Can you wait for 2x your income?
For your own sanity, you might have to jump early
In episode 21 we talked about leaving your 9 to 5 job, when to leave, when to start your business and even if you have the right mindset.
Bowtiedbull tweeted that when you build your business, you shouldn’t quit your W2 job until your business income was two times your W2 salary. This is good advice, and in fact, in a perfect world, it’s great advice.
Your W2 job is a safety net, if your business has a bad month, or fails outright, you have something to fall back on. An established, reliable source of income that gets you through the growth periods and saves you from financial ruin. So why wait until your business is 2x?
Simply put, reality is a bitch. In the small business world you will face regular and sometimes random fluctuations in income. Be it because the business is seasonal, or because your marketing dries up and needs new approaches. Because you need new equipment or get hit with unexpected expenses.
You need to be able to pay your non-business expenses, your mortgage, groceries, etc. You also need to pay the business expenses and have money left over to grow. For this reason, two times your W2 salary is a good rule of thumb, and it reduces your risk exposure to generally acceptable levels.
Put another way, make sure that the vine you're going to jump to is sturdy enough to hold your weight before you take that vine
The world isn’t perfect, and you can’t always wait
Some people are beginning to wake up to the mediocre wage slavery, and they can’t afford to wait for their business to be 2x their income. They’re realizing that the vine they’re swinging on is collapsing, and that if they don’t jump to a new one soon then they will collapse with it.
It’s not a matter of impatience, its a case of intolerance. When you can no longer tolerate meaningless work, being away from your family, not having control of your time or having no real autonomy over your life. That realization makes anything less than self sovereignty intolerable. Which means waiting for your business to earn double is too long.
Sometimes for your own sanity and mental health, you just have to get out of that environment because you can't function in it when you realize that you're just surrounded by drones. It’s a really bizarre awakening when that happens
Risk tolerance and sacrifice
Once you’ve reached this point your tolerance for risk and willingness to cut back and make sacrifices explodes. You don’t have the time to wait for perfect and safe opportunities. If you have experience under your belt, and the ability to assess risk, don’t be afraid to jump before you’re ‘ready’.
The threat of failure can teach you to fly. You can tap into your primal survival instincts as a way of overcoming your dedication to comfortable mediocrity. Is it easy? Of course not. But it’s necessary. Human beings are adaptable and especially when you've got something breathing down your neck, it's amazing what you can figure out.
If you haven’t already, start right now. You don’t know what’s going to happen next, and you need options. Recession, layoffs, or the Competency Crisis. You need to be ready.
There’s no going back
Once you work for yourself, you realize the true value of your time and what you can produce. It quickly becomes the case that nobody can ever pay you something that's worth your time. After that, you can never convince yourself it's worth going back, because every minute that you would spend working on somebody else's stuff, you could spend working on your own things.
Even if you're not getting paid for it right now, it's worth investing in your future. The value of your time working for yourself is still 10x to 100x what it would be working for somebody else. Having that kind of direct control over your success is the beginning of true freedom.
You’ll never see job interviews the same
Getting away from the resume and application process should be all the motivation that you need to start your own business.
Job interviews today are extremely frustrating and horribly unrewarding. For someone that knows their worth, they are degrading. The time penalty is massive. You have to send out dozens of applications in order to get an interview, and minimum three to four interviews to secure a job. (Expect that to go up as layoffs continue)
The whole process is so absurd. You never deliberately lie, but the whole thing is crafted to the job. You're exaggerating as much as possible, without actually lying, your ability to do what you think they're looking for.
It’s an absolutely absurd amount of investment just to become a wage cuck. For the same amount of time investment you could easily start your own company based around your skillset. That right there brings you halfway to sovereignty.
It’s a ridiculous game devoid of blunt honesty.
HR managers are level 1 Gate Keepers. Drones in the broader picture, but not stupid. Their primary function is as your first barrier to success, and in this function they excel. They know what you're doing, so they're scanning through for bullshit words. That’s why resume advice changes every six months, the market gets flooded with new buzzwords and phrases. It devolves into a constant game of creating new bullshit words and sentences that HR hasn't picked up on yet, but that stand out and impresses them.
You can't just say, I am good at this. Hire me, god damn it
This is doubly true in the DIE/ESG environment. If you're a white male, being good at a job means absolutely nothing. There is some pushback on those policies, people using fake pronouns are being dismissed before interview. Lets hope it continues to trend that direction.
Once you go into your own business, all you have to do is just be good at what you're doing and you make money. No bullshitting the Gate Keepers, no wordcraft on your resume. Just results that speak for themselves. Work, succeed.
You know you're doing right because you're making money
Once you get out of the 9 to 5 world and into your own business, the thought of going through another application process for a corporation feels degrading. You’ve proven your value, proven what you can accomplish with your time. For you to sit down in front of a Gate Keeper and beg for a job, you’ll just feel dirty.
If for some reason you do go back, you won’t last. You’ll get annoyed at how little your Gate Keepers really know. And they’ll sense that there’s something different about you. They can tell that you’re not going to last. They won’t understand why, but that’s not your problem.
Once you realize what it's like working for yourself and how silly it is to work for big companies, there's no going back. Working for others becomes a complete waste of your time.
You should wait, but can you?
As I said in the beginning, in a perfect work you wait until your business is doing 2x your W2 income. But we don’t live in a perfect world. And waiting might drive you insane.
Start your business now, and work your ass off to make it succeed.