23. Don’t go “all in.” Get a job.

Having to go back to working a "normal job" means you've failed in your business? Oh hell no. We're thoroughly debunking that dastardly lie in this episode.  

Listen to learn more about:

• The unholy truth about who created "GO ALL IN" culture - and why it was never meant for you
• Why having a "normal job" is your unexpected secret weapon in business-building
• Why most people who have all the time and resources in the world to devote to their businesses actually -- surprisingly -- make the LEAST progress
• Practical strategies for managing your energy and time when you're building a business around other work

If you are seeking a job, or already have a job that supports you as you work on your business, this episode will help you to feel proud of yourself. Because your path is one of wisdom, self-respect, and sharp strategy. 

Transcript

Welcome to another episode of Liberatory Business. I'm your host, Simone Seol, and thank you so much for listening.

Now, I have three goals with this podcast episode. One, if you're on the fence about whether you should get a quote-unquote "normal job" while you're building your business, I want to give you the encouragement to absolutely do so and tell you why this is a really smart move.

Two, if you already took a job or two or three to support yourself while you're building your business, I want to affirm to you that you made the right choice and to encourage you on your path in a world that pretends like anything other than an instant online business success that entirely funds your life is a failure. That is a myth.

And lastly, I want to completely reframe having other work from something that you do when you're failing to something that you do when you're being smart and thinking strategically.

Because I know that if you're like many people in my community, you might relate to stories like: "Oh, I just couldn't get my business to be profitable enough, even though I've been working on it for five years. So I just had to go back to my job teaching at school." Or, "You know, my business was working, but the flow of clients just mysteriously dried up in the past couple of years, no matter how hard I worked at marketing. And so now I'm just driving Uber to support my family while I try to figure out what's going on."

When I hear these types of stories, there's often this weight of shame on their faces, like they messed something up, like they didn't do it right. It's as if having other work is visible proof of their inadequacy as entrepreneurs. But I want to challenge that idea because the idea that making a full living from your creative business is the ultimate key to fulfillment—that it's something that you need to be fulfilled, and that once you start your business, you should be able to get it profitable quickly if you do everything quote-unquote "right"—these are the very myths and lies that keep so many people feeling ashamed, stuck, confused and afraid to make decisions that are actually going to help them build stronger businesses.

Deconstructing the Core Belief

So let's start by deconstructing the core belief creating this tension in so many people: the idea that you should have one business, one professional identity that takes care of all of your financial needs. This idea is so common, it's like an assumption. It's like an unconscious thing that we all assume—that having one business, one professional identity that meets all of your needs is what we should all aspire to, and people who achieve that have it made.

It's so common and so accepted that we don't even recognize it as a pretty new ideology and one that's a complete myth. And this mythology was largely crafted by people who got incredibly wealthy from the dot-com boom and subsequent tech explosions right from the nineties and on.

So think about who was writing these business books, giving the TED Talks and creating hustle culture content in the 2000s and 2010s. It is predominantly people from privileged backgrounds, largely white men who had access to venture capital, education from elite universities, family safety nets that allowed them to take big risks. They champion the idea of one business, one professional identity, because all the padding of their social and financial privilege allowed them that luxury.

But for most people, the math isn't mathing, as the kids say. Nowadays, starting a business requires capital, yes, for the business, but also for you to survive while the business is not profitable yet. Most businesses take at least one to three years to become profitable, if they ever do. Actually, most online businesses take longer than one to three years, and the vast majority of people don't have enough savings to just cover their living expenses, let alone invest in their business for that period without any income. Like who has that much savings in their bank account? If you do, you're part of a very small, highly privileged minority.

And beyond just the financial reality, there's also the learning curve. Building a business requires skills that most people don't even have yet: sales, marketing, operations, customer service, financial management. You are essentially learning multiple jobs while trying to generate income from day one. And this isn't even considering whatever your craft is, whatever it is that you're selling, whether it's courses or services. When you start, you are probably just not as good as you're going to be later.

So you are trying to hone your services, make your products as good as they can be so that they're actually competitive in the market at the same time that you are having to learn all these business skills in real time. It's just a lot. So it is simply not realistic to not have a different source of income for the first one year, three years, five years, sometimes even more than that—the time that it takes for you to line up all these ducks in a row.

So those who championed this idea of one professional identity, one business applying all their needs, what they did is they turned this very specific historical moment—being in the right place at the right time during a massive technological and social shift—into a universal philosophy about work and self-worth. They sold that dream to countless people who were likely to fail at achieving financial self-sufficiency as entrepreneurs, because that path was rarely available in a short amount of time to anyone without enormous preexisting financial and social capital.

The Problem with Going "All In"

So here's what they don't tell you about the "go all in" approach. When your business is your only source of income, every decision becomes loaded with desperation. You are more likely to take bad clients or bad students because you can't afford to be selective. You make short-term decisions that hurt long-term growth because you need that money now. You're going to pivot too quickly when things get tough because you can't afford to wait and see if something's going to work. You underprice your services because you're scared of losing any opportunity, and the desperation shows up in your marketing, in your pricing, your client relationships.

