The Hard Part of Entrepreneurship is NOT Showing Up
Entrepreneurship is hard. Everyone knows this. However, many people misinterpret the hard part. From the outside looking in it appears the hard part is quitting your job, building your product, and launching your business. Or said another way, just showing up. The reality is that showing up is the easy part.
Quitting your job isn’t hard at all. It’s actually pretty easy and it feels good too. I will admit that it’s slightly difficult to commit to an idea and build your product, but once you figure that out, launching the business is also relatively easy.
With that said, everything up to this point is the bright side of entrepreneurship. Quitting your job, building your product, and launching your business are all fun. It’s the stuff that makes a great book.
What doesn’t make a great book is the grunt work that comes next. The day-to-day grind of testing customer acquisition processes that don’t work. The day-to-day grind of waking up at 4 am and going to bed at midnight not knowing if you made any progress. The day-to-day grind of trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents.
I’ll be the first to admit that I got this wrong. 18 months ago when I drank the startup Kool-aid and quit my job, I thought showing up was the hard part. Now that reality has set in, it’s time to find out what real entrepreneurship is all about.