The Cliff Edge

The Salary Addiction

There is a drug that kills more dreams than failure ever will. It is called a monthly paycheck.

It is addictive. It arrives on the 28th of every month, regular as a heartbeat. It lulls you into a coma of comfort. You start planning your life around it—the car loan, the mortgage, the holidays.

Leaving engineering to become an entrepreneur felt like unplugging my own life support.

My parents, like all good Asian parents, were terrified. “You have a degree from Imperial! Why would you go into sales? Why would you reject a stable job?”

They were right, statistically. Most businesses fail. Stability is undervalued.

But I had done the math on “safety,” and I didn’t like the terminal value.

The Asymmetry of Risk

I viewed employment as a linear equation: Income = Time x Hourly Rate

There is a hard cap on Time. Therefore, there is a hard cap on Income.

Entrepreneurship is a non-linear equation: Income = (Decisions x Leverage) ^ Luck

The downside is capped (you go to zero), but the upside is uncapped (you go to infinity).

I wasn’t chasing money for the sake of Ferraris. I was chasing optionality. I wanted to own my time. I wanted to build systems that could run without me.

The First Reality Check

The first month of being “my own boss” was not glamorous. It was terrifyingly quiet.

There was no manager to tell me what to do. There was no inbox filling up with tasks. If I didn’t generate momentum, nothing moved. The universe is indifferent to your ambition.

I sat in my small room, staring at a phone list.

“Hello, I’m calling to inquire if you are looking to sell…” Click.

“Hello, I represent…” Click.

Rejection. Rejection. Rejection.

This was the fee. The price of admission to the world of unlimited upside is the ability to eat glass and stare into the abyss, as Elon would say.

Burning the Boats

I made a rule: No Plan B.

If I had a safety net, I knew I would use it. So I committed everything. I engaged in what I now call “Desperation-Fueled Learning.”

When you have to sell to eat, you learn sales psychology very quickly. When you have to ship code to get paid, you debug faster.

The risk was real. But looking back, staying in a cubicle was the greater risk. The risk of waking up at 60 and realizing I had never truly tested my own capacity.