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SNM206: Explore 7 Benefits Of Being Your Own Boss

• Jonathan Green : Bestselling Author, Tropical Island Entrepreneur, 7-Figure Blogger

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 The first benefit of being your own boss is creating your own work hours 

  When you are your own boss you can wake up whenever you want, go to sleep whenever you want, and work as much or as little as you want to. There is no one keeping track of how you spend your time 

Living The Best Life 

 I live a life that suits me the best. Many of the people who read my books or watch my videos don’t want to live the life I’m living and that’s fine. It’s not about replicating my life is about the freedom you have to create your own best life. 

The Value of Time

When I do my podcast episodes I have my editor remove any long silence or anything that’s not important so you don’t waste your time. I am a firm believer that time is your biggest investment and I know you shouldn’t give a second more than absolutely necessary. 

 Taking Control 

After listening to my series “how to be your own boss” I want you to take control. I want you to take that first step that will take you to an awesome lifestyle you never dreamed was possible.  



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206-Explore7BenefitsOfBeingYourOwnBoss
[00:00:00] Wanna know the 7  benefits of being your own boss? You're going to find out in today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Pro Writing aid. Save thousands of dollars on an editor by using the best tool in the business at servenomaster.com/prowritingaid. Are you tired of dealing with your boss?
[00:00:14] Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss, and start living your retirement dreams now, then you've come to the right place. Welcome to Serve No Master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical Island in the South Pacific by bestselling author Jonathan Green.
[00:00:38] Now, here's your host. 
I spent the last 10 years as an entrepreneur. 10 years with no one in charge of me, no one in power over me, no one able to tell me what to do. And I've learned a few things over that decade as I've moved from 29 to 39. And I want to share those lessons with you today. The biggest benefits, the biggest perks of being your own boss.
[00:01:01] There's just something about a job where you're your own boss that's freeing and exciting. Most of the time we're taught about all the downsides of being an entrepreneur, all the dangers and the risks. What if it goes wrong? What if it goes bad? There's no safety net. So you don't need to hear that stuff from me.
[00:01:16] What you need to hear is what I've learned from a decade of living without a net. And I'll be completely honest with you. The house I live in right now is bigger than I'd ever thought I'd have. I never thought my life would be this good. In all my predictions and all of my planning, sure I dreamed, oh, I'd love to live in a mansion we all think that (I don't live in 
[00:01:32] a mansion by the way), but I never thought I'd have a house as big as I do. I have so much space for me and my kids and it’s so magical, we live right near the beach and it's all come from 10 years of living this way. And so I want to take you through really what's beautiful about this job and any job where you get to be your own boss.
[00:01:48] It starts with number one: You get to wake up when you want. When I first started this business I would get up around 2 in the afternoon. I was a real night owl and I would just do massive night sessions just crank when it's quiet because you can get the most work done because your phone's not ringing and people aren’t trying to distract you and you can just get so much done,
[00:02:05] and I would just pound and grind and spent so much time on my computer and I would get up whenever I want. And I still have friends who operate like this. One of my friends he’s 20 years older than me he still gets up at two in the afternoon. Now, the beauty of this is that you get up when you want. I get up now at  7: 30. Right now my wake up time now is 7:30  but my wake up times change based on my circadian rhythms
[00:02:23] and what's going with my family. A lot of it has to do with the ages of our kids. Whenever we have a new baby that changes when I wake up. So right now, because my island does not have internet during the day I get up at midnight or 12: 10. I like to get the internet 10 minutes to turn on and I work a shift. It could be one hour,
[00:02:39] it could be six hours, something like that, depending on how long I work, I go back to bed and I get up at 7:30, or sometimes at 7:30, I'm still working, I come upstairs and that's when I do my morning workout. And it's not because anyone else makes me do it, that's my choice. That's a choice. One of the big benefits for me working in the middle of the night is that it's the daytime in America
