Why do YOU want to work for you, yourself and you? (and in part fo' yur gu'mint of course)

It's a pretty popular niche, I understand ...

I want to ...

(i) Not have to go out to work;
(ii) Not work fixed hours;
(iii) Not have to do what anyone else tells me to do;
(iv) Be self-responsible and self-answerable;
(v) Be very highly paid;
(vi) Build up an appreciating asset which, in future, I can sell for a lot of money, if I want to.

My main drive is that as someone who is in a company going through a round of 'restructuring' right now I hate the fact that someone can just pull out all of my livelihood beneath my feet and in turn jeopardise my ability to provide for my family and keep us decently housed within our home.

The other factor is I have a which place me above the herd and give me a good advantage. I have worked in tech for a long time and so I now intend to use my skillset to benefit me rather then a big corp.

Actually I wonder about that...I think more and more opposite really. But that wasn't the question. :p

I've been fortunate to have had a variety of quite different careers in a number of different fields. I'm never quite sure if it is a blessing or a curse that after about five years in some area I flip from fascination to feeling bored and restless.

But I always worked for someone else.

I finally reached a point where I honestly just couldn't stomach reporting to or being supervised by someone. It was a very long time coming but it was almost as though my sense-of-self changed. It was an extreme shift.

Partly it is a need to be responsible for my own success/failure and to see what I can do on my own. Well with help from some of the people here.

Great thread- I want to be in charge of my own destiny... to work when, where and at what I choose. I want to have the time to spend with my family, or on pursuits and hobbies I enjoy...

Working for 40 hours a week for someone else is so limiting and I no longer have the time to do this!! I am now in the process of liberating myself from this...

Well said!



For me, it's about the freedom to live my life on my terms.

It's about having the freedom of time to do what I want, when I want.

It's about taking full advantage of opportunities placed before me.

It's about being to afford the life I want to live and to share my wealth with family, friends, and to help shape society.

It's about waking up in the morning and knowing that you've made a difference in someones life and in the world.

If that lasts for more than four hours, go see a doctor.

To get back on topic, I have several reasons for wanting to make a go of this.

1. I just hate being employed by other people. I read once that the word boss comes from the Dutch baas, which means master. Think about that for a moment.

2. Labor, of all types, educated and uneducated, is in oversupply at the moment, and I don't see that trend changing. If anything, I think it will accelerate as automation increases due to advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanomanufacturing. The way to prosperity is by creation.

All of the things we've seen in the labor market in the last 20 years have been driven by these phenomena. Layoffs, outsourcing, the breaking of unions, the breaking of government pensions (fire, police, etc), are all due to businesses recognizing the oversupply of human labor and playing geo-arbitrage. Once the game went international, unions were finished, they just hadn't gotten the memo yet.

Since I was 9 years old and I made my list of goals for my life, one was I would own my own business.

I set out to accomplish all that list of goals and after one job after college, took the plunge and decided I would sink or swim on my own and took the huge risk of leaving my job and spending almost every dime I had to open my first offline business. I have never looked back.

My reason I decided this when I was 9 was partly because of what I saw in my older extended family members who almost all owned their own businesses....self pride, sense of accomplishment, money, and the ability to be in charge and to do what they wanted, when they wanted, with whom the wanted, for as long as they wanted.

My part time jobs and full time job after college gave me a lot of experience to show exactly the type of owner and manager I would NEVER be so am glad I did have those jobs for a while.

Now, when I am asked why, that is what I say---self pride, sense of accomplishment, money, and the ability to be in charge and to do what I want, when I want, with whom I want, for as long as I want.

Which can be summed up in these words, Time and Financial Freedom.

A month old topic, but interesting...

In my case -

When I started off looking out for a job, I didn't have a ding on what I should do... everyone at that time was running behind computers, java, the internet boom (a pretty popular thing in the early 2000s)... I graduated as an Electronics major, with no background in computers, except for MSDOS, Wordstar, a good typing speed and the QBasic banana game (does anyone remember it?)... I took the "dream job" wagon like everyone else, learned HTML, Java, ASP and whatever was running the world at that time... while learning all that I took a liking to programming... even topped the classes at that time... then I got into my first job which was a rip-off, and I lost a good amount of money to them over the promise of the "dream job"... my next job as a programmer didn't go that well either, though I liked it... the company shut down in 2 years, and I was idle for 6 months as the dotcom bubble burst... that's when the entrepreneurship bug caught me...

I tried to set up a small computer center for sometime, which I figured was the best thing to do where I can teach as well as work on my own projects... but later I learned that it wasn't an easy task around where I live... then it was a time where I had to get a job, family pressure started mounting up... I got into another company into a job which had nothing to do with my past 3 years of experience, then 8 years of corporate life again...

