Anyone Who Became an Entrepreneur ONLY For These Reasons Needs to Rethink Their Priorities

There are a lot of reasons to choose the path of entrepreneurship.

Sometimes, it's about freedom and autonomy — the ability to choose your own hours, forge your own destiny, and to free yourself from the confines of the 9-5 lifestyle.

It can also be about making a positive contribution to the world, about creating something that makes a difference.

But these are just a couple of the reasons people make the decision to start a business.

There are also some motivating factors that, frankly, aren't exactly the best reasons to become an entrepreneur.

It's not that they're immoral or unethical.

But being an entrepreneur is not an easy career path.

It's hard, it's grueling, and to make it through, you've got to have some real, genuine passion that keeps you forging ahead.

If you want to become an entrepreneur for these reasons, you may want to reexamine whether you're making the right decision. A recent article from Entrepreneur explains this in detail.

To become famous

It's true that becoming an entrepreneur has the potential to increase your personal visibility — especially if your marketing strategy relies on media exposure. Look at entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban, Richard Branson or Elon Musk: Tese are high-profile people who get lots of media attention and have attained celebrity status.

However, pursuing business creation and management for the sole sake of gaining popularity for yourself is a bad idea. Relentlessly pursuing more personal branding opportunities is going to take you away from the office, where you'll be needed. Plus, your idea of successful entrepreneurship will lmost certainly be distorted by survivorship bias.

To have unlimited vacation

Yes, it's true: As an entrepreneur, you'll get to make your own schedule. You'll set your own hours, work whatever days you want and take unlimited vacation time, if you want. But, remember, your business's success will depend on the effort you put in, and the unfortunate reality is that your first business is more likely than not to fail.

If you're busy traveling six months out of the year, you won't have enough time invested in your business to help it become successful. If all you can think about is vacation time as a business owner, you'll be grossly underestimating the amount of work it takes to run that business. Instead, chances are, you won't have much time for regular days off for at least a year or two.

You can read more over at Entrepreneur about the rigours of entrepreneurship, and how you should make sure you're doing it for the right reasons.