt, but it’s good debt for the most part. So there was some investments I made in my business, developing physical products and things like that.
There’s also investments that I made where I hard money lent money, so I was kind of being the bank for specific situations. So the really great thing is for the next 12 months, so for the next year, I have a payment that comes in passively from one of my hard money loans, and that pays for my bad debt, my personal bad debt, so that’s my college loan and my car payment, and so I don’t have to worry about that stuff. Of course, obviously, I have rent and everything else going on, but at least the bad debt that I cannot miss payment on or my credit will be reflected, that stuff is paid for. So for me, I was like, “Okay, that makes the most sense.”
The second part of it is there was already proof of concept with the side hustles that I had at the time, air quotes in side hustles, because obviously now, it’s my full-time job, but I already had proof of concept that I could produce five-figure months and do that. And so it was like, “Okay, I understand that I have this proof of concept now. If I just maintain or even exceed effort in that, so if it comes to lead gen or any type of product development or increasing the quality of my content so that I’m getting better reach on stuff, there’s so many different ways that you can play around with it, then I can move forward.” So for me, that was my gauge to it. But again, it’s not a one-size-fits-all. There’s some people that really do need large lump sums of money in the bank. I just don’t really keep that. Because I’m so young, I would rather take advantage of the time value of money.

Scott:
Awesome. Would you classify your expenses as high, medium or low, your personal spending on your life?

Gabrielle:
I’m in between a medium and a frugal. I was pretty frugal growing up, obviously because of my background. And then putting myself through college, I worked so many different jobs to make it all work while I was full-time in school. About 2020, I want to say, yeah, I was 23, is when I made my first six figures. And so from there, I really got to play around, and it’s still a game of getting out of the scarcity mindset.
Frugal is good, frugal is still good, especially for the economic health that we’re in right now. I wouldn’t really advise people to throw that money around like it’s nothing right now. It’s definitely something to be aware of. I think that I maintain that frugalness, but I’ve also been playing around the last three years of treating myself to a certain extent or investing in myself or not being so afraid of depositing money into investments and stuff that there could be a few extra zeros that I’ve never seen before.
I try to grow my stress tolerance when it comes to money, but overall, I don’t live this super, super lavish life right now. I also do really want to pursue the full-time content creation at most responsibly. I want to stay open for investment opportunities, stuff like that. So it’s really just a balance.

Scott:
Love it. I just want to observe. You’re a medium to late spender. You grounded out working your full-time job and creating content on the side to build up business into a place where it looked very promising, and you made the transition at a point in time when you thought that was the right bet for you in life. I also love the fact that you’re breaking a rule of personal finance where you’re doing a hard money loan. By the way, a hard money loan for those listening is when you might lend to a fix-and-flip or a short-term rehab project, usually at a high interest rate, 10% to 12%. I’m doing this with my personal portfolio with about a third of my portfolio.
You’re breaking a rule just as I am. You’re doing this outside of your retirement accounts, it sounds like, and you’re just collecting the simple interest income. That’s not very tax efficient, but what it does is it’s freeing. It allows you to have cash flow that you can then use to deploy for your other debts and your personal business. And I completely agree with it, even though an accountant would give you a lot of grief. So anyways, that’s my observation spiel. I love it and completely aligned with the way you’re approaching your situation.

Gabrielle:
Thank you. I appreciate that. And for me, too, I also encourage anyone to get into this. The biggest objection that someone who’s listening may feel right now is I don’t have enough money, and that’s a completely fair reason, but there’s also different ways that you can creatively gain funds.
So one way that I do that is through a system called credit card stacking. You just need an LLC, and if you don’t have one, the company that I work with can also create that for you, which is a super great supportive experience. So you can actually just leverage business credit cards with 0% down. And I have some programs where some are 12 months, some are 24 months, 0%, and then you can really play with that. Again, I think that would make an accountant really climb up the wall and get really afraid, but it’s one way that you could also leverage this as well if you don’t have a lot of lump sum money right now.
So tons of creative ways to do it. Hard money loans, I think, aren’t the best represented sometimes, because we have this loan shark kind of vibe with them, and they’re really freeing if you can create a win-win with someone. And also, where you were hinting earlier, it’s a great way to get into the real estate market. So the real estate market is so hard to get into right now as Gen Z, and you can become an investor by lending money to anyone that who either is flipping a house or trying to buy a house or anything like that. You can be a bank for someone else right now, and you don’t have to go through the whole loan approval process that we’re all so afraid of.

