July 21st, 2006 by Steve Pavlina
It’s funny
that when people reach a certain age, such as after graduating college, they
assume it’s time to go out and get a job.
But like many things the masses do, just because everyone does it
doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. In fact,
if you’re reasonably intelligent, getting a job is one of the worst things you
can do to support yourself. There are
far better ways to make a living than selling yourself into indentured
servitude.
Here are some
reasons you should do everything in your power to avoid getting a job:
1. Income for dummies.
Getting a job
and trading your time for money may seem like a good idea. There’s only one problem with it. It’s stupid!
It’s the stupidest way you can possibly generate income! This is truly income for dummies.
Why is getting
a job so dumb? Because you only get paid
when you’re working. Don’t you see a
problem with that, or have you been so thoroughly brainwashed into thinking
it’s reasonable and intelligent to only earn income when you’re working? Have you never considered that it might be better
to be paid even when you’re not working?
Who taught you that you could only earn income while working? Some other brainwashed employee perhaps?
Don’t you
think your life would be much easier if you got paid while you were eating,
sleeping, and playing with the kids too?
Why not get paid 24/7? Get paid
whether you work or not. Don’t your
plants grow even when you aren’t tending to them? Why not your bank account?
Who cares how
many hours you work? Only a handful of
people on this entire planet care how much time you spend at the office. Most of us won’t even notice whether you work
6 hours a week or 60. But if you have
something of value to provide that matters to us, a number of us will be happy
to pull out our wallets and pay you for it.
We don’t care about your time — we only care enough to pay for the value
we receive. Do you really care how long
it took me to write this article? Would
you pay me twice as much if it took me 6 hours vs. only 3?
Non-dummies
often start out on the traditional income for dummies path. So don’t feel bad if you’re just now
realizing you’ve been suckered.
Non-dummies eventually realize that trading time for money is indeed
extremely dumb and that there must be a better way. And of course there is a better way. The key is to de-couple your value from your
time.
Smart people
build systems that generate income 24/7, especially passive income. This can include starting a business,
building a web site, becoming an investor, or generating royalty income from creative
work. The system delivers the ongoing
value to people and generates income from it, and once it’s in motion, it runs
continuously whether you tend to it or not.
From that moment on, the bulk of your time can be invested in increasing
your income (by refining your system or spawning new ones) instead of merely
maintaining your income.
This web site
is an example of such a system. At the
time of this writing, it generates about $9000 a month in income for me
(update: $40,000 a month as of 10/31/06), and it isn’t my only income stream
either. I write each article just once
(fixed time investment), and people can extract value from them year after
year. The web server delivers the value,
and other systems (most of which I didn’t even build and don’t even understand)
collect income and deposit it automatically into my bank account. It’s not perfectly passive, but I love
writing and would do it for free anyway.
But of course it cost me a lot of money to launch this business,
right? Um, yeah, $9 is an awful lot
these days (to register the domain name).
Everything after that was profit.
Sure it takes
some upfront time and effort to design and implement your own income-generating
systems. But you don’t have to reinvent
the wheel — feel free to use existing systems like ad networks and affiliate
programs. Once you get going, you won’t
have to work so many hours to support yourself.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be out having dinner with your spouse, knowing
that while you’re eating, you’re earning money?
If you want to keep working long hours because you enjoy it, go right
ahead. If you want to sit around doing
nothing, feel free. As long as your
system continues delivering value to others, you’ll keep getting paid whether
you’re working or not.
Your local
bookstore is filled with books containing workable systems others have already
designed, tested, and debugged. Nobody
is born knowing how to start a business or generate investment income, but you
can easily learn it. How long it takes
you to figure it out is irrelevant because the time is going to pass
anyway. You might as well emerge at some
future point as the owner of income-generating systems as opposed to a lifelong
wage slave. This isn’t all or
nothing. If your system only generates a
few hundred dollars a month, that’s a significant step in the right direction.
2. Limited experience.
You might
think it’s important to get a job to gain experience. But that’s like saying you should play golf
to get experience playing golf. You gain
experience from living, regardless of whether you have a job or not. A job only gives you experience at that job,
but you gain ”experience” doing just about anything, so that’s no real benefit
at all. Sit around doing nothing for a
couple years, and you can call yourself an experienced meditator, philosopher,
or politician.
The problem
with getting experience from a job is that you usually just repeat the same
limited experience over and over. You
learn a lot in the beginning and then stagnate.
