The Urgency of Becoming an Entrepreneur: Your Only Route to Thrive in 2025 & Beyond
I’ve learned so much and gotten so much value from folks online. One of them is Bowtied Bull who wrote a detailed write up Jan 21st, 2025 that got me thinking. Net net: Safe is Unsafe.
"The mega trends don’t really change and the thesis here is still the same: The most dangerous place you can be is in the middle of the herd.
Playing it safe in a career definitely feels comfortable but the higher ups are already using AI tools/software to get rid of the middle as fast as possible. That’s the vast majority of white collar 6-figure paychecks.
It’s what society has conditioned you to do: “Stick to the plan. Follow the rules. You’ll be rewarded.”
Unfortunately, this no longer works in the 2020s. The boomers who told you to get a stable job for 40 years and retire didn’t adapt to the new economic reality: Equity Owners or nothing.
If everyone is doing it, there is no real upside. No different from investing in something that everyone already knows about. While investing in something like the S&P likely goes up long-term, it’s not going to result in exiting the middle.
People will congratulate you on the small promotions at work but it’s just another step towards being stuck. When everyone is doing the same thing, the returns shrink, the competition intensifies, and the risks multiply.
With globalization, automation, and cost-cutting, wages have stagnated while housing, healthcare, and education costs have skyrocketed. Playing it safe in this environment is like staying in a boat that’s slowly sinking."
Source: https://bowtiedbull.io/p/trump-initial-change-and-why-corporate
All this has been very apparent to anyone paying attention to the economy but the BTB guys captured it and articulated it so well.
This was further backed up an eye-opening essay by @TheRealEstateG6: (Source: https://x.com/TheRealEstateG6/status/1876433167789543926) stating the big opportunity that exists for entrepreneurs and the peril faced by employees.
“Let’s summarize this section. You have the world getting more and more financialized with sophisticated investors owning a higher and higher percentage of the businesses in this country.
You have extremely low friction for hiring new, highly skilled employees.
You have AI coming in, which is going to drastically reduce the level of menial white collar jobs.
You have the globalization of the talent pool, which makes it incredibly easy to find a harder working (I’m sure a lot of Americans will get offended by this but I’ve hired both and it’s clear to me foreign workers are simply harder workers on average) employee at roughly 1/4th the cost of an American employee.
You have (extremely likely) expanded high-skill immigration, which is going to further increase the supply side of the labor equation and bring down wages.
And you have a rapid pace of change that’s likely to make long term tenure as an employee very difficult.
Employees are going to be squeezed from all angles in the next 20 years.”
How do you get ahead of all this?
Get fit as you need health energy to do anything and do anything over a long period of time. Good things and big things take time. This could take you 3 years, could be 10 years. Either way you need to be able to sustain a hard pace and allow compounding effects.
2. Develop skills, invest in yourself. Learn sales, marketing, project management, human psychology and behavior, study technology trends and try new low code/no code/AI tools. Build relationships with good, smart people.
3. Then build equity. You do this by building a business, could be ecommerce, could be an agency, could be anything. Acquire an offline SMB. Build equity. Build cash flow via consulting.
Do something.
This is all about surviving. Survive so then you can thrive as most folks fall by the wayside. Sorry but Darwin was right. If you thought the world was competitive out there now, it’s gonna be even more so over the next decade.
I’ll let the guys at BowtiedBull close as they have been right on almost everything for the last decade: “Playing it safe is comfortable, but comfort rarely leads to escaping the middle.
The middle of the herd is the last place you want to be when the stampede begins.
Instead, seek out asymmetric bets. Find the edges of the map. That’s where the outsized rewards—financial, personal, and otherwise—are waiting. Because at the end of the day, the riskiest thing you can do is to let life pass you by while you’re stuck in neutral.
You’re not here to play it safe. You’re here to win. Good luck, the divide will accelerate for those embracing all the new tech and those hoping we return to the past.”
Nuff said. Now get to it!