Why Being Your Own Boss Is Probably A Bad Idea

Why Being Your Own Boss Is Probably A Bad Idea

   January 15, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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For most people, it’s the equivalent of being lost.

You can be very busy, and yet do nothing substantial.

In my experience, that is the reality for most people who are self-employed. They work super hard, but their work isn’t directed into a direction that has the potential of ever getting them anywhere.

Most of my adult life has been like that.

I got excited about something, and I put all my heart and mind into that.

For a while.

I worked very hard on getting as much stuff done as possible with whatever little resources I had other than my own time.

I got myself engulfed in tactics.

Doing. Executing. Working my ass off.

The result? I had done a lot of stuff, but I wasn’t any step closer towards my real goals.

Instead of a good product, I had a nice-looking website.

Instead of real customer understanding, I had a social media account with x followers.

Instead of profitability, I had spent my money on some nice-looking business cards.

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… and then the next “exciting” opportunity came along

What was the result of this? New website, new social media accounts, new business-cards.

Yes, I know. I was stupid.

But I really don’t think that this behavior is so uncommon in the start-up/freelance world.

Most ‘entrepreneurs’ simply don’t know what they are doing. They are without plan. Without accountability. Without any business-sense.

They are either professionals in a particular field, or they basically have nothing tangible except for their own youth and enthusiasm. Regardless of which of these two it is, they have zero experience in building a real business.

You know, one of these things that actually get money flowing in.

A business with a real, actionable business-plan. Not a fluffy, cute little thing that exists only in somebody’s dreams.

Do you even know what you are selling?

Do you even have a clear plan how to make money?

Do you even know who needs that stuff you are selling?

Do you even know how much money you need to cover your expenses, and whether or not a big-enough market exists for that?

If we’re honest to ourselves, most ‘entrepreneurs’ can not even answer the most basic questions around their ‘business’ or whatever that thing is they are hoping to build.

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Busyness without purpose

Photo by Oliver Wendel on Unsplash

The day has come. You have finally decided to take that step. You are now officially un-empoye… ehh, self-employed. Congratulations! You now have what you always dreamed of.

Finally, you can decide whatever you want to do. You can decide when you want to work and when you want to take a break. You can decide how much money you want to pay yourself.

You stare at your computer.

“Now what?”, you think to yourself.

Well, I could… start by building a website! Yes, that way I can clarify in my head what exactly it is I am trying to sell. And, anyways, don’t all the experts say that as an entrepreneur I should always be willing to learn new skills?

So you start working on the website and oops!… before you know it, one week has passed.

Congratulations. You have now spent a week’s worth of time and $100 on building that website.

Now, what are you gonna do with that?

Hmm, okay. So now I have a website. So maybe I could… try to bring on some people who are interested in my product?

(which product, by the way?)

The problem is that very few people who are ‘self-employed’ are actually capable of directing their attention on the most central issues that are actually involved in building a business.

Their mind is simply jumping back and forth between different things that could be done, without any clear plan and sense of direction.

With all the new things that are constantly coming up, in this way it is easy to get caught up in a never-ending spiral of busyness without purpose.

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Going through years of struggle

A business-sense.

Self-control.

Accountability.

Market knowledge.

Dealing with uncertainty.

Making a clear plan and sticking with it.

These, and many more characteristics, are essential to have for successful entrepreneurs.

Unfortunately, none of them can be developed in short periods of time. They are all a result of years and years of making mistakes, learning from them, and re-applying these lessons learned in new situations.

As a result, the large majority of first-time entrepreneurs or freelancers are most likely going to fail.

What does this mean in reality?

Yes, that’s right. Years of struggle. Years of living without a decent income. Years of being scared about whether or not you’re going to be able to pay the bills next month.

Please, live with the reality:

Being self-employed is really fucking hard.

It is definitely not what the media are promising us. All this stuff about being in control of your own life. Having the freedom to make your decisions. Being able to work from wherever you want.

In the beginning, and for quite a long time to come, being self-employed means not being able to think about anything else but your work.

