Why you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur

For every person out there who goes after her dream, ten more sit on their hands and whine. Trust me. I hear from them every day.

I work 12-hour days. I’m exhausted.

I have kids and a husband and a full-time job.

I don’t know how.

Who would listen to me anyway?

But who am I to show up and say what helped me?

Good, then go take a nap and quit bitching about the dream you have of being your own boss and actually impacting human lives in a real, tangible way.

The rest of us stay up late and get up early if we need to. We function on four hours of sleep (sometimes less) and all but kill ourselves to get our message out. Because. We. Must.

Because the burn – the desire to support people and fulfill our mission – is so great, we can’t sleep anyway.

I’m officially declaring war on bullshit excuses

I work with women who get up at 3 a.m. and work on their own business until they have to get the kids off to school. Some stay up until dawn instead. A few do both. Some use their lunch breaks. Some record their ideas on their cell phones during the commute.

“My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve,” Ray Bradbury once said. “So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.”

But I’ll be too tired.

But no one understands what I’m trying to create. They look at me like I’m insane.

But my relationship with my spouse and children will suffer.

Really? Your family won’t understand if you need an hour or two to yourself every day to do what you love? You can’t muscle through a workday on too little sleep? Or is the truth simply you’re afraid you will fail?

Ernest Hemingway – Nobel Prize in Literature, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Bronze Star Medal – said the most terrifying thing he ever encountered was “a blank sheet of paper.”

Writing is hard. Creating is hard. Being your own boss is hard.

It’s not lucrative at the start. It’s isolating and often heartbreaking. So if you’re not getting it done, don’t beat yourself up.

Not everyone is meant to be her own boss

Not everyone has the fire, hears the thunder, feels the promise of the moonlight.

And that’s okay.

But the rest of us can’t help it.

Nelson Algren, who won the National Book award for his novel The Man With the Golden Arm, spent five months in jail for stealing a typewriter. That is dedication.

“In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me,” Kurt Vonnegut said.

So decide. Are you finally ready to dedicate yourself to your business? To do what it takes until it takes?

No one one will blame you if you’re not.

But if you are, take every excuse and flush it. Then get to work.

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