A student from Standford reached out to me about a project called “How to inspire the next generation to succeed the hard way”, which got me thinking about what’s hardest about it, what kept me moving and if there are any lessons worthy of sharing.
Disclaimer: Turns out I got stuck in the “hardships” part and needed to get it out. Eventually I’ll get to the pep talk, silver lining, lesson packed article which I will link to this one, but this is definitely not it.
It’s common knowledge that being an entrepreneur can be tough. It’s also highly associated with novelty, pushing the barriers and high capital gains. This is why every time someone mentions that they are or want to be an entrepreneur they are usually presented with three different reactions: The “respect” face; The “ouch” face; Or the “how exciting!” face. Rarely there is no reaction.
Most people have a picture of the hustle, the grind, the long hours, of people screaming at each other in this billion dollar journey that usually ends with someone getting very rich. But most of the cases are really not like this nor it says anything about the things that make entrepreneurship a really tough thing.
Risk
Everyone knows there is risk in entrepreneurship but I don’t think most people understand the magnitude of the risk taking that can happen. It’s not betting 100k or 200k of someone else’s money on something, seeing it fail and give it a “oh well, we tried”. First of all, to be able to bet someone’s money on something is already a luxury most don’t have. Those that do have it, probably already made a significant bet on themselves to be worthy of other people’s trust.
Risk in business often means betting money that you don’t really have, which means risk in compromising a significant chunk of your future, and this is what it’s all about. The most valuable asset that we have is time and entrepreneurship means embarking on a multi-year choice-filled journey with absolutely no guarantee of finishing better than you started. Actually, it’s the opposite. The odds are stacked against you and every single statistic says that this is a very dangerous bet. One risks current and future money, current and future job security, stability, relationships and literally being able to live life because you’re either busy, invested, poor or in debt., and you’re not sure if it’s going to be worth it.
Best case it is worth it. Worst case, you’ve spent a considerable amount of time, you’ve impacted your future negatively, have less than you started with and will now have to start to build a whole new life plan, or go back at it yet again.
Learning curve
To me this is the most undermined difficulty of entrepreneurship and business in general. I’ve noticed this as soon as I started to invest more and more time into reading and learning all I could about entrepreneurship. I wanted to be better so I set out to learn from the masters. And then I realized that there are not that many all-around books on entrepreneurship. And the ones that exist open up a plethora of new questions. It’s just too big of a topic.
All professions have its learning curve, and I’m sure that for most, if not all, there is a never-ending ladder for people to climb, as in, keep learning and getting better. With business it’s the same, except there are also an endless number of ladders. In business, “being good at your job” means being able to lead Marketing, Sales, HR, Operations, Accounting, etc. One needs to learn about leadership, culture, communication, business strategy, planning, team building, investment, market research, products, services, and the list goes on. And not only know about these things, lead in these things. Thinking then that each of these topics will have dozens of subtopics and different schools of thought with “must read” authors, gives a glimpse of the depth of the rabbit hole.
One might even be tempted to think that companies have different departments and all of these have department heads, which are the so called specialists at their thing, so it doesn’t really make sense that someone needs to know all of these things. But one would be wrong. Starting or small ventures do not have room, budget, nor need any of these roles, and even huge corporations rely on a set of directions, principles and guidelines to operate on. Someone needs to interview and hire these department heads, for example.
Intensity
One personal challenge that I don’t think it’s common amongst Entrepreneurs, at all, is how intense this can be on the day to day.
Business alone is already tough enough. It involves all of the above. The forever pursuit of bettering oneself, learning more about specific parts of the business, failing every single day at something and learning from it, worrying about employees, markets, the future. Entrepreneurship just adds a whole new spin to this by turning everything into a possible opportunity for said business. This opens up a whole new (and exciting) world of things to research and learn. Probably hobbies or side-gigs, future plans, spin-offs, etc.
The above for me is completely unavoidable, nor I would want to deprive myself from it. I am absolutely hooked on the creative side of businesses and that’s why it takes a big toll. Pursuing these ideas to fruition takes two things: Time and knowledge. Time is something one doesn’t have when already employed, specially running a business; Knowledge, as in the gathering of it, is something that already consumes a significant chunk of whatever time I have left.
Does it have to be this hard?
Well, yes and no. It’s significantly easier to launch business today than it was a decade ago. Internet focused businesses, even automated ones with no employees are very common today and it’s easier than ever to make the world a marketplace. This takes a whole lot of complexity away. Also, I honestly believe that today we have way much more information about what it works and doesn’t in entrepreneurship and business management than we had a decade ago. I’d say it’s more “dummy proof” these days. The entry to entrepreneurship and business in general just gets lower and lower as time moves.
Having said that, it’s easier for me to say this after more than a decade living, failing, thinking and reading about these topics. The answers sound so much more obvious today, also because I’ve been through the learning curve. And this is the hard part. It really doesn’t have to be this hard, but it’s not as obvious what to do in the beginning as in the end. Simply because it’s a lot to take in.
Right now the hardship for me, as I am sure is for many people, lies in juggling too many things and still trying to keep chasing the entrepreneur rush with not that much time. I’ll get there soon enough.