5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Have A Cushion Before You Quit Your Job
Once upon a time, I wrote a post about the monetary benefits of having a financial cushion. And I agree with myself. From a purely money standpoint, you’re an idiot if you don’t have at least something tucked away for when all your clients die of smallpox.
But that’s the money part of it. What about business wise? As in, business growth-wise? From that angle, I don’t know if it’s the best idea. Here’s why.
1. Not having a cushion lights a fire under your ass. From E-myth to StomperNet and everyone in between advises against analysis paralysis — what’s the absolute BEST typeface to use on the logo? Should we go with blue or green? Does this job contribute to my future business goals?
When you have no cushion, there’s no time for that shit. That freelance gig you’re dilly-dallying about bidding on? That’s tomorrow night’s dinner.
2. You’re forced to get creative. If you want to market yourself — and since you don’t have a cushion, marketing yourself would be a very good idea indeed — you have to actually think. Any idiot can buy a bunch of ads to get people to buy their service or check out their blog or order their book. But that’s not where the good stuff comes from.
When you have no money, you have to hustle. Your sole source of advertising might be the shirts you just had printed for fifty bucks. You might have to wear your cousin’s bunny suit and stand outside the radio station holding a sign that pleads “Ask me what I do!” Hell, you might even have to get off your ass and talk to some real, live people and ask them for business.
3. You’re going to learn to focus. When you have a cushy start-up loan or a quadzillion months of savings in the bank, it’s awful easy to get distracted. I mean, look at all there is to do out there! Flickr alone could kill a week.
But when you need work or exposure or sales, you focus like a laser. (Yes, Mom. A laser. In air quotes. From Austin Powers.)
When you need a check in the mail sooner rather than later, checking a blog to see if anybody responded to your witty and insightful comment doesn’t exactly seem like the most efficient use of your time.
4. You don’t lose the fire. When you’re first starting out, you’re burning to succeed. All you want is to get your hands in there and do it. You want to print those goddamn t-shirts by hand if you have to. Hanging around in your cubicle for 19 months until you feel you have enough start-up capital is soul-sucking. Your fire goes.
If your fire goes, soon enough those hand printed t-shirts don’t seem like such a good idea anymore and you’re signing the line for your fifth one percent cost-of-living raise in a row.
5. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll succeed. There’s a great saying I love:
“The best time to plant a tree was forty years ago. The second best time is today.”
These are comforting words today because you don’t have a tree. Don’t cry over lost tree planting opportunities, I always say. (OK, no, I don’t.) But do you think it would have been good advice forty years ago? Would you have said, “Well, maybe now’s not the perfect time. I’ll do it when I retire”? Not if you wanted the tree, you wouldn’t have.
I have no doubt there are countless thriving businesses run by entrepreneurs who waited till the time is right, and I applaud them. I don’t know much about them, though. I don’t know much about them because they’re not making the front page of Fast Company. They don’t tend to launch on Tech Crunch.
The ones I know about, the ones with buzz and energy and excitement and soul, they’re the ones who took the plunge and sold their stereo to pay for a bunny suit.
“When you need a check in the mail sooner rather than later, checking a blog to see if anybody responded to your witty and insightful comment doesn’t exactly seem like the most efficient use of your time.”
Ouch. It’s so true.
This sounds like the advice my mother always gave me about having a child– the time will never be “perfect,” things will never be set up exactly just so, so quit yer damn waffling!
Are you spying on me?? I was JUST looking at “Easy at-home screen-printing” sites! (If they’re one color, it should be fairly easy, right??)
Good advice - even if you can’t just quit (hey, I have four kids and a wife, so if I just quit, I’d probably have a very unhappy wife, who’d soon not be my wife…)
–> *pretend* that you have to quit, or you got fired. Hey, it’s a useful thought exercise.
Maybe not as effective as really just doing it, but probably a damned close second.
Example:
I was fed up at work several weeks back. I thought to myself, what if I had just quit, what would I do?
So, I made a phone call, and got a phone interview within a day. Nothing came of it (not yet - the industry I’m in is notoriously slow) - but, it was encouraging.
So encouraging that I’m going to play that game all this week. I’m on vacation and damned if I’m just going to sit back and play GTA…
-Brett
I LOVE your blog. And this article is so right on the money. Although stress isn’t always healthy, people tend to perform best when under stress. You become much more creative when the roof over your head depends on you getting out there and making moves toward building your business. Thanks for the inspiration…I needed that.
I had been growling about my job after my first couple of weeks there and 2.5 years later I found myself with tickets to accompany my husband on a week-long trip to Nova Scotia. I didn’t have enough paid leave so I quit. :)
Ultimately, I found that I didn’t really need a good reason or timing, I just needed to get the hell out of there.
My husband told me (at first) all he wanted me to do was make enough to pay my health insurance since I had lost my free coverage. Thankfully, I’m pulling in more than that now.
