The 9 to 5 Is a Scam, and I Wish I'd Started Sooner

And I'm sitting here thinking about a thing I said in a previous video on my YouTube channel, which is that a nine to five is a scam, and that I wish I'd done this earlier.

I meant it then. I mean it more now.

So let me actually explain it, properly, in writing, because a seven minute video can only carry so much. And because there's a version of this argument that gets thrown around online that I think is genuinely irresponsible, and I want to be careful to not give you that version.

Let me start with the bit that sounds extreme, and then I'll walk it back to something you can actually use.

A quick word from today's sponsor

Popsmith has surpassed its $1 million fundraising goal and is now officially oversubscribed, and its StartEngine campaign may close early.

The business behind the popper: over $20 million in lifetime revenue, $9 million projected 2026 revenue, a 45% repeat purchase rate, a growing consumables subscription business, and a launch in Williams Sonoma stores nationwide.

This is Popsmith's second and final planned equity crowdfunding raise. $350 investment minimum, under 5 minutes to complete. All investors also receive 25% off Popsmith purchases for life.

If you're considering an investment, don't wait until the deadline.

Explore the investment opportunity

Own a Stake in Popsmith

Fair. Let me define my terms, because "scam" is doing a lot of work in that sentence and the word matters.

A scam isn't just someone taking your money. A scam is when the deal you think you're getting isn't the deal you're actually getting.

And here's my honest read on what the standard employment deal actually is. You trade your hours, your time, and your mental capacity to deal with other people's problems. In exchange you get money, and a certain amount of stability.

That's the deal on the label. And the money part is real. I need to say that clearly because I don't want anyone reading this and thinking I'm about to tell them employment doesn't pay. It does. It's the most reliable money most people will ever have, and I've been broke enough to know what reliable money is worth.

But here's the part on the label that nobody reads.

You are also renting out the best hours of your life. Not your leftover hours. The good ones. The ones where your brain still works and your body isn't tired and you could have built something.

People will argue with me on this and I'll happily take the argument, because I've worked a lot of jobs. I'm not some bloke who's going to rock up and tell you how employment works from a position of never having done it. I've done stacks of them. I've worked for other people. I've worked for myself. I know what both feel like, and I know the difference, and the difference is not primarily about money.

It's about who the hours belong to.

I've said before that I think a nine to five is modern day slavery. I stand by the feeling behind that, and I'll be honest with you: I think it's too strong as a sentence, because it's not slavery, and I'm sitting in a comfortable house in a country where I can say whatever I want on the internet, so let's not be ridiculous.

But I'll tell you what it is.

It's the closest thing to it that a free person signs up for voluntarily, on purpose, with a smile, because the alternative is frightening.

Anyway. That's the claim. Now let me talk about why it took me so long to do anything about it, because that's the part that might actually help you.

When I was working for myself, properly working for myself, I was living overseas. That's a whole story and I've told bits of it in other videos, but the relevant part is this: I was on my own, running my own thing, and the money was not guaranteed. Some months were good. Some months were genuinely frightening.

And I have never felt more like a person.

The way I describe it is this. You know when you go on a really long holiday somewhere incredible? Let's say you're Australian and you go to the Greek Islands. You spend two, three, four weeks there. And by about day nine something shifts, and you say to your partner, "I could live here, you know. I could actually live here. We could just move."

Everyone has had that conversation. I love that conversation.

And then the holiday ends. You fly home. You go back to work on the Monday.

And it's deflating. It's genuinely one of the worst feelings there is.

Now here's what nobody tells you: having your own business and then going back to working for someone else feels exactly like that, except it never stops feeling like that. It's not a two week come-down. It's every day. It's like someone reached into your guts and pulled your liver out through your chest, and then handed you a lanyard and asked you to please be at your desk by 8:30.

That is not a motivational line. That's just the closest description I've got.

Because once you've felt your own hours belong to you, you cannot unfeel it. And I know people who've done the thing I'm describing, gone back to employment, and they all report the same thing: the very first day, they're sitting there thinking, how do I get out of here.

