Corporate America vs Entrepreneurship

Filed Under Career

I came across this article, Why do you work so hard?, from SFGate.com. The article is targeted toward anyone who is over-worked in their corporate job and questioning why and how that happened to them. Why are they in a job with excessive hours and workload? Why are they stuck with in unsatisfactory career which is causing negative effects on their personal life?

This article forces you to think about your career and what you are willing to sacrifice if any changes need to be made. How do you come to that decision to make a drastic career change? It depends how bad your current situation is. Certain types of commitments obviously make it harder and riskier for someone to make any sudden career changes. Here is some good advice from the article:

It is not for everyone. It implies incredibly difficult choices and arranging your life in certain ways and giving up certain luxuries and many, many people seemed locked down and immovable and all done with exploring new options in life, far too deeply entrenched in debts and family obligations and work to ever see such unique light again. Maybe you know such people. Maybe you are such people.

But sometimes people do take those risks and suffer the career loses for the greater good of their personal life.

Not long ago, the CEO of one of the largest and most powerful international real estate firms in the nation quit his job. Stepped down. Not, as you might imagine, for retirement and not to play more golf and not to travel the world staying only in Four Seasons suites, but to work on rebuilding his relationship with his estranged wife.

The way we think about our careers needs to change. Entrepreneurship is not taught enough in today’s society therefore many people don’t know what their other options are besides Corporate America.

We always think such lives are for others and never for ourselves, something people with huge chunks of cash reserves or huge hunks of time or huge gobs of wildly ambitious talent can do. It is never for us. And truly, this mind-set is the national plague, a fate worse than death.

Because of this, very few people break from the norm and go on to do great things in business. We need to learn from the people that do and keep educating ourselves to make better career choices.