Don’t give up your day job – part 2

Working for yourself is not an all-or-nothing proposition. If you have been able to accumulate enough money to live on for six months and additional funds to launch your new business, then you might very well abandon your day job and succeed as a self-employed business owner. Otherwise, you won’t.

Far too many of us have started a business with inadequate funds and hoped to make a go of our dream by working incredible hours, only to find that the law of gravity has not been repealed and that credit cards will only carry us so far.

There are an infinity of mistakes that can be made in any business and our chances of success are increased greatly if we have a decent financial cushion to recover from a few of them without going under. If you are spread so thin financially that one mistake will put you under, you are merely gambling, not investing in your future.

If you continue doing your best with your day job, your manager’s insanities, and the interminable bs staff meetings and useless reports, while developing a business of your own, you guarantee that your family will go on eating while you reach for a more rewarding game in life.

This is not for everyone, because you are essentially working two jobs at once and many companies expect you to work 150% on the job they hired you to do. They expect that because the organization spends too much of its working day in meetings and useless report writing to get much useful work done.

However, there are a few jobs that deserve 150% of your effort. If you have one of them, you probably think about work on a 24×7 basis because you are being allowed to create and use all of your abilities. You do not need another job. You probably have difficulty remembering that you have a family and a life outside of work. 🙂

If you have the all-too-common dead-end job in a company that is slowly losing ground, you owe it to yourself to look out for your future. You may not feel up to looking for another job in the same industry for fear of being discovered and dismissed, but you had better do something soon. You can see the handwriting on the wall, but you sit frozen in your cubicle hoping that you can make it through another quarter. You need to investigate a second job or the possibility of working for yourself.

The mere effort of investigating new opportunities will revitalize you and will get your creative juices flowing. Your efforts to develop or discover a viable business model may bring to light all sorts of skills you had forgotten about. It may take several tries to find a business model that works but you have the luxury to try and try again if you have a day job to support you.

You may also realize that your creativity has been stifled by a manager who does not want anyone to make waves. Fearing for his job, he does everything he can to stifle ideas that might require him to make a decision or worse, to propose a change to upper management.

Once you start making your own decisions and dealing with the repercussions and the successful results, your confidence will soar. When your self-employment starts generating real income, you will know when it is time to phase out the day job.

Even if you find that you eventually need to return to working for others, the freedom of being on your own is not forgotten. If you learn from your mistakes, you will be better prepared for the next time you go out on your own. The chances are that you will eventually make it. The freedom and responsibility of self-employment is almost impossible to resist.

How many of you made more than one attempt to develop your own business?

Of those that did so, how many found that each time was easier?

Did anyone try once, and having failed never tried again?

Tag: career advice, day job