Amanda:
Yeah, I think that’s really brave and smart of you to do that with your money. I love that. And I think when you were saying some credit cards are 12 months or 24 months, there’s definitely some mathematical gymnastics that might need to happen when it comes to that. So how would you recommend somebody get educated? Is that mainly what your content focuses on, or do you want to share what your content mainly focuses on?

Gabrielle:
I like to dive into creative ways to make investment decisions as a whole and then really educate that with my audience. So for me, I’m not actually sponsored by any of … I use Fund and Grow for an example. They’re a great company that does credit card stacking. I’m not really necessarily affiliated by them or anything like that. It’s just something that I really like to show people and try to guide them to that success of their own.
So for me, yeah, I constantly debunk, especially because you come from a tech background as well, you’ll understand this, I constantly debunk the whole idea of accredited investors. I constantly debunk so many things that we understand as tech employees. We almost have to be an investor that’s sitting on this shark tank seat, and we have to be making a million dollars a year, and we have to go find the big tech unicorn.
It’s just not like that anymore. So for me, I became a seed investor at 23, and I did that through equity crowdfunding, and that was a really, really cool way where I wasn’t accredited, I didn’t really have to go through all these gate-kept hoops to get there or anything like that. That was a really, really great way for me to enter the door when it came to any investing.
So there’s stuff like that, just small stories or small ways that I kind of find to “cheat the system” that I really, really preach to my audience, because I just don’t think that there’s anyone that looks like me that’s really trying to make this cool, if that makes sense. I think that there’s just a lack of representation. When it comes to women in finance, when it comes to Gen Z in finance, I think we’re still looked at as 14-year-old kids, but I’m 26. We’re definitely very much in the job market and doing things now. So I try to make this boring stuff very cool.

Scott:
I’m a big bull for the Gen Z’ers. I am a Millennial, unfortunately, fortunately, or whatever. But the Gen Z, you guys, I think, have a much better handle on money. I think you’re much more, what’s the word, cautious or careful or a little skeptical that a lot of the things that Baby Boomers or Gen X maybe received in social security and those types of things are going to be available for you, and there’s a lot more interest, I think.
When I talk to people about financial independence, a couple of my friends are interested in it. It’s still not like most of the generation or anything, but when I was starting out on my journey, there was nobody like that that I knew that was going down the same path. And so I think there’s a big advantage here, and Ill put money on you guys. I have a specific question about your content relating to a specific term. What exactly is an Anti Work Girlboss, and what does that mean?

Gabrielle:
I love that. Yeah, so Anti Work Girlboss, basically, it’s just the expansion of work-life balance. I think this whole package work-life balance that we practice today was a great stepping stone. I think the idea of work-life balance really solidified in 2020 with being able to work from home and people really going through this external factor together and just being like, “Hey, how can we take care of ourselves and stuff like that?” And work-life balance to Gen Z will mean something much more expansive.
So what I mean by that is Gen Z, I’m careful about this, because I get stuck sometimes, because I know that we’re considered lazy to older generations, so I try to maintain clear and empathetic descriptions when I’m talking about this. So Gen Z believes that our 9-to-5 is on a dream job. Millennials really fought for this whole dream job situation, and I think that really carved the path for Gen Z where it was like, “Hey, I want to do something that’s passion filled. I want to do something that’s not just this corporate cog in the machine. I want to do something that’s more heart-centered.” That really created that stepping stone for us. We’re more interested in cultivating highly valued skills that we can either work on a 9-to-5 and/or work as a freelancer and/or be a side hustler and/or be a content creator. Gen Z is very multi-faceted.
I actually read a study recently where Gen A, who’s in elementary school right now, and they just got surveyed, and the biggest job that they want to be right now is content creators. And content creators as a whole, you’re wearing five hats at a time all the time. It’s a very multi-faceted profession. So we’re seeing this taste and this interest for not just being the 9-to-5, and I just actually made some content that I’m going to post about this week, is I think we’ll decenter the 9-to-5 from our actual identity.
If you look at traditionally how Americans talk to each other when we meet each other, the second or third question that we ask each other is what you do for a living. And so that was something that I was grappled with when I was still a nine-to-fiver and being a content creator, people were like, “Yeah, but what do you do for work work?” And then it’d be like, “Okay, I do this.” And they’re like, “Yeah, okay. I understand.” And it’s like, “No. That’s just a third of what I’m doing all day. It doesn’t even represent who I am.” So that will be more and more a thing with Gen Z.
So what I’m saying is the idea that we have of work-life balance today is awesome. You can work at 10:00 AM instead of 9:00 AM, because you have a dentist appointment. Great stepping stone. I think that that’s awesome. And Gen Z will come in and really show … We talked a little bit about quiet quitting and stuff like that. It’s like, “No. I’m here to do my job responsibilities.” If we want to do anything more than our job responsibilities that increases our pay, because that’s how it makes sense. And then if not, I want the space to be able to create side hustles for myself or do passion projects on my own. I want that space to be able to do that. And so that’s where we’re getting all these quiet quitting and all these different crazy trends are going on right now.
But anti work is basically a riff off of, there’s r/antiwork, which is a subReddit community. It’s crazy if you’ve ever … Definitely when you’re bored, go in there. It’s just nightmare work stories and just crazy stuff that goes on. I used to work in retail, and a lot of them are retail focused and just the whole gamut. So it’s that plus the whole Millennial term girlboss, which was the whole concept of climbing the corporate ladder, so it’s kind of the balance of the two. But at the end of the day, I’m just teaching people to be more discerning, like, “Hey, what do you want to do from 9-to-5? What do you want to do throughout the day? What are you interested in? Are you getting full ROI?” And the ROI means return on investment? “Are you getting a full return on investment on what you’re doing? Are you fulfilled? If not, how can you create that for yourself?” Stuff like that.

