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'Quit Your Day Job Is Garbage Advice' (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: While Daymond John was building his clothing line FUBU, which would evolve into a $6 billion brand, the entrepreneur was living on the tips he made waiting tables at Red Lobster. "I was working at Red Lobster for five years as a waiter as I was running this business," the Shark Tank star said at the iConic conference in New York City on Wednesday. At first "it was 40 hours at Red Lobster and six hours at FUBU. Then it was 30 hours at Red Lobster and 20 hours at FUBU, because money started to come in." Even after FUBU started to take off, John continued waiting tables. He wouldn't do things any differently if he could, he told the audience on Wednesday: "Don't quit your day job. [...] Let's say I was making an average of $40,000 a year," he continued. "After five years, that's $200,000 of salary. I would have had to sell $1 million more worth of FUBU product to bring home the $200,000, but I didn't have to do that. I just had to sacrifice time."
Anywhere else... not so much.
A few points why bringing up a start up at Red Lobster works over basically any other kind of job:
1. You can pick your hours and change them on a moment's notice.
2. It's not brain heavy work. You can keep the start up as your primary focus.
3. You don't have to worry about your employer accusing you of using their resources (and IP) to start a business.
It actually makes a lot of sense to get a job working at Starbucks/Red Lobster/serving food anywhere when doing a start up to ensure that the rent isn't something you're worried about and you can put that extra focus on the startup.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Because everyone knows money is far more valuable than time...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
He probably got to eat for free, and take home left overs and feed rest of his family too. Saved money definitely. Only compromise is having to agree that what Red Lobster dishes out is food then have the gumption to eat it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Most billionaires probably have garbage advice, once you separate out the survivor bias. That said, this tidbit makes more sense than most.
The summary says you shouldn't quit your day job, but obviously he did because he doesn't still wait tables at Red Lobster. It's about WHEN you quit your day job.
This will be a fairly personal decision, but a bunch of factors come in to play. first of all, if you can't survive on the money your startup is providing, then obviously you need to keep your day job. And once you can make more money running your own company than spending that same time at your day job, it's a no-brainer to quit to focus on your startup. The real challenge is the in-between states, and that's going to depend on your opinion of your existing job. Is it something you enjoy? and does it provide you the flexibility to work on the other project that you're passionate about? in that case stick around. Is it something you despise? Do you absolutely detest going to work each morning? is it interfering with your passions? In that case it may be worth taking a pay cut to work on your startup.
Never follow your passion, but always bring it with you. -- Mike Rowe
https://www.prageru.com/sites/...
There are only two things I can tell you today that come with absolutely no agenda. The first is “Congratulations.” The second is “Good luck.” Everything else is what I like to call, “The Dirty Truth,” which is just another way of saying, “It’s my opinion.”
And in my opinion, you have all been given some terrible advice, and that advice, is this:
Follow your passion.
Every time I watch the Oscars, I cringe when some famous movie star—trophy in hand—starts to deconstruct the secret of their success. It’s always the same thing: “Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t have what it takes, kid!”; and the ever popular, “Never give up on your dreams!”
Look, I understand the importance of persistence, and the value of encouragement, but who tells a stranger to never give up on their dreams, without even knowing what it is they’re dreaming? How can Lady Gaga possibly know where your passion will lead you?
Have these people never seen American Idol?
Year after year, thousands of aspiring American Idols show up with great expectations, only to learn that they don’t possess the skills they thought they did. What’s really amazing though, is not their lack of talent—the world is full of people who can’t sing. It’s their genuine shock at being rejected—the incredible realization that their passion and their ability had nothing to
do with each other.
Look, if we’re talking about your hobby, by all means let your passion lead you. But when it comes to making a living, it’s easy to forget the dirty truth: just because you’re passionate about something doesn’t mean you won’t suck at it.
And just because you’ve earned a degree in your chosen field, doesn’t mean you’re gonna find your “dream job.”
Dream Jobs are usually just that—dreams. But their imaginary existence just might keep you from exploring careers that offer a legitimate chance to perform meaningful work and develop a genuine passion for the job you already have. Because here’s another Dirty Truth: your happiness on the job has very little to do with the work itself.
On Dirty Jobs, I remember a very successful septic tank cleaner, a multi-millionaire, who told me the secret to his success:
“I looked around to see where everyone else was headed,” he said, “And then I went the opposite way. Then I got good at my work. Then I began to prosper. And then one day, I realized I was passionate about other people’s crap.”
I’ve heard that same basic story from welders, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, HVAC professionals, hundreds of other skilled tradesmen who followed opportunity—not passion— and prospered as a result.
Consider the reality of the current job market.Right now, millions of people with degrees and diplomas are out there competing for a relatively narrow set of opportunities that polite society calls “good careers.” Meanwhile, employers are struggling to fill nearly 5.8 million jobs that nobody’s trained to do. This is the skills gap, it’s real, and its cause is actually very simple: when people follow their passion, they miss out on all kinds of opportunities they didn’t even know existed.
When I was 16, I wanted to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps. He was a skilled tradesman who could build a house without a blueprint. That was my passion, and I followed it for years. I took all the shop classes at school, I did all I could to absorb the knowledge and skill that came so easily to my granddad.
Unfortunately, the ha
I was working as a software developer on a very demanding project, pulling 60+ hours a week most weeks while I wrote my first novel.
It was a long process, and it was very hard, and yes I had no free time between my money job and my passionate speculative job.
As time went on I finally finished the book, and sold thousands of copies.
I am proud to say that today I make 6 figures a year...
...as a software developer, because that's my real job and nearly every novelist who ever lived didn't make a living at it, and it is important to have realistic dreams.
