The Hidden Advantages of Working for Yourself by Making Money Online
The man loved doing heroin until someone took a chance on him
The most awkward moment of my life happens daily.
What do you do for a living?
It’s hard to answer. I’m a weirdo. I write. I have an academy. I publish strange eBooks that 99% of people don’t understand.
This question came up yesterday while filming a short movie about my debilitating hearing condition, Tinnitus.
The videographer asked me. I felt awkward and quickly made up an answer.
“Me too, mate. I work for myself,” the videographer said.
He goes on to tell me about a sound designer.
The guy was a heroin addict.
He loved getting high and thought he’d die that way, until someone took a chance on him. They took him in. No more drugs. He had no idea why anyone would take an interest in him. But he accepted the help.
The person who helped him get off heroin said, “there’s this school that teaches people to record sound. They can train you for three months for free. Do ya a lot of good, it would.”
The former junkie had nothing else to do so he said yes.
After a few weeks at the sound engineering school, the teachers told him “you’re a natural at this. You’ve got a real talent.”
The man said “you have to say that to make me feel better about my drug addiction.”
Eventually, a Hollywood producer saw his talent. He went on to do the sound design for iconic films like Happy Feet and Mad Max.
The best part wasn’t the acclaim. It was that he got to work for himself and experience freedom from his former drug habit.
A standard 9–5 would have likely led him back to heroin, a different type of drug (salary crack).
Working for yourself making money online has many hidden advantages.
Infinite leverage
Give me a place to stand and a lever strong enough and I can move the world — Archimedes
You’ve heard that quote before. It’s the idea that if you want to move something heavy, it’s easier to do it with a lever than your bare hands.
A lever multiplies the maximum force in your body. It makes lifting big things easier. Leverage is a doing word that means to use something to its maximum potential. Leverage exists online too.
Naval Ravikant says these create online leverage:
- Tools
- People
- Capital (money)
- Digital Products (software, social media)
When you make money online it’s easy to access leverage to grow your income and impact faster with the same amount of work. For example, if you want to amplify a message you could get 100 people on Twitter to retweet it.
Now your tiny impact becomes massive.
Buying stocks with your income generates leverage too. That investment creates leverage that does more work for you over time without you doing a thing. Hiring a virtual assistant to help with an online business is leverage too. It amplifies the use of your time to get more done.
The great thing about online leverage is it’s infinite. Every year more users join the internet. Every year there is more software to increase your leverage further and get more done in less time.
Even the psychological phenomenon of flow states is a form of leverage.
Working for yourself helps you get creative about all the ways to add leverage to your life. Leverage makes everything easier with the same inputs of time and effort.
Master leverage to master making money and buy back your time.
If you want a pay rise or a promotion then you can get one
One thing that pissed me off about my 9–5 job was a lack of control.
If I wanted to earn more money it wasn’t easy. I’d do all this extra work upfront in the hope it would be rewarded “one day” or at bonus time.
It rarely was.
If I wanted a promotion I had to kiss the ass of other leaders and brownnose until my nose was covered in brown sh*t.
I hated kissing asses full of skid marks.
Since I started working for myself, I’m in control of how much I earn and what my job title is. The other day someone called me CEO.
Lol.
I hate that title. I’m the CEO of nothing. I hate the pretentious word founder. I hate the label of entrepreneur that makes me feel like a capitalist maximalist. In my old job I had no control over any of this.
Working for myself means I get to write the story. I can opt-out of flashy titles and just be myself.
Last year I decided I wanted to earn more money, so I simply created more products people could buy. Then recently I wanted to give myself a promotion to get more time, so I got outside help with my online business.
Control is massively underrated.
Calling the shots carries risk, but you get to keep all the upside.
Meet fellow creators
A job can become a bubble.
There’s a small group of colleagues you communicate with that shape your perception of the world. It’s easy to believe that bubble is reality.
What I like about working for myself is I’m always meeting other creators. Many of them come from all over the world.
Yesterday I had a call with a creator from Ghana. The connection kept cutting out because the electricity in her town was unreliable.
Another creator friend comes from a different part of Africa. When we chat he shows me around town with his phone. I get to teleport into another world I would never have got access to at my boring job.
Tomorrow I talk to Todd B from Tennessee. The guy is a cowboy. If he wasn’t a writer, he’d be a country music superstar with his rhyming ability and former love of Tennessee whiskey.
The difference with creators is they consume less than they create. Hanging around them makes you appreciate this reality.
Creativity rubs off on you even if you’re not that creative.
Bizarre 3rd world perspective
Meeting creators from 3rd world countries gave me a different level of empathy.
So I decided to find a way for first-world students of my academy to pay for scholarships for third-world students.
This insight would never have made sense unless I became a global citizen and immersed myself in other cultures by working for myself online.
Less risk, less stress, thanks to multiple incomes
Most people are in debt.
It’s fine when you take out the loan. Your career is great. Your cash flow is good. Then a black swan event happens. Something you couldn’t predict changes your finances.
Suddenly you’re in survival mode. The loan payments don’t stop even if your income does (or it gets sliced in half).
Working for myself taught me about multiple income streams. One income source is risky. It can get cut off. Making money online allows you to diversify easily. I make money from coaching, books, teaching, events, occasional sponsorships, writing royalties, etc.
If one money honey pot dries up, there are others to keep my stomach full.
I never had that feeling with a job. I was always scared a restructure or new boss would chop off my income. Then I’d be left in the street trying to explain to pain-in-the-ass recruiters why my career gap wasn’t a big deal.
Again, I always felt out of control. A puppet getting pulled from side to side without any control over the strings.
Critics say making money online is risky.
I say one income is way riskier. And if a recession or global health crisis hits, one income is incredibly dangerous. Companies on auto-pilot will happily shred salaries the way a snake sheds its skin.
The difference you never think you can make
Much of my corporate career felt lifeless.
So much of the day was spent talking about revenue. I just wanted to hit leaders over the head sometimes and tell them to shut up about it.
Since working for myself I’ve found a way to escape this painful topic. I get to make a small difference in the world by teaching people how to write online.
A lot of it goes unnoticed until you ask for feedback. Then you find yourself getting hit with story after story of people that took what you showed them, applied leverage, and created something beautiful.
I never thought I could make that kind of a difference. Working for myself taught me I can.
Final Thought
You don’t have to quit your job and make money online.
The benefits of working for yourself can be accessed by starting an online side hustle after hours. Then you can experience the feeling and see if it’s something you want to do full time.
Once you work for yourself and upgrade to the power of full autonomy, I doubt you’ll ever go back to a job.
That’s the hidden advantage of making money online in your underwear.
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