A few friends and I got together recently and caught up. Two of the three of us were practicing business owners (trying to avoid the bullshit word entrepreneur), and the third one was a at the cusp of becoming one as well.

The discussion at hand was mainly focused on building one’s own business. We talked about the all-too-typical struggle of the corporate worker bee who has the aspiration of running his own show someday. How do they support their family without a steady paycheck? How does one come up with the capital to start a business? What’s a good business idea that isn’t too risky? What level of risk can I tolerate for an acceptable return? What if it fails, will I have wasted precious time that I could have been using to earn a dollar at a job?

Typical questions to ask, right?

This morning I pondered these questions further, and remembered my crazy time in my first year of running my business. I didn’t expect others to do the kamikaze approach I took, but if not, I wondered how people would start their own enterprise. Most people have priority commitments, whether it be in the form of debt, family, or other obligations. The vast majority are tied to their jobs due to the perceived stability it brings. To most folks, the idea of tearing away from that biweekly paycheck is akin to jumping off a cliff. How to pay the mortgage! Those car payments won’t pay themselves! How will I pay off my student loans without a job!! Oh MY!!

All common fears, and completely understandable.

However, the takeaway from our recent conversation was this:  to achieve true independence from the tyranny of the corporate soul-sucking morass of clocking in day in and day out, of jockeying for promotions each year only to see them handed to the short hot-headed numskulls who would throw others under the bus (yes I have one such person in my mind from my Amgen days), endless meetings of nonsense and Powerpoints about topics no one truly cares about, and so forth – to achieve freedom from this, there is no better time than now (both in the temporal and the historical sense), and there is no better way than through creating your own enterprise. People suffer from the illusion that working a corporate job, as cushy as it might be, represents some sort of stability. It might be in the short term, but in the long term, it is a prison for one’s mind. It’s a ball and chain that limits one’s true creativity and potential to doing just enough to get the job done and go home to have happy hour, dinner, binge-watch Netflix, help the kids with homework, and pass out to do it again the next day. Eventually, one’s capacity to truly think is eviscerated, and they are stuck in the paradigm of whatever superior’s bidding they are paid to perform. And they’ll do this continually, jumping from lily pad job to the next lily pad, in the name of advancing their professional career. All this for a pittance of a salary that is heavily taxed by Uncle Sam and the state you live in.

Some people may take offense to what I am about to say, but I honestly don’t care. It’s actually for your own good if you understand my message.

Unless you truly love your job – and be real about your definition of being truly in love with it – and if you’re not doing it to make money, you’re wasting your time and effort. I’ll say it again: unless one is doing a job and does not need money from it but derives pure joy from it and loves said job, one should be doing everything they can to create their own enterprise in order to enable them to DO those things they really love (i.e. spending time with their children, family, buying the house of their dreams, traveling the world, creating music, writing, playing sports, etc.) Anyone who tells me that they LOVE their job with a straight face is usually lying to me. You really know when someone loves their job- because they’d be doing it whether they got paid or not. These folks usually have income coming from somewhere else, just so you know- so money is usually not an issue.

The reason for this urgency, and for my passionate view on this? It’s for all those reasons I stated above – but moreover, because spending more time developing a “professional career” only grooms one to be more efficient of a lapdog for a group of shareholders who could care less to cut them loose when they need to “rationalize their resources” in the company. It creates an artificial stress on the body which manifests itself in chronic disease over time. It also robs one of the short time we all have here on this earth. It is mainly for these last 2 reasons here that I am so passionate about helping people escape this hell. As Peter Gibbons said in Office Space, we were not made to sit in cubicles all day and slave away for others! He wasn’t joking!

One of the things I’ll say here is – once you have experienced the power of free enterprise in your life, you will never go back. When you take the leap of faith, your view of the world changes. Your perspective on money, time, relationships, all change for the better. WAYYYYY better- I can’t stress this enough. I look back on my old corporate days and am extremely thankful for all the people I met along the way, along with the experience and discipline I learned – but man, 10 years was enough. When you make that transition into this world of running your own show – you set the rules, you set your goals, and you set your life up. Success is now your fully vested interest (or as Eminem said, your only muthaf****n option, failure’s not). I have also found from personal experience that fortune truly favors the bold in that doors of opportunity present themselves organically to those who are fighting this fight. They just happen, the more you push on.

So if you’re tired of doing the same shyte every day in and day out to make someone else rich, if you want to be physically present as an integral part of your child’s growth, if you want to truly BE with your family instead of Netflixing and chilling for a few tired hours each day, if you want to pursue the hobby you’re passionate about, if you want to live in the house you’ve dreamed of, if you want that idyllic boat or car, if you want to travel the world and experience everything you’ve wanted to, it is truly possible- do not let anyone else convince you otherwise.

Because real talk – it’s either this, or it’s rat race time. And I trust that most of us aren’t fortunate enough to have a trust fund to subsidize our lives. It’s my genuine hope that everyone will find their path – and that it’s not a path of hell on earth, because it definitely doesn’t have to be.