Not in a year. On the first day. In the first meeting.

There's a version of this where I tell you employment is bad and self-employment is good, and you should just go for it.

I'm not going to do that, because it's a lie, and also because I have a job, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend otherwise. More on that in a minute, because I think it's actually the most useful part of this whole piece.

Let me draw the trade honestly.

Working for someone else gives you more stable income, usually. That's real. If the business you work for has a bad quarter, you still get paid. If the economy turns, someone else loses sleep over it. You close the laptop on Friday and it stays closed until Monday, and nobody's mortgage depends on you having a good idea at 3pm on a Thursday.

That is not nothing. That is a lot, actually. I have friends, people very close to me, who work full time jobs and they are extremely good at it, and they're happy, and they have no desire to run a business at all. And that's fantastic. Genuinely. It's not a lesser life. If that's you, I'm not here to recruit you.

Working for yourself gives you less stable income and total ownership. You also get a very specific thing that no salary can buy, which is that if this works, it's yours. Yours to grow. Yours to sell. Yours to hand to your kid. Yours to take with you if you move country.

But what you're really signing up for, and I need you to hear this part, is not "being the boss".

It's being the boss, the employee, the marketer, the salesperson, the bookkeeper, the accounts department, and HR. All of them. At the same time. In one body. With one calendar.

I wish I had an HR person. I've said things on the internet that an actual HR person would have pulled me aside about, and the only reason nobody does is that there isn't one.

So when people say "I want to be my own boss", what they usually mean is "I want to not have a boss". And that's the wrong picture, because you're about to become the worst boss you've ever had, and you will be able to see your own face while you do it.

A quick word from today's sponsor

Done with the same leftovers? Add more variety to your week with CookUnity. Discover 500+ meals nationwide handcrafted by world-class chefs, featuring 60+ cuisines and diets. Delivered fresh and ready to heat in minutes, this is a great way to explore authentic global flavors, and the best of your local food scene at home.

See What’s Fresh Near You

Here's the other half, and this is the reason I get excited about this, and the reason I bother writing about it at all.

I genuinely think it is easier than it has ever been to build a business.

Not to build a big business. I'm not going to sit here and promise you a software empire. Easier to build something, starting from nothing, with no funding, in your evenings, alone, at your kitchen table.

And here's the bit I really want to talk about, because I think it's underrated.

For all of you introverts out there, and I'd count myself in a lot of rooms, there is so much you can build now that does not require you to talk to many people.

When I started my first proper company, if you wanted customers you had to get in a room with people. You had to ring them, or door-knock, or go to the breakfast networking thing and give out cards and pretend to be excited. If that's the thing that stops you, that barrier is basically gone. You can build, publish, write, ship, and let the marketing find people for you. You can be introverted and commercial at the same time now, and that is genuinely new.

If you've got a bit of money behind you for the marketing side, even a small amount, that goes further than it has ever gone as well.

But I want to be careful here, because I don't want to sell you a fantasy. There's a version of "it's easier than ever" that really means "it's cheaper and faster to pretend you're running a business". Anyone can buy a domain and put up a landing page. That's not the hard part any more. The hard part has moved.

The hard part is starting, and then not stopping.

Which brings me to the only thing I actually know about who succeeds.

Starting from scratch is a pain in the arse. There's a hundred stupid small things you need to do and most of them are boring. You need a name, and a way to take money, and an invoice template, and some kind of bookkeeping, and an answer to "so what do you actually do", and you need a hundred of these before anything interesting happens.

It's tricky. It's unglamorous. Nobody claps.

And the people who succeed, in my experience, are almost never the smartest ones or the best funded ones. They're the ones who just stuck around and kept doing the things. Long after the excitement wore off. Long after the first three clients said no. Long after month four where nothing happened at all.

I've said this in another video and it holds: the people who make it treat their business like an actual job, not like a hobby.

Because here's the thing about a hobby. A hobby is something you do when you feel like it. That's the whole point of a hobby, that's why it's nice. And a business that only gets worked on when you feel like it is not a business, it's a hobby with a domain name.

