If you work for yourself, you will fail
Kia ora e hoa,
I have a confession to make. Since starting YouTube, I thought this was a pathway to working for yourself. How awesome is that? Be your own boss!
This is what MJ Demarco has to say about it in “A Millionaire Fastlane”:
The greatest myth of business ownership is “be your own boss”. Owners who live by that mantra eventually find themselves bosses of nothing—dead, bankrupted businesses. Success ina business comes from make your customer the boss and the No. 1 stakeholder to your business.
“My repeated, and often preached, motto to my employees was, “the customer pays your paycheck, not me—keep them happy.”
Hilarious! My stupidity proclaims itself once more.
Working for yourself is cleaning your house, cooking a meal, mowing the lawns. It’s not for running a business.
YouTube (or content creation as a bigger picture) needs an audience. Your responsibility is catering content for that audience. It becomes a chore when that content doesn’t align with your interests and beliefs. It’s also a chore when you make videos for nobody.
I was having a conversation and brought up the idea of some work that I needed to do.
Immediately, there was resistance against this solicitation.
This person proclaimed that they would rather work for “themself”. And working for others is a “chore”.
I didn’t engage further. But I thought this would be a good learning opportunity for all.
As we know, you are always working for someone. That could be a boss, a client, or a series of customers.
And an idea I want to adopt is there is no working “for” or “under”, but there is working “with”.
When we think about working for “ourselves”, we really mean control. You don’t “have” to work, but you “choose” to work.
There is a deadline with the work that I had, but it's up to the individual to complete that work. If they didn’t complete the work, there would be no exchange of funds. If completed, then the reward is a transaction. See, control.
So, it’s not a matter of working for yourself or others; the truth-teller is attitude.
In other news, I need to stop reading YouTube comments:
Feel free to share this or any content with anyone who you would think will benefit. Thanks for reading and talk soon.
Ngā mihi nui,
Shivan
Discoveries
Book Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge This book was recommended to me by a friend. I’m still reading this book but a solid point from the beginning is that a lot of racism is “American-centric”. Eddo-Lodge provides an account of structural racism in Britain in detail.
Book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor I’ve bought this book and yet to dive deep into it. After realising sleep is important, now it’s breathing too. I don’t know how far the rabbit hole I’m going down.
Podcast Not Overthinking: Pills & Paradigm Shifts Taimur and Ali Abdaal discuss points in their life where they have been “pilled”. This could be a piece of learning material that changes the perspective of the world. Just like how Neo takes the pill in The Matrix (1999).
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