Career Guide: Getting a Job or Building Your Own Business

After you complete your education and are ready to build a career, you basically have two options, get a job, or build your own business.

The first option looks easy for a lot of people because you have nothing to lose as you can receive your salary every week or every month. The second option is risky as you might lose your money and waste your time if you failed. However, if you are a risk-taker, you will choose to build a business.

Get a Job Vs. Build Your Own Business: Which One is Better

When you are on a job, there is a cap; there is a limit on how much you can earn, but when you build a business, there is no limit on how much you can actually earn. Success depends on how much effort you can put on, how well you are doing it, how you surround yourself with the right kind of people, and how hard you can work. It is something like planting seeds now and waiting for years to see the fruits.

When you are bound to a job, you cannot build multiple income sources because you don’t have the liberty to explore other things. But when you do not have a job you can explore a lot of things and build multiple income sources, you can even make some of these income sources your passive income.

Building Your Career: Working Smart Vs. Working Hard

There was a time when business gurus used to say you need to work hard to become successful. However, as opposed to working hard, these days you are advised to work smart in order to become successful in your business.

Working hard means you are tiring your body and mind at work to generate profits. Working smart means you earn profits without doing a lot of hard work. Let me exemplify, in ancient times, in order to lift the load a lot of people pulled the load through a rope. Over a dozen people were required to lift even a 1000 kg weight. But after the discovery of the pulley 3-4 people easily lifted 1000 kg weight. This is smart working.

It is true that most of us want to work smart and earn a lot of profits without doing hard work. However, most of us end up working hard to earn little profits. Sadly, not all of us can work smart.

How to Learn to Build Better Career

There are too many resources available, a lot of courses, videos, audios, and books. You will be easily trapped into these resources end up feeling super whelmed. Even if you pick up a course or two and go through it, you only gain theoretical knowledge, you do not have the skills to do it.

Consuming information will not make you an expert. Your focus should be on application. It does not really matter what’s in your head until you know how to implement it. So, how do you learn to implement? Well, you learn how to implement by practicing implementation. 

Project-based learning is better because you know how to apply things you have learned.

You can build a better career by learning just enough and doing the project.

How to Become Successful in Your Career?

The road to a successful career begins with education. You need basic education where you learn all subjects like mathematics, science, language, etc. In other words, you need at least 12 years of school education.

You will have to choose a specialization. What subjects you should choose depends on your interest and mental capacity. You will have to spend many years in college and university to master your subjects. For some people going through a higher level of education is not possible. For these people developing skills remains the only way to enhance their capacity. Actually, skills are needed even if you have an education.

Generally speaking, you cannot choose between developing skills and gaining academic excellence. But it is also true that some people succeed without skills.  But the best way to build a successful career is by combining education with skills. You need higher education as well as professional skills.

Can you actually become very rich from your job?

One of the major drawbacks of having a job is a limited income opportunity. Even though some people can earn a commission, especially if they are in the sales and marketing field, for the majority of people the weekly/monthly paycheck is the only income from the job. So, the question is can you actually become rich from your job. I mean can you build and multiply your income just from your job?

Well, it is really hard to answer this question because the answer depends on where you work and how much salary you draw. If someone works in a company like Google, he must be drawing fat check and he might be able to multiply his wealth over time.  But for someone who is working in a little-known company or a very small company, he might be having difficulty even managing his expenses.

First published on Trendri in author's name