Just Over Broke? Or Just Obey Boss. Whatever J.O.B. means, it is all about obeying someone’s else’s rules; achieving someone’s else’s targets; fulfilling someone else’s dreams; working for someone else. You, the guy who greets you everyday at the door, the receptionist to whom you nod a careless ‘good morning’, the guy running around with tea for everyone, your boss who eyes you grimly as you just about manage to get through the door with a minute to spare and finally the Big Person at the corner office, the person whom you rarely see and can only feel by his/her presence – all of you are just employees of the person who owns and runs the organisation.

Is that the height of your ambitions? Earning maybe a crore or two, having two cars, a fancy house or two, and then ……what? What assets have you created for yourself and the world? All the hard work that you have put in through the years has actually helped to enrich someone else. While you were probably thinking that all your dreams have been achieved with that huge bank balance, the person who is employing you is probably earning in several hundreds of crores and his assets are in multiples of what you own.

Oh no, I’m not knocking Jobs. After all, it is the jobs that feed us, clothe us, and give us a certain position in society blah blah. But just think, what would happen if the company you were working for suddenly went bankrupt. Its happening all over the world, companies suddenly crumbling overnight. What will happen to your future, your security, your family?

Or if you think that the government company to whom you have given your life’s blood, so to say, is going to take care of you after you retire, what if the government suddenly announces that it plans to stop paying out pension? What if you are suddenly slapped with a vigilance case for no fault of yours – your retirement benefits could be frozen for years until you manage to clear your name.

There are enough horror stories out there to know that these things can happen. The unexpected is sometimes, not so unusual.

What I mean to say is that sometimes a job is not really as secure as we think it is. With a job (as in an employed person with a company) there is a limit to the salary you can earn; with a job there is a limit to what you can do; with a job there is a limit to what position you can reach. Everything is limited by the vision of the company whom you work for or the people who own that company.

For those salaried people who think that they can achieve their dreams by working for a company, let me ask them a question – what are your dreams? Do you have a dream?

Is it to earn a lot of money?

Is it to own a lot of houses?

Is it to buy all kinds of luxuries?

Is it to go on fancy holidays?

OK, suppose you have achieved all of these, would you say that you are fully satisfied?

Your income is directly proportion to your ability to perform in a company. Now suppose, you lost the ability to perform, then your income will be zero. What happens if the company you were working for, closes down? Then again, your income becomes zero. Of course, you can always look for work in another company. In this event, you are merely transferring your place of employment from one place to another. Your basic status does not change.

Now visualize this. Suppose you were the only earning member of the family and you lost the ability to work. Then what would happen to you or your family?

Jobs are very transient things. It can come and go on the whims of the people who run it.

You hear a lot of people complaining about the ‘Monday blues’ and their reluctance to go to office at the start of the week. If you are so unhappy in your work, why are you there? Where is your passion for your job? What about the dreams that you thought you would achieve by getting this job? If this job is not giving you the satisfaction that you thought it could, then why are you sticking on?

Let me tell you a simple fact of life – the only way that you can get job satisfaction is if you are doing a job that you like and the perfect job can be created only by you. You have to employ yourself – in other words, become an entrepreneur!

Yes, being an entrepreneur is risky, but then so is crossing the road. In fact, every moment of our lives is fraught with risk – you might have a heart attack; you might get a brain stroke; you might be assaulted; a car could hit you, or you might just slip, fall, and break your neck – anything can happen at any time.

Risk or fear of risk is not reason for not doing something. When you took your first baby steps, wasn’t that a risk? But you did it. When you first experimented with running, wasn’t that risky? But still you did it. We never thought of those things as risks, because they were essential for our survival.

It is funny, but it is the educated people – people with skills, who are the most scared of taking risks. Have you thought about the local kirana store owner? Or you milk supplier? Or your newspaper distributor? They are all entrepreneurs. They do not have the education, as we know it. They are not equipped with management skills. But they have the courage to set up their business and be their own bosses.

The time to take risks is now, when you are young. You have the time; you have the flexibility; you have the strength. What is stopping you? Why do you have the fear of failure? So what if you fail at first? When you started walking, didn’t you fall a few times? When your first learnt to ride on a bicycle didn’t you fall off and scrape your knees? Did that scare you?

Take your life in your hands. Shape your destiny. Steer your future the way you want it.

Take the risk. Become an entrepreneur.

Contributed By : Sidhartha Mohanty (Class of 2005, IBS Ahmedabad).