Amanda:
And just to piggyback off of what both you and Scott just said, Scott made a comment where he said that Gen Z is a little more skeptical. And I think that is so spot on, especially with everything that you talk about, because you guys are skeptical, and I’m a Millennial as well, so you guys are skeptical in that. You’re like, “Well, wait a minute. Working 4,000 hours a week is not fun. Zero out of five stars. Don’t want to continue doing that. How do I not do that but still live a life that I want to live?” And I think you guys are balancing that so perfectly. So I love the whole Anti Work Girlboss thing, the whole quiet quitting. Let’s just do the work we were paid for and still be allowed to live our life as humans. So I love all of that.
But I do have another question for you, which is I feel like right now, if you’re somebody who wants to rely on a 9-to-5, going into tech is looked at as super sexy, because there’s all these different perks that you get, but also it’s really tumultuous. Becoming an entrepreneur and a content creator is really sexy, because you get to work for yourself and do things that you’re passionate about. But both of those things are also really volatile industries. So what would you recommend to someone who was interested in going and pursuing the life of their dreams, doing the quiet quitting, working, but also following their passion? What would you say, because both of those things are hard?

Gabrielle:
It’s all hard. And to be totally transparent, Amanda, because that’s so true, I don’t want to sit on here and sell this dream of like, “Oh, you just get to do this thing,” and choose it and it happens for you. It takes some work, it takes some focus, and it takes trial and error, and it’s also okay to fail sometimes, and that’s how it is. So at Anti Work Girlboss, we really preach this idea of a lazy girl job. And so what I mean by that is it’s safe, it’s equitable, it pays your bills, there’s room for work-life balance. You have a great transparent and honest relationship with your boss, so you can articulate clear boundaries back and forth to each other.
So I’m still on the team “tech jobs will fulfill that.” I know that obviously the tech industry has gone through quite the gamut in the last year, so it’ll be a little bit harder to find jobs like that. But for me, I always preach, “Hey, there’s something in the tech industry that you can do.” Because there’s people that are in literally unsafe jobs trying to make things work or hustling in a way that just isn’t safe for women especially.
So that’s something that I really try to make cool is what’s wrong with making $75K as a marketing associate, and then the extra time that you do have just figuring it out. That’s literally how I figured it out. It doesn’t sound as sexy. It’s not that cool yet, because you’re kind of spread thin and you’re doing all these things. But why can’t we normalize a 9-to-5 that pays your bills and it’s kind of that soft life and stuff like that. There’s something really sexy to that. And when you become self-employed, you have to wait two years anyways to buy a house traditionally because you have to have that average and stuff like that.
So when you’re thinking about the other stepping stones to adulthood, it could make sense to stay in a salary job. So for me, I always appreciate that to my community. I don’t expect everyone to come into this content creation space with me. It’s not ideal for everyone, and it’s actually not as glamorous as it seems all the time, and you understand that very, very hard. But I hope that answers your question in a fair, practical way, because that’s what I really tried to maintain at Anti Work Girlboss. I’m not here to sell a story.

