Many of us are taught that there’s only one path in life and that is to go to school, get as high of a grade as we can get, graduate, get a job, climb the corporate ladder, takes 2 weeks off a year, work until you retire at the age of 65. What if there are other ways? And there are!
Just because no one is doing any other things doesn’t mean there are no other ways. In today’s age, it’s not impossible to make a living online and become your own boss. Many people build up a side hustle while they are in school or have a full-time job and slowly but surely, it became their full-time job.
I’ve seen countless people who started out with nothing and within a short span of a year or two become their own boss, work 10 hours a week, pull in a comfortable 6-figure and even more than a million a year, live a life of freedom. If anyone can do it, you can. As long as you have access to the internet and a will to succeed, it’s within reach.
Here are 8 reasons why you should become your own boss.
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Table of Contents
1. You’ll never have a boss to respond to again
Who hates having a boss? I had other jobs in the past where I absolutely hated my supervisors and boss but I couldn’t say anything. I had to act like everything was good and that I’m totally okay with being treated like sh*t.
A while ago, I quit my job, and after I quit my manager was fired. That should tell you how awful she was. She didn’t get fired because of me but because of her bad managing style. You see, it wasn’t because my complaint against her was invalid, in fact, they were so reasonable and expected that she was no longer working there. I didn’t feel respected by her. Neither were a lot of other people. I hated having someone breathing down my neck. I felt like I was just a tool. I felt like I was trading my dignity for money.
I’m sure there are more things that other people find unappealing about having a boss. Guess what? If you’re your own boss you won’t have to respond to anyone! You don’t need to ask anyone for permission to take time off. You control your own time schedule!
I know some of you may say “Well, your customers are your boss if you’re your own boss so you have more bosses to respond to…”. Listen, there are many forms of self-employment that don’t involve having any customers. I’m talking about building your own brand. For example, if you have your own Youtube channel, there would be no boss to respond to. People who like your videos would watch your videos. The more views you get the more sponsorship deals and affiliate marketing potential there is and the more money you get.
Blogging is also another way in which you can become your own boss and have no customers. You write about stuff that helps people in some ways, people read it, the more monthly views you get the more money you earn from ads, affiliate marketing, etc.
If you hate to have a boss, you should become your own boss instead. You’ll need to be very self-disciplined. It isn’t for everyone so if you think you got what it takes, why not give it a try?
Want to be your own boss? Here are 11 reasons to start a blog.
2. You decide what you want to do and when you want to do it
If you have a typical 9–5, this is what your life will look like: wake up at a predetermined time, commute to work, work for 8 hours a day with a 15–30 minutes lunch break in between, maybe another two 10–15 minutes break that is predetermined by someone else, wait for people to leave work after five so you don’t look too eager, commute home, order take out or cook, clean-up, sleep, repeat. And if you got children, your time would be a lot more hectic than that.
Imagine doing the same thing five days a week, 50–52 times a year with 2 weeks off a year, for the next 50 years of your life until you can finally retire. Mind you, 50% of people will get cancer and if you live above the age of 85, 50% will have some sort of dementia. Time after retirement is not all sunshine and roses.
Is this really what you want out of life? Is this it? Think about what you really want. No judgments. I know nobody tells you there are other ways but there are. Friends, I want you to think about what you want to do if you got a year off. Travel? Spend more time with your family and friends? Revisit that old hobby of yours? Catch up on sleep without setting an alarm? Think about it. Picture it. What is that life like without a job? No, don’t worry about money. Just picture it.
You know why a lot of people want to win the lottery? Because with all that money they never have to work again and they have an idea of what they want to spend the money on. The chance of you winning the lottery is lower than the chance of you getting eaten by a shark, getting struck by lighting, getting hit by a car on your way to get your ticket, and you getting Covid.
Did you know that sanitizers kill “99%” of germs? There are 1% of germs that can’t be killed by sanitizers. The chance of you winning your freedom with the lottery is so astronomically small that you can say it’s impossible and you’d be more than 99.9999% right. Even 99% is already considered to be a high enough number by those who produce products relevant to people’s survival.
But the chance of you doing exactly what you truly want out of life by working hard on a side hustle and becoming your own boss? It’s surely astronomically larger than you winning the lottery.
Imagine the freedom to choose when you want to work and when you want to do anything at any moment in your life. You are your own boss. You decide your own schedule. That’s a life of freedom that is a lot more possible than most people dare to think.
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3. You can choose who you want to spend your time around
One of the worst things about school and work is that you’re forced to spend your time around people that you don’t necessarily like. I don’t hate anybody but there are times when I would prefer to be alone rather than be sitting next to somebody who wouldn’t stop clicking their pen on and off or be forced to interact with somebody who makes me question all my life choices. Okay, that’s a bit dramatic but you get the point.
