Liberating?

SimpliSiti’s booth didn’t do well at all last Saturday. It was moments like this that gives me doubts. That’s the nature of an enterprise, I know – sometimes you’re up sometimes you’re down. (Just a note, my primary intention of attending AnNajjah event last Saturday was to help pass the contributions from our surau collection drive as well as to show them my support.) To be fair to myself, the place wasn’t much a proper booth and I did arrive late and hence gotten the last booth which is quite hidden, not many people actually came to my booth at all. But that’s the thing you see – I did arrive late (nevermind why). It boils down to one of the things about entreprenuership that I’ve learnt some three weeks ago: what you get (returns) highly correlates to what you do. Yes, I know – that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? But knowing about it and experiencing it, is somewhat different. When that struck me three weeks ago (well, I made a relatively good sale after putting in some efforts) – it felt liberating. How much I make depends on the work I do, the efforts I put in, the decisions I make, the ideas and thoughts I have, etc etc. The same cannot be said of a salaried income. Well, your pay may vary depending on your performance (or overtime perhaps), depending on how your employee structures the pay scheme, but it would probably be only a relatively small correlation. Except perhaps for sales personnels, whose pay may be on commission basis.

Anyway, liberating – yes, liberating. But on Saturday, it turned from liberating to scary! Ah-ha risk risk risk.. of course. I’m not being too hard on myself – I’m just trying to familiarise myself with the pros and cons of being independent (of fixed income, that is). I’m just feeling a bit more nervous – because I do set myself targets, in terms of returns and timing, and at the moment it doesn’t seem I’m reaching them yet. Having an enterprise as a side income is still fine I guess, but it gets ‘scarier’ if (when?) it becomes the only income.

(Woops – is this blog turning into “A Journal of an Entreprenuer-Wannabe”? Hehe ;p)