These are not unprecedented times. There is a list of cases where change, or something unexpected, has put many companies out of business and made other companies come out stronger and reinvent themselves.
The invention of the internet has put many companies out of business, the ones who could not reinvent their companies for the internet age but rather double-down on their old way of doing business, closed down.
Every video store is already out of business not because of Netflix but because they chose not to reinvent themselves.
Social media platforms such as Facebook put newspaper companies out of business. Not because of Facebook, but because the newspaper companies refused to change the way they did business. Uber and Grab put taxi companies out of business, not because of Uber and Grab but because taxi companies refuse to change.
This is not unprecedented. This is more sudden, more shocking, but not unprecedented in the business world.
This is not the time to ask ourselves what we should be doing, but rather, what should we be doing in a different world.
There was a time in my life when like you, I thought that the best thing to do to provide for my family was to get a good education, get a well-paying job, and work in a beautiful office. I worked in a bank, in a comfortable 9-5 job, and made no effort to change my life.
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A few years later, I caught the entrepreneurial bug and started my first business venture, thinking that I was going to do things differently. I thought I was going to change my life.
Little did I know that I wasn’t being different after all. I designed my own business to be very traditional, where everyone had to come to an office to work, and our sales process involves getting that face-to-face meeting with a prospect.
I thought I changed my world but I did not, I simply doubled-down on the old way of working, the old way of doing business, and exposed myself more to the risk of a changing world.
Fast forward to 2020, the year of the Coronavirus. Governments are pulling out all stops to prevent the world from burning down. Businesses are closing everyday, and people are losing their jobs every hour.
This was what happened to the companies who did not reinvent themselves for the internet age, to video stores, to traditional newspaper companies. But same as before, there are also companies that have now come out stronger because they reinvented themselves a long time ago.
These are mostly companies that already had a strong remote work culture before the pandemic hit. Companies such as Amazon, Etsy, Adobe, and Zoom. Those companies are still aggressively looking for the right talents, and that could be you, sitting on your desk, at home.
There are still lots of opportunities to find well-paying jobs, that allow you to have the perfect work-life balance. This pandemic has presented you with the opportunity to take back control of your time, take back control of your life, take back control of your finances.
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Stay in Singapore, but work globally.
Value yourself and your time
When working remotely, you take control of your own worth. Your employers have to evaluate you by your actual productivity, instead of judging who sits longest at their desk as in traditional work.
This means that you won’t have to be dragged into a meaningless and unfair competition to appear productive. Instead, you will start being valued and respected for the actual work you contribute.
Remote work also allows you to take control of your schedule. Because now you are truly judged by your productivity, you can actually complete small tasks during those 10-15mins dead spaces before a call, such as getting up to stretch without being seen as a total slacker.
Stuck in a long meeting you need not be part of? Simply mute your microphone and continue to work. Stop subsidising your employer’s bad practices with your personal time.
Take charge of your finances
Practically speaking, remote work also lets you take control of your finances. Think of all the money you have spent on commuting to work, on that exorbitant lunch, and on childcare for your children while you’re at work.
Remote work puts decisions back in your hand, as you need not be strung along by external circumstances. More important than saving, it also allows you to plan your day such that you can take more than 1 job at a time.
The world is different now, and it has become more challenging to stay afloat let alone thrive. I am not encouraging you to fix what’s not working. I’m encouraging you to completely replace what’s not working with something better.
And you don’t have to do it alone. It’s easier to do it together with a group of like-minded people who seek to help each other in this moment of drastic change.
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