career Archives - Page 6 of 6

Quit your job

Posted on April 26, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

You should really quit your job on Monday. Yes tomorrow today . If you are working for a salary or wages and have no equity in the business that is.

And here’s why:

You are living someone else’s dream.

You are exchanging the days of your life to build the vision of someone else. You are not doing what you dreamed about as a child.

The reality is this: once you have a place to live and food to eat, the rest is ego. Chances are you are working in a job just to feed your ego. I know because I was this person for more than 10 years. I had jobs I didn’t like – high paying ones, to buy things I didn’t need, to impress people I didn’t care for. It’s a pointless treadmill which the government encourages to maximise consumption, generate higher tax rates and PAYE deductions and enforce control through a passive education process which says consumption equals success. We must remove this idea of the power structure from our minds and remind ourselves that real wealth is defined by the cool stuff we are doing, rather than the stuff we buy.

Quite your job, de-gear your life and do something of value. To further encourage this process I’ll leave you with one final thought I tweeted a while ago:

picture-15

Cheers, Steve

[digg=http://startupblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/quit-your-job/]

No 1 reason being an employee sucks

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

The number one reason being an employee sucks is this:

You can’t sell your job.

No matter how good you are at what you do,

–   you don’t own your output
–   you are building other peoples brands and empire
–   you are at the risk of hierarchy
–   you are not servant to customers, but wage earners (the fundamental issue)

What this means is that as an employee you are not serving those who actually pay your wages – your consumers. Instead you become servant to people who are best at ‘internal politics’. So for you to succeed in this environment, you too must excel at internal politics. Which takes you always for important real world skills entrepreneurs develop. And then the final reality is that at some point in your ’employee career’ someone will not like you, and dispose of you. At this point you instantly lose any good will or employee equity which was built. Even if you are a stock holder, you still have no decision making authority.

employee-silhouette

The point is, if you want to build assets, being an employee makes it difficult because you lack control. If you want control, then you must have the courage to build something independently, like entrepreneurs do.