Why Bother Starting Your Own Business
I’ve always thought working for someone else is a means to an end, an opportunity to save enough cash so that one day I can strike out on my own when the timing is right and launch a successful business. I have always had some personal side project going on, something I worked on during evenings and weekends. Kind of like how guys used to work on their hot rods in their garages, I would work on a video game or a productivity app or something I enjoyed or thought had market potential. This also serves as a great way to learn new technologies and keep my skills sharp and up to date. As a computer programmer with 10 years experience, I generally feel a job I would need to be formally trained on is a job that would carry a junior level wage. You get paid more when you hit the ground running and to stick with only one technology is a great way to become a dinosaur when trends change (which they always do).
To me, working as an employee is good, the steady income and structured environment and process’s for everything truly do make your job easier. But at the same time, structures and process’s take a lot of the thinking out of work, unless I am stimulated and have real goals and new challenges to work towards, my interest wanes and that is usually when I spend most of my free time working on my own projects.
Working for the Man is exhausting and there are lots of really good TV shows and video games that easily consume your attention. It’s hard to find the time and energy to work on something that statistically will go nowhere. I usually get my motivation to work on side projects from taking a measurement of where I was X months/years ago, where I am now and extrapolating where I will be in 30-40 years. Using a sophisticated algorithm (most in tune when at a bar with other programmers), it’s easy for me to see that I will likely be doing the same sort things. If I’m lucky (or not), perhaps promoted into a managerial role or some sort of higher paying sales-type role.
But I generally conclude that the big difference between now and 40 years down the road is that I will probably have a mortgage and extra mouths I’m responsible for feeding, it will be more difficult to change my life then (ie. do something risky).
Me being the type of person to take popular clichés such as “you only have one life” or “Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live” or “I will rest when I die” or “You’re not getting any younger” or “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives” or a number of other clichés to heart, I find these side projects suddenly give me something to work towards. I have something to keep my mind occupied and even a means by which the next 40 years can be a crazy roller-coaster ride where anything can happen.
