10 reasons you should never get a job.

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I quite enjoyed this list. The guy makes some excellent points. I'm looking forward to the time I've accumulated enough money, knowledge, and skills to make a go of some entrepreneurial plans. All in due time... but in the meantime, here's a little inspiration for all of us:

http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics. ... get-a-job/

Discuss. What was your favourite part of this list? I know what mine is - the reminder to decouple your sense of value from your time.

All of those are good points....

Here is the obvious counterpoint....

Being able to make money 24/7 often means you START with considerable money in your hands. Any venture MUST be capitalized. If you can't do it, you must find lenders/investors, and then you really must turn a profit.

Profit doesn't happen without a lot of work on YOUR part. Most self-employed people put in more time and effort than any "wage slave" does, and all at the risk of losing what they've invested without seeing a dime.

There is no such thing as an income-generating scheme that has no risk or is 100% guaranteed to work. A regular job can be lost, but by law, you must be paid for the time you put in.

For someone with autism, it's even harder to be self-employed. Much of making money is being able to market your product or service. If you don't want to eat up your income with advertising or a hired gun to do the selling for you, then you must sell the product/service yourself. This is something NTs can have problems with.

So, either way, there is no easy way in this world. Just different options.

I second that, while entrepreneurship is a wonderful thing, it's hard to start a business without SOME capital.

You can get that capital from all kinds of places-- with the simplest being a 12-year-old who talks his/her parents into buying or lending some tools so s/he can start a bicycle repair business and the most complex being a 25-year-old (just to toss out a random number) who convinces investors to contribute thousands or millions to start up a business-- but you have to get capital somehow. Whether that's pooling resources with friends (which still have to be earned), taking out a loan, gathering investors, or taking the chance of a lifetime with Mom's life insurance money, you have to be able to buy materials and get word out.

It is also a HUGE amount of work. People sell businesses to reap the entire profit; people also sell businesses because the workload has become life-consuming. My best friend's dad growing up ran a small appliance-repair business; it was a case of the cobbler's children going barefoot. He spent 16-hour days fixing other people's washers and dryers while his wife agitated the family's laundry in the bathtub with her feet, wrung it out by hand, and hung it on the line...

...and speaking of my best friend's dad, his wife got fed up not only with doing laundry in the tub but also with praying that the car would run long enough to get to the food pantry so she could put something on the table. It wasn't because he was shiftless-- the man worked like a dog. It wasn't because he drank it, or gambled it away, or spent it on women and toys. He didn't do any of those things-- the worst thing he did was fix the fridge even when the client couldn't pay, because he knew all too well what poverty was. It's a predatory environment in business in America today-- even people who are bloody good at what they do, and have a great head for business, have businesses fail. If that's not a description of you, the odds of failure go up to around 80 to 90 percent.

If you're not organized, and a cautiously confident person who can assess the risks and then take worthwhile ones, and a self-starter, and either good at talking to people, acquainted with someone who is, so damn good at what you do that not being a good people person doesn't matter, or working with a group of people who don't care (see Aspies who make a great success as engineers or something similar; see also John Elder Robison and similar), chances are it's not goifng to work too well for you.

Even if you ARE good at those things, it takes a few false starts and failures to get one to work. READ Look Me In the Eye and Be Different, and SEE how many times even golden children like JER fell on their faces before something actually took off and flew. He was a feral Aspie with 57,000 chances to land on his kiester while said kiester was still close to the ground.

You CAN make a good living-- even a great living-- as an entrepreneur. You can also make a good living-- even a great living-- by going to work for someone else and letting them handle finding the clients, getting the contracts, making the big decisions, and managing the risk. It depends on your preferences, your personality, your skill set, et cetera et cetera. One isn't always good, and the other isn't always bad.

BOTH of them require you to work hard, think carefully, and live below-- not above, and not even at, but BELOW-- your means. All things that require discipline and aren't always fun. Especially in a culture like this one, that equates success with stuff and encourages you to always want bigger, better, newer, faster, and more (hey, all those people who started businesses have to SELL STUFF to stay in business).

Final point-- to quote a cliché, you can't run a village if you've got a bunch of chiefs and no Indians. Even an entrepreneurial start-up, if it becomes highly successful, needs employees eventually. AKA people who "get a job." Not a whole lot gets done if everyone is in charge and no one is taking orders from someone else.

My friend's folks?? It turned out all right. Her mother got mad, bucked the church (they were extremely conservative Christians, of the stripe that held that a married woman should not work outside the home), and went to nursing school. As of a year ago, she was still enjoying work (as much as anyone enjoys work-- if it were all pleasure, they'd call it play) as a home health nurse. Her dad failed at a few more start-ups and finally took a job as an employee of a major appliance company. At which job he made more money, worked fewer hours, and stopped having to load refrigerators into and out of a pickup truck all my himself.

There is, of course, a third alternative before accepting a life on the dole-- self-reliance, also known as producing the vast majority of what you need, also known as living at a subsistence level and liking it. That, also, works for some and not for others, and probably only works well if not everyone does it (frankly, if everyone liked it and it worked well when everyone did it, we would have rejected enough of the Industrial Revolution that it would have stopped with the steam locomotive, the mechanical thresher, and the cotton gin). If everyone did it, we wouldn't have progress-- and even a Luddite like me (who would probably be a self-reliant subsistence farmer if I didn't love someone who would hate that life) has to admit that progress can only go forward if a sizable percentage of the population wants it and embraces it.

