Escaping the rat race
“Is it right for me?” you ask. The simple answer is that it depends on you. Even using a term such as ‘rat race’ implies that being in salaried employment is a bad thing. I don’t necessarily believe that working for somebody else in gainful employment is the wrong way to go. It simply means you don’t get any benefits of leverage.
For example, if you deliver a million-dollar project you’ll get your wage or salary, plus maybe a performance bonus. If you do all the work and produce the goods, but for some reason the client backs out, or a competitor pips you to the post, you still get your salary, even though the project made no money for the company. Wouldn’t it be much better to work as a corporate entrepreneur and get paid a percentage of profit on the project? Better for both the individual and the company, as the rewards and (very likely) productivity would increase.
So I am not throwing out the idea of ‘having a job’, or labelling it ‘the root of all evil’. But it needs to be a means to an end. You can use the salary to fund your other more enterprising ventures – avoiding the immediate need to borrow money from banks or relinquish equity to a business angel.
The ideas that I blog about under the SIREN name – for example: salary, investments, residual income, enterprise, networking – are not new at all. Charles Handy, the writer and philosopher, originally advanced the concept of a portfolio career, encouraging people to create a set of different earning activities which should reflect their skills, income aspirations and lifestyle. And serial entrepreneur Ian Sanders coined the phrase ‘going plural’ to describe this idea.
So escaping the rat race may not be the all encompassing goal for any of us. There are compelling considerations for each side of the ‘will I/won’t I quit’ argument. What if you love your job? What if they provide a great pension scheme? What if they are paying for me to get my degree or MBA or some other important (but expensive!) qualification? If you work in a small company, you might even be in a position to buy out the boss in a couple of years – much less risky than starting a brand new company.
On the other hand, you might be bored with what you are doing or depressed – this might be solved by getting a different job rather than quitting the rat race altogether perhaps. Maybe the boss is a control freak and you aren’t progressing, and anyway he’ll never retire. What if the company is looking shaky? If the company is going down the tubes, it’ll be obvious for a couple of years before it actually happens – so make plans, NOW!
It is almost always better to dip a toe into self-employment or entrepreneurship while still in a job, if only because of the financial aspects. Apart from the money argument though, people have polarised views on whether to jump in and burn the bridges, as it focuses the mind on the business; or whether to start slowly while still earning in the day-job. Both sides have their merits and their problems.
Ultimately, people who jump off the hamster-wheel of work and go down the entrepreneur route have a totally different mindset to ones who stay in 9-to-5s. I’ll write more on this aspect next time.
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