I'll be honest with you about my own stuff. I run something called the Safer Internet Project, and I've said on camera that it's absolutely a hobby, and that I should probably stop calling it a business. That was a joke and it was also completely serious. You can hear the difference in how I treat it and how I treat things that have to pay bills.

I've learned that lesson more than once actually. Years back I spent about two years bringing in clients and doing work for my own company while I was employed somewhere else, and scheduling that work around the day job. That's the most successful thing I've ever done, and it was built entirely out of time I didn't have.

So that's the actual method. Now let me give it to you properly, because this is the part I care about.

I said this in the video and I'll say it again here, and louder:

Do not quit your job to start a business.

That's not real advice, and if a video or a blog post or a bloke on a boat in Bali gives you that advice, you should be suspicious of everything else they tell you.

Quitting your job to start a business with no income is financially destructive. If it works you'll feel like a genius. If it doesn't, which is the more likely outcome, you'll have burned your savings, you'll be under pressure, and pressure is the worst possible state to make business decisions in. You make desperate decisions when rent is due. Desperate decisions are how businesses die.

So here's my preferred way of doing it, which is also the way I coach people on.

You build it while you are still working.

Not on company time. I'm not telling you to defraud your employer. Read your contract, know what you've signed, and stay inside it. That's not a moral lecture, that's basic self-preservation, because the fastest way to lose the income that's funding your business is to get fired for doing your business at your desk.

But whatever you can legally do outside of those boundaries, in your evenings, on your weekends, in the two hours before anyone else in your house is awake, that's what you should be doing.

And I know how that sounds. It sounds like "work more hours". And it is, sort of. I'm not going to pretend it's not a season of being tired.

But look at what you're actually buying with it:

You keep the stable income while you find out whether anyone wants the thing you're building.

You get to be wrong cheaply. Your first version will be wrong. So will your second. If you find that out on your weekends, it costs you a Saturday. If you find that out after quitting, it costs you the whole gamble.

You find out whether you actually like it. And this one's underrated. A lot of people who dream about running a business would hate the actual day-to-day of running a business. Better to learn that on a Tuesday night than after you've given notice.

And you get to keep your nerve. This is the big one. A person with a job can say no to a bad client. A person without one says yes to everything, and then resents all of it.

So when should you actually leave?

When the side thing can pay the bills. Not the whole dream number. The bills. When it's paying enough that leaving is a decision rather than a leap.

Or when staying costs you more than leaving. That happens too, and it happened to me. I'm going to be straight with you, because I think anyone writing about this who isn't straight about it is selling something.

I don't tell people to quit and go all in. But I also don't sit here and pretend employment is a safe harbour that never breaks up. It does. Companies restructure. Contracts end. A job you thought was permanent turns out to be a lease.

The difference is, if you've been quietly building something for two years in the evenings, that's not a catastrophe. That's Tuesday. If you haven't, it's a catastrophe.

I'm not going to get into my whole employment history here, because that's a longer story than one blog post and honestly some of it I'm still working out. But the short version is: I've run my own thing, and I've worked for other people, and I currently do both, and I've stopped pretending those two facts cancel each other out. They don't. They're the honest position of a man in the middle of it, which is a much more useful place to write from than the top of the mountain.

Which is the whole reason I'm writing this, actually.

Here's my confession. For years I told myself the reason I hadn't started was that I wasn't ready.

I needed more skills. More certs. More money. A better idea. I needed to wait until things settled down, and things never settle down, so effectively I was waiting forever.

What I was actually doing was protecting myself from finding out.

Because as long as you haven't started, the idea is perfect. It's the best business in the world, and the only reason it isn't working is that you haven't launched it yet. The moment you start, you find out. And finding out is terrifying, because the answer might be no.

And the answer will be no. Not to the whole thing, usually, but to parts of it. Your pricing will be wrong. Your first landing page will be ugly. You'll launch and get four visitors and two of them will be your mum.

The failure will teach you something you can improve on next time. That's not a consolation prize, that's the entire mechanism. You cannot think your way to a working business. You can only run into the wall enough times to find the door.

