The Lost Balance In Entrepreneurship Is Sometimes Not Worth It.
It's an equation, but sometimes it's just not worth it.
Most of my readers are interested in entrepreneurship. It’s been my career for the past 15 years. I’ve been working with new startups to make their ideas a reality by raising funds, and others who already raised sums of more than $40m.
Here’s the thing about entrepreneurship, that takes years to realize.
It’s not a must…
Yes, it feels good to create something wonderful.
Yes, it feels good to bump up your net worth.
But you’ll always wonder what you could’ve done if not. You see, most people are simply putting things in black or white. It’s either a “9 to 5” or a “startup.”
In reality, it’s much MUCH more complex than that. Both options require you to spend hours doing something. You’ll always have some other time available.
Now here’s the critical thing that, the older I get, the more I realize — It’s what you do in this available time that makes your life meaningful.
I meet founders all the time, and some of them show the aging process it took for a successful entrepreneurial project. Sometimes, trading this life, for a more relaxed work-life-balance, is simply the right (even if unfulfilling, choice.)
It’s similar to running completing a 5000 kilometer marathon. You might make it, but after ending up with a knee injury, you’ll always wonder what would’ve happened if you hadn’t done that.
Don’t get me wrong — you’ll always wonder the “what-if”
But entrepreneurship is a guaranteed path of exhaustion. We need this as a community/society. But you don’t have to be the person doing it.
The final piece of the puzzle is that most founders realize this way too late.
They start off with the dream of becoming billionaires at 25.
They hustle, hustle, and hustle.
The successful ones (and that’s a very tiny percentage) creates companies of value when they’re 45 years old, and full of grey hair.
There could’ve been an alternative life that ends up with them feeling satisfied. You see, this feeling of “satisfaction” has nothing to do with entrepreneurship. It has to do with the founders from within.
Some people never think of starting a business and have this “self-satisfaction.”
Others are serial entrepreneurs that never find it.
They all end up growing older and living their lives. So yeah, find this “self-satisfaction”, then become the serial entrepreneur you want to be. That’s the truly proper way of doing it.
I just feel that someone you know NEEDS to hear this. It’s okay either way.