[00:02:55] so I can connect with people that I need to talk to. I can do my phone calls, do my interviews, record any interview videos, upload files, all those things can happen at night. And my family's asleep most of the time, which means they're not distracting me, cause they're the main distraction when I'm trying to work. So, whenever you want to get up, whenever your time is, whether you want to get up at 6 in the morning, whether you want to get at midnight or whether you want to get up at 2 in the afternoon
[00:03:15] you can work the schedule that matches your lifestyle. If you want to party all night and work in the afternoon for six hours and then go back to the next party or the next club or the next house party you actually can. So you have that amount of control over your time. You can live an alarm clock free lifestyle.
[00:03:29] Think about how you felt every Saturday morning as a kid. Most kids can sleep in as much as they want but we get up early cause we wanted to watch them Saturday morning sweet cartoons.  It's like a nightmare for your parents to wake you up at 8 in the morning for school, but on Saturday you suddenly up at 5:30 because that's when the cartoons start.
[00:03:44] It's crazy but when you're in control of your own schedule, there's this level of freedom that you have. You could treat your body in a much better way because you have control.  The second park being your own boss comes from a wonderful movie called “Labyrinth” and it's this movie that my
[00:03:58] sister loved as a child so I've seen it thousands of times. There’s a moment near the end where the girl finally realizes that the Goblin King David Bowie isn't as powerful as she seemed and she says these magic words  “you have no power over me”. That's the greatest feeling in the world. Every once in a while I encounter someone who mistakenly thinks they can tell me what to do, whether they're giving me advice on how to raise my children,
[00:04:20] or telling me other things, because they're older than me. I always say you have no power over me. Nobody gets to tell me what to do and nobody can tell me what hours to work, nobody can tell me what to do with my business. No one can tell me what to do inside my home. I'm in a situation where I have absolute dominion over my life.
[00:04:39] And as I shared with you on a previous episode, I've had bosses who treated me very horribly, who really took advantage of my ignorance and treated me in a way or took advantage of the power over me. And this comes from when I lost my job. I was fired, I was driving home in a blizzard in my new car and I said, I never want someone to have the ability to shatter my life
[00:04:54] again. I don't want someone to have the ability to take away my revenue stream, mess up with where I'm living, and affect how I feel about myself. To judge me... I’m not interested in that. It's really, really beautiful when you can live your majestic life, your version of life, your idea, your concept of freedom.
[00:05:12] Most people who listen to my podcasts, who read my blog, read my books, do not want my life. Most of you don't want to live on a tropical Island, most of you do not want to live in the middle of nowhere and that's okay. Your perfect life could be selling your house, buying a van, and going to every single national park in America.
[00:05:27] I think that's a cool one. Yours might be living in the mountains or living in Alaska, or simply having no financial obligations so you can do whatever you feel like every day, work in your garden. All of those things are wonderful. It's not about doing what I actually do, it's replicating the ability to do what you want to do.
[00:05:43] That's what I want to give you because that's one of the most beautiful and wonderful parks of being your own boss. Nobody can tell you what to do so you can do what you're excellent at, what you're passionate about. It's so freeing! Number three, you don't need permission to go on vacation. When I go on vacation with my family is when I want to. I've worked at a lot of different places and you always have to apply for vacation time
[00:06:05] and at some companies, I worked at a large copy where we used to have to fill in like go through a software system where we'd fill in an application for different days off and the software system would randomly assign it or use some algorithm that no one could ever figure out to determine who could have days off who wouldn't. I've worked during the Superbowl,
[00:06:19] I've worked on new year's Eve,  I’ve worked on Christmas... No thanks. Thanks, computer. I don’t have to do that anymore. Now,  when I want to go on vacation it’s not about anyone else giving me permission, it's just about logistics. It's about how am I going to get all my kids to not go crazy when we're on a plane? And the beauty of being your own boss is that I can work from anywhere.
[00:06:36] When I went on a vacation last year, we went away for an entire month. I took my kids on vacation and the entire time I worked every single day. We had amazing adventures, and we traveled somewhere that was awesome and the best part was there was internet all day long, I didn’t have to wait untill midnight, so I could work during the day or I could work at night, just depends on our schedule.