Well said! The vision of William Wallace just flashed through my head, after he gave the valiant speach and all of the men were rushing to the attack. Makes me glad I gave myself a month to launch!
Ferchrissakes don’t quit and then start! Start first and then quit. I am living proof you can get by on 5 hours of sleep a night in a non-baby situation. You’ll reach a point where you realize the time you’re spending at your “job” is holding you back and hurting your real money-making. That’s when you quit.
I agree with Michael.
Full disclosure: I had been freelancing for several years before I quit my dead-end job. My side work was much more interesting and frankly, I wanted to get some of my evenings back.
If I had a quarter for every time I hear someone tell me they ‘really should’ leave and do their own thing… or some version of same. I heard once that you shouldn’t ’should’ all over yourself all the time!
The order of events will unfold uniquely for everyone but the wisdom principal that you articulated perfectly Naomi, holds true in every case. Thx.
Nike said it best….Just do it! Have a plan of course….just don’t wait for the perfect time, because it will never, ever come. People are very good at looking for reasons not to succeed and using that to hide behind.
“You have to make allowances for differences in temperament and disposition. Not everybody is the same…” Jane Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (BBC).
Unlike Mr. Martine, I would never shame anyone for not being able to survive on 5 hours of sleep. Shaving sleep that severely as a long-term lifestyle management policy is foolhardy. I can and have done it. I have even managed for several weeks on 3 hours of sleep a night, and sometimes that was one hour slots at 8 hour intervals. That should be reserved for emergencies not to make day to day life work out.
Sleep deprivation exacts a very costly toll over a person’s life and overall health, longevity, and life satisfaction. Life is more that just doing, it is first of all about BEING. In her book “Basic Black” Cathie Black wrote that “you work for what you go home to at the end of the day.” One of those things should be a nice comfy bed and permission to crawl into it at a reasonable hour and let go of life for 6-8 hours. And don’t forget that the brain does a ton of work while the body is in the suspended animation of deep REM sleep that it cannot otherwise accomplish.
I thought the point of the post was about courage and motivation not how little sleep life can be squeezed by on. Of course some of us have motivation but no legs to stand on.
Okay, I have been reading your blogs for a few weeks after stumbling upon your site while researching for starting my business. Yes, I was a lurker. First off, let me say that in the sea of advice that is available on the internet, you are one of the very few people that can make me laugh hard enough to wake my baby, but also gives me inspiration for my business.
With this post, it really hit home. I lost my job a month before my daughter was born, after planning on returning to work part time after a month long maternity leave. After licking my wounds for a couple of weeks I got a wild hair up my ass and decided to go with my dream of starting my own administrative support company and working from home. (Without consulting my husband first.) Not having a big financial cushion, and no real time to plan for success, I look at it as my time to sink or swim as I really have no option for failure.
Another big motivator is looking at my kids big toothless grin while she drools all over herself. Who wouldn’t want to work with that over annoying co-workers!
Measure the chain before you tease the dog.
LK
LOL, I have to agree with Michael… “Start first and then quit. I am living proof you can get by on 5 hours of sleep a night in a non-baby situation.”
Except that I’m living proof that you can get by on 5 hours of sleep a night IN a baby (toddler) situation, LOL.
I’ve always been a planner, and I had to take the “safe” route of having the cushion before taking the leap. However Naomi’s points are all very good - nothing like not knowing where tomorrow’s dinner will come from to light a fire under your arse. ;)
I took Naomi’s advice from an interview I read on Akemi’s site - “Jump and the net will appear” - it’s this advice that helped me take the leap before my cushion was as large as I would have liked. So I’m probably at an inbetween point…. I know where tomorrow night’s dinner is coming from, but I definitely have a light under me working for next month’s dinner. ;)
“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” ~ George S. Patton.
PS - 3 kids. 5-6 hrs a sleep each night (even when they were screaming babies). I have plenty of energy and no health issues. You just have to eat/drink right, exercise, and focus on the right things - it ain’t easy, but if you can stick to the self-dicipline, it’s totally doable.
There should be a support group for entrepreneurs, like an Entrepreneurs Anonymous!
Me: Hi, my name is Vicky and I’m an entrepreneur.
Group: Hi Vicky.
Me: It’s been 2 full hours since I last read a blog on my iGoogle. I’m an entrepreneur with a FT job to support my “ambitions.” I don’t sleep. I don’t execute because I’m waiting for every little detail to be perfect.
(jk)
But seriously, I find it fascinating how certain articles pop up in my iGoogle page just at the time when I need to hear that advice. I’ve been told by several people that I need to take the plunge b/c I have a cushion that keeps me from getting where I want to be. It’s just amazing how debilitating fear can be. I have no kids. My cost of living is not significantly high. I’ve made the plunge before actually but I wasn’t ready and I see now that I wasn’t ready back then. But I guess starting your business is a little bit like having kids. Even with all the preparation, you’re still not 100% ready. You just have to do it and trust that you can do it.
