The first time I started making enough money to stop depending on my parents financially was when I graduated from college. Since then I’ve come to realize that ‘real life’ is increasingly uncertain. When you take a young person’s passion and ambition and add to it the necessity to make money, everything gets more complicated. The need to eat, live and support yourself undercuts all thoughts. Any ideas you have about the future inevitably include the question, how much will it cost? Every decision you take now comes at a price, literally. 

Most people don’t think about it too much, and get a job. Having a job means that you trade your time for the certainty of a steady income. Some uncertainty still exists, but much of it is abstracted away because your employer takes care of it for you. You still have to figure out how to save for big financial goals like buying a house, for example, but the fact that you have a steady stream of income is not in question.

But the opportunity cost of having a job is very high. To reap the benefits, you have stay in the system all your working life. Rent out your time and hand over partial control of your decisions to organizations that you had no hand in creating and have deceptively little control in running. And even after all that, most people don’t make enough money to reclaim full control of their time until a few decades into their career, and some never do.

As far as I can tell, other than inheriting wealth the only real way to escape this system is by starting a company. And that comes with a lot of uncertainty of its own. Uncertainty about if or when you’ll make money, and how to keep going in the face of it. 

It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be

In the beginning it is more important to make a decision than it is to worry about what that decision is.

There is a lot of advice out there on how to start a company. Early on that can get quite overwhelming. A lot of it might seem contradictory, or might not apply to your particular situation. The thing to realize at this point is that any decision is better than no decision. Sure you might go down some paths that you’ll later realize weren’t the most optimal, but the solution is to self correct when that happens, instead of spending a long time trying to decide on an initial path forward.

It’s like trying to learn the landscape of a new city without a map. You have an idea about what you’ll find - most cities have grocery stores, restaurants, office buildings and houses - but you don’t know where these things are in relation to you. Some people may tell you that the first thing you should do when you arrive is get groceries, others might say it’s more important to learn the route to your office. You use your best judgement at the time and decide to go to the grocery store first. Along the way you run into other people and ask for directions. It’s quite possible that you might’ve started walking in the wrong direction entirely. But the only way you could’ve known that is if you’d picked a direction and started walking.

Over time you start to form a map in your head of what the city looks like. You’ll learn which routes you like best and which ones work for you, even though they might not work for other people given that your starting points are different. But none of this would be possible without first making a choice, any choice, and committing to it.

Maintain balance, and faith

Once upon a time, a member from the audience approached a violinist after a performance and said, “I would give my life to be able to play like you!”, and the violinist replied, “I did.”

Starting a company is going to take over your life. Out of all the things this will make more difficult, consistency will be the hardest one to maintain. And yet it is the one thing that will make the most difference to the outcome in the long run.

The easiest way to remain consistent is to keep a healthy balance. Experiment with schedules till you find one that makes you feel like you’re getting a lot of work done, and still gives you some down time to recharge. Compounding returns only work if the effort is sustained over a long period of time, usually on the order of years. Staying the course requires both stamina and patience.

It is also useful to maintain balance when it comes to planning and execution. You can’t know what to work on unless you decide what needs to be done and triage the tasks in order of importance, and yet it is possible to spend too much time planning or change plans too frequently. At some point you have to put your head down and commit to a direction for a while before resurfacing to review your work and make new plans for the next chunk of time.

And finally, keep the faith. Trust that you made the best decision with the information you had at the time, and see that decision through. The most emotionally challenging thing is to feel like you’re going down the wrong path and yet have no idea what you’re doing wrong. External validation is not a luxury available to the self-employed. The only thing you can do now is remember that other people have gone down this path before and it has worked out for them. It will for you too. It’s called delayed gratification for a reason, so keep going.

The uncertainty will always be there, so get comfortable

This is what you signed up for. Being on your own tiny boat in the ocean. Make no mistake, people with jobs are on boats too, just ones that they didn’t build. Theirs might be bigger, but they’re prone to winds, waves and unpredictable weather just like the rest of us.

The ocean has calm days and some not so calm ones. People have gotten better at predicting the weather, built tools to warn us in advance when a storm is about to hit. Smaller boats will be harder hit of course, but with a little luck and a lot of work, many have shown that it is possible to come through.

And being on a smaller boat has its advantages. You can chart your own course, go wherever you want in the world. You get to learn all there is to know about keeping a boat afloat in the ocean. You will even have the option to build yourself a bigger boat, or continue to be small and nimble if you choose.

You will be the captain of your own boat. Free to make any decision you please. Free from the politics and hierarchy that are the norm on bigger boats. Bigger boats might even want to buy you in the future, and you will have the freedom to decide whether to take them up on their offer.

There will be challenges to be sure. You will have to work harder to keep yourself afloat, be more resilient and resourceful than the bigger boats, and compete with the big boats and all the other little boats.

In the end you have to decide which life you want to live. A life that gives you immense freedom if you can learn to live with the uncertainty, or a life in which you never have to face the uncertainty head on but one in which you’ll never be completely free.