Your Full-Time Job Is The Same As Owning Your Own Business, Really
Once the internet algorithms learn that you’re interested in something, they don’t ever give up. So even though it’s been over two years since I’ve been living the #startuplife, those wacky algorithms are still at it, recommending to me a lot of content regarding startups and entrepreneurship and hustle porn, which isn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds.
I don’t think I’ll ever get the algorithms to stop showing me this stuff. At least not without committing some sort of social-network-genocide and/or creating a fake online persona just to read the news.
Hello, I’m Rangus Wargleman, I like whole grain bread and always wearing socks.
I don’t want to be Rangus. I want to be me. The internet really needs to stop trying to be clever and starting learning that people grow and change.
Anyway. I could rant about the horribleness of algorithm-based content recommendations all damn day, but then I’d have to point on the hypocrisy of using Medium to do so and I’ve got places to be.
Instead, I want to talk about something that I see coming up over and over and over again because of my continued exposure to startup content. It’s advice from startup founders, or successful this-and-thats, or people who want to be startup founders or successful this-and-thats, on building wealth. It goes something like this:
“Don’t sell your time. Create something that makes money while you sleep.”
They’re saying don’t have a job that pays you hourly, which includes hourly and salaried jobs. The idea is that you should be more clever than 95% of the workforce and you should start a business with infinite bees making infinite honey that you can sell for infinite dollars.
You’ll be rich! Sure, you might get stung a few times. But the potential is huge! Don’t be a fool! Hashtag no FOMO!
I do not like this advice. First, because you shouldn’t listen to anything other people tell you to do, including what I just said. Do whatever you want. People are different, y’know? It’s your journey. Just don’t buy a Dodge Journey, and you’ll be fine. Unless you want a Dodge Journey. Again, it’s your journey so buy a Dodge Journey if you want to.
Anyway, the second reason I don’t like the advice to make something to sell instead of selling your time is that there’s also a lot of survivor bias in this advice.
People who are great at entrepreneurship are like, “This is awesome, I had so much fun and made so much money! Everyone should do this!”
But there are piles and piles of wonderful people who just ain’t that good at creating value that way. Many waste their time and money and effort and stress and get nowhere except broke.
If you think of your life as a business, having a steady job is a pretty fantastic way to generate revenue. But I think what’s not talked about enough is profit.
So to reframe the don’t-sell-your-time advice into something that makes sense to me: everyone should treat their life as a business.
And like a business, be driven by profitability.
We all think about our salaries. Do I have a good salary? Am I willing to take a lower salary to have more fun? Is my salary more than your salary, cause internally I think I’m better than you so it better be? And on and on.
Salary is important. But it’s only part of the picture. Profit is the other part.
Profitability in a life-treated-as-a-business is whatever is leftover after you buy stuff. An average actual business will struggle with profitability, having great years, and bad years. If you have a salary, and you don’t spend it all every month, you can have a profitability hot-streak that’ll last for ages.
This is really just a reframing of the same ol’ save-more-and-live-below-your-means advice. But saving money is boring. Optimizing profitability is fun!
Okay, so I’ve been told by my editor that neither of those are fun and I don’t understand what fun is so this post may be for a very specific type of person. Fine. Still, if you’ve ever thought about starting your own business, starting with optimizing your life’s profitability is a good place to start, because those are the profits you’ll be re-investing in yourself to said that business.
You can keep your business small, with a single client (i.e. a full-time job) or you can try to build a bigger business (i.e. entrepreneurship) or you can try to add new income streams (i.e. side projects).
Or you can live in a forest and eat worms and wipe your butt with leaves.
There are plenty of good reasons to choose to start your own company — like solving a problem that no one is solving, or if a vision came to you at night and you feel compelled to obey — but you can sell your time and still have a financially successful life.
In any event, money isn’t a good thing to base your major life decisions on.
Unless you want to. Again, it’s your Dodge Journey.
But imagine a world where we didn’t focus on salaries, but instead we focused on profit margins.
“I made $5,000 profit this year, up from $4,000 last year!”
Now that’s a good way to build wealth.
