Archive for category Journal

Just how fun work can be when you do it right.

When I talk to my friends about my entrepreneurial aspirations, sometimes they tell me that they want to start their own businesses too. However, most of the time, I hear that response with one short caveat – that they’ll only do so after a few years of working experience in some large multinational company, supposedly to gain experience and to be more financially stable.

I never quite agreed with that line of thought and by beliefs were further confirmed when my supervising professor for my professional attachment paid me a visit at the Jipaban office. My supervising professor had been involved in dot coms since way back before the turn of the millennium, before the dot-com crash, and was extremely eager to hear all about the Jipaban.com.

Somewhere in our conversation, he mentioned this – that he had many students who also similarly told him that they wanted start their own businesses. When he asked them how they were working towards their aspirations, they told him that they’ll go start out working for a large, stable firm, gain experience and finally come out, 10 years later and start out a business of their own.

His reply was simple. It was – why do you think that the experience you gain at working for a large firm would be the most relevant to your future entrepreneurial exploits in the future? Really, would experience in spending your day focused on solving someone else’s problems and working on making that person rich be the best teacher at teaching how to make yourself rich? I really don’t think so.

Why I don’t believe that this is the way to go.

When you work for someone, it’s your job to make your boss rich, not the other way around. Always remember that.

When you spend the majority of your time thinking about how to maximize someone else’s profit and not your own, I believe that it’s easy to get caught up constantly focusing on that issue and not on what’s efficient – increasing your personal wealth and working towards financial freedom. Working to make others rich is vastly different from working for yourself.

When you work for yourself, you make all the decisions, but you reap all the benefits (and losses) incurred by your actions; when you work for others, an artificial safety net is put under you. When you work for yourself, it’s so much easier to be motivated to understand every aspect of your business – you try to understand it from a macroeconomic point of view, you analyze customer feedback, you check the data religiously; when you work for others, that kind of intense motivation to master the business just isn’t there.

I believe that the only way to really teach yourself business is to immerse yourself inside a business that you really care about, and experience the pure joy of working hard to make it all come together. That’s just something I don’t see happening much if you decide to work at a large firm where the red tape just ties you down.

The red tape, politics, and artificial safety net does more than limits your potential to shine, but I also believe that it is one more additional barrier that stands in the way of you learning good business habits. Getting used to the wrong level of thinking, a totally different level of decision making, would not only hold you back but may go on further to negatively affect the business decisions you make! You may have been better off starting with a blank slate as you might have incorrect perceptions and habits you may have acquired about business by immersing yourself inside an employee culture!

Money ties you down.

Another reason I don’t want to apply for a job in a big multinational the moment I graduate is because money just ties you down. Holding a high paying, “stable” job is quite a bit like giving in to the urge to just lie down in an extremely comfortable sofa – it’s really comfortable to get into it, and very hard to get out.

I have always believed that the worst thing that can happen to someone is to get too comfortable. When you’re too comfortable, there’s nothing forcing you to get faster, smarter and better – you just take it easy. As a result, you just end up sloppy, lazy and inefficient.

Life’s short – you gotta be efficient.

All in all, I strongly feel that working for someone else just happens to be the roundabout way of doing things should you want to start your own business in the future. I believe that it’s not only inefficient, but also that being trained to be a good employee might not make you a good boss. I guess that’s exactly why I’m so happy during my internship over the past 10 weeks at Jipaban – I’m right on track to getting to where I want to be.

Now I’ve just got to apply those lessons I’ve learnt with diligence and focus!