Your Job Shouldn't Be Your Single Point of Failure — Here’s How to Avoid It

What happens when the one thing that pays your bills also becomes your identity, your status, your security and your entire life? Congrats, you have created a single point of failure.

After more than 14 years in the corporate world, I can assure you that I deeply and truly regret trusting the corporate lore more than anything.

In This Article

• Why your career can become a single point of failure in your life
• How to build a backup through hobbies and side projects
• Why your financial strategy needs to go beyond saving
• How to build transferable skills and create options beyond your current career
• What I am doing to build my own career and financial backups

My primary work domain is cybersecurity, and there's a very fascinating concept called "single point of failure (SPOF)", which is every company's nightmare when it comes to maintaining the availability of critical servers or assets.

Basically, every critical asset needs to have some form of backup or redundancy to ensure that if the primary server or the application fails to boot up due to a cyberattack or technical issues, you will always have a backup ready in passive mode or standby mode, which can take over the primary asset to keep the operations running. Because the longer a critical server or application is down, the more money the business loses.

And it never dawned on me to apply the same theory in my life. I lived paycheck to paycheck, making dangerous moves that would only amount to a checkmate by fate, but never once considering having a backup strategy in place.

Not to beat my own drum, but I have acquired a decent amount of skills that I can use to start a small business or create content to share my knowledge and journey. And I never did any of it. I didn't even give it a try. I always thought my loyalty towards my work would pay off, my good karma would be rewarded with good results, and that my salary was enough for me to live happily (pun intended).

Two and a half years back, when I got my promotion with a hike that was even less than the annual hike, something broke inside me. I was unable to cope with the reality. The hike was the last nail in the coffin I had prepared with my mindless habits and foolishness.

The turning point, or the humbling realisation, came when I was in the planning phase to get married. I had absolutely no savings to even have a simple, plain marriage. And that one year of planning and accumulating debt just to get married left me with a bitter feeling in my mouth.

I no longer craved to live vicariously. I wanted to build backups desperately.

So How Do You Build Backups?

Go harder on the hobbies or the side business that you have always wanted to start.

It can be something as small as creating ceramic bowls or plates because you took pottery lessons and now you are so good at it that your friends or even your followers on Instagram want a piece of that handmade art.

Or it could be picking up knitting and using it to knit unique sweaters. Or it could be that your partner or someone in your family is starting a business, or they have a business that you could support in a way that expands your business knowledge.

It doesn't have to make you money right away. The point is to pick something completely different from your current career domain and become good at it. It may or may not turn into a side business, and that's okay. The whole point is to give it a try, which could trigger a spark for another, better idea.

What I am doing in this space:

I picked up writing because I have loved writing forever, even when I was just 10 years old. This website is an outlet for my thoughts, experiences and knowledge to come out in my own unique writing style. I have not earned a single penny from this, but I am going to continue writing. Who knows if one day it catches the eye of a publishing house and I get to write a book? Manifesting it right here. 😄

I also started content creation, which is a struggle for me, but it makes me hopeful that one day things will shift.

If you have read this far, consider supporting my work with a coffee ☕. Completely optional.

Invest aggressively in your 20s and 30s to make your money work for you

I hate to break it to you, but your money is not going to grow meaningfully by simply sitting in a savings account. It isn't going to grow either through recurring deposits or fixed deposits the way you want it to. We think that simply starting a recurring deposit every month at a meagre interest rate of 6-7%, with 5% inflation, is going to be enough.

We forget to consider the future value of the money the investment will grow into and the impact inflation will have on that money.

The returns on these bank deposits can be abysmal and depressing. The majority of households in India still rely on these methods to save their money in the hope that it will be enough.

For example, if you invest ₹10,000 every month for 10 years at a 7% annual return, you would accumulate roughly ₹17.3 lakh. But if inflation averages 5% during the same period, your investment is generating only about a 1.9% annual return in real terms.

Instead, invest a portion of what you invest in RDs and FDs in mutual funds. Choose investments across different asset classes based on your goals, time horizon (15-30 years) and risk tolerance. In the shorter run, you may see fluctuations, and that's completely normal. The point is that you need your long-term investments to grow faster than inflation.

What I am doing in this space:

I started investing seriously only in the last two years. I like to have a diversified portfolio to cushion against a bad market while still investing aggressively in mutual funds.

Currently, I am growing my money through provident fund, NPS, and mutual funds. I use recurring deposits primarily for certain short-term goals like travel or an emergency fund.

Understand how you can use your existing knowledge and experience for other domains.

Evaluate manually or through ChatGPT what types of skills you should acquire to expand your experience into other domains.

Alternatively, identify skills required in your current domain that can make you harder to replace and that companies find difficult to do without. This will place you in a position of confidence and leverage.

In 2026, I have seen a surge in non-linear careers or portfolio careers, which I believe is only going to grow stronger with years. The only way to bulletproof your future is to understand your options and run with them.

What I am doing in this space:

I have not actively started working towards this, but at the beginning of this year, when I asked ChatGPT to tell me which other areas I could apply my existing cybersecurity experience, the response surprised me. It responded: ESG.

This then led me down a rabbit hole of understanding why there are similarities, and the key word was risk assessment, which is something I also do in my current domain. I am planning to do another evaluation to see if I really want to gain knowledge in ESG to map my current skills to that field.

What kind of backup are you building so that your career doesn't become your single point of failure?

Let me know in the comments.

See you in the margins.