Why your 9-5 is your best asset
How your job gives you the edge
It’s the winter of 2016. It’s dark, cold and I hate my job.
Correction. I feel like this career path which I’ve chosen has run its course. I feel a deep desire for a change.
My manager and mentor of fives years has been promoted. My new manager is the polar opposite and we do not get on. At all.
She is making my life very uncomfortable and I need a way out.
This is when I entered the content rabbit hole of “making money online”.
I can’t remember why or how but I landed on ebook publishing. Publishing ebooks on amazon was THE way to make money back in the day. I bought a course on KDP publishing and went at it. Hard!
The advice around making money online never changes:
Pick a profitable niche. Solve a problem and sell the solution.
The more I doubled down on this the more I questioned what I was doing. The business plan was to pay ghost writers to write books. Get them ranked on amazon, and then sit back and watch that passive income flood in.
Everything hinged on getting the book ranked. I’m sure you can imagine with these incentives at play a lot of unethical black hat tactics were employed.
Somewhere along the way it started to feel wrong. Why was I doing this? This was really time consuming, hard work and it was not fun at all. I gave up. (the guru who sold me the course? He’s no longer in business).
The perfect way to make money online is like a slippery eel. Just when you think this is it. I’ve struck gold. The algorithm changes and something else comes along. What you once had a firm grip on slips right out of your hands.
Amazon FBA, Facebook ads, Instagram flipping, drop shipping, crypto, NFTs, influencers the list goes on.
The platforms change the dynamic does not.
The desperate desire to make money never fades. It is a need which can never be quenched. And where there is a need there are those looking to capitalise. Savvy marketers never cease to find new ways to hook those who are desperately in need.
There is a common theme throughout all of this.
The best marketers don’t market a product which already exists. They create desire. It is a game of constant ego stroking and ego poking.
If you have a job, you are a potential client. Employees are in fact the business model for many online gurus.
The first ego poke is to slowly filter in the idea that you are a dumb sheep.
Jobs are low status
Jobs are for followers
Jobs are for losers
If you are an employee you are a weak NPC who cannot think for yourself. You lack character, grit and determination. You are in fact, a second class citizen.
The ego stroke? It doesn’t have to be this way. You can change. You are an intelligent individual trapped in a broken system. It is the system which has enslaved you, you can break out. With my course you will learn how to exit the matrix of wage slavery and become your own man.
These master manipulators use psychological tactics to their advantage. They use known concepts such as the threshold effect to trap you in a cognitive headlock.
The threshold effect is a phenomenon in which a certain threshold of discomfort must be reached before a person feels motivated to take action. In this sense good becomes the enemy of great.
So a good job is preventing you from taking the risk of starting a business which will lead to a great life. In order to be successful in business you have to quit your job!
Now I don’t mean to sound too conspiratorial here. There are many well meaning people out there who genuinely want others to succeed.
However we must also be aware that selling the dream through courses is often the one and only business model of online marketers.
If no one was buying their courses they wouldn’t have a business and so the incentives are aligned for them to be opaque and secretive about the true nature of their business.
The reality is that a tiny fraction of those who decide to take a course and start an online business are successful. The vast majority fail.
Because of survivorship bias you only hear the success stories. Success is loud. Failure is quiet. Success is shouted from the rooftops. Failure slinks into the shadows with its tail between its legs.
The lie that is spun is one of disproportionate outcomes. Entrepreneurs have:
Full autonomy and control
Freedom to do whatever they want whenever they want.
Passive income - money on autopilot.
Jobs are for the compliant masses who want to be enslaved.
There ARE people who achieve this level of lifestyle. They are NOT the ones on social media talking about it.
The reality of a CONTENT business such as a YouTube channel, marketing agency, newsletter or something attached to social media is that it requires constant output, and it relies on algorithms.
Meaning you do not have full autonomy or control. You do not have the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want, and money is only generated when content is produced and leads are converted into sales.
What people don’t understand is that an online business requires a lot of moving parts.
It is the challenge of managing these moving parts that should excite you. This is part of the process of building an interest into a passion by harnessing desire. When done right this becomes a deeply fulfilling virtuous cycle. But it is not a get rich quick scheme.
