Body and Mind

Who’s The Boss? How Sitcoms Can Help You Decide On Your Future

By Joe Marchelewski ⋅ March 27, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Subscribe By Email ⋅ Post a comment

It’s 7:45 pm, you’re 2/3 of the way through a project that started at 9:05 am and this project has to be finished by tomorrow morning. Working for someone else, or worse yet for many others, can stretch your patience and your commitment. The question is though, how does one go from lackey to king of the castle? And, can you deal with someone else’s crap for $100K as easily as you deal with small business chaos for $60k?

Here are some tests you can run to measure whether or not your frustration at work means you need to run the show, or if it means you need to simply find a new job:

1. The Facts of Life - Can You Pass the “Get Out of Bed Test”

Ask yourself this question “Am I Self-Motivated?”

Truth be told, most small businesses fail, so before you go renting office space, measure yourself to see whether or not you can get up on your own. When you have two hours to spare, what do you find yourself doing? Reading, watching television, cleaning the kitchen or some other activity? The answers you’ll find about the direction you should take may lie in those unconscious activities. Small business owners, or new business start-ups, need to bust their butts for at least the first few years in order to get off the ground, get out of the red and into the black and succeed. If your “me” time involves football, pizza and soda, you may not have the extra energy it’s going to take to become your own boss. However, if you always find yourself cleaning or cooking, if you have extra energy, if you’re naturally inclined to read the business section, you may have “the knack.”

2. Curb Your Enthusiasm - The Passion Test

Where do your passions rest? What makes your blood boil, or what catches your eye when it passes across the television screen? If you watch cooking shows, cook for your family, have taken cooking classes and love restaurants, maybe you should open up your own? If you feel television and print ads stink you constantly find yourself critiquing them, maybe your the next great advertising executive. However, if you spend fifteen hours a week watching and screaming at the Mets, chances are you’re not the next Dwight Gooden or Carlos Beltran.

3. The Office - What’s Your Background, What Do You Bring to the Table?

Depending on what age you are, you must have spent 5-10 years doing something for someone else. Maybe you were a marketing executive, maybe you flipped pizza’s for Dominoes, maybe you cleaned engines and maybe you were the accountant for a pharmaceutical company. Regardless, you’ve learned a trade, a set of skills. Will this translate into something you can market as your own? During your years as a maid, did you develop any style that would give you an edge against other maid agencies? While you counted pennies for some big-wig, did you learn how to get people tons of money back at tax time? When you wrote ad copy for that software firm, were you highly regarded? These skills can lead to you branching out and opening your own shop.

4. Diff’rent Strokes - What Market Fascinates You?

Restaurants? Accounting firms? Sporting good stores? We all consider ourselves arm-chair experts on some topic or aspect of our world, gardening, journalism, dessert making, etc. These fascinations may be the things you do for a living. Again, a lot of this has to do with marketability. The Yankees already have a second baseman, a manger and a general manager, however there is always a need for better gardeners, more chefs and cooks, better writers and so on.

5. Head of the Class - Are You Willing to the Back to School?

You may need to take classes in marketing, advertising, business management, accounting, or other topics that are vital to running a successful business. You have to ask yourself, are you willing to put forth the effort it’ll take to go to class two or three nights a week and actually learn this stuff?