If you’ve been an employee for a while, you may have brainwashed yourself into believing that you have steady income stream security for as long as you’re occupied working for your employer.
This is a persistent deception. Employers in the marketplace can and often do make cuts in your income through a variety of techniques that you permit. They choose to end your income security real fast!
First, there is the obvious reduction of workload that happens most often during economic recessions. This reduction can take 2 direct forms: 1) fewer work hours or 2) the elimination of promised incentives.
If you’re an hourly employee, your employer can tell you to leave early or show up later to work, depending on available workload, so you get to earn less little by little.
Alternatively, if you’re salaried, you could work hard all year, staying overtime without additional compensation, believing that you’ll receive a bonus to make up for all that commitment, only later to learn that your employer will yield no bonuses for that year. So you get smacked with a total loss in one fell swoop. Nothing you can do about it except leave.
But there is more to work than your present financial compensation. There is the compensation that you can earn in the future if you’re advancing in your career today. And this is invisible compensation but just as real as VISA’s promise to pay your purchases when you swipe that credit card in your wallet.
The Cost of Relying on a Single Employer for a Steady Income Stream
If your career stagnates any time because the workload diminishes or the assignments become mundane and your skills are not improving, yet the job market is “soft” and you fear taking a leap to go elsewhere, then your future income security is on the line today.
You go home, an employer’s promise in hand. You wait for your employer’s situation to change. But what’s your situation?
You’re getting less money now or, day by day, you’re stagnant and reducing your future prospects for making better money. This waiting has a price.
In fact it is a cost to you. It’s known as opportunity cost.
You’re giving up something during that time of waiting. Whatever size that opportunity that you’re surrendering has, that is the income which you’re permitting your employer to keep you from getting just for waiting for your employer’s situation to change and promise to fulfill.
What kind of opportunities are we therefore talking about?
The main opportunity that you give up is working on buying yourself a new job — one that gives you a chance to stay productive working for more than just one current, troubled employer.
- You could be working on buying yourself future control over your income, by making yourself less dependent on 1 employer and 1 source of income.
- You could be working on buying yourself an opportunity to use skills that your employer finds of little if any use, but which 50 of your own customers can find crucial to their success.
- You could also be buying yourself the certainty of not getting dismissed without recourse because of an at-will employment situation.
So, don’t give up your control and income opportunity in exchange for what seems to be a steady income stream from your single employer. Why have only one employer to cover you when you could have 50?
The only income stream security that you can have is the one that won’t depend on having 1 employer alone secure it for you.
The truth is that you can start your own business in spite of all the barriers that may seem daunting at the onset, including all those local, state and federal governments regulations we all face.
Think of these barriers as hurdles along an obstacle course. And the race still goes to the swift!
Do not become discouraged to the point where you won’t even start to run, if you want more than a single steady income stream. Having your own business is far better than having nothing to call your own. Having multiple income streams to defend will empower you more than having nothing but one fickle employer to depend upon.
These are not mere fanciful platitudes. This is truth.
Economist Milton Friedman said:
The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way.
Bureaucracies do not invent anything. Bureaucracies don’t work to make themselves nimble. They simply slow down the progress of invention. So, don’t use them as an excuse to remain inert or doing pointless work inside a large corporation. Go start your own business now in spite of bureaucratic mandates placed upon you.
Run circles around them.
Force them to catch up to you.
Teach them what competition is all about.
Starve them of their lust for more of you without having to pay you everything that you’re worth.
Do not fear doing what is good. And it is good to come to depend on multiple steady income streams. Learn more by visiting my Facebook Business page for more material.