Jumping Ship

Many entrepreneurs think that the ultimate goal is to develop their career to the point where it sustains them financially. Is that the only option, or can keeping a part-time job work in the long-term?

Jumping ship is a powerful expression illustrating the idea that a ship is safely moving along across the open ocean, but only in the captains desired direction. If you want to go right or left, the only way to change course would be to jump out and swim on your own.

It is a matter of risk aversion. The ship, being a steady corporate salary job for instance, takes on all the risk of being a business. Whether it gains or loses money, your 40 hour work weeks will maintain the steady flow of income and a steady predicability to your lifestyle allowing you to predict what you can afford.

But if your dream is to go left or right and the boat is continuing straight, how long do you keep your day job until you jump out into the ocean and swim towards your destination?

Keeping in theme to analogies, your exit strategy should have a financially safe distance that you know you can swim without assistance. It should involve knowing what success and work happiness looks like for you. When you swim too far without a plan, you risk drowning or worse, trying swimming back to something like what you had before.

The moment you put all of the pressure on your career to keep you afloat is when it becomes extremely stressful. A success-minded person would channel that nervous energy into fuel with laser focused motivation. If everything you did was strictly for the success of the goal and not for the self, many things such as fear and doubt would drift away because you have removed yourself as the focus. You have become the tool for the dream machine.

People work for others because they don’t want the pressure of running their own business and it allows them to take on other things that they want rather than the need to stay afloat. Working for yourself means wearing multiple hates from salesmen, marketer, financier, creator and developer to name a few.

That’s their comfort level. We have this image of the successful entrepreneur as someone who makes their full-time living doing it, who is thriving and gets all this work. There isn’t one way to be an entrepreneur. There are lots of ways to do it, and to do it well, and to live a happy life, because ultimately that’s the goal. The goal isn’t to have a successful career. The goal is to feel fulfilled having a purpose.

-Busy Brain