Here’s where I’m at in my creative entrepreneurial journey: I’ve come to the undeniable reality that entrepreneurship ain’t easy. It takes a lot of work. And by the way, it takes a great amount of mental fortitude, as well.
In order to stand out in an overwhelmingly congested crowd, you have to be willing to work even harder than you did when you had your 9 to 5. Now, I’m not saying that you didn’t work incredibly hard at your job with your employer. I’m not saying that at all. I mean I know how hard I worked at my various places of employment and I wouldn’t call it light work by any means.
What I am saying is that the type of work has changed and it requires you to work in a different capacity than you worked when you got to clock in and clock out. You had some burden of responsibility to bear when you worked there. Making sure the work you did was stellar and making the company look good was par for the course — it was expected. And if you cared about your reputation on the job (and cared about keeping your job), then you made sure to perform on all cylinders — at least most of the time, anyway.
And if you had some less than stellar days, you usually had a chance to make some mistakes, fail a little bit, recover, and get back to your level of excellence without your faux paus adversely impacting the bottom line of your company’s performance. You were just one of many fish in the company waters; and although your contributions mattered, they probably weren’t the make it-break it of its existence. In other words, YOU could make mistakes that didn’t cause the company to go down, you could even neglect some things to focus on others, you could take vacation and someone would cover your stuff while you were gone, and you could even leave the company and someone else would be hired to fill your spot. No harm, no foul.
But now, you’re the boss man or boss woman. You’re in charge of it all — all the victories but all of the failures as well. You can’t just afford to be less than stellar and think you’re going to make any headway in this crazy business of entrepreneurship.
You may be able to take some time off; but just know that, while you’re not tending to daily tasks that still exist when you’re on vaca, work’s piling up and isn’t getting done (unless you have employees or contractors you’ve hired who are keeping things going in your absence). NOTE: Realistically speaking though, if you’re just starting out in your creative entrepreneurial journey, then I’m willing to guess that you don’t have people doing any of your work for you. And therefore, you’re what I like to call the lone solopreneur. YOU’RE IT, Baby!
Furthermore, as a solopreneur, if you decide to up and leave and move on to something else, then your business venture will, more than likely, dissolve. There’s no one else to pick up the pieces, unless you’ve been able to build up enough value in your business to where someone else is willing to take it over and keep it running.
I’m willing to say that this picture looks a little bit different than your days of working for someone else, don’t you think? The work then may have been hard, but the work now (with flexibility and all) isn’t some leisurely walk in the park by any stretch of the imagination.
As I stated before, the work is STILL hard, but just in a different way.
Even the entrepreneur that’s been doing this thing for many years will tell you that a business can’t run itself for very long without you intervening and making your presence known. I don’t care how many automations that person sets up in their business to streamline processes and set themselves up with multiple streams of passive income. “Passive” doesn’t mean do nothing. It just may mean putting processes in place so you work smarter, not harder. Hey, but you’re STILL working. Get it?
Furthermore, even in passive income entrepreneurial ventures, there’s such a thing as all the up front work you have to do to even get a passive income situation started. Then, there’s the maintenance of that passive income. Passive income work is ongoing work that you will have to consistently do if you want your business to be long-term. No such thing as do something once and never touch it again. The constantly changing times we live in won’t allow you to function in such a capacity.
If you want your business to stay alive and flourish, you have to be ready to add the gas when you need to, slow down when times call for it, pivot the direction you’ve been going in order to stay the course, keep going when you’re tired of the journey, detour off the beaten path if something’s not working, and put in the necessary hours of work behind the wheel — ALWAYS.
So, you see? Everything in business takes work. Even the stuff that looks like it’s effortless. Most of us only see the results of what these entrepreneurial giants put out and rarely the behind-the-scenes look. These multimillion dollar ventures that they have going didn’t start out of thin air. The gurus probably won’t tell you all their trade secrets (just some of them). And even if they did, you’d never be able to replicate them to get these gurus’ exact business results.
Why? Well, because we’re all unique individuals with unique sets of mental fortitude, skills, abilities, knowledge, foresight, visionary perspectives, goals, outlooks, intuition, work ethic, circumstances, challenges, limitations, and I could go on and on. We all have a variety of differing contributions to add to the entrepreneurial table.
And don’t misunderstand what I’m doing here. What I’m doing is simply trying to impart some realistic wisdom on what being the boss man and boss woman look like, in case you had any misunderstandings. And if you haven’t taken anything else away from today’s discussion, please know this: owning your business requires you to be a worker bee and to have the mental wherewithal to withstand the pressures that entrepreneurship may bring your way.
Finally, even with all that hard work I’ve been talking about this whole blog post, I absolutely love being a creative entrepreneur. The sheer joy in doing something you love and getting rewarded for it far outweighs all the hard work involved. To give you a little hope and make sure you know that I’m all for the boss life and the opportunities it brings, I’ll make sure to address some of the outstanding benefits you can expect to receive from being a creative entrepreneur. Keep tuning into this series and you’ll see all the good stuff come out as well. How does that sound?
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