Steven Cristol - NO BOSS! The Real Truth about Working Independently: 12 Lessons from 30 Years of Bossing Myself Around

I began planning this book shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic swept across our planet. It seems like long ago: B.C.Before Covid. In those days, working from home was, for some, an idealized fantasy. But for the overwhelming majority of employed people, it was impractical. For others, undesirable. For most full-time workers, regardless of appeal, it was certainly not normal.

Then came lockdowns and social distancing, and Zoom became a household word as teleconferencing from home quickly became pervasive. Suddenly there was collective whiplash among the employed: instead of needing permission to work from home, permission was needed to enter the workplace. Many companies announced that they would permanently relinquish some office space because employees had proven that working remotely could be sufficiently productive. Before the pandemic, Americans spent five percent of their working time at home; by mid-2020 it was more than 60 percent. In Japan, where company employees working from home was almost unthinkable B.C., more than 30 percent were doing it by mid-2020. Similar stories echoed in developed economies around the world.

At that point I had to revisit pre-pandemic assumptions that led me to write this book. After all, with millions of people having wondered what it would be like to be their own boss and, in many cases, work from home independently, some of the books value would be to illuminate what to expect from the latter. Now, A.C.After Covidso many people have experienced working from home that much of the mystery and wonderment has dissipated.

I (briefly!) considered scrapping the book when the pandemic was at its worst. Then, as we entered our second Covid year, survey data began to show the degree to which working from home was a polarizing experience. Many enjoyed their increased independence, the pause in commuting, and more flexibility to attend to family matters. And many actually increased their productivity. But for many others, the consnot least of which were deep feelings of isolation and lonelinessoutweighed the pros so much that nearly one third of employed workers banned from their workplaces considered quitting their jobs. Either way, well beyond the issue of workplace, Covid provoked heightened levels of soul-searching about the nature of work and its enormous place in the contemporary human experience.

Such introspection, it turns out, along with Covid-driven societal and economic disruption, fertilized the need for this book. Even after a pandemic has pushed us closer to lifes biggest questions, few things require more self-examination than deciding to be your own boss. The books real value has much more to do with working independently than with working from home. In some endeavors, the two are tightly intertwined. But in most, where the work is done is so much less important to satisfaction than what the work is, to what degree it provides meaning and joy, and what it means to be your own boss. Those are the primary themes herein. So the book survives. I hope youll be glad it did.

Youre the boss! Now what?

It may seem obvious that this is the crucial space for your mind to inhabit before venturing out on your own, whether to start a company or hang out a shingle as an expert. But the first time I left a very good job to do just that, at age 28, I had thought a lot more about the first part of Youre the boss! Now what? than the second part.

This is not a book about how to build a business (though it will help!). It is not a book about business strategy, writing a business plan, researching your customers, or turning your idea into a wildly successful major corporation. Nor is it a book about how to get richat least not in monetary terms. What it is is a book about knowing if independent work is a good fit for you, acting on a dream, and increasing the odds of positive outcomes. Its also a book for those already on the independent path who want their work to be less stressful, more productive and more satisfying. For those of you not yet working independently but frustrated by your current or recent employment experience, its a book about saying goodbye to soul-sucking work for someone else and replacing it with some balance of purpose, fulfillment, self-sufficiency, freedom, andoh, yeslivelihood.

If youre gainfully employed now (or only temporarily unemployed) and have ever sat in a staff meeting or at your desk, or stood on the floor while working in a company factory or retail store, and found yourself staring into space and fantasizing about working for yourself, this book is for you. Its a window on the world of being your own boss, through which I simply share the things I have learned and wish I had known ahead of 30-plus years of self-employment. Its about the emotional and financial ups and downs, and the joys and scars from re-inventing ones self multiple times, with a frame of reference informed by my previous full-time employment at five companies earlier in my career.

Of course all those companies had bosses. Many bosses. Ive been near the bottom (in two mid-sized companies in the early years), and closer to the top (vice president in both a Fortune 100 company with more than 60,000 employees and a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup as employee #35). I had a total of nine bosses in those five companies (and several other senior executives who presumed they were also my bosses, and acted like it). In between and afterwards, Ive had a tenth boss: