Posts Tagged ‘Employment’
Paying to Work
“What’s this all about? I have to pay to work?”
The curt response came in a one line email without punctuation and it followed an enquiry from someone who answered an online advert about working from home.
So it was someone who was looking for a job – and you can’t blame people for looking for a job.
Look at me: I spent most of my life working in a job. This was hardly surprising because all through my schooldays I was told “Work hard, get good grades, get a good job…”
And I did have a good job. I was proud to have it; but it was still a job: I was employed.
Now I realise what that meant. It meant that my employer decided whether I could have the job in the first place and then decided how much I would get paid… and they always paid me less than I was worth. If they hadn’t done that they would never have made a profit out of me.
That’s the way it is with a job – and yet all over the country, millions of people accept that having a job is the norm.
And just to add to the absurdity, these millions of employees all have to trust that their employers are going to run profitable businesses – otherwise their jobs may not be secure.
But of course it has always been this way – the relationship between the employee and the employer. A thousand years ago it was little different. Then we had the serf and the lord – and a thousand years before that we had the slave and his owner.
Admittedly, conditions have improved – but has the relationship really changed? Remember, the employer must always pay the employee less than they’re worth – the employer understands that, but does the employee?
So here’s the alternative: You start your own business. That is to say you invest in yourself: You pay out money up front because you believe in yourself. Then you decide how much work you will do and you will get paid exactly what you’re worth – which may be more or less than you imagined; the marketplace will decide…
The point is that you are in control. Oh yes, the marketplace may change the rules as you go along. Your product or service may go out of fashion or become obsolete. You may have misjudged the market entirely and never get started. This is the risk the business owner takes – and their success or failure is dictated not by what happens to them but by how they react to what happens to them.
In other words, if you start your own business, you are in charge. Your success is dependent on no-one but yourself.
Scarey, yes?
So I shall explain this to my correspondent who asks about “paying to work” and I shall pose the question: Job or business: which of those two ways of making a living would suit them best?
Of course, they may choose “Job”.
And I shall breath a sigh of gratitude that there are such people. Because, you see, the world is divided into two types: The ordinary people and the special people. And the special people are always going to need a lot of ordinary people.
They will need ordinary people to wait on their tables and service their cars and build their houses . They will need ordinary people to decorate their offices and look after their health and their bank accounts…
So it’s a good day when you meet an ordinary person.
But when you meet one and you show them that they can be special – well, that’s a great day.
What kind of day is it for you?
P.S> If you would like to explore this philosophy further, you can’t do better than Darren Hardy’s excellent 2-CD set “Making the Shift”.