Every entrepreneur enters business thinking they’ll get more time, more money and less stress.
The reality of being an entrepreneur includes stress, cashflow challenges, anxiety and all sorts of emotional highs and lows.
When everything is invested in your own business–time, money, passion and creativity–it can border on obsession. And when you work from home or your spouse or family members work with you, you rarely, if ever, leave the office–at least from a mental standpoint.
Here are some harsh truths about running your own business and being an entrepreneur:
It’s never ending…
In a way it can be thankless to work for someone else, knowing your skills and talents are ultimately making someone else a profit.
In most jobs, you can leave the work behind when you go home to enjoy your family, friends or hobbies.
As an entrepreneur, the workload can be intense, especially during the early stages when you are the CEO, HR person, sales staff, marketing guru, tech guy, office manager, and everything else.
With all these roles, there’s rarely a moment that you feel your work is “done” for the day. There’s always something more you could be doing, like researching new markets, creating content, answering emails…
That can eat away at time formerly devoted to family, leisure activities, workouts or relaxation. It’s a difficult balance to strike.
You are not entitled to rewards based on effort, time or passion
You’re here to solve problems for others. Your most rewarding work will be in the service of others, delivering meaningful but challenging outcomes.
You might not get recognised for this work, the credit might go to someone else who doesn’t deserve it or the people you help might not be grateful at times. It doesn’t matter because you’re not entitled to any rewards for your work.
It just so happens you’ve already won the human lottery. By virtue of the fact you’re alive at this moment, you’re educated, have access to technology, have food and clean water, you’ve already got the rewards.
You’re luckier than 99.9% of every human or animal that has walked the earth. Now it’s time to bring your A-game for helping others.
As soon as you give up on the idea that you’re doing this business for a payoff, and you just serve others as best you can and as sustainably as you can, you’ll start to gain huge satisfaction from the work itself.
Nothing works for long, it’s ever changing
There’s no fool proof system, there’s no magic bullet and there are no people who just work hard without leadership.
Every system will need to be refined, every cutting edge strategy will become commonplace, every hot product will cool off, every great team member will need training.
If you expect people, systems or things to just work, you’ll be upset and constantly let down.
Business requires you to juggle and there’s no such thing as a ball that just stays in the air, there are only people who get good at juggling.
No one thing will work, but you’ll get better at working things.
As soon as you give up on the expectation that things just work, you suddenly embrace the challenge of dealing with more and more complexity.
Overall being an aspiring entrepreneur is a bumpy ride but isn’t life in general a bumpy ride, indeed.
Thank you for reading this far.
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