Self-employment Week: 66
I feel like I’m going to blow up my life soon.
But what does ‘blowing up’ my life mean?
I have found that with anything in life, you get into - education, dating, employment, parenting, or entrepreneurship.
As ‘pathless’ as you attempt to go, once people around you start to make sense of what you’re doing, somehow, they will chart a path for you. Not the default path, it’ll be your own custom one.
They will have expectations, root for their own versions of your success, and ask you to worry about projections of their own fear & tell you what you should be doing next.
And it usually looks something like this:
Making more money
Getting married
Hiring employees
Applying to the biggest firm
Getting a bigger house
Traveling more
Blowing up your life means changing tracks instead of naturally progressing on the one you’re currently on.
Once people accepted that I would work for myself & freelance, forgone conclusions were made, that I would continue to raise my rates, work with more clients, and make more money.
And while I do that, also to write online, build an audience, create a product, stop freelancing, and create a passive business.
No one would think I worked so hard to start freelancing just to stop after a year or two.
That doesn’t make sense to people. And people really need to make sense of the world.
I don’t know how exactly I’m going to blow up my life but I do feel like it’s time to make changes with what I consider as work.
The freelance work I do is too certain & comforting. And I know that’s a dangerous territory to be in.
“I dont know what I would do if I lost my client” is not a place I want to be in.
I have dropped out of an engineering degree.
I quit my first corporate job at Goldman Sachs.
I’ve gotten laid off.
All in the past 8 years.
My life has been blown up before & each time when the dust settled, my life has looked exponentially better.
It’s not my first rodeo & it won’t be the biggest but each time it always feels the same.
And here is what I do know about blowing up one’s life:
You will always figure it out.
It feels almost primal. Like I would imagine parenting to feel.
Before you quit, nothing seems doable. After you quit, you do all of it.
It’s magical the way our brain works when it knows it doesn’t have any choice but to survive.
But that doesn’t mean it ever wants to be in that position. So even though you have backed yourself into a corner & found your way out multiple times before,
each time you plan on doing the same thing again, your brain will convince you that it will not survive it.
And each time it does.