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Should I quit my job? should I be a freelancer instead of traditional employeement? Many people are curious about the job vs. entrepreneurs debate. Some people are not satisfied with being employee and wants to quit. They want to jump and plunge, to chase some dreams of drop shipping, social marketing, SaaS coding. Some people wants entrepreneur life and eventually quit job. Some young people don't like their jobs, and some never want to have a job. So what the situation really like.
Pros of a job:
Advantage of job #1: It has monthly fixed salary and a safety net.
Although you complain about your job and your boss, you will never find someone who pays you regularly. You may earn more money as an entrepreneur, but you will be busier, won't have regular routine, and be stressed all the time.
Advantage of job #2: the company or organization you work for has networks.
Until you start your own company, you will never understand that the students coming to a university or the orders rushing to your design team is such a luxury and result of such hard work by someone.
It was a startup. It has good network and good market connections. It is a started that proved to work. If you build one, it will be your current organization in its infancy.
Advantage of job 3:
Pros of entrepreneurship:
Advantage of entrepreneurship #1: it is the best learning.
You learn business, learn products, learn market, learn yourself, all from first hand experience and the deepest dive to deep sector knowledge. You become an authority in the niche, you generally becomes a much wiser and mature person.
Advantage of entrepreneurship #2: You will appreciate everyone, anyone.
Starting up is touching the framework of nature - you understand how everything work - and you don't complain about anyone anything anymore.
Disadvantages of entrepreneurship:
Disadvantage of entrepreneurship #1: Many people are badly prepared.
They are destined to struggle. Many start a business that is a lean business or bad business or tough business.
Disadvantage of entrepreneurship #2: You are a one man team against the automated scaled industries
Entrepreneurship may be over blown as romantic, easy, free, and descent, but it is not. It is like you step off a Disney cruise ship during one of the tropic island stops and decided to stay!! You will soon learn how nice it is on the boat, even if you have a bad room.
Most organizations survive because they found the right business at the right time. They organize industrial machines and capture business from people. It is not easy.
Disadvantage of entrepreneurship #3: It is the hardest thing on earth and hardest life on earth, failure is the way to start
To say "all rich man are self made" and therefore "I want to be rich, I want to make it myself" is like saying "All NBA players are man, they are rich; I am a man, therefore I want to play NBA". It is fallacy logic.
You lose your breaks, you lose your vacations, you lose your benefits, you lose your sanity. You lose your relations, family in most cases. You make money, but barely to pay the bills. You have some revenue, but they are all used to pay employees and taxes.
Many media blow entrepreneurship as cool, rich and glorious. It is like blowing Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant's life as cool, rich and glorious.
The good thing about plunging to entrepreneurship, you will understand where your job came from.
Top fallacy's of the "quit job for entrepreneur" argument:
Fallacy 1: You think you are free, but you are busy all the time.
Fallacy 2: You think you will make passive income. But it only happens after 10 years of hard work.
Fallacy 3: You think you will get rich, then you find paying bills is pretty hard.
Fallacy 4: You think you will have employees to boss around. Then you find you must pay them before paying yourself.
Fallacy 5: You thought you got a brand new idea. In fact it is a desert with no road. You have to build the road.
Fallacy 6: You think you will be the leader, but in fact you become the lead worker.
Fallacy 7: You though you kept the idea to yourself, but then you find 100 ships docked at your "idea island" already, some ships are dirty rich and some ships are dirty.
What do you do if you are an employee and wants to be entrepreneur?
Step 1: Prepare, drill, train. Startup is a skill, like driving and baking. You can not just plunge, although plunge-and-fail is still inevitable and is necessary rite of passage.
Step 2: If you can not create, excel at your job. Get yourself promoted to a leader, learn skills AND business.
If you have an idea, how do you know if you should quit your job to pursue it?
Every idea is good for someone. The hard part is 1. to find the someone; 2. make something of enough quality; (3) have money to let people know; (4) sell enough that you can at least pay the bills. It takes 2-3 years to turn anything around.
Is there a short cut to have a guaranteed success?
Every idea is good. Veterans can assemble good ideas. Veterans can execute an idea and make it work. The key to become a veteran is to fail once. Failure is the rite of passage. It is because entrepreneurship represent deep knowledge experience.
If there is a guaranteed success script, everyone would be doing it (like going to school and get a job).
The plunge is very rewarding but very dangerous.
Startup is the best learning and longest strive. It will change you as a person, so it is very reward. But the risk is extreme. You could lose your health. You could lose your livelihood, you could build a bad business that struggles.
The best course of action is to practice. Fail at will.
The best way for employment to entrepreneurship transition is to master two things:
learn a building skill.
get to market and learn deep knowledge, find your audience first and make for them, don't make something and find the audience.
Startup is very difficult. If you are "brand new", you have to spend a lot of money to educate customer. If you are in established area, you fight with many people.
It is easy to "make a few bucks or a few thousand dollars", but to go further is hard:
finding traction, which is "people who want to keep what I build" is very time consuming and uncertain
EVEN IF you have something people may appreciate, getting them a finished product with reputable backing that they can pay is not easy.
making quality offering or writing quality articles is hard
making profits is hard, because customers won't just pay you
going to market and engaging in customer is very time consuming and hence expensive.
Most peoples script is this: I will make something, find someone, asking them if they like it or not, and charge "accordingly". I don't have money to put in, and I don't know how many can sell, and they just "hope" and "wish" and "try".
Entrepreneurship is hard. If you know it is hard, then it is easy. To understand it is hard, you need to fail once. If entrepreneurship looks easy, it is the same as "opening a restaurant looks easy" and "opening an online store looks easy". There are millions of details. If there are two thousand ways to fail, you must understand and experience everyone before you succeed. Life is not exactly fair when it comes to business.
This script does not work. Too many people are doing THIS anyways.
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