The Challenges of Entrepreneurship

Online personalities have a lot to say on the subject of entrepreneurship.

Nowadays there is a lot of hype around the term ‘entrepreneur ‘ – it’s likened to a flashy, fast-paced, easygoing lifestyle where you make it big overnight and travel the world on your yacht the rest of your life.

They’re made to seem like celebrities or professional athletes living the high life.

This is a misleading take, entrepreneurs weren’t perceived in this way until very recently.

30 years ago entrepreneurship wasn’t seen as the route to go down. Nobody wanted to take risks, make sacrifices, and invest all they had into a business that MIGHT turn profitable.

Now entrepreneurs are associated with fast jets and Lamborghinis driving around in the Hollywood Hills.

Entrepreneurship is sold as a quick and seamless path to freedom, control, and fast prosperity – that you will tap into wealth, happiness, and freedom without any ramifications.

Essentially, what the faux gurus are telling you is that entrepreneurship will absolve you of responsibility, and that the world of online business will bring you so much wealth that you won’t even have to THINK about productivity.

These are insidious lies that have and will continue to mislead millions into stress, inaccurate expectations, and in the end, poverty.

Real entrepreneurs will never, in reality, work a 4 hour work week, spending 90% of their time sipping cocktails on a Hawaiian beach.

Real entrepreneurs possess these 5 ingredients:

1. Patience
2. Consistency
3. Obsession
4. Drive
5. Guts

Each and every one of these ingredients are necessary for the creation of real, fulfilled, successful entrepreneurs. Without just one of these elements, you can’t make it. Not everyone can make it – and that’s okay.

I said it before and I’ll emphasize it again: there is no business that you can build, scale, and bring to profitability overnight.
It takes an enormous amount of patience to make it. You will work every day, try dozens of angles (most of them will fail – only 20% of your campaigns will end up working, and that's a generous figure), for weeks, months, often even years before you even see an ounce of real profitability.

Many entrepreneurs lose motivation. They’re told the get rich quick lie – once they enter the real business world they learn very soon that it takes a lot of time to get anywhere, and they get discouraged as a result.

On your entrepreneurial journey you will need to work for a long time before you see success – that takes real patience.

And you have to do it consistently. Every day you need to work on your projects. Businesses cannot exist on your periphery, only tended to once every week or two. You need to allot time every single day, consistently, for a very long time, to work on your projects in order for them to actually grow.

But, when they grow they REALLY grow if you’re consistent.

At first, usually for awhile, this consistent hard work doesn’t deliver any results. Excited new entrepreneurs get hyped up, start their business, and then wonder why they’re not millionaires after a month.

Businesses cannot explode overnight – if you’re an entrepreneur you’re playing the long game.

The biggest, most successful entrepreneurs are OBSESSED with their projects.

You can’t feel lukewarm about your business and expect it to thrive. You need to be totally obsessed with your campaigns if you want them to reach astronomical heights.

It takes a lot of drive – a lot of energy, ambition, to take a business to prosperity. If you’re reading this, you likely have drive. You have enough ambition to do actual research on the subject of business and entrepreneurship, that’s 10x the drive most people have.

Not only does it take, patience, consistency, drive and obsession to be a successful entrepreneurship – it takes guts. When you embark of your business journey, you will be taking hundreds of risks.

There is no successful entrepreneur who hasn’t taken risks. You can throw millions of dollars, thousands of hours into a project only for it to fail. And you will fail.

There will be months carved out of your life that get wasted on campaigns that flop.

That’s scary to many people, and understandably so.

Who wants to take that much risk? Who wants to potentially waste years of their lives on things that just end up failing?

It’s valid for you to think these things, but you definitely should not be an entrepreneur if this kind of lifestyle seems unsuitable.

Only embark on this journey if you’re willing to fail miserably, dust yourself off, and get up the next day.

These gurus try to sell a solid, risk-free lifestyle that anybody can do almost instantly.

This is a complete lie.

You will risk everything.

You will have to make sacrifices.

You will have to work HARD every single day.

If you can do that, then, and only then, can you become a successful entrepreneur.