Rule 35: Understand That Working for Others Won’t Necessarily Make You Rich – but It Might

Most of us assume that wealth isn’t possible while we are working for someone else and only as entrepreneurs will we become wealthy. For a lot of us, this may be true because there is a limit as to how much you can earn per hour in return for your labor. However, there are some who are able to trade their labor for high incomes

For some, being employed may be the best route for them; perhaps they have no desire to run their own business. There is a whole subset of employees that are doing quite well not being entrepreneurs. For example, a friend of mine is a travel nurse and she’s extremely wealthy thanks to her flexibility and negotiation skills. In many ways, she lives semi-retired. She says she wouldn’t be any better off working for herself.

But this doesn’t work for every profession. Many people working in the computer business opted to become contractors because they assumed they would earn a lot more. Some did, but at the cost of stability. When the contracts dried up, some were worse off than when employed.

Understand that working for yourself might make you wealthy, but it might not. Nearly two-thirds of business start-ups end in failure within three years. There’s no certainty there. Working for yourself generally has higher earning potential, but not in every case. You have to look into it very closely: right business, right demand for your services, right time, enough effort, and so on.

There isn’t the space or time here to go into all the pros and cons of working for yourself. Except to say it’s a hell of a lot easier and much more fun working hard for yourself than for someone else. But what we are aiming for isn’t freedom from work but freedom of time and obligation. Many people love to make a contribution to some purpose. They just don’t like working 12 hours a day to be poor while someone else gets rich off their back. For that reason, we have to be open to whichever means will hasten our achievement of that goal. Employment or going it alone? It entirely depends on which one will get us wealthy efficiently. And your day job doesn’t have to be your route to wealth at all…the secret is not to close your mind to any opportunity to get rich.