Sandbox From the Sandbox From the Sandbox: My Way or the Highway – My View on Career Choices

From the Sandbox: My Way or the Highway – My View on Career Choices

July 22nd, 2010 by Katrin Winiarski

Every day, our community manager Katrin Winiarski, reads through her feed of all Sandboxers’ blog posts. Every Thursday, she chooses the most inspiring, funny or brilliant one and reposts it on this blog. This post has been written by Sandboxer Fredrik Hagenius. This is only a shortened version, the original version can be found here.

For me choosing between to make a career as an employee or to be an entrepreneur, is as choosing between a highly trafficked highway and a smaller country road to go from A to B. When you first look at it the highway seems like the obvious choice, it has a higher speed limit, it is going much straighter from A to B, and it has at least two lanes. However, the highway is more trafficked, since it is the choice of 99% of the car drivers, you have to make a lot of overtakes to go from A to B faster than all other car drivers, and it is much higher risk to get caught by the police for speeding or to end up in a traffic jam. When choosing the smaller country road, first, the road might be a little bit more bumpy and more curved, but the driving experience is often much more fun, you can practically drive with unlimited speed, given there is no traffic, the road view is often much more beautiful, and you could end up places you didn’t even know existed. In addition, if you get tired of driving (on the smaller country road) you can pull over and pick up a hitchhiker. Your car is still moving from A to B but you can spend time watching a movie or focus on finding beautiful stops on the way. Be careful though, there are hijackers out there.

Fredrik Hagenius is Sandbox Ambassador, Anders Wall Scholar at the Swedish Chamber of Commerce in London and a young entrepreneur. He is founder and partner of young Entrepreneurs of Sweden. During his bachelor studies in marketing at University of Gothenburg Fredrik founded Campusbokhandeln and is still CEO of the company.

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Very good allegory, congrats