The marketing campaign to sell self-employment really succeeded with the ‘freedom’ angle.
Work for yourself to travel the world.
Work for yourself to never go into the office.
Work for yourself to never answer to anyone.
Work for yourself to work very little.
Work for yourself to never work.
If you don’t aspire to that. I got good news, that’s not what self-employment is about.
As shocking as it may sound, we actually want to work. We just want to work on stuff we want to work on.
Self-employment doesn’t get categorized as ambitious.
Not ambition in the traditional sense. Which is to chase more, to want more & acquire more.
But I do identify as ambitious. I am chasing the work I want to do & the life I want to live, extremely ambitiously.
So, I want to spread the word that being self-employed is also an act of ambition.
Because I fear that ambitious people would not resonate with the self-employment message.
They’d resonate with the investment banker message, the lawyer message, or the advertising strategist message. Or god-forbid the ‘entrepreneur’ message.
Because if someone wants to work, we don’t want to make it seem like we don’t.
This isn’t a lifestyle choice for people who don’t care about their work, it’s actually for people who care about it a lot.
So much so that we’re willing to let go of all the perks ( the prestige, the free lunches, the bonuses, the paid vacation ), all just to spend more time doing the work.
Working for yourself lets you skip all the career rules & get straight to doing the work you want to do.
Now, that doesn’t equate to having a bunch of underqualified kids running around wanting to do highly skilled work.
No one’s faking it, the market decides whether you’re genuinely good at something. Customers decide, clients decide, and brands decide. They do this based on complete merit & no other requirements.
Traditionally, work has had rules & limitations.
You couldn’t just do whatever you wanted to do right away.
There were degrees you needed to get, connections you needed to have, places you needed to be & the right things you needed to say.
Especially coming from a third-world country, we’re limited when it comes to the things we can work on if we choose to be employed.
Most global organizations only offer support & operational functions to people in India.
So, dreaming to work at one of the best organizations in the world does not, unfortunately, equate to doing the thing that the organization is best at.
For eg, I worked at Goldman Sachs. I was not an investment banker. I did reconciliation of trades.
And let’s say you’re really good at what you do & a company does take you on to work on their front-end stuff.
You’re not getting compensated nearly equal to your counterpart doing the exact same thing in a first-world country.
Why? Because there are rules & rules have their own rules in the employment world.
How many years you’ve done something.
Where you’ve done it.
Where you went to school to know how to do it.
How well you perform on the test of your knowledge of doing it.
Whether someone who’s been doing that thing longer than you’ve been doing that thing likes your personality.
Whether you’re okay with how much someone else thinks is fair to compensate you for doing that thing.
Whether you promise to do that thing & nothing else.
Whether you’re okay doing that thing from a certain city.
The funny thing is, you can follow all the rules & still find yourself years later wondering how you got to doing some weird work that you never wanted to do.
Or,
You can do what you want to do right now. Assuming you don’t suck at it.
In 2019, I was insignificantly one of the 48,000 employees working at Goldman Sachs.
Now I sit in meetings with C-suit Goldman executives through the clients I work with.
I didn’t excel some crazy amount to get there.
I just went independent.
Now I pitch roles to people I want to work with. And I get to work with whoever I want to. The biggest & coolest people.
I make my own job descriptions based specifically on the stuff I want to do.
I propose compensation that is fair to them while also reflecting on how much or how little time I intend to allocate toward the work.
I try, fail & move on without the consequences being too big.
I diversify work so that a failure in one doesn’t destroy me.
I do the things I know I’d be good at & politely say no to tasks I wouldn’t be good at to avoid the stress.
I do higher-level strategy work & I also do mundane administrative work.
There is never ever a fear of me being put in a managerial role.
We don’t do this to not work. We do this to do the best work of our lives.
There is a but though. A big but.
Here is the reality you need to deal with if you want this too,
No one’s going to know you’re doing amazing stuff.
At a job, you could be doing the most mundane thing but your family will treat it like you’re saving the world.
When you’re self-employed, you could legitimately be saving the world & your family will treat you like a cute stay-at-home wife with a laptop.
You have to be okay with that. And I think you will be.
Because you’ll stop caring.
Because you’ll feel challenged, in control, fulfilled & so content that you won’t care.
That’s how it feels to do work that you enjoy & do it in a way that doesn’t make you hate it.