Your life partner

All you single folk can skip this, but perhaps you ought to read it anyone because you may not be single all your life. This post was inspired by a thread over at ProBlogger about taking business risks.

For most of us, any form or self employment looks risky. I don't think it necessarily is: if you are good enough at whatever you do that someone else will pay you to do it, why can't you do it for yourself? But that's easy to say, and making the leap is frightening. Any new venture is frightening, for you and your life partner, so aside from anything else, you do need to discuss it.

I'm usually much more pessimistic than my wife is. For example, I'm moderately good at poker, and I once toyed with the idea of doing that for income. However, "moderately good" is a fast road to poverty in that particular shark tank. I realized that pretty quickly, but my wife thought I gave up too easily.

I've done a few things without my wife's involvement: I bought a car once without getting her opinion and she was pretty upset - I was surprised, because she has her own car, but she felt my car was "our car" because it's what we use when we drive together - so I should have involved her. She's right. It should have been "our" decision and I never did that again.

As to business, she assumes I'll find a way to keep us alive. I guess that's because I always have, but again she's often more optimistic than I am. As I already work for myself, adding another income source is just one of the things I do to bring in money; not so scary as leaving a job to pursue a new career.

One of my revenue streams is Google's Adsense™ ; it is a small but significant part of my income but my wife seems to really like the checks they send. She asks me almost every day "How's Google doing?". At the end of the month I give her the printout and she's happiest if it's been going up (which it has been, generally). She's more interested in that than any other part of my business, probably because it's harder to tell "how is it doing" with anything else. But she is always optimistic and supportive.

I think other people said it best: if you and your partner aren't on the same page with regard to business, you need a different partner or a different business.

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