In defense of my uncle

Zlata Nikolaeva about hired workers

Author: Zlata Nikolaeva

Zlata Nikolaeva (by the way, we don’t know who she is) wrote us a column about those who work “for their uncle.” And about those who have achieved success in business and begin to put pressure on others with their weight, many of whom sincerely do not like doing business.

“I don’t want to work for my uncle” is a phrase I often hear from friends, acquaintances and colleagues. Getting up on an alarm clock, breakfast in a hurry, work email, metro or traffic jams, deadlines, disruptions, overtime, lack of sleep, fatigue, meetings, “the boss is an asshole,” difficult clients, drunkenness on Fridays and the desire to die on Saturdays, vacation twice a day year, life passes by while you are writing a quarterly report - at some point it gets to everyone. “One day I woke up and realized that I couldn’t live like this anymore. I want to be the master of my life, and not a doll in the hands of employers. — another person who decided to give up everything tells me. “I don’t want to work for my uncle anymore, only for myself.”

I hate this phrase. It has become especially popular in recent years - a time of the cult of entrepreneurship and startups, fueled by funds, accelerators, seminars, lectures, business schools and Ust-Zadnitsa MBA courses, publications in the media and individual, let's be honest, not isolated, success stories. I ate this startup porridge with raisins when I worked in business journalism, and I can say that it has both good and bad raisins. I communicate with about a dozen people who, to varying degrees, have succeeded in getting investments, building a business from scratch, starting to earn money and scaling, to highlight what is necessary. And several dozen of those who did not succeed: for years they hover between coworking spaces and investors, either returned under the wing of another “uncle”, or fell into depression and went on a drinking binge. However, even those who fail are perceived by the public as better fellows than those who don’t try. And this despite the fact that not wanting to be a hero is actually a completely normal story.

So what do heroes who decide to change their lives once and for all not take into account? Even if we omit all the routine details, from difficulties with registering your business and taxation to hassles with partners and investors (aspiring entrepreneurs are told about this at lectures and seminars), there are a lot of nuances.

Firstly, the hated “from call to call” only gets worse as soon as you become your own boss. Hired work is at least somehow regulated: someone works eight hours a day and then walks quietly, someone overworks and spends 16 hours a day at the machine. The owner of the business, until he earns his millions and the opportunity to leave his operational work (and this happens, oh, and not in six months, but much later), is busy around the clock. There are no days off, no “I’m sick,” and there’s no “drop everything and take a day off” either - as in that joke, you have to go to school anyway, even though Sidorov teases, because “you’re 40 years old, Vovochka, and you the director of this school." And no one, if not you.

Secondly, there are a few people who are capable of starting something of their own from scratch and without good work experience. And don’t pat yourself on the head with the story about a simple student, Mark Zuckerberg - most of us have never even dreamed of such an education and social connections as this simple guy. And mere mortals, alas and ah, need to establish these connections and work hard to understand how things work, how to build processes, and so on.

In addition, few people think about this, but not everyone can do their own thing (and make it successful). The notorious business sense and entrepreneurial spirit are, of course, not magic or wizardry, but a combination of qualities, skill and luck. Are you sure that all this is successfully combined in you? Do you evaluate yourself soberly? People often ask me: “Maybe you should start doing something of your own? You have hundreds of ideas!” Ideas are good, but you need to be able to implement them, and I know for sure about myself: I am a good performer and organizer, a good manager and, probably, a leader. But not a businessman.

Finally, if employees are suckers, and entrepreneurs are great, and everyone turns into a businessman, who will work?

I imagine the situation:

— Help me change my wheels to winter ones, I’ll pay.

- Sorry, dude, I'm a businessman.

- And I have my own business.

- Figure it out yourself, in short.

Think about this if you want to quit everything right now and open your own startup selling radio-controlled collars for cats. And I’ll tell you a secret: that same “uncle” most likely also hates you from time to time. Sometimes you just make him sick, and he gets into his expensive car in the evening, stands in a traffic jam on the way to his elite cottage community and thinks: “Lord, I can’t live like this anymore.”

Greetings from the office,
Aunt Zlata Nikolaeva,
Especially for TJournal

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