Amanda:
I love that. And actually, you know what, I probably jumped the gun. I should ask you, can you define for everyone what quiet quitting is?

Gabrielle:
Okay, well the definition of it is you don’t go above and beyond anymore at your job. So typically, obviously, what we do at corporate jobs is we’re promised you go above and beyond, you do the extra work, you do all of that, and one day you will get the promotion, one day you will get the raise and stuff like that. That’s one way. I’m not saying that that’s wrong, but really what Gen Z coined is this term of, “No, I’m staying discerning in what I’m doing. You’ve hired me to do X, Y, and Z. I’m going to do that, and then the rest of the time, I’m either making a family or I’m making a side hustle or something like that.” There’s more of that creation and that multifaceted thing that we were talking about earlier. So that’s really what it is.
And so quiet quitting as a whole, I don’t really put my stamp of approval on, because it’s interpreted in many different ways as content is. So it’s not something that I’m necessarily like, “Hey, kids. Go out there and quiet quit.” I just mean, “Hey, figure out what you want to do outside of work, too, if work’s not fulfilling for you.” I’ve also made content in the past before where I’m like, “Why are we putting so much weight on our jobs anyways to make us happy? It’s kind of not really what it’s there for. It’s there for the transaction of your work and your pay.”
Of course, having nice coworkers, of course having someone of a fulfilling intellectual job is super awesome. But what just happened to, I don’t know, just facing it, actually viewing this at face value and just being like, “This is a job, and it’s not here to fill my cup up to the fullest. That’s my job outside of work and stuff like that.” And so that’s why I try to stay practical with it.
But quiet quitting is just super interesting for Gen Z, because we’ve entered the workforce at a difficult time. So I entered the workforce at 2019, that’s when I graduated college, so that summer. We were still going into the office< because it was before the whole go home kind of thing, so I remember going into the office and putting my outfit on and being like, “Oh, I’m doing this for the next 40 years or whatever.” And then March 2020 happened, and there was no raises. There was layoffs and stuff like that, so we’ve had quite a wild ride.
And so I think Gen Z’s really staying observant of that and trying to be safe with the time that we’re giving and what the actual payment back is. I think Millennials, you all too, the 2008 recession was kind of your version of that. And so I think that there was that kind of coming of age and that almost uproar of, “Hey, this is what we want, corporations that really started this stepping stone for Gen Z.” So it’s cycles, it happens.

Scott:
I’m a CEO. Let’s pretend that I’m 30 years older, and we’ll add the adjective crusty to my demeanor here. I’m not familiar with the term quiet quitting, and I learned that Gabrielle is quiet quitting on our company. What does that mean? Does that mean she’s going to do a bad job? Does that mean that she’s going to skip out? Does that mean that once she finishes the assignment that I give her, she’s going to start working on her side blog during work hours? How should I understand this as a skeptical Gen X, not crusty yet, Baby Boomer? They’re not crusty either, none of those. But just tell me how someone who’s maybe not as in the know with this should interpret it maybe at another level.

Gabrielle:
Is Crusty your first name, or is that just like a nickname?

Scott:
My brother’s name is actually Rusty, but yeah.

Gabrielle:
So funny. Okay. So my interpretation of it is if I were, say I was your assistant, and I’m prepping you on the meeting that’s going on, I would be like, “Hey, so Gabrielle is doing her tasks, and she’s doing them well. She’s staying active at work, she’s not not showing up to work. She’s there, but she doesn’t seem motivated to do extra stuff. She’s not really checking in with her manager for extra work. It doesn’t really seem like there’s a lot of co-collaboration going on, but she’s doing her work and she’s getting the job done.”

Scott:
Okay, fair enough. Do you think this is a power dynamic shift between companies and employees over the last couple of years and that it may be reversing, or do you think that this is here to stay?

