Evan Carmichael tells a recent grad whether to take a corporate job or start a business. He took a year off to launch his startup after turning down offers from financial firms, betting that he could always get hired later if it failed. Younger people have fewer obligations, making now the best time to test an idea.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and in today's video I want to answer a question for one of my readers, James. James is a recent graduate from university with a Bachelor of Commerce degree, and he's asking if he should go and get a job or if he should start his own business. So whenever giving career advice, I always encourage people to really trust in their heart and try to follow their intuition. I can only tell you from my experience what I did. I also had a Bachelor of Commerce degree from university, and I was already running my business when I was in university. And when I was graduating, I had a couple of offers from fairly large financial organizations and had to make a decision. Do I go take the nice high-paying job, or do I focus on my business and see if I can make it a big success? And I was looking around and see what my friends were doing. And some of them were going off into the workforce right away, and others were taking a year off to travel, find themselves, and then get started working. So I thought, I'm going to take a year off and I'm going to focus on my business and see if I can make it really take off and build something that I can be proud of. And if it doesn't work out, I can always come back. Those opportunities will still be there for me in a year if I wanted to go get a job. And worst case scenario, I learned a lot about running a business and now I'm ready to go get a job. I never actually went back to get a job because our business did do well, so that was a success story. As you get older, I think it's harder to have the guts to go and start a business. You know, once you have a family, you start establishing roots, you have a lot more commitments, it could be harder to start a business. So I encourage young people to try to start their business as soon as possible, see if entrepreneurship is for them. And if you take a year off to focus on that and see if you can make a success, those other opportunities will still be there for you a year later if you want to go get a job. So I hope that helps. If you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. I'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you want to leave a comment, and stay tuned for the next video.