[00:06:52] We can go to the water park all day, my kids would pass out when we got home and I could put in some really beautiful work. And we had a really great vacation where I made more money than the vacation costs. We actually came home with more money than we had when we left. When you're your own boss
[00:07:05] everything becomes an opportunity. See, when you're working for someone else and you go on vacation if you're lucky to have a paid vacation, and if you don't, or maybe you don't get full pay on your vacation well you're taking a loss, right? You're spending money, your savings are going down and your time investment is going down, right?
[00:07:19] That disappears when your own boss? No, you get to be strategic. Most of my team will continue to work, the wheels will continue to spin, this business will continue to operate even if I'm not available. And no matter what location I'm in, it doesn't matter. I can send them instructions and messages to anyone in the world because we don't have an office.
[00:07:36] Everyone on my team is their own boss cause they're all remote. They work their own schedules. Every time I hire a new employee we go through this conversation, they go, oh, so do you want me to work American hours? I said, why would you do that? I don't work American hours. I said, here's what it is. I expect you to respond to any message within 24 hours if we have a big event where 
[00:07:52] I need all hands on deck, which happens maybe once or twice a year, then I'll expect you to be near your phone or answering messages during that time, just in case something goes wrong, a website crashes, or we have a tech support issue that I want everyone kind of available, but otherwise work when you want,  do your hours at the end of the week, as long as your tasks are done, I don't care if you do your entire week's worth of work on Monday. If you do 20 hours of work on Monday and sleep for four hours
[00:08:12] then you have rest a week off. What do I care? I don't measure my team based on traditional business metrics, them working a consistent set of hours across the week. I just look at, did they complete the number of tasks I expected them to complete in an amount of time I expected them to complete them. That's it.
[00:08:27] Simple formula. Did you get your list of tasks done? Did it take you that time that It should have taken you? Great. Then you're done. So you can have control of your own schedule, be your own boss, even when you're working for someone else as a remote employee. Thant’s another perk of being your own boss.  Number four, no one steals credit for your work.
[00:08:42] There's nothing like having a really good idea telling it to one of your coworkers to get their feedback and then suddenly they're in the boss's office getting the praise and the promotion, the high fives and the pat on the back. It doesn’t feel good. Or maybe you've done really hard work on a project to come up with a really good idea or saved a bunch of money in a project
[00:08:59] and your boss takes all the credit. Why shouldn't they? They hired you so they should get the credit for every idea you have. They own your ideas as well as your soul. Doesn't feel good when you're not in control of your output. When you can't control the message on what you do. If I have a podcast episode that's not any good
[00:09:14] I can just not release it. I have that power. If I have a book that gets a bunch of bad reviews I can take it down from the shelves. I can control the messaging that goes out to the world so I can control the credit that I get. That's the power that you deserve. You deserve to be your own boss. You deserve to have people hear your message, to hear what you're actually saying, to get credit
[00:09:32] for your really good ideas. For far too long, far too many of us have worked for people and corporations and organizations and conglomerates that don't reward us for our actions. Oftentimes when we have really good ideas and we speak up we get punished for those. And then when it turns out our idea would have worked
[00:09:48] our boss gets mad at us because we didn't speak up loud enough earlier on. There's no way to win in those environments. Who wants to be trapped in that type of place? Number five, your own dress code. I shoot a lot of videos, I do a lot of video content. You watch the other videos on my YouTube channel. If you watch closely, you'll notice that I only own one shirt.
[00:10:08] I've turned it a little bit into an inspector gadget or any cartoon character from my childhood where I have one outfit. You opened my closet it's just 50 inspector gadget coats. The only difference is that I have my shirt in every different color they offer available. One time I bought a red one big mistake,
[00:10:22] I looked like a tomato in it so I don't like to wear that one when I'm gonna be on video, but sometimes I forget so some of those are out there. I bought one copy of the shirt years ago when I was first dating my wife. Seven, eight years ago. I bought the shirt and I go: oh, this is pretty... it was on sale for $4,
