For many years, I have seen the quote “Salary is the bribe they give you to forget your dreams’ used countless times by many different people. This morning, part of a friend status message read ‘Don’t bury your vision because of job. The job was never meant to be a permanent take but it’s established for those who have a vision but lacking funds, can raise funds through their jobs, resign and pursue their vision’.
These quotes and many like them have troubled me greatly because it is filled with many false assumptions and by buying into this kind of thinking many people have been led into great ruin; driving people who otherwise would have fulfilled their vision in a corporate environment into the street & poverty. Yeah, I have seen people with well-paying jobs, who resign to ‘pursue their dreams’, then falter and end up in penury. Some have hastily left the country in search of greener pastures only to be trapped in an endless cycle of regrets.
These sort of statements are pushing people into self-employment but unfortunately are based on false assumptions as discussed and debunked below.
Everyone has a vision that can make them very rich!
The concept of success has been bastardized. It’s now all about money, money, money!!!! Success is not about being materially rich only and not all visions or dreams can be monetized.
Life purposes built around service to God and to people may not lend themselves readily to profit. This purpose may be expressed through occupations such as Social Worker, Preacher, Teacher, etc. There are so much school proprietors, Church or NGO Owners that we can have and indeed, most of the people who enter into some of these vision-inspired occupations take a ‘vow of poverty’ and it is perfectly ok!
Think about it, how many people’s vision can feed them when it is actualized in a self-employment setting? I know someone who is a Painter, and who for over 30 years has struggled to make ends meet. He is happy with what he does and considers himself successful and I agree but where is the money? There are Painters who are in Public and Private Employment and who are rich materially! Out of 1 million visions, you may not see up to 1,000 that can feed a family let alone make one rich in a self-employment setting.
Pursuing your vision or dreams is to become entrepreneurial and that can only be achieved when you are self-employed and running your own business.
Entrepreneurship can be expressed either in a private or corporate setting. Everyone who works is an entrepreneur – traders of skills, talent, and competencies. Some choose to sell to one person or organization in an employment relationship; others chose to sell to many people or businesses as business owners. No stress which you choose, be entrepreneurial that’s all.
You can not become rich with Salary
Some people have actually stated that! Well, around the world, there are many billionaires & millionaires employees in companies and corporations such as FaceBook, Google, Alibaba, Tesla, Coca Cola & so on. You may have heard of the staggering millions of Dollars paid to Chief Executives and their teams – those guys are employees living their dreams on salaries!
It is the 8 hours of work that is preventing you from realizing your vision
We have 24 hours in a day. Let’s allocate 8 hours to sleep and 8 to ‘salaried work’. That leaves an unaccounted 8 hours to pursue your dreams and visions but these motivational speakers will tell you that what is pulling you down is the 8 hours you spend at work. Lies!!! If you have a dying vision, it is because of the free 8 hours you blow away. (As well as the time within the 8 hours of work that you are unoccupied but you choose to waste in meaningless gossip and idling, and perhaps the time you could save from unneeded sleep).
Work is slavery except you are self-employed
The people who parrot this fallacy, deceiving many other people are employers of labor; are they enslaving others?
It is the work environment that is preventing you from realizing your vision
Have you heard of nestled vision? What about ‘Tie your wagon to a star’?
Sometimes you need the environment of an organization to achieve your vision. They are not mutually exclusive, but can be complementary. The Corporation with its enormous resources in technology and people has helped a lot of inventors and innovators to prosper. If your employment is paying you well remain there (same as if your standard of living is top notch in your home country, don’t run abroad & become a suffering visionary).
Honestly, there are people whose best bet in life is to work as employee. Will they be happy & fulfilled? Very perfectly & many that I know are rich, some superbly!
My advice for salaried people who wish to pursue another dream or vision is this: Consider the salary as an incentive to pursue your dreams. Utilize the unaccounted 8 hours, sleep less, use all the ‘downtime and free time at the workplace to work on your vision and when this is not enough, you may move to part-time work provided you have a path to pay for your needs. If your vision can take care of all your needs at this point you may then disengage from salaried work. Please don’t entrench poverty and misery in the name of pursuing a vision.
Whatever you do, don’t let anyone hustle you into the street with fanciful words until you are ready, having counted the cost of becoming self-employed. If you choose to sell your talents’ to an organization on paid employment, don’t let anyone make you feel inferior and lost. If the job doesn’t pay you well, doesn’t allow you to grow or pursue more dreams, you may consider a change of employment but never jump into the street if it is best you remained salaried.
If you decide to start up a business, see some tips on how you can succeed in the link below.
Image credit: https://www.vecteezy.com/
14 Comments on “The Salary Debate”
Spot on. Thanks for weighing in on the debate.