I've seen enough Shark Tank to notice that the other judges are always saying "I can't invest with you because you don't believe enough in your idea to quit your day job" or "you're not 100% committed to this when you're not doing this full time."
Like any from anyone who "made it big". And it's not even that they try to deceive and mislead you because they don't want you to succeed.
Any time one of those self-made billionaires tells you how he made it and what to do, you're essentially listening to someone who won the jackpot in the life lottery telling you the numbers he played. At the same time, you could ask a thousand people who didn't make it who will tell you exactly the same, but they just didn't have the luck to be at that right place at the right time that this guy was.
That what he did worked for him at that time when he did it is obvious. Just like playing those numbers on that day worked for the lottery player. You will not reliably repeat this by doing the same, for this too many variables changed in the game. Even if there was no FUBU today, opening a chain like this today would fail simply because the market changed and there is no longer the amount of young people with expendable money, just to name one factor that makes or breaks this business.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am not sure what is with this Millennial hate? Is it only because Generation X was just a boring name. I mean Generation X for a short time was the slacker generation, but that stopped fairly quickly. The Baby Boomers in my book are still the worse. Living off the benefits of winning WWII, where they grew up in housing funded by state government, and with state of the art infrastructure, parents who with the GI Bill had college education. All this stuff allowed them to get drugged up during their late teens and early 20's and still get into Dads business as a professional to pick up his business, learning the ropes and having dad retire at an early age. Then to call yourself a success if you didn't drive the company to the ground, and keeping your job well past the age you should retire, not training the newer generation the ropes. Living in a time period of long term economic growth.
Now they are retiring, and the kids are trying to fill the void, however Boomers will not let them get a foot hold, cutting their salary so they cannot make a living, and then when they say it is unfair, they will just say you kids don't know about hard work.
For the most part Millennials are very hard workers, they found a way to survive in a period of economic stress, with a hostile to them work force.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
They're competing with a more experienced generation that isn't retiring at the age when previous generations did, and they're competing for fewer jobs.
This is the Lump of Labor Fallacy. Later retirements do not lead to "fewer jobs" . Labor force participation has actually been falling for more than a decade, so if there was really a fixed number of jobs in the economy (there isn't) plenty would be "freed up" for millennials.
Most can't, and then get told they're a failure as a human being when they can't. The worst thing is lots of them believe it. That's where the race to the bottom starts.
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The ,main reason people don't/can't move is the actual cost of moving.
The average cost is about $5,500.
How many broke motherfuckers you know that have that much in the bank they can just drain so they can pack up and move?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
to his competitors. When he was competing the competitions were pretty friendly and it didn't occur to anyone he'd lie to them. He gave them a routine that was massive overwork. They tried to stick to it and of course burned themselves out.
What's the old saying? Never ask a man how he made his first million. Odds are if someone didn't inherit it or win the lottery they did something awful to get it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Fast food and fast casual (Red Lobster probably is the latter) are moving to a "just in time" scheduling paradigm
This is just one example of how bad a lot of advice from earlier generations can be when applied directly to more recent generations. There were a whole slew of mindless jobs which paid a decent wage two decades ago which are far less desirable now. I for one was able to support myself just fine on $8/hour working at KFC nearly full time in college (except for tuition, that was all loans and my parents' college fund). But rent prices in my college town are more than double what they were 20 years ago, and I'd be lucky to make $10/hour today at the same job. And tuition has more than doubled as well.
Advice from those who have succeeded is nearly always worth listening to, but you need to be very careful about how much value you give to that advice. The economy and workforce simply changes too much from generation to generation today.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It cost me almost that much to move and all I had were 5 boxes of items.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
About a meter cubed each, and I had those shipped while I took a plane.
Most trucking companies aren't dropping off a 40 ft trailer at your residential area (which likely has a "no vehicles over 2 axles" restriction, which also excludes the largest of U-Haul trucks,) let alone dropping one off at an apartment complex, where a huge chunk of the population resides, as there is simply no room for it.
Then there was staying at a hotel for several days while waiting on approval to be shown apartments.
Then there's the food needed to eat during that whole thing.
And more.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I've been part of several failed startups, plus a couple of very successful ones. The ones which failed the most spectacularly were the ones which had very early injections of seed money. The ideas were certainly viable, but the problem was that the investment took the immediate focus off of making money. Of course that was partly the point of the investment, to focus on development, however it was a strategic and grave mistake. In all cases, whenever the investments dried up, the ventures had to go out of business - because there were leases and employees and services to pay for, which could not be sustained.
The most succesful ones started with nothing but, say, a $1500 line of credit at one distibutor and a corner in somebody's garage. At the very outset, every single transaction made money. They accepted no outside investments. They just kept cycling the profits back into the business, with a very low overhead, fanning the embers until there was so much work to do, they had to hire people to get it done - and before long find bigger space to do it in. One such company, a wholesale distributor which followed the telemarketing model of sales, grew no less than 35% annually for about 10 years before going public via merger. At the time of merger there were about 270 employees.
And I am not his mom or his best bud.
Startups are simultaneously a lot of fun and as depressing as shit because most of you (99.9%) will fail and by the time you admit that you're burned out and lost all confidence. If you don't have something to put the breaks on you'll keep hacking even though your smarts and quality of work turns to shit and you don't realize it.
In the morning your brain is fresh, but by late in the day your brain has turned to mush anyway. A job without much responsibility is a relief. You can pay the rent and stop worrying about that. Hang out with coworkers which will likely be mostly nice because few crave aspire to keys at the Red Lobster executive washroom so without the backstabbing that takes place in startup land - (don't claim you know a man until you've worked in his startup!), and you remind yourself there is life during and after startup. And when you do get back to work the next day, your brain is fresh.