If You Are Self-Employed Who Signs The Paycheck For You?

Do you want to be your own boss? Of course you do. Who doesn’t?
When you are self-employed the world is a completely different one. You answer to no one but yourself. You don’t have to work anymore than you really want to. There will be no performance review meetings in which you get evaluated like a fifth grader. You will never complain about forced work hours and there is zero percent chance you will be fired. I know what you are thinking. All of these things can happen when you are an entrepreneur too. You work for yourself, so when things go down, there is no one to blame but yourself. You don’t need a performance review since you will be out of business if you don’t perform. As far as work hours are concerned, you will have to be working more hours than you thought it was possible for you if you want to keep your venture afloat. But the question I asked was, ‘Do you want be your own boss?’ And the answer is still “of course, you do”.

The first thing that stands before anyone who wants to step out of the much crowded salaried-employee tent is of course, the fear of failure. Entrepreneurship is a daunting task even for veterans of the field and if you are a newbie, then it borders the impossible. The sheer number of things that one has to do even before the first product is sold or before the first receipt is collected is enough to make any sane person tremble at their knees. But then isn’t that why it should be done? When so many are fearful of doing something new, something unique, may be that is exactly the reason why we should do it. At least it won’t be crowded as much and you might very well be laying down the path for others.

The amount of risk involved is definitely high and with the amount of uncertainty in running your own operation makes it a much harder proposition for many of us, especially for those who have dependants and other priorities. But then you encounter the same amount of risk every time you drive down the highway. We don’t stay away from the streets; we learn and adapt ourselves. Its strange that we are willing to risk our own lives more than our money which is most definitely a renewable resource. I am not suggesting that we should venture out on everything mindlessly squandering our hard earned dollar bills. But we should be investing it in ourselves. And what better way to do that than coming up with a dream and then doing everything at our disposal to make that dream a possibility.

When you become an entrepreneur, you become the symbol for an idea, because that is what your product is, an idea. A movie is an idea of the writer visualized by the director and a song is an idea of the musician. Same thing applies for chefs, carpenters, software developers and CEOs. Just look around and you will find that we are surrounded by ideas, from the carpet that is beneath our feet to the light fixtures that hang over our head are ideas. Someone dreamed up these things and decided to make them. Everything from chairs to iPhones are simply physical representation of ideas that were conjured up by their creators. Sure this did not happen instantly, but that is the point. People kept adding brilliant ideas on top existing ideas to come up with even brilliant-er things. When we become an entrepreneur, we have a chance to add to existing ideas to make a brilliant idea.

Almost all successful creators seem to have done the same thing. Find what your passion is, and make that your work. Although the working-for-paycheck scheme provides us with a secure and predictable style of life, at least for the most part, it should never stand in the way of our dreams. We know if we worked hard, we would succeed. But that success would be more meaningful if we just worked hard for ourselves. Imagine what you can achieve if you spent your working hours just working for yourself.  That is how you end up working more than you ever thought you could. That is when your job becomes your career. That is when you find out you are much more than what you always thought you were.

To paraphrase Steve Jobs, one of my favorite creators of all time, ‘When you create something, we have the potential to change the world’. The first step in this path is to start the change in ourselves.

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