Ha, author here -- I'm probably a member of this group myself. I bootstrapped my first company and then ran a small consultancy for awhile.
Spent some time at a fund, but we primarily bought and operated SaaS companies as cash flow businesses. It's been base hits all the way.
I think if you're happy with building a business that gives you freedom and work life balance, this can be a great life. Personally, I eventually got tired of consulting even though it was good money and lifestyle. There were other things I wanted to work on that I didn't have time for, and I wanted to create something of my own, rather than just working on other people's projects.
But that's just my experience--I think if you're happy in the freelance / agency life, it can be great, but you are still ultimately selling time for money. Maybe this is a 4th path, the career craftsman--working a job you enjoy with people you like, and not needing your work to be as aligned with a "passion" or some sort of calling.
Just my $0.02 -- appreciate the comment and will have to make my writing sound less like an AI in the future ^_^;;
The most common pitfall I see on the bivocational path is when work consumes so much of your time and attention that you don’t have the energy to pursue art in your spare time.
One common pitfall of the integration approach is what I call the “bakery trap.” It goes like this: someone likes to bake pies, so they decide to open a bakery. A year in, they realize that they’re spending all their time bookkeeping, managing staff, and trying to market the business—and don’t get to spend any time actually baking.
these are really very similar.
especially with your followup example of travelling for work and never making it to the beach.
because that is actually choosing your work so that it aligns with your hobby, and not making your hobby into your job.
that is fine, it's just different from directly integrating your interest with your work.
i once worked as a developer evangelist. i got to travel and give talks. i never made it to any beach either, but that didn't matter because going to conferences and hanging out with tech folks was the very thing i enjoyed doing, and here i got paid for it. perfect job.
so for integrating, you really have to make sure that the thing you enjoy doing is the very thing that pays you. or realize that while you managed to align your interest with your work you didn't integrate them and you still are on the bivocational path.
EDIT TO ADD:
and the key for the bivocational path is to set proper priorities.
i never let work get in the way with spending time with family, meet with friends or other activities that i'd do after work. don't work over time. don't allow work to become more important than your other activities. if they do, fight back or switch jobs.
and if anyone questions your priorities, straight out tell them that your family is your priority. (while you are single, this means building a family and finding a partner, which requires time to spend with your friends and on your hobbies)
unless you intent to never get married. then you may need a different excuse.
Yep -- this is where I tend to see people end up after doing a sabbatical. That, or they alternate between periods of highly paid work and periods bumming skydiving, making art, etc.
Hey, author of the post here. My takeaway after trying all these strategies is that there's no one right answer. All paths can work but also have failure states.
If you want to talk, feel free to drop me a note - hi@nosmallplans.io. I spent 2 years doing consulting before shifting into other work, happy to share more specific thoughts / reflections offline.
I quit drinking ~9 years ago. I tried to start several companies while drinking, built and exited a company after quitting. Now I work as an exec coach w/ a focus on recent applied research in behavioral psychology. All that to say, I’ve thought a lot about both healthy / unhealthy alcohol use and productivity. Here’s my $0.02.
I’m not of the mind that no one should drink, but if you’re noticing that it’s hard to work and be productive without alcohol, you might want to explore that more before going back to drinking.
It could be as simple as you’re using alcohol to get past the initial discomfort of starting a task / etc, or it could be that it’s a way of avoiding some deeper emotional issue (anxiety, depression, ptsd, etc).
Regardless, even if you continue drinking, it would be ideal if you could access vitality and excitement and productivity without needing alcohol, so you can freely choose when to drink and when not to. If you can’t be productive without drinking, on some level you’ve developed a dependence on it, and this is not typically a great place to be. Even if you never have major consequences, it just tends to make the joy of everything else a little duller.
The fact that you’ve quit for 6 months and still aren’t feeling more excited seems indicative that something else is going on, whether you’ve replaced alcohol with something else (caffeine, nicotine), you actually don’t enjoy your work, or you were drinking quite a bit and your brain is still recovering. It can take 6-24 months for people who were significantly alcohol dependent to get through “post acute withdrawal” and return to normal brain activity. If you drink during that period, it more or less resets.
Anyways, hope the above is helpful for some context. If you want to talk, drop me a note.
Good points, thank you. There are definitely anxiety, depression, ptsd types of issues at play.
After reading your and others' comments, I've decided to skip the alcohol for as long as I can and work on other modalities to try and increase my passion and motivation for work. Maybe I'm burned out and need a sabbatical or break.
I hear you — taking some time off can definitely help.
The one other idea I’d offer is that the way you’re talking about drinking is a sort of “dead person goal.” In behavioral psych we define this as a goal that a dead person can accomplish better than an alive person.
A dead person will be really good at not drinking.
To turn it into an “alive person goal,” all you need to do is make it positive — ask yourself, what am I moving towards that I care about by not drinking?
Maybe this is a better relationship with work, connection to family, health, or even something like making space for healing. Whatever it is, the more you can focus on what you do want to move towards rather than what you want to move away from, the greater chance you’ll have at tapping into vitality and engagement in your day to day.
All that being said, this can be easier said than done. Especially if you’re burnt out, taking time off and getting back in touch with doing things for the intrinsic rewards can go a long way towards rekindling the spirit.
College degree is a requirement for most work visas. Otherwise, you can show significant work experience, but from what I remember last I checked (been a few years since I looked into this), it's a significantly higher hurdle in terms of # of years.
If anyone is interested, I'm currently starting a weekly ZK meetup on Zoom w/ a few founder friends who want to dive into the method.
Format is:
* 15 mins - check in on your workflow
* 30 mins - work on your ZK (write notes, refactor, etc.)
* 15 mins - set ZK goals for upcoming week and discuss tactics
If you're interested in joining, drop me a quick note to the email in my profile with a bit about yourself and experience in the method!
Spent some time at a fund, but we primarily bought and operated SaaS companies as cash flow businesses. It's been base hits all the way.
I think if you're happy with building a business that gives you freedom and work life balance, this can be a great life. Personally, I eventually got tired of consulting even though it was good money and lifestyle. There were other things I wanted to work on that I didn't have time for, and I wanted to create something of my own, rather than just working on other people's projects.
But that's just my experience--I think if you're happy in the freelance / agency life, it can be great, but you are still ultimately selling time for money. Maybe this is a 4th path, the career craftsman--working a job you enjoy with people you like, and not needing your work to be as aligned with a "passion" or some sort of calling.
Just my $0.02 -- appreciate the comment and will have to make my writing sound less like an AI in the future ^_^;;