To those full time employees, don’t get me wrong here. I don’t mean that you should tender your resignation soon.

By all means, continue to work and continue to give your top performance for the company. What I mean is that, while you’re busy and consistently producing your best effort, pleasing your boss and making your company richer and richer, you should seriously start considering minding your own business right now, if you have not done so.

In other words, find other ways to give you income in addition to your full time job. And this can be achieved via doing part time or freelance jobs, involve in small scale investments (legal!), or any other job according to your preferred work schedule.

Here are 5 reasons why you need to do so:

1. You may own the profession but you don’t own the company.

By now you already know that job security is a myth. You would’ve probably heard Narayana Murthy’s advice (founder of Infosys) to “love your job but never fall in love with your company.”

It is a brave but fair statement from someone who comes from the employer side. Narayana is right. We can brag about how much we love our company, but we may forgot that we’re only about 1 paycheck away from losing our job. There might be a lot of emotional attachment between you and the company that you even bring your home planted trees to your office to show your love, but when it comes to financial decision for a company, there’s no emotion involved.

Carolyn Kepcher was a trusted hand right person for Donald Trump in his Apprentice show until she herself was given the boot. People were saying that Carolyn was indispensable to the Trump Organization. They were wrong. Another classic example is Steve Jobs, who was fired, 10 years after building the Apple company from a 2-person company to a US3 billion organization.

Steve Jobs started the Apple company at his parents’ garage at the age of 20 and in 10 years he developed Apple to become one of the fastest growing companies in America and soon went for public listing. A year after Apple’s finest creation, Macintosh, was unveiled, he fell out with one of his own top executives they hired and the Board of Directors decided to remove Steve from Apple. How can you be fired from a company that you started on your own?

Even though many years later he was approached by Apple and eventually made the CEO, I do not think he will ever forget the betrayal.

2. To find the life time opportunity, you need to look, and not wait for it.

Rather than playing a waiting game, go play seek and find game. The opportunity is there waiting to be found. Only those who seek for it will find it. When you find it, you are a free man. You can now quit your day job and go for world tour or live in Venice. Sometimes, the opportunity is there in front of our eyes but we fail to realize it. It happens so often that it takes some immigrants, sometimes illegal ones, from other countries to capitalize it. This is a syndrome called ‘we look but we fail to see’. In his book The Silent Millionaire, author Chef Li quoted an example of an illegal immigrant, by the name of Diyono Santoso, who came to Malaysia from Indonesia via boat and had to swim many miles before reaching the shore.

While wondering around in Kuala Lumpur looking for jobs, he noticed that people would not hesitate to part with one dollar to buy something. He thought, if that’s the case, then he needed to find something cheap to sell. Since making cendol is the only thing he could do, he decided sell cendol for a dollar. He got 300 dollars on his first day of business. Realizing its potential, Diyono opened another stall, one after another, managed by other people. In the end, he opened 7 different stalls and the 7 stalls gave him a handsome income of 20 thousand dollars. Now can someone tell me how long do you need to work to get that kind of salary?

3. Expand your network

By doing something which is out of your current line and job scope, your rate of networking growth will be much faster. You will be meeting different sets of people who share a lot of common traits with you.

The good thing about meeting people who share common things with us is that, getting along with them is a breeze and becomes a very natural process. The thinkings are of the same wavelength.

Apart from meeting new friends, you will also be surprised to see some of those you meet along the way are your old friends and buddies who have been out of touch with you for so long.

4. Make more money

The market out there is unfair. It includes the employment market, the industrial market and the consumer market. A rise in a petrol price will be followed by rises of almost any other product prices. When the last time the government announced the new salary rate for the public servant, do you remember what happened? Correct, the price for almost all household products increase.

Furthermore, the increase in salary is always one step behind the increase of the standard of living and the inflation. Actually we realize this. In fact, we probably involve in most of the so-called ‘big talks’ in coffee houses. But talks always remain talks and we remain inside the rat race. And remember, Mr Tax Guy is not a nice person either. As an employee, the bigger your income, the bigger your tax bracket is. Our portions are taken without us even seeing the money.

So it is always nice if we can come out with something that can give us some extra money.

I have a number of Chinese friends, who worked together with me many years ago, who were busy both as employees and as businessmen. While their day time was spent with them busy with the office work load, their free time was filled with increasing their additional income. They involved in the trading business, property investment, stocks and bonds and so on. One of them even became a loan shark (to which we advised him to chose other venture instead)!

The problem with being an employee is that, your income varies almost linearly with your effort. That means, no matter how hard you work, you get the same income every month. While being in the business allows you to tweak your work and strategy and the result you see can be tremendous. The income you get as a result of you spending a lot of time and effort in marketing your products can simply hit the roof.

5. Learn to give back to community

Having more money give us opportunity to give something back to the community. Sometimes, we complain that our income is too meager that we need every penny of it to spend. We also complain that we are not giving enough to the community because we only have little left after spending most of our hard earned income.

When our business grows, we also provide opportunities for other people as well. The opportunities can be in the form of business or employment. How noble is that. They have been many stories of people who were once drop-outs and came from the poor rank of the society that eventually provide jobs to graduates like us. Time for a pay back.

[Image credit: People's Daily Online]

Technorati Tags: freelance, Going entrepreneur, job

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1. “The Boss”
2. Finding Your Ideal Work Right At Home
3. No Minimum Wage in Malaysia, Yet
4. 20 Myths of Entrepreneurship
5. You are Closer to Your Dream, Yet…