Opinion: why you should not strive for business
'02.08.2019'
Sooner or later, each of us must decide what to be. The topic is complex and the question is always open: there are too many components and all the clues are wrong. The exceptions are Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, or, there, Chaliapin. They say they didn’t have these questions (by the way, I’m not sure about that, but it’s difficult to verify). I want to raise a narrower topic. Who to be - an employee or business owner?
The solution is not easy. If you were born and raised in the family of a scientist, musician or race car driver, as a rule (and unfortunately), the parenting profession is “blown into your ears” with a powerful pressure. It can be confusing and push you where you don't need to.
But I'm talking about something else. There are lots of ways in which a person comes to owning a business. For example, dad has a business and he put you there to work, and then gave you a job for good. Or you graduated from business school and understand how it should work. Maybe friends called you to the co-founders of the new project.
No matter how the situation may be, you need to understand the following: business owners are born. I am sure that many will disagree with me. They have a right. No, man does not know about it. It's like a birthmark that you can never see because of its small size, or it is a place on the body where you never look.
If owning a business is not destiny, or (more mundane option) circumstances do not work out, you may never know what you were born for. Although this is unlikely. A person born to own a business, as a rule, from childhood has a set of qualities that someone who becomes a wonderful worker does not have: a doctor, engineer, programmer or pilot.
What is this set and how to recognize it? A business owner is a special view of himself and the world spreading around him. This is the desire (not necessarily immediately the ability) to lead, not follow. This is the ability to take risks, not to be afraid of the unknown and incomprehensible. Such qualities can be possessed by those who get into a fight in childhood, regardless of an opponent who is three times larger, or there are several of them.
On the subject: Point of view: the myth of fake smiles and dumb Americans
These are those who are cramped in a cube environment, where people have been sitting for decades, able to follow instructions, smart or stupid, and not suffer from the fact that they are just small screws of a large mechanism. These are not those who like to work in groups, carry pencils home from work and make a copy of a book for a son on a working copy machine during a break.
The amount of money raised for the start and the presence of a great business idea have nothing to do with it. Just owning a business is not for the weak. Here you will not complete the set hours and will not forget about the work. This is an incessant brain activity that does not turn off even in sleep - and there is a reason for that. Suppliers, buyers, employees (who often want to work less and get more, which is normal), stockholders, insurance, expenses, competitors, partners, and so on. There is a reason to swell your head from thoughts. For the majority of the people (business owners are less than one percent of the population), this burden is too heavy. For one person, this is too much stress, hanging on him like a bag of stones behind his back, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
On the subject: Personal experience: how I worked for a year and a half without holidays and weekends
Conclusion? Do not rush into business if you do not feel like an adventurer, an entrepreneur, afraid of risk, kind-hearted, too polite and overly intelligent. Owning a business, especially in the hope of making it successful, is a task for powerful, tough, prudent, and sometimes even ruthless people. And this is the rule.
Yes, there are exceptions - perhaps many of our readers know one or two. But they are not a rule, and we are trying to isolate any rule from the general direction of movement. Owning a business, if you like, is more of a state of mind than a set of specialized knowledge. Knowledge can be found, bought, acquired, but the state of mind is not, if it is ... not.
But I still wish you success. Do not despair, even if you are not born for business. There are also advantages here. Less headache, risk, zero chance of loss, and certainly more free time. Get pleasure from it. This is so important. Personally, I think so.
If you want to talk with me about it - go to my page in Facebook.