This forces you to miss other experiences that would be much more
valuable. And if your limited skill set
ever becomes obsolete, then your experience won’t be worth squat. In fact, ask yourself what the experience
you’re gaining right now will be worth in 20-30 years. Will your job even exist then?
Consider
this. Which experience would you rather
gain? The knowledge of how to do a
specific job really well — one that you can only monetize by trading your time
for money – or the knowledge of how to enjoy financial abundance for the rest
of your life without ever needing a job again?
Now I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have the latter
experience. That seems a lot more useful
in the real world, wouldn’t you say?
3. Lifelong domestication.
Getting a job
is like enrolling in a human domestication program. You learn how to be a good pet.
Look around
you. Really look. What do you see? Are these the surroundings of a free human
being? Or are you living in a cage for
unconscious animals? Have you fallen in
love with the color beige?
How’s your
obedience training coming along? Does
your master reward your good behavior?
Do you get disciplined if you fail to obey your master’s commands?
Is there any
spark of free will left inside you? Or
has your conditioning made you a pet for life?
Humans are not
meant to be raised in cages. You poor
thing…
4. Too many mouths to feed.
Employee
income is the most heavily taxed there is.
In the USA you can expect that about half your salary will go to
taxes. The tax system is designed to
disguise how much you’re really giving up because some of those taxes are paid
by your employer, and some are deducted from your paycheck. But you can bet that from your employer’s
perspective, all of those taxes are considered part of your pay, as well as any
other compensation you receive such as benefits. Even the rent for the office space you
consume is considered, so you must generate that much more value to cover
it. You might feel supported by your
corporate environment, but keep in mind that you’re the one paying for it.
Another chunk
of your income goes to owners and investors.
That’s a lot of mouths to feed.
It isn’t hard
to understand why employees pay the most in taxes relative to their
income. After all, who has more control
over the tax system? Business owners and
investors or employees?
You only get
paid a fraction of the real value you generate.
Your real salary may be more than triple what you’re paid, but most of
that money you’ll never see. It goes
straight into other people’s pockets.
What a
generous person you are!
5. Way too risky.
Many employees
believe getting a job is the safest and most secure way to support themselves.
Morons.
Social
conditioning is amazing. It’s so good it
can even make people believe the exact opposite of the truth.
Does putting
yourself in a position where someone else can turn off all your income just by
saying two words (“You’re fired”) sound like a safe and secure situation to
you? Does having only one income stream
honestly sound more secure than having 10?
The idea that
a job is the most secure way to generate income is just silly. You can’t have security if you don’t have
control, and employees have the least control of anyone. If you’re an employee, then your real job title
should be professional gambler.
6. Having an evil bovine master.
When you run
into an idiot in the entrepreneurial world, you can turn around and head the
other way. When you run into an idiot in
the corporate world, you have to turn around and say, “Sorry, boss.”
Did you know
that the word boss comes from the Dutch word baas, which historically means
master? Another meaning of the word boss
is “a cow or bovine.” And in many video
games, the boss is the evil dude that you have to kill at the end of a level.
So if your
boss is really your evil bovine master, then what does that make you? Nothing but a turd in the herd.
Who’s your
daddy?
7. Begging for money.
When you want
to increase your income, do you have to sit up and beg your master for more
money? Does it feel good to be thrown
some extra Scooby Snacks now and then?
Or are you
free to decide how much you get paid without needing anyone’s permission but
your own?
If you have a
business and one customer says “no” to you, you simply say “next.”
8. An inbred social life.
Many people
treat their jobs as their primary social outlet. They hang out with the same people working in
the same field. Such incestuous
relations are social dead ends. An
exciting day includes deep conversations about the company’s switch from Sparkletts
to Arrowhead, the delay of Microsoft’s latest operating system, and the
unexpected delivery of more Bic pens.
Consider what it would be like to go outside and talk to strangers. Ooooh… scary!
Better stay inside where it’s safe.
If one of your
co-slaves gets sold to another master, do you lose a friend? If you work in a male-dominated field, does
that mean you never get to talk to women above the rank of receptionist? Why not decide for yourself whom to socialize
with instead of letting your master decide for you? Believe it or not, there are locations on
this planet where free people congregate.
Just be wary of those jobless folk — they’re a crazy bunch!
9. Loss of freedom.
It takes a lot
of effort to tame a human being into an employee. The first thing you have to do is break the
human’s independent will. A good way to
do this is to give them a weighty policy manual filled with nonsensical rules
and regulations. This leads the new
employee to become more obedient, fearing that s/he could be disciplined at any
minute for something incomprehensible.