[00:10:35] okay? Before we start thinking I'm super fancy. I said, Oh, that's a great price, the shirt is comfortable. And that's it. I don't have to wear a tie. I don't own a tie anymore. All my ties have been destroyed by the weather here. They've been in storage, our attic for 7 years cause guess what happens when you're on the equator? Stuff that's made for cold weather basically explodes.
[00:10:52] Well, defuses. My leather jacket is now a leather cube. It was probably not real leather. I don't think a leather jacket melts into plastic, but all of those clothes I would have to wear, I don't have to wear uncomfortable clothes. I don't want to wear a belt. So you get to wherever you want. Now I have people contemporaries who work in my environment, people that I do projects with and they wear a suit to work every day, because to them, it's like putting on a suit of armor,
[00:11:11] it puts them in their work mindset and they activate that part of their minds and there's nothing wrong with that, but they get to choose. It's not what they wear, It's the choice. The ability to wear what you want to work every single day. I've always been baffled by suits. Why do we have to wear a suit to work?
[00:11:26] Now, I understand uniforms, I understand the idea of people dressing in a similar way. I also don’t know why I got to strap something around my neck, choked myself in order to do my job, wear a power tie. It is what it is. But when your own boss, you can make those decisions. And if you watch all those people that have their own companies and tech startups in Silicon Valley, they all dress like trash.
[00:11:42] You can be a billionaire and you wear sandals to work every day if you want. When you're the boss, you get to make the decisions. You can wear sandals and a hoodie to work and make everyone else wear a suit if you want. It's powerful. Number six, bye, bye commutes. I went to university near the nation's capital, near Washington, DC.
[00:11:59] And some people who live in that area drive two hours to work at two hours from work every day. Four hours. No, thanks. Wow. That's time she's been working on your business. If you're stuck in one of those commutes. When I was living in London and teaching at one of the universities I worked at took me 45 minutes to get to and from work, I didn't even live that far away.
[00:12:15] I could have walked it probably in an hour. And sometimes you're on the subway or they call it the tube and it's so crowded, it's so hot and just so horrible. There's nothing about commuting that I like. I don't want to learn how to shave in a car. I think of commuting as time is thrown away or time wasted.
[00:12:31] And that's unfortunate because your most precious resource is time. The fact that you spend time listening to me, that's the greatest honor you can give me. Investing time in me by listening to what I have to say it's great kindness and it means a lot to me so I try not to waste your time. I try to be as efficient and lean as I can
[00:12:45] when I record these. I even have my audio editor remove long silences cause I don't want to waste any of your time if I'm spending too long, thinking about the next thought or planning how I'm going to say a phrase. I don't want you to lose that time because your time is valuable. If you're spending time in the car.
[00:12:58] Oh gosh, we've all done that, we've all had commuted. Different projects I've worked on and you look and you go, wow. I spent hours every day on the train or in my car. All of that is lost time. Imagine just getting all that back. Let's just assume you only do an hour commute. 30 minutes to work. 30 minutes back,
[00:13:11] that's pretty average around the world. You go to work five days a week. That's five hours of life. Imagine getting back five hours every single week, 250 hours a year. Wow! That's a lot of time. That's a vacation in and of itself. That's a pretty good one. The amount of time we spend on meaningless tasks,
[00:13:28] repetitive tasks, rewardless tasks, all of that goes away, no more time wasted. Every single minute of the day you can spend doing what you want to do and you never have to be stuck in traffic again. I don't own a car. I haven't owned a car in a long time. I'm not sure I still know how to drive. I haven't driven in almost a decade because I don't want to.
[00:13:43] When I was young, all I wanted to do is learn how to drive. Done enough in my life. It doesn't bring me pleasure, it doesn't bring me joy, I'm not passionate about cars. I know some people are and that's okay, everyone's different. Where I live, I can walk everywhere I want to go anyway. That's the life I always wanted,
[00:13:56] and that's the life I've created for myself. And number seven, most importantly, you get to choose who you work with. I have a feeling there's someone at your office that you don't like. In every office I've ever worked there has been people I don't like. When I first started building my own business, I'll never forget this.
