What if you love your job? You don’t want to break free from your daily commute, water cooler chit-chat, or lunch with colleagues. There may be occasions when you don’t want to break free.
I used to love my job. I made friends at work. And on weekends we’d even get together and play poker and drink. Sometimes we’d even travel on vacations together.
I loved the work I was doing. I was working on AI when AI was no even in Gartner’s hype cycle. I will tell you what is better than that, because I can’t be so arrogant to think that nothing is better than that.
I always write about “ten reasons to quit your job”. Of course I still believe that. You should quit your job. It is the ultimate freedom. It proves who you are. It proves you are worth something.
But maybe not today. Not everything is black and white.
For a few months I day traded. I had closed to million in my checking accounts. I thought I am on the top. I have achieved success. Then I started losing money.
Sometimes in the morning I was so afraid to lose more money I pray to Jesus that NASDAQ futures would go up in the morning. I’m an atheist so it never worked.
That never happens at a job. At a job you go into work and they send you a check every two weeks. That’s real magic.
A lot of times people think the alternative of a job is to be an entrepreneur. That’s not true either.
An entrepreneur is someone who has a job, but it’s a job he made up all by himself. He woke up one day and said, “I’m going to make an app to connect all left-handed people on a dating site.”
And then he raised money, hired people, made an app, tried to sell the app.
An entrepreneur has a job also. But here’s the difference. In a regular job you can probably get by (maybe unhappily but still get by) forever.
But an entrepreneur has a job where there’s a well-known 85% chance rate of failure.
Which would you rather take?
I don’t want people to stay at a job. But here’s several good things about having a job. We can’t ignore them.
Here’s several things to think about it. And I finish with the alternative.
A) Steady paycheck. It might go down over time and you might get fired suddenly but for a while, at least, it’s steady.
B) Sex. A lot of people have sex with people they work with. That’s a really great thing until it isn’t.
C) Chance of promotion. I don’t know if promotion is good or bad. But for about a day or two you think, “they like me! They really really like me!”
D) Fake money. If you rise really high at your job then it’s as if the entire company is your fake bank account. They pay for your travel, your computers, many of your dinners. They might even pay for some of your friends.
E) Respect! If you become the CEO of your job then people will respect you. It’s not easy to be the CEO of a big company. To be CEO of a big company I will tell you what you have to do:
- You have to work in many divisions of the company so you know what they all do.
- You have to build relationships with the other board members of the company so when the time is right, they pick you.
- Go on vacations with the biggest customers so you become indispensable. It’s not such a bad thing to go on vacations
- Build connections between the different divisions. Always be the behind the scenes guy between you, the CEO, and the other divisions. You know what happens after that? Behind the scenes becomes in front of the scenes and you are the CEO.
- Make a lot of money for the company. This seems hard. But it just involves signing one or two large customers or large distribution partners or launching a lot of products, one of which might become successful.
- Try things long enough and you will make a lot of money for your company.
- Always over promise and over-deliver. Sometimes people hate that. They want to under promise and over deliver. Don’t do that. That’s stupid!
- Most jobs are not so hard to over-promise at because for years, the employees before you have been under-promising.
- And the jobs are not that hard. What…are you trying to launch a spaceship to the Moon?
- Overpromise and over deliver and you will keep getting promoted because nobody else is doing it.