Eight years ago, Charlie Hoehn had no job. He submitted application after application to no avail. Only two companies offered him employment. His choices? “Back-breaking labor and a pyramid scheme,” he says. Today, Charlie turns down work. He is a speaker, an author, and a marketing strategist. His recently-released book is Play It Away: A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety. At one point, the former unemployed man worked so much that it burned him out – but he triumphed over that, too, and wrote a book about curing stress. The turnaround is dramatic, and Charlie attributes his successful employment to his signature strategy: work for free. He didn't figure it out immediately. Charlie graduated in Colorado State University's Class of 2008 and soon faced a job market mired in recession. Bleak. Job-seeking millennials know it well. “I was just blasting out my resume to all these companies for jobs that I didn't really even want … because that's what everyone was doing,” Charlie says. “All my friends were doing that and that's what I was told would work.” Conventional wisdom wasn't working. Go to school, submit applications, get a job – Charlie rejects that. “We get caught into these dead-end careers, and once we start buying a bunch of stuff with the money that we've earned, we've built ourselves a golden cage … that's surrounded by nice furniture and all these nice things,” Charlie says. “And then after five or ten years we think, 'Well, I can never go back, you know, I can't give all this stuff up.'”   At that point, Charlie says, “you've built your own prison.” He looks back to his days of blasting out job applications and sees a mistake. Life isn't a sprint, he says: it's a marathon. There's no need to rush for a mediocre position that doesn't interest you. He found this out firsthand – his work-for-free strategy required patience, but it took him from being an unemployed college grad to later landing jobs with Tucker Max and Tim Ferriss. In this interview you will learn:   - Tactics and strategies for curing stress and anxiety - Why we work so hard and how to slow down - Ways to connect with highly influential people - What Charlie learnt from working with world re-knowned entrepreneurs like Tim Ferriss & Seth Godin - How to become a recession proof graduate - What Charlie believes it takes to become a successful entrepreneur - & Much more of course!   I Need Your Help!    If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!