Why Work for Yourself
In the nineth of our series of informative and helpful articles on the honest way to earn an income online, we take a look at why you should work for yourself.
Most people work for someone else. They earn a set wage they can depend upon. But what happens when the bottom falls out or their world and they can no longer depend on that wage? What are the options?
Here's a look at one of them: Why you'd work for yourself.
It's a difficult question to answer - whether to work for a company or run your own business. It's a dilemma which many people will face in the course of their lives. Sometimes, they leave school and are hit with the dilemma straight away. Sometimes the question will present itself after years of working for someone else. The time will come when that decision will have to be made. Let's take a look at some of the factors that might create this dilemma and some of the solutions available.
Working for yourself can be hugely rewarding if you manage your own business properly. If you don't, it can turn into a disaster. You can have a comfortable, good life or you could lose everything including your home, your family and your friends. It's the risk factor that keeps the majority of people working for a company playing it safe. Of course, it's more secure and doesn't come with the headaches and worry that running your own business entails. But is it really always so secure and rewarding to work for someone else? We'll see from the following scenario that it's not always the case.
Our subject, who we'll call Mr Fred Blogs leaves school and gets a good job with a local, respected company. After a few years, Fred gets married and has kids. He buys a house with a mortgage, a nice car and all the usual household paraphernalia. You know, all the usual things in life that most of us take for granted. Life is good, he likes the job and so he and stays with the same company for twenty years. Fred rises up through the ranks, slowly but surely although he never attains the position he thought he deserved. For all that, Fred is happy in that it the job is stable, secure and he doesn't have to worry about anything.
Then the company starts to make cut-backs and starts laying people off. Fred stays because he believes his job is secure and he's been working there for so long it's a way of life to him. Fred's work schedule is becoming more and more overloaded and stressful as more people leave and he find himself filling the gaps. Before long he's doing the job of three people for the same pay. Fred found he was being put upon to work longer hours and even some weekends for overtime pay but getting no thanks for it.
In the end, it gets so much his health begins to deteriorate. Fred is spending so much time at work, he is hardly ever home so his family life also begins to deteriorate. His kids have grown up but are still at home and costing Fred a fortune. He's at the stage where he has to keep on working to pay the bills and keep the roof over their heads but at the same time he's working so much it's destroying his life.
Fred Blogs is in the classic no-win situation and there doesn't seem to be a way out.
Then it comes like a thunderclap out of the blue. Fred's boss makes him redundant and pays him off. He goes home in a state of shock, sits down and buries his head in his hands. It's all over. How is he going to keep up the payments on everything? His wife was sure to leave him and the house would have to be sold.
Fred Blogs has lost everything.
Wait a minute. Has he really lost everything?
Not yet he hasn't.
Fred gets himself together, calls up a few friends and acquaintances and starts finding out what the job situation is like on the outside. Ok, he's a lot older than he was and companies don't tend to want to hire older men when they can get young guys to work for peanuts. Fair enough. He makes a chance call to someone who is in business for themselves and they suggest that Fred try working for himself too.
That night, after Fred explained everything to his wife (and she still doesn't leave him), he feels positive and even excited. He can't sleep for thinking about all the possibilities.
The next day, Fred forms his action plan. He knows that he has absolutely no idea how to go about starting his own business, but he has friends who do. He sets up meetings with them and seeks their advice. Fred hits upon a great idea that his friends back him with and gets things started. He has money in the bank from the job payoff, so he knows he can survive the first year of so until his own business starts to show a profit.
The rest, as they say, is history.
That was a fairly generic failure-to-success story which is actually rather more common than many people realise. Success doesn't come quite so easily as was just outlined because everyone will do things differently. Some will succeed and some will fail. The bottom line is that some will have to work extremely hard to make it work. Those are the successful ones. Others will sit back on their lazy behinds and wait for the money to fall out of the sky. They are the ones who will fail miserably and blame everybody else for their failure.
Whatever the level of your success, working for yourself has al lot of positives. Perhaps you gave up wanting to work for anyone else ever again because of bad experiences with employers who have consistently devalued the employee's status, benefits, pay and job security over recent years. Maybe you got fed up working your guts out for rotten wages while the guy at the top was getting rich off your back. So you left that unsatisfactory rat race behind and decided to work for yourself. Maybe you've been up and maybe you've been down. But after all is said and done, don't you think it's worth the struggle to be independent?
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