[00:14:09] One of my first clients was a building website, I was helping them with that project and he'd gone to the same school as me. He graduated from the same high school as me 10 years earlier. And he started talking to me like an employee and even worse, he started talking to me like a freshman and he was a senior. Now, where I went to high school,
[00:14:23] I got hazed a lot. Those were good old boys type school in the South and I definitely went through all that stuff. And I said, hold on, man. I'm not freshmen anymore. I went through the whole thing. I was at the bottom, I worked my way to the top. No way I'm going back to the bottom and for  thousand bucks a month,
[00:14:36] I'm not your employee. I'm a consultant for that price. You get a little bit of my attention. Do you know what I did? I fired him. Felt so good. You can fire the people you don't want to work with even when they're paying you. Not right away, but you absolutely positively can. And that's really, really, really beautiful.
[00:14:52] I've worked with people that were mean, which made me uncomfortable that said things that I thought were really dumb. Well, the last place I worked at the university, I received the job because the person they'd offer to turn it down. And every day she would come to my office and complain. She goes, why did you get a new chair?
[00:15:06] I never got a new chair. Why do you get a new laptop? Well, guess what? When I came there, there was no chair. There wasn't a laptop in the office. They didn't replace the old equipment. They just gave me one $800 laptop, by the way, it wasn't like they set me up with something that was really fancy.
[00:15:20] They didn't even buy it. They just had one, you know, it was a massive school, so they just took one from the supply department. It was an $800 laptop. The cheapest laptop Macintosh makes. I didn't even choose Mac it was just what they gave me. And she would come by all the time and complain about stuff.
[00:15:31] And I said if you want it, why did you turn the job down? And I had to listen to all this stuff all the time. It was so annoying, I'm just trying to do my job. It's not as though I stole the job from her, she turned it down. And so then they went out looking for someone and I took the job and had to put up with that.
[00:15:44] I've had bullies at work before people who thought they could be physical with me in the office space. I don't think so. I'm not putting up with that. I am not 14 years old. So all those things that you don't like, whether it's someone who's annoying or someone who's flirting with you too much, or someone who makes little comments that don't make you feel comfortable,
[00:15:58] or its someone you just don't like the cut of their jib. You have to work with them. I choose not to work with people all the time. I chose not to work with someone a couple of weeks ago cause they didn't like the tone of one of their emails to me. I said you know what, good luck with your life. You don't get to talk to me like that
[00:16:09] that’s not how it works. I don't care. I have enough money, enough resources, enough things in place, self-control my destiny because I'm my own boss. I don't have to work with people who are annoying me even via email and people don't treat me right when people don't pay on time with people act the way I like them to act,
[00:16:23] or they don't talk to my family the way I want them to talk to my family  I don't do business with them. I just don't care. I don't have to. That's the beauty of being your own boss. The most freeing part is that you never have to spend time with someone you don't like ever again. You're in complete and total control of your social circle.
[00:16:36] You don't have to grit and bear it. You don't have to sit next to the person that credits on one of your projects, you don't have to sit across the aisle from your ex... all these things that happen in offices, right? That makes us uncomfortable. You don't have to listen to people complaining about your promotion or bragging about their promotion all the time anymore.
[00:16:50] All of that fades away and disappears. And these are just seven of the benefits of being your own boss. And there are so many perks beyond this. When you get to work from home, you wake up when you want, you have power over your life. Go on vacation when you want you to get credit for your work, you wear what you want, stop wasting time, commuting, and work with people that you like.
[00:17:07] That's an awesome lifestyle. And that's the lifestyle I want from you. If you want to spend the rest of your life working with people you like and having control of your destiny, why don't you throw me a thumbs up below this video? So I know that you're excited. Because I'm excited to spend time with you.
[00:17:21] Thank you for listening to this week's episode of serve no master. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to servenomaster.com/podcast now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No Master.
[00:17:43] All you have to do is leave a five-star review of this podcast.
[00:17:52] Are you ready to make your first dollar line? Grab my free guide, how to make $1,000 this month at servenomaster.com/1K