Gabrielle:
Such a good question. I think about this every day. I literally think about this every day, because it haunts me. Because my thing is what’s respectful and what’s fair, what’s responsible? I think Gen Z has a lot of leverage to come in and be like, “You laid off everyone, so I’m going to sit here and do nothing. What are you going to do about it?” There’s tons of leverage for that, but that’s not responsible, that’s not efficient, that’s not helpful, that’s not anything. So I always think about with that lens as well of what’s the end goal? What’s the end goal of quiet quitting? How is it actually going to affect us in the future? What started quiet quitting? And we’ve talked about it a lot. It’s the economy and what happened and what Gen Z really values. I think workplaces also, I mean the great resignation happened, and so I think that that was a huge shift for workplaces as a whole and employers.
I work with a lot of people who are trying to get into the tech industry or have just got laid off from a job or whatever, and there’s companies that are just shutting computers off. I’m sure you’ve just seen news like that, where they’re shutting the computer off, and you actually don’t even know that you got laid off until 8:00 AM that day. So I don’t know. We’re seeing a lot of retaliation on both sides. I wish I had a magic wand to help everyone out at the same time.
But again, it’s such a loaded question, but it’s a question that needs to be talked about more, for sure, because I think especially me and other creators in my place, there’s a lot of people that look up to us, and I try to be really conscious of what I’m saying, because especially on TikTok, there’s some young, young kids, and I don’t want to create this whole, “Well, Gabriel Judge said that I could just close my laptop kind of thing.” That’s not what I want to do. But I also want to teach kids stay discerning to what you want to do and be really clear about your work boundaries, because it’s open now. We can start doing that.

Amanda:
I love all of that advice, and I have to say that you made a comment that Gen Z was really interested in quiet quitting. I feel like I have to speak on behalf of all Millennials that we are interested in following your guidance here, because you are onto something, I think. But I have to ask, how does one set those boundaries appropriately within workplaces that might not be as forward-thinking?

Gabrielle:
I think about that a ton. So I always am really careful, too, when I make content, I can really only speak to the tech industry when it comes to professional stuff, because that’s what I’ve been in since 2019. I have a computer information systems degree, and that’s what I went to school for. Prior to that, I was in the restaurant industry, and I’ve done tons and tons of customer service jobs, but it was a different lens, it was a younger me.
So it’s hard for me to give advice on something that I don’t know. So that’s something that a lot of times I do get comments sometimes where it’s like, “Well, not everyone works in the tech industry,” and absolutely super fair and never going to delete that comment, never going to make them feel bad for that. Absolutely, that’s such an important thing. One thing that I do is I teach people how to use ChatGPT and other free tools to leave their job for a better job, and so that’s a huge solution that I try to do with people of how can we practically get you out of that job and that situation? If there’s no way to negotiate these things that you want, how can we get you out of that job?
Actually with our offering of being able to quit jobs with AI, I’m actually doing a lot of research with people who work in other areas of STEM, so science, technology, engineering, and mathematics for people who don’t know what the acronym is. And I’m working a lot with medical people right now, because I don’t understand that world at all, but I want something for them, because I feel like there’s a lack of career guidance in that industry as a whole. It’s very educational, and it’s very scholarly, and I think that there’s a lot of career gaps in that. And so I’m working with a small group of people in the medical field right now, too, because I’m trying to roll out way better messaging for people beyond the tech industry, because again, we don’t rule the world.

Amanda:
No, absolutely. Okay. And then I want to ask you a question about ChatGPT, since you just brought that up. So you’ve done some really, really interesting things with ChatGPT and maybe potentially some life-changing things for people. So can you walk us through how you’ve leveraged the tool to be able to help people with their job hunt and other things?

