Freedom is Found in Your 5–9, Not Your 9–5.
What the recent tech lay-offs taught me about my creative side hustle
Photo by Thomas Franke on Unsplash
Deciding to write online in 2019 was the best decision I ever made.
Did I make a million dollars?
Nope.
I probably lost money. LOL
During my first month on Medium, I barely made a dollar, my articles received less than 100 views and my writing was terrible
(and probably still is, tbh).
But making that first dollar rewired my brain.
It’s like learning to ride a bike without the training wheels.
You feel liberated, free to explore the world, unencumbered by the constraints of the world.
That’s the beauty of writing. Not the achievement or glory.
But the internal transformation.
Achievements can be taken away, but transformation lasts forever.
Long story short? Cheat on your 9–5 with your 5–9.
Here’s why.
You are replaceable in your 9–5, but irreplaceable in your 5–9.
No one is irreplaceable in their job. No one.
Look at the recent tech layoffs.
One former Google employee woke up to realize she couldn’t access any of her emails or work platforms.
She documented the whole process on Tik Tok (the original video seems to have been deleted).
She didn’t get any reason why, no instruction for what she should do, or any support to find her next role.
Laid-off, soz. Good luck finding your next job. Bye.
You are one bad boss, or poor ‘macroeconomic conditions’ away from losing everything you worked hard for.
Don’t be fooled by nice words and perks. You are a line on a spreadsheet until the maths doesn’t add up. Nothing more. When push comes to shove, your line might be next to go.
Harsh? Yep. But it’s true.
Whether you want to admit it or not, if you died tomorrow, your 9–5 will find another warm body to fill your spot within a week.
After a few months, people will forget you even worked there.
Who’s Michael again??
But what you build in your 5–9 is completely you. You are irreplaceable. There is a nice (or daunting?) feeling knowing that your side hustle lives and dies with you.
You have no ownership in your 9–5, but you have ultimate ownership in 5–9
I spent almost six years at my previous job building up several pipelines of work to multiple six figures.
At one stage, I was even bringing in 50% of the work we had won.
When I decided to leave, I realized I owned none of it. It was a sobering realization.
All the resources, relationships, and revenue were rented. I would have to start over again.
Luckily, I had been posting regularly on LinkedIn for years and had built up a small email list and following that I owned.
I could quickly find freelance opportunities to transition into my own consulting business.
Without this life raft, I would have been left up sheets creek without a paddle.
It was like going through a divorce and losing the house, car, and pets.
I realized at my various jobs is I never would become an owner, which means I’m always at someone else’s mercy and vulnerable to recessions, bosses, layoffs, and pay cuts.
Everything you create in your 5–9 you own.
Every article I’ve posted on Medium are tiny digital assets that work for me even when I sleep. I repost the articles on my own website. No one can take that away from me.
I can reuse, repurpose and reformat them into new digital assets.
Ownership is not something, it’s everything.
You have no leverage over your 9–5, but you have the ultimate leverage in 5–9
When you build a successful 5–9 online, you are building leverage for yourself.
Once you’ve got leverage, you can use it to do whatever you like.
Want to work less? Great. You’ve got the leverage to do it.
Want to work more? That’s up to you too.
You decide how much effort and how big you want to grow.
No one tells me what I can or can’t write on Medium. No one sensors my work. I have complete freedom to follow my curiosity and interest.
Leverage gives you the ability to tell people to f*ck off and say no more often. When you have ‘f*ck off’ leverage, you become a nightmare to negotiate with.
With enough leverage, you can work from where ever you want, with whoever you want whenever you want.
You decide where you want to take your life.
You first build your leverage, and then you can build whatever else you want.
The 9–5 was specifically designed to take freedom away from you.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory.
Only an outdated model we haven’t yet grown out of.
The 9–5 was born during the industrial revolution when the majority of jobs were ones where we stood on a factory line cranking out widgets.
Every unit of your time could be broken down into tangible units of value.
But that’s not the case anymore with knowledge and creative work.
Input does not equal output, let alone quality.
Freedom in our work is not natural. It will not be given to you. You have to create the future you want for yourself. You have to be unreasonable and fight for it.
Cheat on your 9–5 with your 5–9, and create a love child of freedom.
Let your creative side hustle build the future you always wanted, but felt like you didn’t deserve.
You have one life. Make the most of it.
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