Should you become an entrepreneur? Here’s the honest truth (as I see it).
1. Autonomy
Pro: you’re the boss and decide what to do.
Con: you HAVE to always decide what to do. There will be a huge array of options at any given moment, and you’ll never know for sure which to work on. You can seek advice, but ultimately YOU are the one who must decide.
2. Lifestyle
Pro: since you’re the boss, you’ll have flexibility in your hours.
Cons: you’ll inevitably be working a lot of hours. It takes a lot of work to succeed as an entrepreneur. Since there is never an end to how much work can be done, you may have trouble “turning off” at the end of the day or on the weekend.
3. Resilience
Pro: it’s an incredible way to train resilience, persistence, and problem-solving skills.
Con: the world will punch you in the face between 5 and 100 times, and if you ever give up, you lose. This is stressful, and most humans would give up after 5 or 10 face punches.
4. Expected Value
Pro: if you’re well suited to it and work on a good idea, the expected (mean) value in terms of potential impact and monetary reward can be REALLY high. Some companies have truly altered the course of history. And obviously, many of the wealthiest people are entrepreneurs.
Con: the probability of failure is high, and luck is a significant factor. And unless you have substantial savings, you’ll likely be living frugally at first.
5. Learning
Pro: you will learn a tremendous amount. Even if the startup doesn’t work out, this valuable experience will apply to MANY other things. I don’t know of another way to learn so many things so quickly. One of the most important categories of things you’ll learn is “how to get difficult shit done in the real world while charting a path yourself for how to make it happen.”
Con: you will inevitably make many mistakes (ouch), and you have to face up to them (double ouch) in order to learn fast enough. It forces you to acknowledge and improve (or develop workarounds for) your weaknesses. It’s also important to note that if you are really not suited for entrepreneurship, or you just get unlucky right away, you might not learn that much. The great learning from entrepreneurship certainly doesn’t require success, but if you fail too immediately or don’t get anywhere close to success, it will be much less of a learning experience.
6. Meaning
Pro: you can choose to work on an idea that is DEEPLY meaningful to you. Most jobs don’t provide this level of meaning.
Con: if you fail, you will have invested a lot of time in (and then failed at) something deeply meaningful to you.
7. Respect
Pro: many people have a lot of respect for entrepreneurs, and it’s considered cool in plenty of circles.
Con: this respect increasingly kicks in as success increases, and before that, some people won’t even respect it as a career choice. If you fail, that will still garner respect from some people, but most people probably won’t give you much respect for having tried and failed.
8. Relationships
Pro: you will likely meet lots of interesting people and build meaningful relationships with your team members.
Cons: you may have to deal with difficult personalities or navigate complex human dynamics when it comes to employees, investors, customers, and/or co-founders.
9. Responsibility
Pro: it teaches you a deep form of responsibility, which strengthens your character.
Con: you are ultimately, at the end of the day, responsible for everything. You’re the captain, the last line of defense, and the goalie. When someone else at your company screws up, and it ends up having a bad effect on the business, as unfair as it may seem, it’s actually your fault. You hired them, or didn’t put safety measures in place, or didn’t spot the problem early enough, or didn’t give them the training they needed, etc. The captain is responsible for the fate of the ship and every crew member on it.
10. Adaptability
Pro: it hones your creativity and adaptability, can really build self-confidence, and can help you develop a sense of how much you’re capable of (probably more than you think!) as you figure out solutions for complex challenges, develop new ideas, and map out how to make them a reality. It pushes your boundaries in new ways and makes you grow.
Con: it can stretch your creativity and adaptability to the limit. Plans, essential as they are to make, rarely survive their collision with reality. It sometimes pushes your boundaries more than you would like and can place you into situations that you find terrifying (e.g., a high-stakes negotiation to save your company when it is on the brink of failure, or a major technical failure that leaves hundreds of customers furious at you, etc.).
So, why NOT be an entrepreneur? Because it’s a high-risk, chaotic, stressful, responsibility-filled, boundary-pushing, challenging life. And it’s hard work. Not everyone is suited to this path, and it’s irresponsible to pretend that everyone is.
BUT, if you’re well suited for it, it can be one of the most deeply meaningful, high-value, high-impact lives to lead. You’ll meet lots of people, build resilience and adaptability, push your skills to new heights, and learn a STAGGERING amount. For some people, it is absolutely their best life path.
If you think that entrepreneurship may be the right path for you, and you haven’t yet picked what idea to work on, you may be interested in learning more about our work at Spark Wave. We’re a startup studio (venture builder), and we recruit people who are interested in becoming CEOs for our mission-driven software products (no technical background or prior startup experience is required). We aim to reduce some of the worst negatives of entrepreneurship while building products that we believe could add a lot of value to the world. Our goal is to help make a better world through software and entrepreneurship. You can learn more and get in touch with us at: https://www.sparkwave.tech
This piece was first written on September 3, 2020, and first appeared on this site on July 29, 2022.
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