Becoming Unemployable Is How You Become Free

Here's how I did it (without being a d*ck)

“Be careful Timbo, you’ve got to stay employable.”

That’s what my first manager said. He told me to add “employable skills,” get plenty of certificates for different stuff like an MBA, and always build my career network.

Staying employable became a mantra that motivated me. I always felt if I lost my focus on being employable, my career would end, and I’d plunge into darkness and poverty.

A few weeks ago I got a punch in the guts. A former banker I used to work with said:

“Tim, there’s no nice way to say this but you’re now unemployable. You can never go back to banking. You’ve crossed to the other side. What if your online thing doesn’t work?”

I realized in that moment they were right. I will never be employed again.

What it bizarrely means to be unemployable (see if you can relate)

To understand the reality of being unemployable, we first need to look at the other side of the spectrum.

Writer Sean Cheo explains the current business environment better than I can:

“Corporate hiring is broken.

AI-drafted job specs with unrealistic expectations, ATS (Application Tracking System) filters, 6+ rounds of interviews, 25 hour ‘practical tests’, rampant ghosting... all for a chance to get a low-ball offer then laid off within a year because the CEO wants another 8% annual pay bump.

I find it absolutely insane that right now it's easier to make money off crypto, the stock market and self-employment in that order than it is to land a full-time job.

And this seems to be consistent across age groups. The young get rejected for lack of experience, the old for ageism, all while the same vacancy gets refreshed every few weeks.”

Being employable used to be the American Dream.

Now it’s the American nightmare. I’d rather go to hell than join the current circus that is corporate and the business world. It’s a joke.

Last week I stopped working with a long-term client. They told me they’re now too busy to work with me. I went back through the notes. When we first met he was working 9-10 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Now he’s working 16-hour days and all weekend. So he’s right, he is too busy. What he can’t see is the transition into this death spiral. Last year he was a froggy sitting in warm water. This year he’s a froggy sitting in almost boiling water.

I said this: “How far can this go?”

It’s 16 hours a day now. Does he break at 18 hours a day? 19 hours? To top it off, he told me he has two kids. So yes he’s damn busy and can’t work with me anymore, but at the same time he is unable to see his kids again until retirement.

He’s 55 and will retire at 65, so that’s 10 more years without a family.

Yet I’m the weirdo for working with him to build a Plan B. He’s too busy for me. If he leaves his 16 hour a day job, he immediately can’t pay his bills.  See the problem?

The corporate world gradually turns up the heat until your f*cking face is on fire and you can’t leave without getting your genitalia caught in a guillotine and going home bleeding while not being able to ever piss again.

I’m already teaching my 1 year old daughter to say “Go F yourself” to university and anyone selling 9-5 jobs.

So, yes, I’m unemployable, but it’s obvious being employable is way worse.

Image Credit-Midjourney

The subtle shift in the working world

There’s more to the story…

I find it absolutely insane that right now it's easier to make money off self-employment than it is to land a full-time job – Sean Cheo (edited)

Writer Hildy Harker notices something similar:

I’m more frequently seeing people hired as contractors.

In my academy I’m seeing this same trend. Solopreneurship, contracting, freelancing, consulting, and coaching are exploding like never before. In my last 9-5 job ever, at a bank, about 50% of the 40,000 people they employed were what they call flexi-workers (I was a consultant employed by a consulting firm.)

The trend of full-time employees is slowly dying. Why…

“Once you taste the money of working for yourself you automatically become unemployable” – Wyld Tribe

It’s not just the money either. It’s the freedom.

Screw commuting hours every day to sit on a chair in front of a computer when you could do the same from home. It used to make sense pre-2020. Now it just seems crazy to a rational person.

With the right skills you can serve multiple employers at a time.

In my last consulting gig, I consulted to several banks simultaneously. What I did for one bank I could do for another. Business isn’t that complicated. You can copy and paste your skills to any corporation. You can serve an Aussie client today, and an Indian one tomorrow.

Expect the trend of solo business owners to continue.

Here’s how to become unemployable so you can experience personal freedom

A few ideas to get your mind cranking and your heart pumping.

1. Believe in ownership

As an employee you’re a renter with a landlord.

At any moment you can be evicted thanks to the magic of layoff culture. To become unemployable like me you must understand ownership and the benefits. The biggest takeaway of ownership for me is how tax works.

• As an employee your tax is taken out before you get paid.

• As an owner you get paid in full then decide when, how much, and how you want to pay tax.

This gap in the matrix has doubled, if not tripled, my personal net worth (legally).

If you like being told what to do and having zero ownership, stay employable. But without ownership you’ll never be wealthy and you’ll always be told what to do.

2. Reject corporate nonsense

Politics is a hell hole.

The 2024 U.S. election is painful to endure. It took me a decade to realize working for a corporation is no different. The workplace is full of politics by default. There is no promotion or career ascension without playing politics.

That means you have to act fake, mislead people, and play each other off as if you’re a character in the movie Hunger Games.

Only once I left corporate did I realize how stupid it was.

Sitting in back-to-back meetings. Wearing a penguin suit every day. Saying the right thing. Pretending to care about a war in Europe. Wearing a badge on my suit jacket for whatever random special day of the year it was.

When I visit my 1 year old daughter’s daycare, honestly, it reminds me of the workplace. In fact her daycare is more civilized than any workplace I’ve seen. A workplace has lunch breaks, lockers for bags, a desk to sit at, teachers to tell you what to do, and story time aka town halls.

I don’t want to work in an adult daycare ever again. Perhaps you can relate.

Bottom line: until you hate corporate culture you won’t leave. Get real about it. Do you really love it?

3. Become unreasonable enough to think you must be paid more

If you think you’re paid fairly you’ll never leave.

I used to think $700 a week with $100 leftover at the end was great. Then I got one client outside of my bank job that paid me $200 for a 1-hour video call. It bent my reality. In the open market online you can get paid a lot more.

The point of a corporation is to make a profit. That means they need to pay employees the least amount possible to maximize their profits. So the incentives of a job literally work against your personal goals. Yet 99% don’t realize.

Your income could probably double if not triple what it is now. That’s a huge knife to the chest for some.

Don’t quit a job. Experiment outside of your job to prove it to yourself (then send me a commission of $1000 and let’s call it even…joking not joking).

4. Make money online and don't be a skeptical pleb

Skeptical people don’t make it in life.

They also can’t become unemployable. There’s a level of optimism and open-mindedness needed to transition away from being employable.

Almost 5 years ago I partnered with a stranger named Todd. We did an experiment together. It worked. So we did another one. Then we became business partners.

I live in Australia. He lives in Tennessee. He has all my passwords. I know the code to his cupboard full of naughty books from an adult shop (Jane Austen novels).

Todd and I have never met. Read that again.

Maybe he’s 4-foot or a drug dealer or smokes meth. No clue. Don’t care. I didn’t trust him. Nope, I validated through proof of work.

If I was a skeptical pleb that outcome would never have happened. It requires some level of trust. Contrast that with a reader I met last week who was petrified to put their credit card number into a website for a $50 newsletter purchase.

The internet isn’t a scam. Neither is AI or crypto.

These systems run the Earth, and you either understand and take advantage of them, or get replaced by them.

The way to defeat skepticism is to try some stuff. Take some small, calculated risks. Cap your downside so that if one risk, a $50 newsletter, blows up in your face, you don’t go bankrupt and end up living in a gutter eating beans and rice.

Have you ever felt unemployable? What was your strategy?

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