In these days I realized one thing... "dream companies" do exist, but the "dream job" thing was a scam... companies would just want you to do odd jobs for them, like it or not (not all companies, but I have seen my share)... there were half yearly and yearly targets which the companies wanted to achieve, but there was no sense of accomplishment at the end of 6 months... even if you are good, you have to compete against an odd set of people from various streams to show that you fall into the near to zero margin of excellent folks, or be roped into the broader margin of "yeah-you've-done-what-you-were-asked-to-but-that's-all" folks... (I don't want to talk about office politics either - "poli-tricks" as we used to call it)... besides, being in the support stream needed an always-on-phone, which means getting called up in the middle of the night by junior guys for questions as silly as "dude, I forgot my password, how do I get it back" (RTFM, dammit)....

Anyways, when I found that I was losing my life more to my office, I started looking at what I wanted to do really... I figured I liked to do programming... I also wanted to study further, complete my masters degree (which in turn is tied to what I want to set up going forward)... so I checked out my options around in the same office to see if I can move into the programming arena, but every company including my current one wanted past experience on the resume... so I decided that it's time to look forward and throw away that monthly paycheck... I waited for 6 months, got some savings accumulated and then I quit my job... threw away a high paying job and said good bye to my 12 years of corporate life...

Now? I work more than what I did before... much, much more! I have sleepless nights, I work through night and day, and have worked for three to four days at a stretch without having a wink of sleep... I run out of money now and then, and my savings are kaput... I still have people around me who curses me for giving up on the "dream job"... but the difference is, every day that I work, I see myself one step closer to my goals... I get that sense of accomplishment every day which I didn't have in the past 10 years of my life atleast... I know when I want to go to sleep and wake up when I want to, and I decide what I want to do in life. In short, I know that I'm moving forward!

(Some of my friends to whom I told this story tells me that I sound like a loser... but that's ok, I like making my own mistakes now )

When I lived in Toronto and got my first job, I found out fast I hated the office scene, it just didnt work for me. I tried lots of different jobs and the best solution for me was to work for a temporary agency, but working pretty much full time, and working as much as I wanted. If I wanted a day or week off, I could make it work easily. So that fulfilled me to some degree, but I still hated working in an office. I hated getting up at 7 to go to a job I didnt really like, riding the bus and subway in both directions.

Moving to the country put an end to the daily grind as I knew it. Eventually I had 2 kids and my husband went to work at a job he didnt care for, that had lousy hours. But you do what you have to do when you have kids to take care of. Eventually we hit on the self employed angle doing touchup work on cars for area car dealers. 17+ years later he's still doing that, and it's very successful; he answers to himself, he can take a week off if he wants. He is not part of a franchise, so he keeps the money he makes. We have expanded to an online biz that is doing very well, and we are in the midst of setting up another online biz in much the same field.

We like being the ones in charge, making the decisions as to how to run our biz and change things around when needed. We can take time off each winter for a great holiday down south without having to ask a boss for permission. It all suits our personalities very well. Being corporate sure never appealed to either of us.

Living life on your own terms is something that is so priceless that it was the clincher for me to work for myself.

I'll still freelance from time to time but as an independent contractor and not as an employee! Customers are MUCH more appreciative of your contribution and talents than your bosses!

Once you work for yourself, it is almost impossible to ever return to the horrible environment and politics of most businesses out there.

Those progressive, encouraging business environments that you see profiled in articles in FastCompany are more the exception than the rule which is really surprising in this day and age!

I AM working fr myself now FULL TIME! At home on my own terms. NO BOSSES or any of that crap.

Actually I cried for a few seconds when one of my servers down at our local sports pub said she was under the thumb of FOUR BOSSES! I felt so horrible for her. I thought, what a cruel world. Lucky haves, like me have none of that sh!t, and others that didn't get that break, get stung with four+ bosses.

Right now, why do I want to work for myself?

Because I see a problem that no one appears to be working to solve that I think I could potentially solve which would help a lot of people doing work that I myself have enjoyed doing in the past, i.e. creating art.

If I can solve this problem that I see which modern artists face, then I could help them be successful, i.e. earn a living doing what they are passionate about and in turn, I could make a living doing something I'm passionate about.

Why do I want to work for myself? Because the kinds of work other people have paid me to do bores me or makes me miserable. The kind of problem solving work that I've been working on in my head for the last several years, and the skills I've learned in the process of studying the problem I've wanted to solve make me happy and bring joy to my life.

I want to work for myself because no one will pay me to do the work I want to do, but I can get paid by providing a service no one else is offering presently, if I do the work that must be done to show others the way.

Major manufacturing companies and software developers big and small have already democratized the production and publishing/distribution of movies, music, and books, BUT nobody has democratized the marketing of movies, music, and books.

If I can do that, then I will have made a significant contribution to the world and brought joy to both artists and their audience, and in turn, will potentially make myself a good living in the process. That sounds like FUN to me.

Freedom for me is being able to work from home. Seeing my child grow is such a bliss! I'm happy to be an independent contractor and yet I do not stop looking at other income avenues. I have realized some years ago that I love being online, and earning from what you love doing is simply ecstatic!