10 Scary-but-Exciting Reasons to Work for Yourself

Note: I was going to publish all 10 points as one mega (4,500 word) post, but Nick and Sam convinced me that might be a bit overwhelming! So you’re getting half the list now, and half on Monday…

I first read Steve Pavlina’s rather well-known 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job when I was a month into my first full-time job. I’d done what I thought was “expected”: I graduated, applied to jobs, snapped up the first one which accepted me, and moved out of my parents’ home.

After the initial newness of it all began to wear off, I thought is this it? Is this my life? Going to work, performing various tasks that (frankly) don’t hold much interest for me, learning little or nothing new, and trying to squeeze all the rest of my life – writing fiction, blogging, Church, walking, my boyfriend – into the gaps?

It’s what most people do. It’s what society encourages.

Steve’s article made me quite depressed. I saw the truth in it, and wished I’d read it a few months previously.

Fast-forward three years, and I’ve been working for myself for fourteen months. And, while I still find Steve’s article powerful, I think that “not wanting a job” isn’t the best spur to start your own business: so I decided to write my first ever list-style post for Aliventures (and my longest ever post, anywhere) on 10 Scary-but-Exciting Reasons to Work for Yourself.

Why scary-but-exciting? I’d rather not bore both you and me with a list of trite things like “You can listen to your own music” and “You can work in your pyjamas“, so these are reasons which tap into the feeling that Lorna mentions in this comment (emphasis mine):

I’ve now taken a deep breath and just done it – and it certainly isn’t perfect yet, but already I’ve done more than I could have believed possible. I’ve brought my website to life and I’m really proud of it and I’ve set up courses in creative writing – and this time I won’t be doing it for an organisation, even though that’s always been a safer ‘umbrella’ under which to work. It’s scary to be out from under the umbrella but it’s also exciting!

(Lorna Fergusson, from Literascribe and the new Fiction Fire)

These are the scary-but-exciting reasons to start your own small business. You don’t have to quit your day job first … most of the small business success stories I know started alongside a job or college studies.

1.     You Learn About Yourself

Running your own business is going to teach you a lot more about yourself than most day jobs. In a typical office job, you might learn things like It’s easier to endure meetings if I have something to doodle on or I can’t stand people playing loud hip-hop music through headphones or I hate driving in the rush hour.

When you work for yourself, you’ll learn big, deep things. Some will be unpleasant truths, but that’s okay: once you recognise and acknowledge these, you’ve taken the first step towards changing them. I’ve learnt that I’m impatient: I get frustrated quickly when the computer is slow to start up, or when I don’t have as many blog subscribers as fast as I’d like. I’m working on taking things more slowly, and on setting goals which make me enthused rather than stressed!

Many of the things you learn will be nice surprises, though. Perhaps you find out that you’re actually okay at networking when you get to talk about something you’re really into. Maybe you learn that a skill which you don’t yourself rate too highly at (your writing, your graphic design, your social media skills) is regarded in a very positive light by your clients.

You can do things other people find valuable, but since they come naturally to you or you’re just used to having the skills and hanging around people with the same (or better?) skills than you have you’re feeling sorry for yourself… Your skills are not worthless and you can absolutely add value.

(Dave Navarro, 7 Steps to Playing A Much Bigger Game (With Free Workbook), The Launch Coach)

You might also learn that, when you need to, you’re capable of setting aside your fear and doing things which scare you. Whether it’s cold-calling, emailing someone out of the blue, or telling your family that “I quit my day job” … that adrenaline rush of being scared and doing it anyway is a great natural high.

2.     You Can Focus

Many would-be freelancers and entrepreneurs worry they’ll be incapable of working without a boss. I know that when I started out, I wasn’t sure that I could work from home: as a student, I studied in a library because I got too distracted otherwise. Within the first days of freelancing, though, I found that I was capable of staying on-track with things that mattered to me (in fact, I was spending less time idly surfing the web than I did in my day job).

You are capable of a lot more focus than you think, when you’re working on something that you really care about. When you’re working for yourself, you’ve got two big motivators pulling you forwards: your love of your actual work (such as writing or web design) and your pride in your small business. It’s not primarily a matter of self-discipline, though there will be times when you have to push yourself to work: it’s about doing something that you’ve invested a lot of time, energy and emotion in.

Also, a lot of the distractions and interruptions that eat up time in a typical workplace can be eliminated when you work for yourself. You don’t have colleagues or meetings (except for ones you arrange). You don’t have noise from other people’s conversations or music. You can unplug the phone if you want. You can work in a library or coffee shop.

Caveat: If you’re starting up a small business whilst working full time, you’re inevitably going to have less energy to devote to it. Treat yourself gently. It’s frustrating to feel that yet another week has gone by without any real progress, but you’ll get there in the end.

3.     Your Work and Life Will Fit Your Values

Some companies have grand mission statements, documenting (in pompous or dry language) their purported values. Most of us never get a chance to have any input into these – and, in the vast majority of organisations, they don’t have any impact.

When you work for yourself, you can put your values first: both in the work itself and in your life as a whole. If you’ve never really sat down and thought about your values before, then make some time to do so.