Sweet!
It took me a while to understand that working a job doesn’t stop you from chasing your dreams, and in fact, I wanted to jump out of a job to the streets in a bid to pursue my dream. But I didn’t, thankfully. Today I understand a lot better and your skillfully written piece has reinforced this understanding.
I’d love to hear your view on this perspective I’ve got about a job: A job was not designed to make you rich. As you’ve rightly captured people get rich from the jobs they do, the highly paid executives of the Googles and Microsoft, but they are very few compared to the others, the majority whose salaried jobs enable them to be able to just get by in life. A job is designed to be able to sustain the majority. As long as you are able to work then you won’t have much problems. That’s what makes developed western countries attractive, in the sense that there seems to be equal opportunities to live a fairly comfortable life as long as you the requisite skills and you can work. The workers do not strive to get rich but are certain they won’t be hungry as long as they can work.
This is a paradigm shifting piece, I’ll definitely share it. Well done!
✌
Thanks HRH for staying back in the medical field while pursuing your other talents; you are such an excellent Doctor!
On to the matter you raised about jobs – ‘A job was not designed to make you rich’. It is a knotty issue for which a Yes or No would not be sufficient without more information. I’ll try to fill in the context in providing a response:
From my studies of the Scriptures, Philosophy, and Nature, I deduce that the World was built on the model where everyone is rich in all respect. This model has at its foundation the following:
1. Everyone works! You may look at my last blog post on Purpose. We are all endowed with something the world needs & our existence is made meaningful when we explore our talents and contribute fully. That is how we are designed. Anyone who fulfills his purpose is already rich, so on this basis, a job should make everyone rich!
2. Everyone gets all they need – each according to his needs fulfilled by the work the person & everyone else does. Everyone ought to be materially rich as a result but in the corrupt imperfect system, we live in today, this is not the case & many factors contribute to that including a. the way we reward people’s contributions which is skewed, reflecting our value system. Who says the contribution of the footballer is more valuable than that of a refuse collector or a teacher or a nurse? We!; b. then there is greed and corruption eroding the well-being of jobholders, etc.
3. All of the earth’s resources are used in a sustainable way for the benefit of all – this would have effectively ensured that everyone got all they need & thus everyone would have been rich materially.
4. There is full cooperation by all. No strife-ridden competition. We all work as one to solve our problems.
5. There is justice, fairness and love. With the ‘strong’ protecting the ‘weak’.
You will agree that with all 5 factors working together, every job holder would have been rich! But wake up brother, that utopia is yet for the future when the promises in the scriptures come true.
As it is now there is a bell curve ensuring that the majority of people will never be rich materially. So in that respect, you are right – ‘job was not designed to make you rich’. Just a few will; the majority will be ok; the bottom will get by & be poor. But all could be happy & fulfilled like Charles Bassey stated ‘Success is anchored on deeper sense of meaningfulness in life and attaining that exceed the scope of pursuit of happiness.
Another factor making jobs not materially great is the concept of money which is a matter for another day. So yes, simply holding a job won’t make one rich. For the general populace in a given place people will be on the same pedestal mostly middle-class and a few rich people such as in Scandinavia; In comparison with workers in another country, they may be poorer or richer based on their purchasing power.
I enjoy the piece. There are clearly deep assumptions and myths about life success. The very construct of rich as a measure of success in life does not have any empirical basis. Success is anchored on deeper sense of meaningfulness in life and attaining that exceed the scope of pursuit of happiness. It is the assumptions you’ve outlined and underlying myths that have contributed to some people becoming depressed.
Another good piece!
Thanks so much Bro. Well.
I love the write up, it is high time people stopped listening to the sugarcoated motivational speakers.
Keep up the good work
VERY UNIQUE PIECE, I have been worried about this too.
i agree do what is best for you leave motivational speakers of leave or not leave salaried job. We are cut out to be sucessful in different ways. So weigh your decision carefully and save yourself heartache.
Dear writer good Job
I need to go back and re-read this. So much to learn from.
Writer you are smart enough to say “don’t jump into the street without a back bone. We all need a means to survive our vision.
Great piece
Dear Kem,
“Pursue your dreams and vision” was the philosophy held a few years ago when I lost my job.
My trusted colleague encouraged me to just go on with my dreams, but I reconsidered dreams and vision are not automatic.
One needs, money, experience, consultation, etc to thrive.
Thanks for your piece.
Thanks for busting those fallacies around salary and paid employment!
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Great read Kem, I love your punch lines and rhetorics.
Way cоol! Some very vaⅼid points! I appreciate you penning this write-up plus thе rest of the site is
alѕo really good.