Pack Post: Buying Yourself a Job You Can’t Quit: When Entrepreneurship becomes Unhealthy
Here’s one thing I know for sure:
If you put the work in, stick out your business for 3 years at minimum, and are taking a careful look at your projects, finances, and clients or customers at relative intervals, you can create a successful and profitable business.
In today’s “gig” economy, where businesses are outsourcing projects rather than hiring internal staff to manage them, there’s a greater demand for freelance services and companies who can solve problems cheaply.
If you’re a product maker, getting your product into the hands of buyers has never been easier.
So like I said, if you wake up every day and do this damn thing, you can, in fact, do the damn thing. If you’re in that crappy part of being your own boss where you’re worried and scared and not sure how you can make this thing sustainable, I’m here to let you know that with enough patience and time being a business owner, you’re going to be fine. Seriously, I know it.
But here’s the other thing: once you get to the place where you’re running your own little company, you’ll start noticing that the things you need to do every day (like accounting, invoicing, following up with a vendor for the twenty-fifth time) start feeling a whole lot further away from the DREAM, aka the reason that you started your business in the first place.
And then, we find ourselves in the place of feeling tired, burned out, stressed, and looking forward to the weekend instead of the work we love so much.
That is the moment, my friends, where we’ve bought ourselves a job we can’t quit.
So if you aren’t there yet, I promise that you will get there, because everyone gets there at some point in their business life. It’s what you DO with that feeling that will matter.
This leads to unhealthy entrepreneurship: running a business a pace and rapidity of growth that becomes almost impossible to keep up with. It’s when you sacrifice your free-time, your health and well-being, your friends and family, all to keep up with the needs of your clients and customers.
It’s when you can’t go on a damn walk with your neighbor because you’ve got too many balls in the air.
Here’s the other thing:
I wish I could solve this for you. I wish I could tell you the ‘three tips to beat burnout,’ or the ‘magic secret to taking more vacations.’
Instead, I’m going to challenge you to think about WHY you started your business in the first place? Did you start it so that you could be recognized in your industry? Have creative freedom? Take on more fun projects than what you were doing before? Sleep in until noon?
Whatever the reason is, I challenge you to:
Write those reasons down on a list
Rate yourself next to each reason on how well you’re doing
Entrepreneurship has become very, very glamorous in the last 10 years, but businesses go off the rails all the time, and most of the reason is because CEOs and business founders lose sight of why they started this damn thing in the first place.
Don’t lose sight of what the mission is. Otherwise, you may find yourself owning a job you can’t quit.
- Lauren Caselli