I would urge all jobless PMETs who can afford to, to start businesses and not only those jobless PMETs but those with jobs too. We have to ween ourselves off this “employee” mentality that has been programmed into many baby boom generation Singaporeans. I will have to say that not all jobless PMETs can do this because some of us have our hands much closer to our mouths than others. That is all I will say of this here. The purpose of this article is to rationalize about the situation.
Now if you think that older people are not capable of starting successful businesses, than you should read this. The report says “firms surviving through 2008 were much more likely than firms that exited over the period to have primary owners older than age 45.”
And this. “Research that my team conducted, based on a survey of 549 entrepreneurs in high-growth industries, showed that the average founder of a high-growth company launched his venture at age 40.”
And this. “The collective summary of their learnings is: the average entrepreneur is 40 when they launch their startup. People over 55 are twice as likely as people under 35 to launch a high-growth startup”.
The immediate point is that PMETs hold the experience of many years of work in different industries. At some point even, some PMETs ran the businesses they worked for. So why not just take off where your last business left off? Barring any contractual restrictions of course. If the issue is money, then work out a business plan and do your rounds of securing funds. That is what most CEOs do anyway.
I once attended a entrepreneur motivational seminar and the lady presenter said something very true. She asked us attendees, “Everyday when you go to office do you see that sign?” All of us were taken aback and didn’t know what she was talking about. She said “That sign above the company door that said that “You will never become rich here!” I later realized that it was worse than that. Not only would an employee not “get rich” in a company he worked for, he would also not have a job whenever the company felt that his services would no longer be required. So EVEN if a currently jobless PMET got a job now, he would still be counting on the hours when he would lose the job AND at that point, even more time would have passed.
Working for people essentially means a form of servitude and we have to take whatever comes with the job. Some workers are all too familiar with the family owned company which was founded by the father, the mother is probably working in some senior administrative position in the company, and the children will be graduating soon and doing their internship in the company after which they will become boss. If you are still working for the company by the time the second generation takes over, do you think that the second generation will know more about the business than you? Then how is it that they feel that they can take over the company and you think you can’t?
Lastly, and finally, when it is time to go to that big job market in the sky and we look back on our lives, what do we want to see? Do we want to see years and years of indentured servitude to others who did not know wtf they were doing and latter, an unceremonious retirement? Or do we want to look at the challenges we were brave enough to undertake whatever their outcome! Like the young Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) did not say in Starship Troopers “Come on you apes, do you wanna work for somebody forever?” So PMETs who can start your own job, do it your way and then show the world, and the PAP government, how it should be done!
AiYoYo
TRS Contributor