How Your Job Might Be Holding You Back
Are you working for someone else or do you write your
own paycheck? If you are an employee
instead of an owner, you may be limiting yourself more than you realize. As long as you continue to work for someone
else, you can be held back in a number of ways.
Consider some of these unattractive facts about being an employee.
First, you are never in control of your own
destiny. There is a longstanding myth
that if you work hard enough and do a good enough job, you will work your way
up the corporate ladder to a position of wealth and relative power. Some people do manage to climb up from
entry-level positions to management posts, but most do not. Somewhere along the line, we decided to
pretend as if the exception really is the rule.
What happens if the company’s sales force fails to
close enough deals to fuel expansion (or even maintenance of the status
quo)? What happens if your boss decides
to model his behavior after Kenneth Lay or the other once-successful heads of
Enron? All of your hard work goes up in
a puff of smoke.
That holds true on more “down to earth” levels, too. If the person in the cubicle next to you decides to play video games instead of finishing his report or happens to come down with a nasty case of the flu, the forty hours of hard work you offered will not be enough. You will be on-site Saturday afternoon picking up someone else’s slack. You will be telling yourself these extra hours are greasing the promotion track, but you have no way of knowing if that is true.
That is because much of that will depend on the personalities and attitudes of those who outrank you. You are at the mercy of middle managers who may or may not like you or who might have an inaccurate perception of your value relative to other employees. Your future becomes a matter of corporate politics. That is not a reassuring thought.
Second, you will always be capped off. Unless you rise to the top, amass a huge
fortune, and then somehow buy out the company, you will always be an employee,
serving at the behest of a boss who can release you at any time. You will never really get to be in
charge. You will never truly control
your future.
Sure, you might have authority over some aspects of your division. You might get to hire and fire a few people. Who knows, you might even get a company car, good benefits and a gold-plated watch at age sixty-five when you finally decide you have punched the clock for the very last time. You can gain little pieces of control, but you will always be at the mercy of people and powers that outrank and control your financial and professional future.
Third, you will never know what you might have really
been able to accomplish. You only get
one chance at life, and it seems almost sad that you can spend it without ever
really testing yourself, your ideas or your skills. Nonetheless, that is what happens to those
who remain employees.
When your working days are over, do you want to know
that you were part of a company that did well or performed poorly based on the
actions of many other people and forces over which you had virtually no
control? Some people are comfortable
with the idea of being a good cog in a successful machine, but others want
more. They want to know that they were
capable of building something that mattered to them.
Of course, the right person can shed those
limitations. The right person can decide
to start their own business. They can
slip away from a dead-end, low-paying job or a nice comfortable corporate
existence and take a chance to work without externally imposed limitations and
hindrances. There are varieties of ways
to do that. One of the most popular and
successful is by escaping the workforce and establishing a home-based
business. It can be a wonderful way to
reach for something more.