I like having choices, we all do. Nobody likes to be forced to spend their time around anybody and if you’re your own boss you decide who gets to be in your life.
Many people who make a living on the internet are only working 10 hours a week and could pull in a 6 or 7 figure a year. They get all the time in their life to spend with their family and friends. If you’re a parent, you’d appreciate the extra time for your children. After all, it’s impossible to go back in time to see them grow up again.
Read the 7 things you must stop doing if you’re broke, here.
4. You decide how much you want to earn
Listen, your boss would never pay you enough for you to become his neighbor. Do you know what I mean? When I was working at my old job, I’d see the CEO touring the building. A young guy in his late-30s. Once in a while, I’d see the CFO too, a middle-aged woman in her early 50s. They make millions a year. I’m not joking.
No matter how hard you work, your boss would never pay you past a certain amount. Sure, you can get that bonus maybe but your earning is capped.
You decide how much you want to earn if you’re your own boss. If you work harder it often equates to a reasonable compensation whereas, with a typical 9–5, you working harder is just you doing your job in your boss’s eyes. Many people have put in sweat and tears into their job only be fired as if they were replaceable (and they are) the moment something changes.
You’re a tool! You’re a tool if you’re an employee. If you die today, your boss will put out a job ad tomorrow.
They bought you for your time and skills. They won’t pay you more than they have to. Think about this. I hope you understand what you have to do.
You never get rich from working for someone else. Don’t let a job be the limit of how much you earn.
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5. You do what you love
Nobody likes every aspect of their job all the time and if you are hired by someone else that is even more so the case. If you’re your own boss, on the other hand, you have greater control of what you do and you may actually get to do what you love more.
Say you own a blog that is doing well and is pulling in a comfortable 6-figure a year. All you would have to do after you gain enough audience is to write more articles per day and market them. It may take you just 10 hours per week to produce the number of articles that you set out for yourself to accomplish. You can decide what you want to write that your audience would want to read.
The degree of freedom for creativity and expression of your passion is limitless when you are your own boss.
Your life becomes much more meaningful when you are doing what you love. Instead of going to work every day and being forced to produce work that you find little to no enjoyment in, you can do what makes you happy. There’s nothing worst than slaving your life away by doing something you hate every day.
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6. You won’t regret your inaction
Imagine being on your deathbed and thinking about what your life could’ve been like had you tried to make a living online. You could’ve been your own boss. What could that life of freedom be like?
Regret is a hateful word. It suggests that nothing can be done about the thing that you did or didn’t do. While you can’t possibly go back in time to fix anything, you’re now in the place where your future self may like to be, but can’t get to. You get to decide how your life will go from here.
Don’t regret your inaction. Do something about your desire to become your own boss. You’re here reading this for a reason. If you made it this far, I can say for certain that you want that life of freedom you dream of.
If you try and you failed at least you won’t wonder what if you had tried. Maybe you’ll learn a few things from your first few failed attempts and eventually become successful.
It’s a risk worth taking. It’s better than just accepting your fate of limited freedom for the rest of your life until you’re able to retire. Remember, life after retirement isn’t all rosy. You want to be able to enjoy life while you still can doesn’t matter what age you’re right now. The choices you make today can impact how your life will be a year from now, two years from now, ten years from now, etc.
Click here to learn how many articles you’ll need to blog full-time.
7. Your days won’t always be the same
This is a problem for many people. Their days are the same at their jobs. Nothing exciting, nothing new, and they sit at the same desk for 8 hours a day 250 days a year. doing something that doesn’t spark the fire in them.
If you’re your own boss, you may be able to add more sparks to your life and work that you couldn’t have before. The degree of freedom that you’d get to explore with your job as your own boss is unlike anything that a typical 9–5 employee could experience.
Say you’re a Youtuber who is in the food niche, you can decide to do a food review of the 5 best ramen shops in your city for your next episode because you’re just craving ramen. Or, maybe you decide to take a trip to Paris and film yourself eating different cuisines because why not? People love food. Food is food doesn’t matter whether you made them or not. Although, if your audience subscribed to you for homemade content, you don’t want to deviate too much from your usual content.
Nevertheless, you get to experiment — something that you’d never get to do if you don’t own your job.
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8. You fully own your life
I hated how someone else gets to decide aspects of my life. When I wanted to be a doctor, I worked really hard to get the best grade I could but sometimes a bad mood in a teacher can deviate from my plan. A 1% difference in grade could mean whether I get accepted into medical school or not so you can see how stressed out I was.
