Self employment

I keep reading about independent workers who are self-employed and don’t have a regular job. One reference many of the authors use is the transition from small farmers and crafters to factory workers, driven by the industrial revolution, and that people who are creating their own work are just returning to those roots.

The part they leave out is why so many people gave up self-employment and went into those factories. They could make more money and live better! The hidden fact that everyone glosses over is that leaving corporate jobs, for most people, means accepting a much, much smaller life style, smaller homes, fewer dinners out and driving older cars.

Cutting you life style is not progress. Most people who try self-employment / free lancing fail because to succeed they must master work skills that, until they left their regular jobs, someone else did for them. It’s called division of labor, but working alone means that you must do all those tasks. Most people fail because they are unable to master those new skills fast enough to keep their business producing income.

I keep reading that if you love sports then learn to write about them. That presumes you are in that very small minority of people who love sports that no only are able to write but enjoy writing enough to keep at it steadily to make a living. It also presumes that you are in the even smaller minority who either already know how to market your writing or are able to learn how and enjoy that part of the process enough to put up with it to sell the output of the part you do enjoy.

The truth is that of all the people who try to develop themselves as an independent only a very small percentage will succeed, not because they aren’t good enough at what they love, but rather because they can’t get good enough at what they don’t love!