Yes, I work hard. I put in nine to ten hour days at work then get home and run my own small business and then find time to write articles for this site. I don’t get as much sleep as I should but that doesn’t bother me. It’s not the money that motivates me, entrepreneurship is about the freedom.
I’m more than a little focused on getting completely out of debt and I have a very short time table to do so. With over $130,000 owed to creditors and a goal of paying it all off in less than five years, I am extremely aggressive in my narrow-minded focus of paying debt and amassing retirement funds. The goal is that once everyone is paid I will work for myself on my own terms – effectively retiring at 40.
There’s something mentally different with people who have an entrepreneurial mindset. Sitting in a cubicle farm day after day working for someone else is what we might do because we have to or because we crave stability, but we fastidiously plot our escape into the land of I-Control-My-Own-Destiny and the luckiest of us all make that leap and never look back.
It’s not about the money. It’s not about making more money or having more money or buying nice things or taking fabulous vacations. It’s about the freedom to manifest our own destiny by perhaps taking off into uncharted, shark-infested waters in order to be in full and complete control of the pathways of our own lives.
It’s about freedom.
Once you have mentally reached a place in your life when entrepreneurship calls to you like the siren’s song, self-employment appears to you like a wondrous and magical mirage of an oasis in the desert of life and you long to leap out of the office chair and swim the sands into your own idea of paradise.
That’s not to say that entrepreneurship is all margaritas and Coronas on a beach. It is filled with long and sometimes lonely hours. It can be filled with backbreaking work and days away from friends and family. It does not shut off at 5 PM or has weekends and holidays off. It will own you, your life, your blood, your sweat, your tears and the very air that you breathe until that baby, your baby, is able to run on its own without you constantly having to run behind it arms opened in case it falls.
But it’s still about freedom.
And sometimes that freedom means having to work harder than you have ever worked to escape the corporate yoke. It might mean sacrificing time that you would rather spend with friends or family because sacrifice is a part of the package as well. It might mean being away behind the glow of a computer when you would rather be in bed snuggled up to your partner with a remote control in hand.
These are the things that would-be entrepreneurs must struggle with day in and out. Your friends or family might not understand you because they do not think as you do. They will think that you are obsessed or they will tell you that you are crazy to leave a perfectly good job to be your own boss. When others discourage you or tell you that your path is not one that they would choose, make sure you tell them, “I want to be free.”