Of course I’ve already said this on my blog in a way or another, but it seems is never enough. Probably the latest time I’ve said it was in “There is something wrong with entrepreneur’s minds” – “Having more free time is an absolute non-sense, at least in the beginning. If you start small and probably without any significant outside investment, then, here we go, you will have long working hours, working weekends, and no holidays!”.
Well, right now, I’m able to make a little differentiation: we have a big difference between work long and work hard. And, unfortunately for the entrepreneurs they have to do some sort of work hard for long if you get what I’m saying.
But why is this so hard? (I’m not complaining I’m just putting warning labels all over the place). Well, Socrates said: “The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know”. And if you are just starting up, well, you actually don’t know anything yet, no matter what or how good you were in your 9 to 5 job so far. And even if you are a serial entrepreneur, you still don’t know anything. Because each time is different.
OK. I hear voices saying that I need to bring more on the table if I want people to believe me. And here I am saying that: Entrepreneurship is hard because there is nobody telling you that you are going the wrong direction until its too late. When you work for the MAN, well, the MAN usually plays safe enough that a mistake it’s filtered out several times. I mean is quite hard to make a monumental mistake without getting anybody else to notice. Hell, they even track down when I’m getting in or out the office. But if you are an entrepreneur, entrepreneurs are lonely persons. Even if they have partners, the total number of filters in their thinking and actions is always smaller than the filters put in place by a hierarchical structure.
And being an entrepreneur is hard again because the number of ideas you can output during your lifetime is limited. No matter how hard you try, the ideas should come from a closed circuit – your mind – as opposes of the “open societies” – more people and more ideas working for the MAN.
Entrepreneurship gets even harder when you don’t know if or when you are going to make it. Being employed, chances are that you are going to succeed to the end of the month when you are going to “make it and get your paycheck”. But you never know that when you are an entrepreneur.
It’s hard because you are fighting all other entrepreneurs. Well, not exactly all, but if you evaluate on a theoretical level, the entrepreneur that started a restaurant on my street could very easily change his business and open a PR company. Because his own entrepreneurship thinking should give him the same opportunities as it gives me. And it does.
I don’t like this article. Still I’m going to push the “Publish” button, maybe it will help somebody sometimes somewhere.