9-5 Jobs vs. Self Employment
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I’ve now been working for myself full-time for 2 months and I’m slowly getting the hang of it. It’s strange getting used to being your own boss after working for companies for the better half of a decade. Regardless, so far I’m loving it and there’s 3 things I’ve internalized from these last 2 months of self-employment.
1. Highest Leverage Wins
Working at a 9-5 job you’re typically either:
Told what to work on or
Helping decide the direction of what you’ll work on for some next increment of time (next quarter, half, year, etc.)
I’ve found that this differs drastically with what I decide to do each day being self-employed. For me, I wake up each day and try to think about the highest leverage activity that I could work on. Some days this might be my newsletter, other days it might be my coding interview platform The Daily Byte or my mentorship program DevLaunch.
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What I love about this is that I’m not siloed into working a one particular project for months on end. Working on multiple ventures allows me to easily switch between them depending on factors like what will drive the most impact, what needs my immediate attention, and what I’m enjoying doing at any particular point in time.
2. There is No Ceiling
Another aspect that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed so far about being self-employed is that there is no ceiling with respect to pay. Previously when working at companies, pay was largely determined by two factors: your performance and stack appreciation and this has two problems.
The first problem is that you can only influence one of these levers (i.e. you can largely control how well you perform, but you can’t directly control how well the stock of the company performs). The second problem is that there still exists a ceiling for how much you can make regardless of how much money you bring into the company or how much impact you have. Imagine you led and delivered work that saved the company millions of dollars. The most you’d likely see from that work is a larger end of year bonus, a larger stock refresher that year, and a potential bonus at some point in the future.
In other words the benefits you’d reap from that work would pale in comparison to the actual impact of the work you delivered. Now, working for myself, I don’t need to wait for others to reward me for what I’ve accomplished or need to worry about a potential cap for how much I can earn. Now, the amount I can make is only limited by myself and what I’m able to deliver and this I love.
3. Sink or Swim
While it’s great that there is no longer a ceiling capping my upside, a harsh reality of self-employment is that it’s sink or swim. Unlike a 9-5 job, it’s up to me each day to do things of value that will help me make a living. This differs from typical jobs where you can largely rely on a biweekly paycheck to land in your bank account regardless of whether or not you’ve done your best work last pay period.
While this can sound scary it’s also very motivating to me, if I want to work for myself I need to work hard to figure out how to do so sustainable — no one is coming to save me. So far, the last two months have been great and I’m confident that if I continue working hard each day figuring out how to sustainably work for myself is only a function of time.
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congrats + all the best on DevLaunch, Kevin