How I Feel to Be My Own Boss in Two Professions

An honest account of how I feel about it.

I’m lucky I don’t have to suck up to any of the bosses. I’m glad I don’t have to face any pay cuts or lose my sleep waiting for appraisals. For most of us, that’s the best thing that can happen to a person.

I was one of you when I used to do a job. The difference was I knew I could not spend my entire life doing someone else’s work.

When I completed my 12th, I had to make the inevitable choice — should I go into the corporate or the medical field? Surprisingly, I was very clear about two things:

• I loved biology. The way our body is created always left me curious.
• I could never work efficiently under someone’s supervision.

That meant being a doctor. It was an honourable profession that had higher chances of me working for myself at some point.

Five years into studying dentistry made me too comfortable with my choice. I read nothing beyond dentistry. I did nothing beyond my job. I didn’t pursue my hobbies and spent hours of my free time watching Netflix.

Little did I know there is something called digital writing that had the potential to make me work for a greater purpose, despite my extreme laziness to look beyond my profession.

The pandemic changed things. I refrain from calling it a blessing in disguise because I don’t want to disrespect the ones who lost their loved ones in that chaos. But for me, it did bring a massive change in my life.

I unlocked the world of online writing. It fascinated me how a few hours of work in the comfort of your cosy room can get you paid that’s almost two times more than I was earning from my job back then.

I started freelancing and scaled up a bit in the two years while managing my dentistry job. It was the first time my mum saw me doing something other than watching Netflix after coming back home from work. I bet she was happier about my side hustle than I ever was for this one reason.

By the end of the last year, it became clear to me that I can’t go on freelancing on the side forever. I needed passive income if I ever want to focus on my dentistry and personal life. Sadly, I didn’t know how.

So, I stopped writing online completely for 4–5 months. It’s always easier to sometimes take a step back and reflect on your choices than to keep on pushing when stress and confusion are weighing you down.

In these 4–5 months, I opened my dental clinic, made some massive changes in my preference list and dived in with full force.

With freelancing, I was only focused on short-term income. But if I needed big changes in my income, I needed to invest in writing for the long term.

Thanks to my dental clinic, now I have much better control over how I spend my time.

• I schedule all my Twitter content for the week using Hypefury and save over an hour per week.
• I write LinkedIn posts on the go but have a content calendar in place so I don’t have to start from scratch.
• I write daily for 30 minutes. That’s a non-negotiable. So I never schedule a patient’s appointment from 12.30 pm to 1 pm every day. That’s my time for deep-focused work.
• In an event of some changes in my usual schedule, I can still manage because scheduling tools, creating outlines and my content calendars help me to quickly come up with good content no matter where am I, or how hectic my day was. I know exactly what I want to write.
• In case a patient comes complaining of pain, I have to treat him immediately. In such cases, I make sure I make full use of time after 2 pm for writing because that’s when I close my clinic.

Despite having everything planned, it’s not easy. Since I started my clinic, things were all over the place. I needed to remind myself regularly that my day job is not a 9–5, where I can just ignore everything that’s happening in my workplace after 5.

It’s my own venture. Anything that happens here at any point in time, I’m responsible for it. Be it updating the clinic inventory, checking the smooth working of my dental chair and all other machines, paying the bills, etc. is all on my head.

I can’t avoid any of that. After struggling to streamline all these managing tasks for over 4 months, I confessed in my newsletter 4 weeks ago that I’m terrible at clinic management, or maybe I just felt that because I hadn’t found a system for myself to manage everything.

In that newsletter I also told my readers that to remedy this, I’m going to dedicate 1 hour of my daily schedule to clinic management. And since I started doing this one thing, my clinic is in much better shape.

The thing is we underestimate the power of a tidy workplace. Just seeing my tidy drawers today makes me feel like I achieved a great feat. The more clutter we see, the more distracted our mind becomes.

So many people I meet ask if I will quit one of my ventures in the future. I’ll be honest. it’s not a crazy idea. I know that if I want to give my time and attention to my family in the future, doing these two jobs is not feasible. I know I’ll be facing that inevitable choice someday.

But, just for now, I want to explore my potential as much as I can. I want to know if this is something I can do well. I want to experience the pride I’d feel when I’d created a successful side hustle despite being a full-time dentist.

For now, I don’t want to think about what lies ahead.

I don’t know if it’s the right choice or not, but I know I’ve been the happiest since I started this side hustle.

And that’s all that matters.

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