I found out @ this article thru Twitter and it spoke to me. Even though I’ve taken huge leaps of faith before (try quitting a six figure career to pursue a spkeaking career), this was a reminder that its easy to get complacent. Its time to light a fire under my arse again!
Great advice. I know so many people around me who never get started because they are so afraid they haven’t figured everything out. I don’t know if I’d be so confident if my husband didn’t have a normal full time job to allow me to figure out a freelance lifestyle, but I’m super motivated, and prideful, and I don’t want him to bear the weight of all our financial needs.
The ridiculousness of the private-equity funded start-up is that they are actually asked to use up their cash, quickly. This is because according to financial equations, their cash burn rate in the first months/year is what tells analysts they are spending on capital investment, which is a good sign. However, the second half of the equation is that the cash burn rate doesn’t tell the whole picture. If your cash burn is just that, burning, and no more cash is coming in the door, you are F*cked. So, a lot of times, investors don’t notice you are crashing and burning until the last flame is smoldering.
Um. All that means is Naomi is right.
@ Susan — I doubt many of us could have said that better ourselves. Welcome, and good luck.
@ MM and Dave — First of all, I think you guys are super awesome and I have a boatload of respect for what you’re doing.
Second, I think it works for you guys, and for a lot of other people, but not for everyone.
In your examples, you are either the sole or main source of income in your household, and your households include several people — including children. (”Children”, in this capacity, is synonymous with “ungrateful, money-sucking pits”.)
A lot of people aren’t in those situations, though, and many don’t have the same cost of living. The risk isn’t so great for them.
And for me, anyway, and others too, just because I can get by on 5 hours of sleep a night, doesn’t mean I want to.
Although I really, really, really love that Patton quote.
I must be the biggest retard on this blog. I am a big time leaper. I quit my job with two kids 4 and 5 and a husband that is on 100% commission. Oh hell….he’s a used car salesman allright? And yes…he has a gold pinkie ring (shut up). Sometimes he makes a paycheck and sometimes not so much. But lighting a fire under my ass is what I personally need otherwise I just go about my life until 10 years later a man at my work hangs himself from one of those fake ceiling tiles (true story) and wakes me up to what the hell I am doing at a soul sucking company (that someone would rather hang themselves than go to work for them another day)!
I realize everyone is not as imbalanced as I am I mean I had no savings, maxed out credit cards, two kids to feed and a gold pinkie ring to keep shiny! So I did what any insane person who doesn’t mind living in a refrigerator box would do - quit my job! And it’s fucking awesome! And no….I don’t fart around anymore but get to my marketing straightaway….and yes I have an extra refrigerator box in my garage just in case.
I see this a lot Naomi, and couldn’t agree more. Way too often people use the excuse that they ‘can’t quit‘ to hide the fact that they’re scared silly.
I’ve taken the plunge at least 2 or 3 times in my life, and know that feeling when you think ‘Bloody hell, I’m in the shit now.‘ and get moving.
Being in those situations forces you bring out the best of you and allows you to see what you’re really made of, and that’s worth it’s weight in gold.
It’s okay to be scared silly - it’s sign that something matters to you. If it comes with some excitement too then you’re onto something.
I love this post! I jumped off my own cliff, and that’s why I think my new business succeeded. It HAD to succeed. And I always try to do something impossible before I have the chance to convince myself that it IS impossible.
The whole “I can’t quit” thing bothers me sometimes. There was a story in a Po Bronson book (I forget which one) that chronicled people who had made major life changes. I remember one story where the person had moved to another country. Their friend was reportedly jealous that they were able to “give it all up” and move to start a new life in a new country. When asked why the friend didn’t do the same, they responded “I’d love to, but I just bought a new couch.”
I pride myself on my sense of logic, but I really can’t see what a new couch has to do with anything. There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to move to a foreign country, but don’t pretend you can’t go because you just bought a new couch. If you find yourself coming up with these kind of excuses, perhaps you need to re-examine what you think you want.
This is a great piece! I have just discovered it on Stumble Upon and shall stumble it also. You really learn to cut out the BS when you are working to eat or starve - no cushion- a bit like the pace on The Apprentice. It’s interesting to see what can be achieved each show by working at it frenetically to save their skins. (give or take some production assistance).
You might be interested in this article as motivation to cut the 9-5 chains once and for all! I found it very inspiring.
http://www.posts.trea.org.uk/working9to5part2.html
[...] recently read a post from Ittybiz that made me think about my own career. 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Have A Cushion Before You Quit Your Job. I am currently working at a job that’s not my perfect fit, but I still get a lot out of the [...]
[...] the crowd. Many small businesses don’t have a financial cushion, and we hear repeatedly that not being ready to finance several months of losses (or more) is why [...]
The only danger of taking away the cushion is burning yourself out. We nearly killed ourselves starting our own online business, but now my wife quit her job and can take care of our kids full time!. We’ve put together a blog about our story. Stop on by if you have the time.
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