(Brief interlude: I did a values exercise in my first coaching session with the wonderful Tim Brownson, which gave me a lot of clarity: we figured out that my top value is “significance”, and whenever I’m unsure what big goal to focus on, how to arrange my week, or which tasks take priority, that word is my compass! Tim includes the values coaching worksheets and process in the first chapters of his co-authored How to be Rich and Happy – hint,  it’s cheaper to buy the book than to hire Tim for an hour. )

Your values will come into play in two key ways:

Your Work Itself

You might value a lot of things over simply making money. Perhaps “excellence” is one of your values, or “friendship”. The joy of working for yourself is that you can run your business however you want. That might mean things like:

• Choosing an eco-friendly webhost for your business’s website
• Donating profits from a particular product to charity
• Offering some free work to charity or community groups
• Committing to quality – even if it knocks your bottom line
• Always meeting deadlines – even when it means working long hours
• Turning down jobs that go against your ethics

One of the things that frustrated me in my job as a software tester was that I’d report bugs and be told by management that these wouldn’t be fixed until a user complained about them. Now, I recognise that I’m a bit of an idealist – and a small company does need to prioritise and not waste money on unnecessary work – but I felt we were doing a disservice to our users and potentially creating more support and clear-up work down the line.

When you bring your values into your work, some truly amazing things can happen:

Hey, so, remember? Last week? I told y’all if you bought Teaching Sells through my affiliate link I’d give the money to the Cambodians?

We made $12,405.

Go back and read that again.

Yeah. I know. For those of you who don’t swear, I’ll swear for you. HOLY FUCK!!!

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU to everybody who sacrificed food and/or risked divorce to contribute to this. I am totally and completely awestruck. That is a WHOLE SCHOOL. We still have to fundraise later for the bells and whistles — like, say, teachers — but we raised enough money to build a WHOLE SCHOOL. In a day.

(Naomi Dunford, Cupcakes, a Cambodia Update, and More, IttyBiz)

How Your Work Fits Into Your Life

As well as bringing your values to your work – how you work, who you work for, what you do – you can build your whole life around those values. This is hard to do when you’ve got a full-time day job, but once you quit that or move to part-time hours, you can start constructing the lifestyle that you want.

You can:

• Set your own working hours (want to take Fridays off? Go ahead!)
• Take a week off work to volunteer with a kids’ summer camp
• Make time to go to the gym or for a walk each day
• Spend Saturday working so you can take Tuesday off
• Study for a degree or other qualification
• Get your family involved with your business: employ your teenager as an administrative assistant, get your kids to stuff envelopes…

Yes, you need to do enough work to pay the bills, but working for yourself means a lot more flexibility. With the additional focus that comes from doing something you love (see #1), you can get through all your work for the week in four days. Paid-by-the-hour jobs encourage inefficiency: if you work hard, you just get given more work. Working for yourself, when you’re paid based on what you complete, helps you focus.

4.     You Have Time to Volunteer, Study and Do Cool Stuff

In the list above, I mentioned volunteering and further study. Working for yourself can open up opportunities like this, because you have control over your hours. If you want to take a couple of weeks each summer to do voluntary work with kids, you can. If you want to spend a few hours on Wednesdays helping with an after-school club, you can. You could even organise your business so that you could take a month off every year to volunteer abroad.

Many people get a huge amount out of volunteering: there’s something great about choosing to work at something purely because you want to make a difference in the world – rather than because you need the money. It’s also a great way to build up skills, confidence and friendships.

Further study can also be extremely rewarding. You could take a course that’ll help directly with your business activities, or you could do something just for interest’s sake. In many cases, your reasons for studying will be a bit of both. I’m taking a part-time MA in Creative Writing, partially because I want my fiction writing to be one of my business (ie. income generating!) activities, but partly because I love writing fiction, and would do it whether or not I expected to make any money.

5.     You Choose Who to Work With

You’ve probably heard the Jim Rohn quote that “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” If you’re a full-time employee, the people you spend most of your waking life with are your colleagues.

Now, you might be lucky enough to have fun, enthusiastic, dedicated, supportive, encouraging colleagues who challenge you in all the best ways. Or you might not. Many of your colleagues won’t share your core values. If you find yourself drained, irritated or upset by your colleagues, they’re a negative influence in your life.

When you work for yourself, you can choose who you want to work with. You might choose to work on your own. You might partner up with others, either on an ad hoc or more organised basis. You might refuse clients who seem unethical or shady.

If you want to employ people, you can set the criteria for who you want. (I’d prioritise someone who understood my values over someone who knew the technical side of my work. I can teach processes; I can’t teach attitude and alignment.)

The best part of being an entrepreneur is not the control you gain over wealth, but the chance to handpick the people you surround yourself with and create an organizational culture that is complete in sync with who you are.

(Jonathan Fields, Career Renegade, p29)

Again, if you’re starting a small business whilst working full time, this is trickier. You’re still stuck with the colleagues you have in your day job. But you can build up new contacts whose values, attitudes and priorities are more similar to yours: people who can either help you directly – with advice or particular skills – or who can simply be a source of inspiration and support. I find people like this in my local church, at my college, and (online) through “meeting” other bloggers.

The second half of this list is coming next Monday – so grab the Aliventures RSS feed if you’re not already getting new posts directly to your feed reader. Or if you prefer, pop your email address into the box below to get posts straight to your inbox.