Gabrielle:
Everyone hates getting a new job, everyone hates interviewing for a new job, everyone hates that horrible, horrible position position you’re in where you are fully committed to a job. You are working 50 to 60 hours a week, and you have zero time to look for another job, because everyone knows that is a whole part-time job in itself. That’s a whole thing. So I’ve been thinking about that a lot last year.
Basically, when I first got started as a content creator, I did one-to-one career coaching. So I helped people break into the tech industry that have not as traditional backgrounds. So when I mention traditional backgrounds, they don’t have a four-year technical degree and they’re not fresh out of college. So these are people that are doing career switches or they have a background in something else, and they’re trying to leverage that and stuff like that.
And I really burnt out really quick, and I was like, “How can I find a way to serve a ton of people at once, so I’m not just spending my time on these one-on-one things? And how can I make a really affordable offering for everyone?” So that’s where ChatGPT rolled out what, end of last year, early this year? Yeah, end of last year. And so New Year’s Eve, I spent the entire week of the new year just learning it and writing this program, because I was just like, “We’re doing this. I finally found a way that we can leverage this and do it.” So to really talk about what it is, it’s for every step in the process, so it’s resume creation, LinkedIn profile optimization, all the discoverable pieces of actually applying for a job. Typically, those things take hundreds if not thousands of dollars if you’re in the tech industry to do.
That’s such an archaic thing of literally when I first got into the tech industry, I think I spent $600 on two resumes. That was such a thing, and I was like, “This is ridiculous.” With this program, you can do it on your own and you can do it in unlimited amount of ways. You don’t have to sit there and go back and forth via email with an agency. You can empower yourself and make all these tweaks. So with ChatGPT, you can write your own resume. You can also list out your accomplishments and really tailor your resume for each job posting. Because that’s the thing, too, that I always preach with my community is you didn’t get any callbacks this week, and that makes a lot of sense. But also, how many job applications did you do? Was it 10 or was it 100? Right? Because that’s going to change your outcomes so drastically.
And it’s just not who’s going to sit there and apply to a hundred jobs a week? It’s just really crazy to do on your own. So I was like, “Cool. Here’s a tool that you can automate all of this for free by yourself.” ChatGPT costs $0 to operate. You can get the ChatGPT+, but very accessible. So I’m really just teaching people how to fish. I don’t want to roll out an agency and take hundreds of dollars from people and stuff like that. It’s just like, “Here. This is one way that you can completely advocate for yourself and streamline the entire job application process.”

Amanda:
I love that, especially since when you are applying to multiple jobs, you have to tailor your resume so specifically, especially if it’s a few different jobs. So I love the idea of using technology like that to …

Scott:
Yeah, personalize. Yeah, on this point, though, we’re getting a thousand … I posted a job. I got a thousand applicants, a thousand applicants for a job, and to whittle that down, absolutely. And I’ll go one step further and say look, yes, do this. Customize the resume for the job. That’s fantastic advice, which I have never really considered. I guess I haven’t been on a job search in nine years for myself.
But second, put a cover letter, and don’t use AI to write your cover letter, but use it to draft it, or speed up that process of customizing it. Because when I get a thousand resumes that are just float in the pile, even if it’s a great resume, what am I going to do with, how do I filter these things very quickly? That’s a tremendous amount of work on my side to do that. And these tools are making it easier than ever to just fling your hat in the ring. I have to go through it in half a second because I have no choice. I can’t go through a thousand resumes in detail. Anyways, just an observation from my side, confirming your biases here.

Gabrielle:
No, I love it. I’m glad that you’re on board.

Scott:
So awkward transition here, but I have some questions about TikToking, which you can tell I’m not very familiar with and don’t do a lot of. Are you worried about the current climate in your business? I think that’s the way you reach most of your followers is with TikTok. Are you worried about that getting shut down? What are your thoughts on that if you had to speculate on what the future of that platform is?

Gabrielle:
Not to be snarky, but I feel like we all forgot what Facebook did with Cambridge Analytica. My whole thing is TikTok isn’t doing anything that American social media companies aren’t doing already. And so not to get wildly political, I don’t agree with the cherry-picking that’s happening. I do, obviously, I’m very pro things need to get figured out with technology. We need more representation in the government.
We saw kind of that recent happenings with the TikTok CEO and stuff like that. There needs to be more representation, and that’s something that I’m very vocal about as a whole, especially as a young voter. Of course, I’m going to vote. Of course, I’m educated and stuff like that, and I want to stay in the voting practice and make sure that I’m maintaining that every four years and even in the local stuff. There’s no representation for social media, and it scares the heck out of me personally, so I’m hopeful for the future.
I’m hopeful in humans, I’m hopeful in America. Whatever happens, I know that we can change and we can fix and we can grow and get better from. So for me, I’m not sitting here white-knuckling every day of, “Oh, is TikTok going to be banned?” There’s certain stuff, too, where that TikTok ban, it has nothing to do with TikTok as a whole, and it’s more about the VPN situation.
For anyone that doesn’t understand in technology, virtual private networks, some of them are, yes, obviously for very scammy things or to pretend that you’re something else, and those should be regulated, especially for streaming platforms and stuff like that or actual businesses, definitely not telling anyone to pirate anything. But they’re also helpful for personal security and stuff like that. There’s some really ethical ways to use VPNs. So some of it just kind of scared me in general. I didn’t love seeing all of that. To be very honest with everyone, I haven’t talked too much about the TikTok ban. But overall, I’m very excited about America as a whole, and I know that we’ll figure it out at the end of the day.