I'll go further, and this is the part that took me the longest to actually believe: I bet against myself. Repeatedly. I have looked at my own ideas and thought, that's not going to work, and I've been wrong, and the only reason I know I was wrong is that I did it anyway and it worked.

The version of me that was right about everything never started anything.

A quick word from today's sponsor

November 19th, 11am ET / 8am PT.

In global employment, the sale is only the start. Customers stay or leave based on what happens after signature.

At The GTM Garage, Pebl’s Chief Business Officer, Dutta Satadip, walks through the tools behind prospecting, pipeline, and handoff to onboarding, and how Pebl uses AI across the customer lifecycle.

15 min conversation. 15 min open Q&A. For Seed to Series A teams.

Request Your Spot

So here's the question I actually want to answer, the one I opened with.

When was the best time to start the business you've got in your head? The one you keep coming back to in the shower. The one you've pitched to your partner in the car and then never mentioned again.

It was yesterday. It was last week. It was a month ago. It was years ago.

Starting the business should have happened the moment you thought about it. Not because the timing was perfect, it never is, but because every month you don't start is a month of learning you don't get back. There is no version of this where the thinking gets cheaper. Everything you learn by waiting, you could have learned by doing, and you'd have learned it faster and you'd have a business at the end of it.

Why not? Genuinely. If the answer is "because I might fail", then read the last section again, because failure is the curriculum, not the disqualifier.

I want you to feel the thing I described earlier. Not the liver thing, the other thing. The holiday thing. The realisation that you could live somewhere else, doing something that's yours.

Except you don't have to fly home at the end of it.

Once you've had that, and once you've built something of your own and watched it start to work, the nine to five looks completely different. You'll be in a meeting, listening to someone talk about a process change, and you'll think: nine to five, one hundred percent a scam. And you'll say it to other people too, because it will be so obvious to you by then that you won't be able to believe you ever thought otherwise.

That's the thing I want for you. Not the quitting. The obviousness.

Not for everyone. I want to say that plainly, because I said it in the video and I meant it.

Some people are genuinely good at jobs, and genuinely happy in them, and the idea of running a business sounds like a punishment. That's fine. That's a good life. Don't let anybody, including me, tell you it's a wasted one.

But if you're reading this and something in your chest has gone tight, then you're one of the ones I'm actually talking to. The ones with a fire in them. The ones who want to take what they know and make something out of it, and who just keep waiting for permission.

Nobody's coming with permission. That's the whole scam. It's designed so that permission never arrives, so you stay, and the good hours go to someone else's problem.

So here's what I'd ask you to do this week. Not this year. This week.

Pick the thing. The one you keep circling. Write down, in one sentence, what it does and who it's for. Then write down the smallest possible version of it that you could have in front of another human being inside thirty days.

That's it. That's the whole assignment. No business plan, no logo, no name that you'll still like in six months. Just the smallest real thing, and one person to show it to.

You can do that while employed. That's the entire point of this post.

And if you do it, and it starts working, you'll be sitting somewhere in two years thinking: I wish I did this earlier.

Which is exactly what I said at the start.

Which means you already know. You've known for a while. You just haven't started.

I want to see what you're building. Genuinely. In the video I made about this, I asked people to tell me the name of their business, and I promised I'd let every single comment through, even the ones with links in them, because I want to showcase them.

That offer stands right here.

Tell me the name of your business. If you've got a website, tell me the website. If you're pre-launch, that's fine too. Tell me the idea. Tell me what you're stuck on. Tell me what the thing is that's stopping you, because odds are I've been stopped by the same thing and I might have something useful to say about it.

I coach people on exactly this, starting and growing a business while you're still employed, and I do it because I like watching people get free of this. If these posts help you get some traction, then honestly, that makes me really happy. That's it. That's the whole payoff for me.

Now go and do the thirty day thing.

Not actual advice. Please don't quit your job.

Anyway. Thanks for reading, guys. I appreciate you. Get yourself out of the slave labour situation and go build something that's actually yours.

See you on the next one. Peace out.