Subsistence-level self-reliance is, of course, another post. Read The Good Life, or Radical Homemakers, or one of Kelly Coyne and Eric Knutzen's books. Or pick up a few copies of Backwoods Home or The Mother Earth News, and save yourself a rambling sermon from yours truly.

Being able to make money 24/7 means you've found a way to generate passive income by providing value for it vs. trading your time for money. Often, yes, but not always - point in case, the website the article is on was created for $9.

Again, the point of passive income is not to spend all of your time and effort on working for money.

Of course there's no such thing as risk free. Take calculated risks. Mitigate them as best you can. But obviously some risk tolerance is required. As the article points out, having a job puts risking ALL of your income in the faith that you won't lose your job. That's risky.

Significant autism symptoms would certainly hinder one's ability to run a business. I've managed to minimize my symptoms and have since been back to work (job) & accumulating capital I intend to eventually use for business purposes. In the meantime, I'm using it to invest in stocks and it's making me money while I sleep.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

You're making the mistake of assuming that someone has to start a business and work it with all of their time in order to make money. The point of the article was to demonstrate that passive income streams can be created so that you don't have to trade your time for money.

I've saved some capital by working at jobs. I'm currently investing it to make more money with it. I'll continue to work jobs in order to build the skills and knowledge I need. Then I'll launch the business I want to in stages. It'll require a LOT of time and energy to get started. But then once it is going, if I choose to I can hire others and delegate tasks and not have to be present working with my own time and efforts in order to make money. It will take time to build to this point, but I don't intend on working my hands to the bone until I retire.

A job is a better option whenever you can make more money at a job than you can generate on your own, for sure. But once I have amassed the experience I need to confidently do my own thing, why would I work to make someone else rich when I can charge the full rate for the value I create myself? For me, personally, I'll end up making that leap of faith (again) because I see it as a better, more lucrative, way to spend my time and efforts. Others, like my father, are the slow and steady paycheque types - very risk averse. Thing is, if I make the jump into the business plan I have and then fall flat on my face with a catastrophic failure.. so what? I can always get a job, trade my time for money, and make it day to day like everyone else. If I don't try it, I'll always wonder if I could have done something much bigger, better, and more fulfilling with my life's work, education, and ideas. I'd rather save up the capital and then bet it all on Me, AND lose, than never have given it the proper shot it deserves.

It would be nice to also come up with other passive income streams. Who knows, maybe someday I'll be a landlord. Or maybe some other income stream will present itself. Or several.

That is also me-- I'd make a terrible entrepreneur. Idealism (what bit my friend's dad) and lacking time management skills would bite me every time, and risk aversion would probably rob me of whatever pleasure I'd take in being my own boss, setting (some of) my own terms, and enjoying leisure time after I'd put in the work to generate a passive income stream.

I can remember fantasizing about something like Heelys as a kid, roller skating around with a pair of Keds tied to my belt loop and wishing I had a pair of skates with fold-up wheels. Think of it?? Absolutely. Risk repeated failures to attempt to design, build, and market it?? No way. Realize that, if I wanted such a thing, other kids probably did too?? 180 degrees of "Uh, no." I figured that, if I wanted it, it was probably a really stupid idea.

You might be able to set something-- say investments, or real estate, or royalties on writings or inventions-- up to generate a passive income stream. Doing the work to get it there might even be a pleasurable labor of love (especially for a keen autistic working on a fascination). But getting it there is still a LABOR. I'd rather than nobody get the idea that there is a path (other than maybe being the beloved heir of a multimillionaire) that leads to wealth without work (and even the beloved heir of a multimillionaire has to put in the work of using the inheritance intelligently and cautiously, or s/he will sooner or later find that the last penny has been spent).

A couple years ago I thought I'd never have the executive brain functions to pull off starting and running my own business again. Although, I thought I could simply hire others to perform certain functions that I couldn't - not that I could never start a business again. My symptoms are now minimal and I know I can do it better than I was ever able to before and hiring others for things like that is no longer a necessity. It may help to have additional expertise, for sure, but I can do things myself decently well now. I'm looking forward to eventually being able to actually apply my business education to my own business vs. just daydreaming about it.

Risk aversion.. nah, that's not me. I've jumped into business partnerships in the past.. highly risky. They didn't work out. But I'm still going to try again. I'm also the polar opposite to my father when it comes to sports and things, too. He would never go participate in any sports with us (i.e. skiing/snowboarding) because if he got hurt he couldn't work and earn his paycheque to support a wife, 4 kids, and a mortgage. Meanwhile I've snowboarded, mountain biked, kite boarded, hiked mountains, gotten injured and healed up and gone back for more - and still doing fun stuff like that. Went river rafting a few weeks ago. About to get back to kiteboarding this Summer soon.

Of course I, or anyone, can set something up to generate passive income. It's not completely passive, but I've made some money trading stocks the last couple months. Yes it's required some time, reading, research, decision making etc but I've made decent money for that time invested compared to wages - especially on some trades.

But yes, to create something that generates truly passive income is going to require labour time to get it going.. but it's a one time setup thing, then it generates income after that.

You seem to have missed the point that value is not coupled with time. One merely has to provide value for money, not their time. That's why there are MANY people on this earth who are millionaires (or wealthier) because they've figured out how to provide value in exchange for money vs. trading their time for it. That's the trick to getting rich. It doesn't necessarily have to require hard work, but rather smart ideas and decision making, the right timing etc. People can sell an idea and become very wealthy. It doesn't necessarily have to take them a lot of time to do those things.