People can sense when you need them more than they need you, and it changes the entire dynamic to something that just repels business. When every client conversation carries the weight of "I need this, or I can't pay rent," you are not operating from a position of strength. You are not operating from a place where you can access your creativity. You are operating from fear, and fear always makes you worse at business.

The Power of Financial Security

Now, let's talk about what happens when you don't buy into the myth and give yourself the gift of actually supporting yourself and your business while you are growing. When you have other income, you gain something that most entrepreneurs desperately lack and could benefit from, which is the power to make good decisions.

Financial security gives you negotiating power. You can say no to opportunities and clients that aren't a good fit. And by the way, bad fit clients, bad fit opportunities—massive drain of time, energy, self-confidence, if not money. So you can walk away from things that don't align with your values or your long-term goals. You can hold out for the right partnerships instead of jumping at whoever comes to you first.

It gives you time to build genuine human relationships without rushing to quote-unquote "monetize" every interaction, which you can just feel how stressful that is, how icky that feels, right? So that you can focus on creating real value, creating real trust. You can invest time in learning new skills, honing those skills, experimenting, building your reputation, and nurturing the community around you that's going to support your business for the long haul without the pressure of immediate financial returns.

And I cannot stress to you how critical this is: when failure doesn't mean financial disaster, you are free to try innovative approaches, test new ideas, pivot, push boundaries. This ability to take creative risk is maybe the number one most important thing when you are first building your business, and it is pretty much impossible when you're feeling financially pressured. The best business innovations come from people who have the security to be able to think long term, and I want you to be one of them.

Learning Through Different Work

But the advantages of supporting yourself financially in a different way goes deeper than strategy because working different types of jobs teaches you things about yourself, people, and the world that you will never learn sitting behind a computer and trying to build out a funnel or whatever.

You discover what you're made of, what you're actually capable of. You learn about your capacity for work, what you can push through, and what actually energizes you versus drains you. And I've had a lot of times where people tell me that they're really surprised by what they learned about themselves through working different jobs while supporting their businesses. You might discover strengths that you never knew you had, or realize that some things that you thought were important to you actually aren't anymore.

You understand people in a completely different way. When you interact with customers, coworkers, or managers across different industries, you learn how different types of people actually think, actually make decisions and live. You learn about what motivates different types of people and what their actual concerns are versus what you think they should be concerned about. In other words, you get grounded in reality because the online business world can really become an echo chamber.

You build genuine resilience, not the kind of resilience that comes from reading another self-development book, or reading motivational quotes, or doing another course on healing, but the lived knowledge that you can adapt, you can start over. You can handle uncertainty. You can learn new skills, and you can find a path forward no matter what happens. Nothing can teach you that except experience.

And all this, I think truly at the foundation, the most important thing is that you develop real empathy and humility. I think not enough people talk about how important that is. Understanding that every job has its own dignity and challenges makes you a better leader, better service provider, and honestly, a better human being.

Addressing the "But I'm Too Tired" Objection

Now, next I'm going to get into one of the questions that I get the most about this, one of the objections that I get the most, which is: "Okay, Simone, this all sounds great in theory, but the truth is that I'm exhausted at the end of a nine-hour workday. I barely have energy to make dinner. I just have to recover from the day, you know, let alone work on my business. How am I supposed to build something when I have so little time and energy left after doing the jobs that pay the bills?"

Like I said, I hear this from lots of different people, and this is a real challenge and I'm not going to minimize it. Working other jobs does take time and energy, sometimes a significant amount that you could theoretically be putting into your business. I get that this is very real. And here's what I would ask you to consider on top of that: quality over quantity matters a lot more than you think.

When you only have a few focused hours a week to work on your business, you're forced to prioritize ruthlessly. You can't let three hours go by while you're tweaking your website or getting lost in busywork. You have to focus on what actually generates results, and then you have to first figure out what meaningful work is versus busywork is, and all of that forces you to sharpen your decision making, forces you to sharpen your focus.

Because here's something interesting—I've seen this countless times. People will finally be like, "I quit my job and now I have all this time in the world to work on my business." And they think that that move is finally what's going to unlock their success. But 99% of the time that I've seen, what happens is the opposite. "I have all of my days free 'cause I quit my job." And what they meet is paralysis. Because without the structure and constraints of a job, they spend entire days just switching between tasks, second-guessing their own decisions, getting lost in perfectionism. Tons and tons of ruminating, thinking, daydreaming, very little doing.

When you have unlimited time, it's really easy to convince yourself that everything is urgent and nothing is urgent at the same time. Many successful entrepreneurs say that their best, most focused work happens when they have the least time available because constraints force clarity.

Tired But Stable Beats Desperate

Now, let's talk about the emotional side of this equation, and I'm here to tell you that tired but stable beats energetic and desperate every single time. Tired but stable works. Yeah, you might be tired after work, but you're not lying awake at 3:00 AM wondering how you're going to pay rent. You're not checking your bank balance with anxiety every single morning. That mental peace is so oftentimes worth the extra hours of work because anxiety, financial panic, these are the ultimate productivity killers that can drain energy more than any day job.

