The Terrible Job

Being an entrepreneur is a terrible job.
No one in their right mind, if they fully understood what the work entailed, would take it on.
And yet, for any society that wishes to remain prosperous, entrepreneurs are the difference makers — the innovators, the creators. I do not mean only the very small number who become fabulously rich and famous; I mean the family who opens a small local shop in an underserved community and brings a richness to it, and the countless other small business owners who create the jobs and the employment that hold towns and economies together.

The statistical truth is that most entrepreneurial businesses fail, and for those that do not, it can be years of simply keeping one’s head above water. There is even an academic paper titled, in plain language, “Entrepreneurship Is a Terrible Idea” (Hartmann, 2021).
When I am asked what it takes to be an entrepreneur, I answer like this: you know you are an entrepreneur when you wake up on payday, with the responsibility of feeding the families and paying the mortgages of your employees on your shoulders, and without enough money in the bank to do so — and yet, by the end of the day, somehow they are all paid and you can sleep easy.

I have experienced that more times than I care to imagine. So have most entrepreneurs. Even billionaire founders face the same pressure in another form, as they go through the years of unprofitable growth that so many technology companies must endure to keep their investors and their employees believing.

In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson make the case that nations remain prosperous only when they embrace creative disruption. Stagnation, control, and the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few kill prosperity for everyone. The entrepreneur, in this view, is not an optional ornament on an economy. They are the mechanism by which it renews itself.

Daniel Kahneman put it more directly:
“Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders — not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.”

If you are one of those people — large or small, household name or local shop — and you have made it to another payday: sleep easy. We need you to wake up tomorrow and do it again.