Employee vs Employer Mindset

I have been reading some interesting stuff recently about the difference in mindset of a salaried employee vs someone who might have started their own business and employs others.

The main point that always seems to come up is the idea of leveraging your time vs others. For example, when you work as a salaried employee, you trade income for time. However, it is a limited resource - there is only so much time in any given day, so that is not scalable beyond a certain point. On the other hand, when you work for yourself, you can leverage other people's work, knowledge, time, and money. This far more scalable and we can see that this is how many of the millionaires/billionaires created their wealth. 

What are your thoughts on this? Have you thought of starting a side business to implement this way of thinking? 

5 Comments
 

Growing up in a business family, I chose to work for someone else because while the employer can leverage other people’s skill sets and time, he/she is still working nonstop and takes on a tremendous amount of risk and stress. That said, I used to think not wanting this life style makes me a failure but I know I just won’t be happy living the way my parents do.

Knowing what you want is important.

 

I agree with this, I feel a lot of people want to go off on their own without realizing the costs of doing so - stress and risk being the big ones. No shame in knowing that you don’t want to take on that risk and stress and would rather have well paying, steady job.
An uncle of mine did well in the restaurant business before losing it all and the stress nearly killed him. He now works for a large corporation. He does have plans to go out on his own again in the near future. Like you said, knowing what you want is important and for him it must be owning his own business. 

 

Yeah and to add to that, I really wish I got more meaningful memories with my family.

We’re not estranged or anything, but compared to my spouse’s family, my family is much less involved with each other’s daily life and our conversation generally evolves around business and work. While I enjoy it, I wouldn’t have minded watching movies or playing games either.

 

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