I have always had a huge problem with authority. My parents must have had a lot of fun raising a kid who constantly pushed the boundaries of the rules and even occasionally got himself out of a grounding sentencing on a technicality. During my time in corporate America, my managers had to deal with my disregard for the standardized approach to my tasks and productivity targets. Hell, I’ve even voted for Gary Johnson two elections in a row, which is itself an exercise in rebellious futility.
Roughly one year into my nearly four-year stint working for a large company, I began to feel a strong sense of lost potential. The universe outside the safety of the cubicles and daily monotony was calling to me, and I became gradually less engaged with sending formatted Excel quotes and managing an amorphous list of clients. Eventually, my anti-authority attitude had accumulated a critical mass of managerial aggravation and formal writeups and I was fired from the company in January 2015.
With a burning bridge at my back, it was time to venture into the jungle of self-employment. Within 10 days and after interviewing with a few different agencies, I started work with an insurance company as a 1099 commission-only insurance sales agent. By March, I had made my first honest-to-god commission sale. The feeling of personally engaging with a client and helping them find a product they needed was unlike anything else in the world, and I was hooked.
With all that said, I’m a pretty boring guy. I don’t like to go out to the bars, clubs, and concerts. I don’t have a large social circle outside of my professional fields, and I spend the vast majority of my time at home. However, despite the highly personal first few paragraphs, this article isn’t about me. This article is about a parallel universe that (according to CareerBuilder) 10 million Americans live in. That may sound like a lot, but that’s less than 7% of the job market. There aren’t very many of us.
“Self-employed” is a term often associated with irritating multi-level marketing friends, starving real estate agents that haven’t sold a house in six months, and people that you’re not quite sure what they do but they seem to sit on the couch all day. That’s a fair perspective of self-employment, but only the mediocre lower echelons of this odd underworld. There is a higher level to all of this.
Anyone who is successfully self employed will tell you that they work a lot more than they ever did in their corporate jobs. Fun hobbies-made-businesses become an all-consuming and exhausting obsession, sales agents often have to work 8 days a week for many months on end, and online e-commerce is anything but sitting around watching the Amazon sales pile up.
When working for yourself, your view of the world will often change significantly. Your very survival and existence depends on your ability to see the world exactly as it really is. All political, religious, and social filters must take a back seat during this process. The difficulty of this perspective shift is often the underlying reason that a self-employed person never becomes highly successful or even fails and returns to the safety of a corporate job. They were unable to gain a realistic understanding of the physics of the environment and society they were operating in.
Equally important, though, is the ability to know your own mind. This requires being brutally honest about one’s own strengths and weaknesses. The process of discovering the nature of the mind and emotions is very important, as this will allow the building of strength in areas of emotional control and mental focus. The mental training stage of becoming truly self-made and successful requires serious research and dedication, and it never really ends. It’s a lot like going to the gym, but for your mind. This process may sound difficult, and it is. However, it is probably the most rewarding thing that happens on the journey to independent success – you are forced to work towards becoming the best possible version of yourself.
This rapid evolution of worldview and mental strength is expensive. People that build incredible businesses and become true entrepreneurs will lose a lot of relationships along the way. Their new skepticism of long-held views combined with the excess of self-confidence that comes with mental training tends to push people away. This apparent new personality oddness combined with the incredibly dense schedule of a growing business owner results in many family and friends no longer visiting or returning calls.
This loss of leisure time, unintended estrangement of friends, and the constant crazy struggle for even a medium amount of income can be incredibly challenging. Yet for those that intend to succeed, these difficulties are as nothing when weighed against the freedom, personal growth, and legacy that the true hell-or-high-water business owners and entrepreneurs will gain.
I personally am only a short distance down this path. I can see on my 10-to-20-year horizon a company so epic and incredible that it will be worth every struggle along the way to get there. The ability to hire Americans and the chance to do something amazing for our species drives me on. That’s a trait that many self-employed people like me have: delusions of grandeur. But we’ll tell you that the vision will become reality eventually. We simply must make it so, or perish in the attempt. The burning desire for real entrepreneurship drives us on.
Yet for now us freshly-independent people must struggle every single day for survival, as our financial freedom and the existence of our incredibly small businesses are very fragile things and will be for years to come.
If you have questions about self-employment or entrepreneurship, comment here and I’ll be happy to share what I’ve learned. This is just the intro article for the weird universe I will mostly be writing about here in the future.
Remmy is the founder of Exoverse Products. He joins the SoBros Network as a contributor in the fields of tech, auto, travel, and anything else he damn well pleases. Check Exoverse Products out on Instagram @exoverseproducts.
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