It means spending almost all of your time on your business, often without making any money at all. It means being anxious all the time, without any clear idea of whether or not you are ever going to succeed. It means devoting all your life to a dream, which may or may never come true.

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Are you really one of the few?

According to the global entrepreneurship monitor, 27 million Americans are currently either starting- or running a business. This makes up for about 14 percent of the working population.

70% of all business ventures fail.

Finally, this means that there are about 8 million Americans are actually going to be able to live from their entrepreneurial venture on the long run.

Not only is this less than 2% of the total population, but many of them are also going to run their business in a way that is hardly better than survival from a financial perspective.

But please, don’t get me wrong here.

It may sound as if I am trying to discourage you from becoming an entrepreneur. That is not the case at all.

Society definitely needs people who are producing rather than consuming, creating job opportunities for others, and push the development of humanity forward with their inventions.

But what I really want is for you to be aware of the consequences what it means for your life if you are deciding to walk that route.

Gary Vaynerchuk has often said that if you have ever been able to stand working on a job as an employee for longer than a year or so, then you are most probably not going to make it as an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs are people who can’t stand living their life in any other way. People who can’t stand working for others. People who love the dirt of working hard and pushing through all odds. People who embrace the pain, instead of running away from it. People who thrive in uncertainty and are pushed forward by it. People who are willing to sacrifice everything in order to make their dream come true.

Before you make that decision to become self-employed, please do yourself a favor and think through all these issues carefully.

Are you really willing to sacrifice almost everything for your dream of being your own boss? And, if yes, do you have the patience to commit to years of eating dirt before you see any results?

If your answer is no, then please be honest with yourself and don’t commit yourself to something that will only make you unhappy. The world needs you the way you are, not the way that the world is glorified by the media.

If your answer is yes, then please build something awesome. And hey, don’t starve in the process.

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Why writing in place is so powerful

Why writing in place is so powerful

   January 13, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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Why do we write?

Take a scrap of paper and answer that question — don’t think about it too much, simply respond — Why do you write?

There are so many reasons: to bear witness; to tell stories; for the trance; because you have to… If you have ‘to get rich’ you might be in the wrong place (not that it can’t happen, but generally money is better as an offshoot than a direct aim). In short, there are many great reasons for writing.

Asked by Geoff Dyer what he saw as the ‘job of his life’ John Berger said”

Perhaps I am like all people who tell stories — storytellers lose their identity and are open to the lives of other people. Maybe when you look at their entire output you can see something that really belongs to that one person. But at any one moment it is difficult to see what the job of your life is because you are so aware of what you are lending yourself to. This is perhaps why I use the term “being a witness.” One is witness of others but not of oneself.

For Berger, this sense of witnessing involves total immersion and openness to other people and to other places.

Finding the rapture:

In Our Faces, Our Hearts, Brief as Photos, Berger describes one of those luminous moments when an ordinary place takes on an otherworldly quality:

Everything was shifting. The three pear trees, their hillock, the other side of the valley, the harvested fields, the forests. The mountains were higher, every tree and field nearer. Everything visible approached me. Rather, everything approached the place where I had been, for I was no longer in that place. I was everywhere, as much in the forest across the valley as in the dead pear tree, as much on the face of the mountain as in the field where I was raking hay.

When we write, we’re opening ourselves up in an extraordinary way. Writing takes us into another space. As Virginia Woolf described it:

I walk making up phrases; sit, contriving scenes; am in short in the

thick of the greatest rapture known to me.

The question for many writers is how to get to the ‘rapture’ without having to go by way of resistance. Some lucky people never have a problem but many will recognise this from Vladimir Nabokov:

Just when the author sits down to write, ‘the monster of grim commonsense’ will lumber up the steps to whine that the book is not for the general public, that the book will never — And right then, just before it blurts out the words,– commonsense must be shot dead.

So begin by shooting common sense dead and taking your imaginations off-guard.

The painter Paula Rego pointed out the importance of the ‘play’ element in her work. In writing we can benefit from ‘playing with language’, which permits us to relax our hold on imagination and memory. It lessens the pressure to produce a finished piece and we are more likely to catch that ‘peripheral vision’. This sense of play can also prevent the personal critic in our head from intervening, Too often this voice sits on out shoulder, frowning and muttering .