My life trajectory was literally in other people’s hands. I can do my part and study really well but sometimes it really isn’t in our control if the teacher decides to make the exam extra difficult such that the class average is 50% and half the class didn’t pass (I’m in the passed group).
When you get out of school, you don’t fully own your life either. Someone else gets to decide when you wake up, when you work, when you take a break, when you go home, when you’re allowed to take a vacation, if you got any sick days left, if having children will impact your work, if you can get that health benefit so you can get the medicine you need, how much you earn, who you work with, where you sit at work, how you dress for work, whether you get to keep working there, etc.
So much of your life revolve around your work when you’re employed by someone else. You have no control of your life if you think about it.
If it wasn’t for your job, you could be working in a cottage somewhere after taking a 2 weeks break because you feel like it. If it wasn’t for your job, you would start a family sooner because you’re sure it wouldn’t impact your job. If it wasn’t for your job, you could spend more time with your kids.
Do you see how much of your life is controlled by someone else when you’re an employee? Someone else owns a huge part of you. I know that’s an awful way to put it but it’s true.
You sold your time to these people and they want to milk everything they can out of it at the expense of your individuality, freedom, happiness, and passion.
Being your own boss means you can take back your life.
You would be a totally different person if it wasn’t because of your 9–5. You decide what you want to do when you want to do it and who you want to be. Do you think you want to fully own your life? Being your own boss may give you exactly that.
Click here to learn the 6 ways to make money off a blog.
How do You become Your own boss?
There are many ways to go about it. What you have to understand is that your time is limited. If you want total freedom, you need to pick something where your earnings aren’t going to be limited by time.
Freelancing for example is certainly one way you can become your own boss but you may be still trading your time with money. You have only so many minutes in a day and it would be hard to scale to make more money if you are a freelancer.
A freelancer would also have a lot of people to please. People may expect a lot for how little they are willing to pay. You may just be dealing with more people you’ll grow to find annoying as a freelancer. Of course, many do find it fulfilling to be a freelancer as long as they get to decide which projects they want to work on.
If you truly want to be your own boss (no customers to please), you need to think about something else other than freelancing.
To achieve financial freedom and become your own boss you need to build your own brand. Think about the niche you want to be in. Is it tech reviews, gaming, programming, fashion, personal finance, gardening, parenting, traveling, food, lifestyle, health… There are so many niches to choose from and sub-niches to start from.
Click here to learn how to become a content creator and make money.
Click here to learn the 7 most profitable blogging niches.
You also have to decide on a platform. Some people choose to build their brands on Youtube and others choose to build them on Instagram while there are people who build it on their own platform in the form of a blog. You also see people using a mix of different platforms but the main emphasis is always on one specific platform.
The best platform I’d say is blogging. If you build your brand on someone else’s website, you’re at their mercy. You could be one algorithm change away from your traffic dwindling. That said, other platforms can still be a great tool. Don’t focus on being everywhere because a man who is everywhere is nowhere. The best thing to do is to build your brand on your own website where you have full control of things. You can use other social media to drive traffic to your site or help establish your brand.
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It takes effort and time but if you consistently push out high-quality content at a high quantity that people want to see, it’s only a matter of time before you can make a living doing it. You may also be able to make a lot from blogging. More than you’d ever make at your old job.
Think about what you really want out of life. Is it a 9–5? If it is, I believe you should have the freedom to choose when to leave. Personally, I don’t think what you want out of life is being someone else’s employee. When you’re someone else’s employee, you’re building someone else’s dream. You should build your own dream.
There’s no overnight success. It always takes time. The beginning is the toughest because you’re putting in so much work with so little in return but the growth is exponential. The first one thousand is the hardest to earn. The first one million is the hardest to earn. Once you get it rolling, it’s easier to get it to roll bigger faster.
You decide your own fate, my friend. Take a dedicated time each day to work on building that dream of yours. Change strategy if you have to but don’t give up. In 1–2 years’ time, you may make it. I wish you luck!
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Final thought
When trying to build a brand and become your own boss on the internet, you must take a realistic look at your goal.
The truth is, a lot of people didn’t make it and a lot of them did put in quite a bit of effort. There’s no guaranteed success. If you do fail, you won’t be starting from scratch the next time.
It may take you many more tries to get it right so be patient, fail fast, learn fast.
Find a niche with proven success. It may be in blogging, YouTube, Instagram, etc. Look at the people blogging for a living, what niche are they in? Find a niche with a proven track record of success because it tells you that there’s money to be made there. Once you found a niche, you must produce unique, high-quality content at a consistent pace and continue to do so for at least 2 years.
If you are willing to do that, you’re ahead of most content creators. Most won’t persist past the two years mark.
Click here to learn how to become a content creator and make money this year.
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