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Reading The Four-Day Week Challenge by Ryan Carson on A List Apart brought this article to my mind, it is a lovely idea to work 4 days a week instead of 5, but is this possible during the construction stage?

Not only towers and buildings or architecture work have a construction stage, we as human beings do construct ourselves too, these years of our twenties when we are working over 15 hours a day to accomplish the unaccomplished and reach the stars, since we are students and after we graduate, putting our dreams, setting our targets and planning for them, then begin the hard work, we start The Construction Stage.

The Two Ways

Whether we are planning to build a successful career and a secure job, or planning to be self employed and independent, in both cases the construction stage is the key to achieve this target, the way we go through and build our assets and our understanding to it.

Career

In the career scenario the target is clear, to find the right job with the right employer that believes in you, utilizes your skills and gives you as much as you give. This job that you will grow with while you are sure that as long as you are doing better, you will get promoted and raised.

Finding this job is the difficult part, after college as a fresh graduate with no experience or practical knowledge, maybe you will spend few years in different jobs until you find your target, meanwhile working on yourself, making better references and gaining respectful experience, this is your construction stage.

Self-employed

Starting a business is not that difficult as it was before, specially if you have the skills and you are able to do it as your profession and craft, but it is more complicated than the career scenario. To go solo you need a capital, resources, you have to build a reputation to move with, not to mention the other responsibilities that you may have, some people have a backup support by their parents or partners, but others don’t and they are fully responsible about their choice and have build it on their own.

One of the reasons why starting a business is more difficult and complicated than building a career is that the employee in general get motivated and encouraged by his management to do more and develop himself, while in the other hand in the solo business situation requires more optimality and strong believe in the self and the dream project itself in order to move forward.

When you are working solo you don’t get encouraged, you are the one who have to take care about everything, the competition the bills, the salaries (if you have employees), and the business itself too, while the employee will take care of himself and his personal skills only as his employer will take care of the rest.

The Hard Way

When your target is to be self employed but at the same time you have bills to pay, then you have to find a job that at least pays your bills and gives you enough time to develop yourself and prepare for the solo move.

I call such a job the Backup Job, it’s the security job, when you are able to secure your life and pay your bills, even save some money to start your own business, it is not the dream job that you are looking for, and not the job that you will get promoted in and do what you love, it is just a job where you do what you know even if you don’t like.

Sometimes even after starting solo business without good planning you may reach the point that you have to do something you don’t like to survive, doing projects that you don’t believe in just to have enough income to support yourself and meet your responsibilities, this is very much related to your planning, if your plan is solid and you did construct well you will not need to do this, and you will be in the exact position you wished for, choosing your own clients and doing the kind of projects that you are really enjoying, not doing them just for the money.

At The End…

It is not just a matter of choice or dream, it’s how much do you believe in your target, and how strong is your will to achieve it, or else why there are many people still working in the same unpromising job for the last decades.. in my opinion it’s either their will that wasn’t enough to help them achieve, or maybe their situation was so bad and they had too much responsibilities to take care of so they didn’t have enough time for themselves.

Back to the four-day week challenge, in the construction stage, I think it should be The 24/7 Challenge depending on our situation, as long as we are in the construction stage the hard work and the believe in what we are doing will take our time at least until we reach a decent position and have the ability to take the four-day week challenge.

Personally I’m in the middle of this stage, what about you? did you build your assets, still planning, or did you already hit your target? share your opinion with us here and let’s learn from each other.