From April 2nd, when you truly work for yourself, you won't have hobbies, you won't have weekends, and you won't have vacations, but you won't have work either. This is the paradox of working for yourself, which every entrepreneur or every self-employed person is familiar with, which is that when you start working for yourself, you basically sacrifice this work-life balance thing. You sacrifice this work-life distinction.
There's no more nine to five. There's no more office. There's no one who's telling you what to do. There's no playbook to follow. At the same time, there's nothing to turn off. You can't turn it off. You are the business. You are the product. You are the work. You are the entity. And you care.
If you're doing something that's truly yours, you care very deeply. So you can't turn it off. And that's the curse of the entrepreneur. But the benefit of the entrepreneur is that if you're doing it right, if you're doing it for the right reasons or the right people in the right way.
And if you can set aside the stress of not hitting your goals, which is real and hard to set aside, then it doesn't feel like work. And that's when you're most productive. You're basically only measured on your output and you're only held up to the bar that you raised for yourself. So it can be extremely exhilarating and freeing. And this is why I said a long time ago that a taste of freedom can make you unemployable. And so this is exactly that taste of freedom.
It makes you unemployable in the classic sense of nine to five and following the playbook and having a boss. But once you have broken out of that, once you've walked the tightrope without a net, without a boss, without a job.
And by the way, this can even happen in startups, in a small team where you're just very self-motivated. You get what look like huge negatives to the average person, that you don't have weekends, you don't have vacations, and you don't have time off, you don't have work-life balance. At the same time, when you are working, it doesn't feel like work. It's something that you're highly motivated to do, and that's the reward. And net-net.
I do think this is a one-way door. I think once people experience working on something that they care about with people that they really like, in a way they're self-motivated. They're unemployable. They can't go back to a normal job with a manager and a boss and check-ins and nine to five and show up this day, this week, sit in this desk, commute at this time. I think there's a hidden meaning in the tweet too, which I'm guessing is intentional.
It starts off with when you truly work for yourself, which I'm guessing most people are going to take that to mean you're your own boss. But the other way that I read it is that you are working for... yourself so your labor is in expression of who and what you are it's self-expression and that's not an easy thing to figure out