Amanda:
So let me ask you, then, so what advice do you have for somebody who would want to become a content creator? Because there’s also lots of really great stuff that comes along with it as well.

Gabrielle:
So being a content creator changed my life. The biggest thing that I say about it is you never know who’s watching your content, and so the craziest opportunities will happen that you can never imagine. I’ve been doing casting calls for reality shows the last two years and stuff like that, just wild stuff that you didn’t know that you could do. Business relationships have happened. I’ve gotten freelancing jobs and brand deals and stuff like that. I haven’t done a resume or a job application in years. It’s just from making content and stuff like that.
If it’s something where you don’t want to make money off of it, you don’t want to be super big, just the way that you can cultivate a community and just the friends that you can make online is just so powerful as well. There’s just such a community aspect to it as well.
So my tips are it’s really actually more of you getting in the way of yourself than anything, and no one has this secret sauce. And if they do say that they have a secret sauce for going viral, I’m sorry, but they’re probably not right. It’s not something that you can do from step A to B to C that you can really do. It’s unique, it’s unique to you, and it comes with trial and error.
So the biggest one that I always get when people are like, “Oh, I want to be a content creator, but I don’t know what to do.” Their biggest fear is like, “Well, what if I make gross content? What if I’m what Gen Z calls cringe? What if I’m cringey out there? What if I’m doing gross stuff, and then my friend sees it or a coworker sees it and stuff like that?” I’m like, “If it’s bad content and it’s not performing well, no one’s seeing it.” That’s kind of the great thing about it. You get to just move on.
The second aspect to it is if your friends or your coworkers or whatever see it, they saw it. It’s a part of life. For me, I notice it’s much more of us getting in the way of our own selves. But my most practical advice is be really kind to yourself. You don’t have to have it all figured out. I don’t have it all figured out. Amanda, I don’t know if you relate to this, but I’m sure there’s moments where you’re like …

Amanda:
No, I don’t have it figured out.

Gabrielle:
Exactly. There’s moments where you’re like, “I don’t know,” and you wake up some days, and you just want to delete your app, because you’re like, “I don’t even know what this is today.”

Amanda:
Yes.

Gabrielle:
It’s just part of it. And I would just say create whatever lights you up. I used to make content just on my work-from-home job. That was so weird. I think corporate Natalie was the biggest person that made that popular and stuff, but before that, it was so weird. And even my talent management, when they first picked me up last year, they were like, “Your niche is just so new and different. We don’t even know what to do with you.”
And so what I’m saying is you love painting. There’s going to be someone in there for painting. There’s so many communities and interests out there, and I think that’s why TikTok did so well is because it’s so interest-based, it really cultivated that community for us. So just be authentic to you. If you get in the way of yourself, that’s okay. Like I said earlier, make a ton of content creator friends, DM people, be kind. You’ll attract the right people and the right support, and you’ll figure it out eventually. I promise.

Amanda:
I love all those tips. I literally couldn’t have said them better myself. So thank you so much for sharing.

Gabrielle:
Thank you.

Scott:
Gabrielle, it’s been a privilege to chat with you today and learn from your really thorough kind of grounding and what the future of a career and what that might look like for Gen Z’ers and other generations as well looks like. Where can people who are interested in learning more find out more about you and follow you?

Gabrielle:
Thank you so much for having me today. This was so exciting. Yeah, anytime that I can be on a podcast and be able to talk about stuff, I also appreciate how thoughtful you all were. When thinking about my brand and what I do, I think it’s very easy to create this story of I don’t want to work and I’m teaching kids not to work. And so I really want to thank you for the open-mindedness and being able to let me just chat about these trends and these theories that I have. So thank you so much for this space today.
So my TikTok is @gabrielle_judge, so just Gabriel Judge, my name. My Instagram is antiworkgirlboss, and so we have a lot of fun over there. Thank you so much for, like I said, just everything and very excited to just do the full-time content creation stuff this summer and see where it goes.

