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Personal Responsibility: Get Yourself Into Business

Guest post by: Michael Hume

Article Overview: If you lose your job, what next? I submit that there are two kinds of people in that situation: the victim, and the entrepreneur.

Personal Responsibility: Get Yourself Into Business

Employed Or Not, Hedge Your Bets In Uncertain Times If you have a job, good for you. These days, you're one of the lucky ones.

However, even if you have a job, it's unlikely you're as secure as you should be. The U.S. government's intervention in the economy is extending and deepening the recession, and it's likely to get worse before it gets better. The odds that you'll lose your job, or some of your pay, are a little too high these days. And if you have a family to support, you need to consider what you can do to "hedge your bets," just to maximize the chance that you'll be able to fulfill your personal responsibility.

Think about it: if you're employed in the traditional sense, with something like a nine-to-five with a seemingly-stable company, it's easy to get lulled into a false sense of security. If that job is your (or your family's) entire source of income, you are placing a huge bet on it. There are many things - most beyond your control - that could go wrong with that scenario. How smart and talented is your company's management? How stable is the company's customer base - and how smart and talented are your major customers' managers? How strong - and for how long - is your market, and your industry? If you lost your top three customers, how easily could your company replace that business? If you are not the owner of the business through which you are employed, you're betting your livelihood on the answers to these questions, and many others. And if you're not the owner, there is nothing you can do to influence many of the outcomes that govern the future of your income.

If you lose your job, what next? I submit that there are two kinds of people in that situation: the victim, and the entrepreneur.

The victim always assumes its someone else's responsibility to keep him employed. He did his self-proving years ago, when he got a degree or some other qualification, and now he can rest easy. If he just keeps his head down and does a decent job at work, everything should go smoothly; and if it doesn't, he's been victimized by someone else ("management," or "those clowns in sales," or a number of other perceived predators) who didn't do their job right. The victim feels robbed of an entitlement, and soon finds himself standing in the unemployment line to get what's coming to him from the government. If he gets a job interview, the first questions he'll ask will relate to the salary range, the benefit package, and other WIIFM ("What's In It For Me") factors.

The entrepreneur, in contrast, always assumes she's in business for herself, even if she happens to have a traditional type of job. She knew she was making some bets on a particular company in a particular industry, but always knew there was a likelihood she'd need to make a transition at some point anyway - so she was always ready for it. She has a degree too, just like the victim. But unlike the victim, she knows she has to prove herself constantly - just as if the business she owned were a retail store in a crowded shopping center, competing with many other offers for the attention (and dollars) of her customers. She is savvy in her job without being political. The difference is that savvy people look for clever ways to add value, while political behavior is more about finding clever ways to look valuable... and if you are a victim, you're more likely to be political because you know, deep-down, you have everything to lose in that job. The entrepreneur, if she loses her job, simply views it as a loss of her biggest client in the market for her time and talents, and quickly goes about replacing that business.

There was a time in America when the "victim" could get away with it for his entire career, particularly in the boom years just after World War II and again after the Cold War. Those days, all those "iffy factors" related to management, the market, and the industry were not as iffy as they are today.

During the Great Depression and the WWII years, though, the U.S. did not enjoy the luxury of wallowing in victimhood. Everyone knew he was really in business for himself, and went about cleaning up the economic and political messes the nation (and the world) had gotten itself into. They started the businesses, built the markets, created the industries, and basically made the world "safe" and stable... without which activity no victim could have had the relatively easy life many enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s.

Think about the next decade. Which of the decades from the previous century will the next one most closely resemble? Are you sure it'll be a comfy type of stretch without major economic difficulty? If you are relying completely on a traditional job, you're basically betting it will be.

If, on the other hand, you think we might be heading toward a 1930s/1940s-style time period, act now to hedge your bets. If you have a computer (and you do), you can get into business for a fraction of the investment your grandfather needed when he started that machine shop that fed all those kids through the tough years. He had to work hard, use every scrap of talent and ingenuity he could, and have a little luck at times, too. You will need less of all these things than he needed (though not zero), and then you'll have what he had: a truly secure future where the bets weren't made on a job someone else could take away, but on your own skill and desire. That's what entrepreneurs create, that's what they own, and it's their legacy that made America great.

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Article Tags: government intervention, inspirational leadership, personal responsibility, successful entrepreneurs



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