Chance and ‘the random’ take us to unpredictable places and enable different narratives. Working with chance allows the writer to challenge her unconscious assumptions about what a piece of writing ‘should be’. It also challenges the reader’s unconscious assumptions. Chance leads to surprise, revelation, the challenge of paradox and the springs of the imagination. It facilitates ways of finding subject, atmosphere and voice, and of realising the imaginative into life. Using random prompts helps to break down the chaos of possibility.

Think about these prompts and write — keep going even if you are writing the same sentence over and over or what seems to be nonsense.

• She watches her sleep …
• She remembers feet on white sand …
• How long ago was it that …
• Today they climb to the top …
• sweat snakes down her face, she is paler with each second …

Even when we find the right headspace, the next question will be about the kind of writing you want to do. Writing involves making a lot of decisions…

Making it real

Understand that you can have in your writing no qualities which you do not honestly entertain in yourself.

Walt Whitman in his journal.

The adage ‘write what you know’ is often too simplistic. Not all writing is confessional or springs from the life we’ve lived. Cormac McCarthy hasn’t lived in early twentieth century America or a post-apocalyptic society. Nonetheless, he writes about both. He write as convincingly as Hemingway writes about war, which he did live through. Both are writing what they ‘know’, in the sense that the work is authentic. It reflects their passions, their values, the way they perceive and relate to the world.

If we care about what we are writing, then we owe it to the characters and places we are witnessing to, to ensure the writing is as polished as possible. ur writing will become: precise, sensory and take the reader into the moment we are evoking.

This is exactly what happens in the description in chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby of a poverty stricken urban area:

This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. … The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour.

Similarly, in my novel, This is the End of the Story the politics, weather, music are major influences that build the picture of a certain kind of reality.

Writing about Place

Even if you are working from the mind’s eye, you must keep your senses open — observe, be precise.

Chekhov puts it like this:

Don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.. ur writing will become: precise, sensory and take the reader into the moment we are evoking.

We write one true sentence and then the next true sentence. Every detail counts.

Be wary of cluttering your writing with adjectives and adverbs. Hone them back — use them with care and precision. And cut out the qualifiers — kind of, sort of, just, very, really — they do no work — somehow, suddenly… follow close behind — nothing happens ‘somehow’.

People come in context — think of a grandmother or favourite aunt — you will think of them in a place, most likely. Places tell us about character — Gatsby’s ridiculous ice-cream coloured mansion. Don’t do the lazy announcement thing — ‘Manchester, 1977, a dark and gloomy night in a terraced house…’

Try this exercise about a place that reflects a person. You might not mention the person at all in the writing and they don’t need to make an appearance. The person can be real or fictional:

First choose your person. Make a few notes about them, think of the type of place that would reflect that character — it might be a whole house or a room, it might be a tent or an open field, a workplace or a boat…

Now describe the place in the present tense — make the description precise and visual, but don’t forget the other senses.

Make every line like a photographic frame — remember, ‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.’

Keep in mind that in writing about your place, you are writing about something you are not saying directly about your character, but you are pointing to.

Cormac McCarthy’s opening of Suttree is a fantastic example.

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.

Get into the habit of making notes about places and make every sense work overtime so that you begin to build place portraits the way a painter might. Every detail counts. You won’t use them all, but you’ll start writing more authentic settings. Put your characters into them to see how they react there, see where they fit and where they don’t fit.

Place as a Reflection of Character

Writing about place is powerful because places reflect character. At its most acute the theory of pathetic fallacy gives emotions to place and weather, as we see in Shakespeare’s King Lear:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulfurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world, Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man!

Similarly, the opening of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist features a violent rain storm that represents the dysfunction in the lives of Sarah and Macon.

When we write about places, it isn’t mere adornment — it isn’t only about adding description. The places in which we set our stories help to define our characters and events. A good sense of place makes a story real and authentic.

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