All of you out there looking to be employed by someone else should consider working toward self employment. Self employment if you have the necessary skills for whatever you want to make money doing might be your best option.
For example, I was talking with a lady who is about 40 who has an MBA in Business. She said she wanted to start her own business. In the 1980s I was a member of Briarpatch, an honest business organization that sprang up from UC Berkeley in the 1970s. The whole point was to meet and discuss ways to benefit both oneself and the customer and the community in as honest a way as possible and still stay in business. Without some kind of business advantage of some sort, your business won't stay in business. You need some kind of niche that gives you the advantage and keeps you in business.
This niche might be your location. It might be that you know someone that will sell something to you cheaper than anyone else. It might be almost anything. But without some sort of niche advantage of some sort over the competition you won't be in business long.
Whatever business you are in will be constantly changing to respond to your customer's needs over time. If you don't adapt to your customers' real needs then you won't be in business.
So what I told this 40 year old woman with an MBA was that whatever she wanted to sell, she needed to talk to potential customers that weren't friends or relatives and to ask them what she would need for them to buy from her, either once in a while or exclusively. If this kind of research isn't done then what often happens is that some people set up a business that they have always wanted to start without any real customers and then are very surprised when no one is interested in what they are selling. However, if that person has invested 10,000 to 100,000 dollars then they just lost that much money because they didn't do the necessary research into their business model.
I was reading an article in the latest Time magazine May 25th 2009 about employment and it doesn't look very good for traditional employees. Most retirement plans and benefit plans are disappearing from most companies left and right. So, if all the reasons that you wanted to be someone's employee are leaving the business you wanted to be hired by then this is just one more reason to own your own business.
People often say to me: "Well. I don't have any money to start a business." Yes. That is what it appears to be true. But remember people like Steven Jobs and Bill Gates who basically started their businesses in their garage or even in their bedrooms at first.
If you have a great idea sometimes anything is possible. And even if your idea isn't on the scale of a Bill Gates or a Steven Jobs and the WOZ it still might make you 10,000 dollars a year to 100,000 dollars a year and you could then forget about working for anyone ever again.
The problem with staying an employee throughout your life, to me is the same problem to me as living with your parents all your life. You get so busy following orders that your mind gets too twisted to think for yourself. So unless you really need that kind of parental approval why not try at least part time with your own business even if you only work on it nights and weekends while working part time or even full time somewhere else. Most really great businesses started out in someone's bedroom, garage or small rented office or something like that. After all, you have to start somewhere.
When I started my first business as a contractor in my late 20s I learned I liked being self employed like my father and grandfather and uncle did. So even though I didn't stay a contractor, I owned several businesses between my late 20s until about age 45 during my last divorce. Owning businesses totally changed how I saw everything and freed my mind from many useless constraints and all the back biting I found working for other people. For me, the freedom to run my life and choose my own hours was much better than being ordered around by people who were only making money on my work and creativity. Why not make all the profits on your own work and ideas? When I started owning businesses my life got 1000 percent better. However, I noticed that most people are not well rounded enough to succeed at their own businesses until they are in their late 20s unless a relative like parent, uncle, brother or sister or friend has already done the groundwork. Then someone might succeed even in their early 20s as long as the basic rules are followed for running a business successfully. But it is very important to be very self disciplined and realistic about what you are doing or else the whole thing can collapse very easily. Any unrealistic fantasies can bring your business down. Practicality and creativity make a business work as long as you can maintain a realistic assessment of what is actually going on.
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