Thus, the employee will likely conclude it’s safest to simply obey the
master’s commands without question. Stir
in some office politics for good measure, and we’ve got a freshly minted mind
slave.
As part of
their obedience training, employees must be taught how to dress, talk, move,
and so on. We can’t very well have
employees thinking for themselves, now can we?
That would ruin everything.
God forbid you
should put a plant on your desk when it’s against the company policy. Oh no, it’s the end of the world! Cindy has a plant on her desk! Summon the enforcers! Send Cindy back for another round of
sterility training!
Free human
beings think such rules and regulations are silly of course. The only policy they need is: “Be smart.
Be nice. Do what you love. Have fun.”
10. Becoming a coward.
Have you
noticed that employed people have an almost endless capacity to whine about
problems at their companies? But they
don’t really want solutions – they just want to vent and make excuses why it’s
all someone else’s fault. It’s as if
getting a job somehow drains all the free will out of people and turns them
into spineless cowards. If you can’t
call your boss a jerk now and then without fear of getting fired, you’re no
longer free. You’ve become your master’s
property.
When you work
around cowards all day long, don’t you think it’s going to rub off on you? Of course it will. It’s only a matter of time before you
sacrifice the noblest parts of your humanity on the altar of fear: first courage… then honesty… then honor and
integrity… and finally your independent will.
You sold your humanity for nothing but an illusion. And now your greatest fear is discovering the
truth of what you’ve become.
I don’t care
how badly you’ve been beaten down. It is
never too late to regain your courage.
Never!
Still want a
job?
If you’re
currently a well-conditioned, well-behaved employee, your most likely reaction
to the above will be defensiveness. It’s
all part of the conditioning. But
consider that if the above didn’t have a grain of truth to it, you wouldn’t
have an emotional reaction at all. This
is only a reminder of what you already know.
You can deny your cage all you want, but the cage is still there. Perhaps this all happened so gradually that
you never noticed it until now… like a lobster enjoying a nice warm bath.
If any of this
makes you mad, that’s a step in the right direction. Anger is a higher level of consciousness than
apathy, so it’s a lot better than being numb all the time. Any emotion — even confusion — is better than
apathy. If you work through your
feelings instead of repressing them, you’ll soon emerge on the doorstep of
courage. And when that happens, you’ll
have the will to actually do something about your situation and start living
like the powerful human being you were meant to be instead of the domesticated
pet you’ve been trained to be.
Happily
jobless
What’s the
alternative to getting a job? The
alternative is to remain happily jobless for life and to generate income
through other means. Realize that you
earn income by providing value — not time – so find a way to provide your best
value to others, and charge a fair price for it. One of the simplest and most accessible ways
is to start your own business. Whatever
work you’d otherwise do via employment, find a way to provide that same value
directly to those who will benefit most from it. It takes a bit more time to get going, but
your freedom is easily worth the initial investment of time and energy. Then you can buy your own Scooby Snacks for a
change.
And of course
everything you learn along the way, you can share with others to generate even
more value. So even your mistakes can be
monetized.
One of the
greatest fears you’ll confront is that you may not have any real value to offer
others. Maybe being an employee and
getting paid by the hour is the best you can do. Maybe you just aren’t worth that much. That line of thinking is all just part of
your conditioning. It’s absolute
nonsense. As you begin to dump such
brainwashing, you’ll soon recognize that you have the ability to provide
enormous value to others and that people will gladly pay you for it. There’s only one thing that prevents you from
seeing this truth — fear.
All you really
need is the courage to be yourself. Your
real value is rooted in who you are, not what you do. The only thing you need actually do is
express your real self to the world.
You’ve been told all sort of lies as to why you can’t do that. But you’ll never know true happiness and
fulfillment until you summon the courage to do it anyway.
The next time
someone says to you, “Get a job,” I suggest you reply as Curly did: ”No, please… not that! Anything but that!” Then poke him right in the eyes.
You already
know deep down that getting a job isn’t what you want. So don’t let anyone try to tell you
otherwise. Learn to trust your inner
wisdom, even if the whole world says you’re wrong and foolish for doing
so. Years from now you’ll look back and
realize it was one of the best decisions you ever made.
Final thoughts
While I
wouldn’t recommend starting an online business for everyone, for many people
it’s one of the best ways to generate income without a job. It has certainly
worked disgustingly well for me. If you’re interested in learning more about
this option, please check out Build Your Own Successful Online Business for
details.
