What I love about working for myself

I’ve never thought of myself as a bad employee. In fact, there have been a lot of jobs I’ve had where I really threw myself into it with the “passion” that people always talk about having on their resumes.

But I’ve had enough jobs turn sour on me that I have to wonder at a certain point if maybe I really am a bad employee, despite perhaps being a good worker. I’m terribly headstrong and stubborn. I want to try things my own way — testing out my theories in reality and refining the results — and I absolutely hate hate hate collective decision-making processes. All things you really shouldn’t say in a job interview.

There’s two categories of “best jobs” that I’ve had. First are the ones where I’m given a lot of autonomy and a big project with tons of moving parts. For instance, working as a set designer in theatre was stressful but awesome. Second are jobs where the work and my role is really well-defined, and someone else trustworthy is in the lead. I really can’t stand working for people who don’t seem to know what they’re doing and are not organized enough to give me a clear pathway about how my actions add to the greater whole.

But we’re all just humans, after all. There are really few perfect jobs out there. Still, I have to admit that starting my own business has really broken me out of all the worries of having a “conventional” job:

I still do work part time in a local slaughterhouse on the production line, but that job is so well-organized and my role so narrowly-defined that, despite being sometimes covered in blood and feathers, it’s actually one of the better jobs I’ve had — in agriculture or otherwise.

Still, running my own small farm business has presented me with just the kinds of big picture challenges that I love, combined with many, many small picture details to constantly be figuring out. My business is also still small enough and new enough that I have the maneuverability to experiment, easily shift and re-focus according to what is proven to work in a very immediate sense.

My work is not some abstract thing one needs a flow-chart or corporate hierarchies to understand. I grow food. You can eat it.

This to me is endlessly liberating.

• Plus working from home.
• Setting my own hours.
• Taking long or short breaks as I feel like.
• Being able to take a decision without having to run it by someone else.
• If something needs to be done, I can just do it.
• Huge variety of tasks to do — the work is always changing.
• Changes, updates, modifications that I make to my work processes are immediately visible in results (or lack thereof).

I’ve also noticed, since starting my own business, that people treat you differently. It’s like if you go out in public wearing a suit versus a t-shirt. It throws you automatically into another category of human expression or perhaps social role. Even if your business isn’t making any money, there’s sort of an in-built social cache around this “myth of the entrepreneur” as being some great hero embarking into the unknown on a noble quest to… make money.

Whether or not the money part is really the noble goal our culture sets it up to be, creating something that serves some actual real essential purpose is — especially if that structure can sustain itself over time and grow, meaningfully intertwining itself with peoples’ lives. That to me is the more fascinating part of the challenge, and I assume if you focus on that — and keep good books — that the money part will automatically follow in time.

But I’m still in my first year — and it’s not even finished yet. A lot of my findings, though based on solid observation, are still tentative. And as much as it’s a breath of fresh air to not have a boss yelling at you or telling you what to do, there can also be a kind of small sadness that comes too from “going it alone.” Both your failures and your successes become much more private, much more yours and yours alone.

Which can be lonely — like you’re the only flower in the field. The only house under the broad dark sky. The only one to try and hold onto the beauty as it passes all around us.

And maybe that has something to do with why I *might* be a bad employee — too concerned with the poetry of the moment unfolding around us. Too in love with the way to simply follow someone else’s orders blindly without reflection. Too bored by what we’re supposed to do, and always wanting to find out what lies on the other side of “What If?”

Now, at least, I have the chance to try and to find out. Now I have the chance to just be me.