Which brings me to another important point: your timeline does not have to match anyone else's, and whatever you think someone else's timeline is, you most likely don't have the full picture. The online business world loves to sell speed and most often presents totally distorted pictures of what's possible. "Six-figure business in six months." Yeah, right. Sustainable businesses are usually built over years, not months.

If it takes you three years instead of one, because you're working other jobs, if it takes you five years instead of two because you're working other jobs, you are still going to get there. And guess what? You're going to get there with less debt, less stress, and a lot more skills and wisdom about what actually works.

Practical Management Tips

So how do you actually manage this in practice? I want you to remember: energy management beats time management. So instead of trying to find more hours, focus on managing your energy better. Maybe you work on your business for 30 minutes in the morning when you're fresh, rather than trying to force it after a long day.

And listen, I see you. I know so many of you will be like, "Oh my God, 30 minutes. I'm going to need five more hours to edit the copy that I wrote in those 30 minutes." Nope. See, this is why constraint of time is such a perfect teacher for helping you be efficient and getting over the patterns that typically sabotage people. Like you don't have the luxury of procrastinating when you've only got 30 minutes. So write that copy and send it and boom, that's it.

Most people who have a lot more time than you waste 100% of their time and opportunities because that very—the sheer amount of time they have enables endless procrastination and perfectionism while they put themselves under the illusion that they're working so hard. But what they actually did was procrastinate and stress out about their perfectionism all week, and there's nothing to show for it, right? So constraint creates focus and does not give oxygen for time-wasting patterns that plague most entrepreneurs.

And maybe instead of just letting amorphous tasks bleed out into your week, make decisions about what actually matters, and batch those tasks into one focused day per week. But this is what I'm telling you, right? You can't take the same kind of loosey-goosey patterns of working and then expect that to work when you have fewer hours in a week to work on your business.

This whole process forces you to build the skills and mindset and the resilience of a real entrepreneur: showing up to work when you don't feel like it, trusting yourself with your decisions, even though you know there's an inner critic inside you that can spout off 15 different "what if" scenarios. It teaches you problem solving, it teaches you project management. These aren't consolation prizes. These are foundational entrepreneurial skills.

People with all the resources and all the time in the world make very little progress because they don't learn these entrepreneurial skills that are foundational because the goal isn't to do everything perfectly as fast as possible. The goal is to keep moving forward sustainably while you are learning skills that actually grow your business and doing work that actually matters in a way that doesn't break you financially or emotionally.

Rejecting Shame and Embracing Dignity

Let me be very clear about something. Any kind of shame that you might have, sense of inadequacy that you might have about working to support yourself in different ways while you work on your business is not coming from the work itself. It comes from a cultural narrative that arbitrarily values some types of contribution over others.

Because at its core, right, what even is work? Let's define the word "work" for a second. Work is about contributing something useful to the world and receiving something useful in return. That's an inherently dignified exchange, regardless of whether you're providing therapy or writing code, or delivering food or cleaning offices.

When you deliver groceries to someone who's sick, you're providing genuine relief. When you clean a building, you're creating a healthier environment for people who work there. When you're stocking shelves, you are making it possible for families to get what they need. Every job that pays you a wage is society's way of saying what you're doing matters. It's useful to us and we're going to support you for doing it.

You are earning money, yes, but you are also participating in the complex web of interdependent support that makes modern life possible. And the idea that some work is more worthy, more whatever, is rooted in elitism. It's elitism, plain and simple. We've created a hierarchy that places some work above others. You know, the work that requires an expensive education and training and cultural capital and social connections at the top, while at the same time we're devaluing so much of the work that actually keeps societies functioning.

An online coach's program is only valuable, for example, because there are people with the disposable time and money to take the course, the internet infrastructure to deliver the course, and countless service workers maintaining the systems that make their lifestyle possible. But we've constructed this mythology that selling digital services or products is inherently cooler or more valuable than so much of more conventional work that makes our entire economies function, including those online businesses.

Key Takeaways

So I don't want to beat a dead horse too much, but here's what I want your takeaways to be. If you are choosing to stay in your quote-unquote "normal job," or go back to such a job after taking time off because you need to or want to, or if you are getting a part-time job or two or three to supplement your business income, you are not behind. You did not fail.

What you're doing is making smart strategic decisions. You're diversifying your income. You're building security at the same time that you create opportunity. You're laying a sustainable foundation for your business. You're learning about yourself and the world. You're developing countless, tangible and intangible qualities and skills that are going to be directly responsible for making you a stronger entrepreneur. And at the same time, you are being useful to society while you do it.

That's just fucking smart. And anyone who tells you otherwise is probably someone who's never had to choose between paying rent and following their dreams, and their opinion isn't worth much.

I hope this episode was useful and empowering for you and, or at the very least, felt like a relief. And maybe like a permission slip to make decisions that really serve the long-term interest of yourself, as well as your business, because you deserve that.

Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you next time.