It takes years to achieve! I’ve been doing YouTube for over 2 years and it is only now that I am very slowly starting to earn a side income with it.
So how does a job fit into this? Why is your 9-5 your best asset?
It solves the monetisation problem. It keeps your intentions pure. Now what do I mean by this?
There are 4 types of wealth
Financial wealth (money)
Social wealth (status)
Time wealth (freedom)
Physical wealth (health)
A job gives you money and time to focus on your creative side project. This allows you to explore your curiosity and create something of value. You keep you current status through your job and your health doesn’t take hit. This is important!
Creativity is about energy. If you quit your job to start an internet business you will be in panic mode. Everything is tight and restricted. You have no money which leads to stress, tunnel vision and a scarcity mindset. Your health will suffer, you will have no social status, no time and no money. Don’t be fooled by survivorship bias.
Having a 9-5 solves the monetisation problem. Monetisation is a problem. It is also a very different problem to the one of creating in alignment with your values and capturing attention.
You cannot master all three simultaneously. Most creators fail because they run out of ideas or do not find a way to monetise their content. Monetising your content with a very small audience requires the skillsets of marketing and sales and constant self promotion. Not everyone want to get caught in that cycle.
In order to succeed you must have clarity. The only way to gain clarity is to keep trying for a long period of time.
People talk about jobs as if employees have zero control and are at the mercy of their boss.
The reality is that the people who peddle this narrative have only had minimum wage low level jobs and are indulging in an emotional reaction against it.
If you are an educated professional and good at what you do, you have a lot of control and leverage. To be honest there are many career paths and skillsets which afford you more time, leverage and control than having a business.
My current job gives me complete and utter piece of mind. I’m good at it, I get on well with my colleagues, it affords me many benefits it just doesn’t fulfil my need to create and share.
When you start building a side project the way you view the world changes. You start to notice different things. As your priorities shift you create new neural pathways and literally rewire your brain from passive consumer to active problem solver.
There’s a reason why company’s separate CCO, CFO or COO positions.
They require different skill sets.
They demand different mindsets
They have different incentives
Creativity is about ideas. This requires a calm and relaxed state.
Operations and finance are about results. This requires structure discipline and implementation.
That is why there are so many starving artists and also why the most successful artists are successful because they have people to take care of monetisation.
Do not underestimate what it takes to be a solo creator. Most of the large creators that you see on your feeds are signed to talent agencies or have teams of people working for them.
They don’t talk about it but they have virtual assistants, community managers, social media managers, editors, guest bookers, copy writers the list goes on.
There are extreme personality types that flourish when put under immense pressure. Burning the ships at the shore, eliminating all exit strategies can work but it will cost you your relationships and maybe your sanity. This is a desperate strategy for those who have nothing to lose.
The struggle is guaranteed, success is not. So why not take pleasure in the struggle?
Burning the ships at the shore is short term thinking. It creates a high stakes high pressure environment which kills creativity and problem solving. It’s a win loose mentality and is the wrong way to go for a solo creator.
Creativity is about solving problems.
Business is about solving problems.
Life is about solving problems.
Balancing a full time job with a creative side project is a problem that needs to be solved. The end goal might be to quit the full time job but in order to achieve that goal you have to break it down into small steps.
This takes time. It requires a shift in focus, emotional realignment and strategy implementation.
The first step is transforming an interest into a passion
The second step is energy management and job integration.
The third step is consistency and monetisation
You first need to understand how to build passion and achieve consistency before moving onto monetization.
It must be done in that order so as to avoid distraction overwhelm and the desire to give up.
Your job is your best asset. It solves the monetisation problem, it forces you to use the time that you have efficiently, it keeps your mind open and serves as a driving motivational force.
If you hate it, use that as motivation fuel but just know it’s currently what is keeping your dreams alive.
Thank you for reading,
Do subscribe, it’s free, and don’t hesitate to reach out. The creator journey is best done in collaboration, not alone.
Benjamin
Your 9-5 is undoubtedly one of your biggest advantages, but only if it doesn’t harm your mental peace.
I teach entrepreneurship to high schoolers, and I encourage them to be weary of marketers selling marketing material about marketing to marketers.