Scott:
Awesome. Well, we really enjoyed this, and we totally get it. This whole show is about financial independence, retire early, right? Fire. So it’s all under the same umbrella of goal here of taking back control of your life. And one observation I’ll leave us with here is the logical response to the apathy that I think that a lot of folks feel about their jobs, in my opinion, is protect that job. Do exactly what you said, good enough, do a good job, get your good performance reviews, get your raise, those kinds of things.
But also move towards financial independence in some form or other, whatever that means to you as rapidly as is reasonable for your situation, and try to do it early in life, because then you can live the remaining multiple decades hopefully on your terms. And that means something different for everyone. But I think it’s all this kind of same fundamental concept that I think has been around for decades but has been slowly compounding and growing amongst the generations. And Gen Z embodies that even more than perhaps Millennials, Gen X or Baby Boomers. And I wish you good luck on that journey.

Gabrielle:
Thank you. 9-to-5s are sexy, y’all. They can fuel your investments, they can fuel your side hustle, I promise.

Scott:
All right, Amanda, that was Gabrielle. What did you think?

Amanda:
Oh, my gosh. I love, love, loved her. I want to be like her when I grow up. I think that all Millennials all ages have so much to learn from a Gen Z, and I think she represented them so well today.

Scott:
Absolutely. I think everyone always underestimates the new generation. I remember that being the same case when Millennials were in their twenties and early thirties. And I think that there’s always this kind of dismissiveness, but you can never underestimate the next generation. They always have superstars filled throughout, and they’re always the future and the potential of this country, and it’s so wonderful to talk to somebody who’s really kind of at the forefront of thinking about independence and freedom and control over your personal finances in the space.
I really also loved a couple of the specific tips that you gave us today around your resume, right? Again, I’m struggling to figure out what are the best ways to use AI in my world, but formatting resumes, coming up with the early stages to a cover letter or something like that, those are all great little tips that I think she has there. Thinking about your work and setting up your financial position so that it’s strong. And again, it’s not a process. No one waves a magic wand when it’s time to quit. It’s just a process that you build towards, and you have to make that break point. And I love the way that we were able to kind of dissect that and think about that position for her when she left her full-time job.

Amanda:
Oh, absolutely. I think that they are the epitome and they define working smarter, not harder, right?

Scott:
Absolutely. Yeah. That’s the name of the game. And I’ll say, though, that she talks about quiet quitting a lot, but this is a lady who worked a full-time job and then another full-time job, just like you, by the way, creating content on the side for years in a row, probably putting in 50, 60, 70, 80, 100-hour weeks when it’s all told between the two jobs prior to moving back to one job, where she probably still works 60+, 70 hours a week, if I can tell anything about the way that she’s thought about all these different frameworks. So I love that it’s work smarter, not harder, but she does both, I would say. And I think I would probably put you in that category. Is that right?

Amanda:
I would say yes, but I think, also, especially when you’re young, the working smarter might be like grinding for a couple of years, but I know I don’t want to grind for 60 years, and I think that that’s really the conclusion that I came to in the whole quiet quitting era. It’s not stop working tomorrow or don’t do a good job right now. It’s let’s do everything intentionally and have a goal at the end of the day.

Scott:
Yeah. When I was in my first job, I was working at a Fortune 500 company. I gave it my all, I put everything I possibly could. And at the end of that year, I thought I was doing the same work as people that were 5, 10 years my senior. I got a 2% raise. And that, I think, to me, that was when I quiet quit. That’s when I dived into the Fire movement and this kind of thing. Why would I give my employer 100% of my effort when that was the reward that was given to me at the end of that? What’s the point? And I think that that Gen Z is just catching onto that faster than other generations. So I’m all for giving it your all in your work when that has the opportunity to be rewarded. And if it’s not, then you need to slowly or quickly redirect those efforts to something that can scale.

Amanda:
Right, absolutely. I think they do a great job of just being unapologetically themselves and questioning everything.

Scott:
Awesome. Well, should we get out of here, Amanda?

Amanda:
Yeah, let’s do it.

Scott:
All right. From this episode of The BiggerPockets Money podcast, I’m Scott Trench and she is Amanda Wolfe from the SHEWOLFEOFWALLSTREET saying see you later, alligator.

Speaker 4:
BiggerPockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench, produced by Kailyn Bennett, editing by Exodus Media, copywriting by Nate Weintraub. Lastly, a big thank you to the BiggerPockets team for making this show possible.