Master your career destiny
Become a Venn Master and control your career
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 16
Homicide's illegal and death is the penalty
What justifies the homicide, when he dies?
In his own iniquity it's the
Master of the Mantis Rapture coming at ya
We have an APB on an MC Killer
Looks like the work of a Master
The Sunday Reader, Aug. 11, 2024
My friend was already exasperated and growing increasingly frustrated with me despite the tranquility of our setting. We were standing in the Naugatuck River fly fishing for Atlantic salmon. He repeated himself slowly, as if that would change my response. I. Want. To. Write. About. FLYFISHING!! He enunciated in my direction as I double-hauled the big eight weight fly rod.
I dropped the fly upstream and mended the cast to take it into a fishy looking patch of river. No one cares, I told him. Either you want to make money writing, in which case you need to run it like a business, or you don’t care about making money, you write what you want, tie your writings in ribbons and leave them in a draw to be discovered by your heirs like Emily Dickenson.
I’d known Tom for years; we’d worked together as volunteers for Trout Unlimited planting those very same salmon into the Naugatuck, restoring a population that had disappeared a century earlier. It’s the kind of work that bonds, picking up trash, clearing debris, testing the water, and then after months and months of this work to bring the river back, planting the salmon that once so choked the river that farmers used them for fertilizer and laws were passed limiting the number of days you could feed salmon to the servants.
Tom was a high-end math teacher working for the state; he was the one who trained high school math teachers and designed math curricula.
But he wanted to write. He wanted to write about fly fishing and get enough articles published to qualify for the outdoor writers association and be able to go to their events.
So I introduced him to the outdoor sports editor at my paper and vouched for him, and he started getting articles published regularly in the newspaper on fly fishing the Naugatuck, the Farmington and the Housatonic rivers. He got accepted into the outdoor writers association, and all was well in Tom’s world.
Then the state offered him an early retirement package, and Tom decided to turn his side-hustle into his full-time career. And that changes the rules.
A side hustle is a great hustle when you have a solid full-time gig as a foundation. The full-time gig provides most of your income, benefits like health care, and handles most of the employer-side taxes.Â
The thing about a side-hustle is that it can provide an escape route from the lockdown that is the employee tax code.
There are effectively four federal tax codes in the United States:
W2 Employee income tax, Social Security and Medicare, all of which go into the general fund.
The small business tax code where Certified Public Accountants help manage taxes.
The large business tax code where squadrons of tax attorneys and accountants minimize the company’s tax exposure.
The mega-corporations who send lobbyists to write the tax codes in their favor.
When corporations reach a certain size it becomes more profitable to manage their taxes than to make more revenue. So they hire tax lawyers and accountants rather than, say, engineers. The results are so convoluted that investors don’t even look at them; instead, they focus on EBITDA-Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization.
In other words, earnings before the shenanigans set in...
So it should be no surprise that despite the years of endless talk about taxing the rich and corporations paying their fair share, 67 percent of federal tax revenues comes from the W2 wages and social taxes paid by working stiffs.
When you start earning through a side hustle you can – and should – incorporate for a couple of hundred bucks, and graduate to the small business tax code. Here’s why that’s such a huge advantage: Let’s say Tom needs a camera to take pictures of his fly fishing trips. Normally that works the way you know; you get your net salary after the income and social taxes are taken out, and you are free to buy a camera with whatever’s left.
A small business can reverse this process. If you are going to earn money with that camera, it is an expense that comes off the revenue before taxes kick in. (It should go without saying, but I will explicitly say it anyway: This is NOT tax advice; if you need tax advice please hire a CPA or other tax professional.)
This adds up to a great strategy as a side hustle. Tom could expense cameras, lenses, trip expenses to go fishing, film and processing all before taxes. Nice!
But now he wanted to take the state’s early retirement package and be a full-time writer. Time to switch from that side-hustle strategy to a full business strategy. One of the core rules of business is supply and demand, of course, and the problem for writers is that there are always more people who want to write than there is a demand for writers. Tom and I were debating his work that morning because he had been complaining that about his latest story. He’d driven two hours to a trout stream, fished for hours, shot several rolls of film that he’d bought himself, paid for the processing, written a couple of thousand words...and gotten paid $50.
He was mad because I’d pointed out he’d have made more money putting that amount of time into a shift at a fast-food joint.
The problem is that everyone who can touch type and cast a fly without hooking themselves in the head thinks they are Ernest Hemingway about to crank out Big Two-Hearted River and will write for little or no money to get their masterpieces out in public.
He fumed for a bit, then asked what I was writing about. Large scale shaftless press technologies, I told him.
Sounds boring, he said.
Sounds like a dollar a word, I told him. One phone call, an hour writing 500 words...$500.
Why? Simple. I was a Venn Master. There were endless writers, of course, and quite a few people well versed in press technologies.
But when you lay that out in a Venn diagram, with the writers in one circle and the press technologists in the second, the number of people in the intersection between those circles – people who could do both at a professional level – was very small.
And when you limited it to people familiar with the new shaftless presses...the number was five. In the entire world.
Become a Venn master, grasshopper.
You remember Venn Diagrams, don’t you? Venn Diagrams were those three intersecting circles that illustrated set theory during all those math classes back in the day.
Becoming a Venn Master means working your way from the crowd in those big circles into the oh so exclusive groups in those tiny intersections.
I told Tom he was one of a handful of people who could write professionally about math curricula, and he should pursue that. But instead he kept writing about fly fishing until he ended up going back to teaching.
It’s not easy thinking about your career as a business. And being a Venn Master is certainly more work; you have to master two or more disciplines. But like any other business, rarity is rewarded because when something is rare and in short supply, demand forces prices higher. Take lawyers, for example. A law degree used to be a smooth path to the upper middle class. But over the last decade that path has become rocky enough that there have been class actions suits against law schools alleging they fraudulently pumped up their graduation employment statistics.
But the vagaries of the legal profession don’t bother my friend the patent attorney, who was an engineer before he went to law school. Two specialties.
Venn Master.
There are always adjacencies. Look for them. There are always enabling technologies. Master them. And communication skills are always at a premium when married to a specialty.
Pick two. Master them. Become a Venn Master, and take control of your career.