BIG LIE: The Price of Entrepreneurial Success Is Just Too Much to Pay
For some, that’s a true statement. For others, it’s a big lie. There are some people who really will be happier and more productive in non-entrepreneurial roles. But there’s also great misunderstanding about the price of success.
Every lifestyle, every choice has its price. The person who follows the old model of staying in a good job with a good company for 40 years pays the price in boredom, frustration, and quiet desperation of unfulfilled, untested potential. Today, people who try to stay with that model often pay an even higher price: after many years of service, a merger, acquisition, down-sizing, bankruptcy, or even disappearance of an entire industry puts long-time employees out on the street. They must tackle a dynamic, tough job market with outdated skills and face the future without the financial security they believed was guaranteed to them for their loyalty and longevity. Entrusting your success to others in corporate bureaucracies is increasingly risky business.
Then there are the legions of “gray people.” I don’t mean aging; I mean pallid, pasty, near dead looking. Every morning they march off to a job they have no interest in doing well and derive nothing from but an unsatisfactory paycheck. Every night they come home bored and boring. The price they pay is huge, but it is a slow, almost invisible dying. If you look close, though, you can see it in their eyes.
Yes, entrepreneurial life exacts a high price. Often in ways everyone around you dislikes intensely. As chief cook and bottle washer, you’ve got nobody to call in sick to. While the employee leaves at 5:00 whether work is done or not, you can’t; if there’s a deadline looming, you must meet it, even if that means skipping dinner, your kids’ school recital, sleep.
In one interview, the daughter of Dave Thomas, founder and developer of the Wendy’s fast food chain, was asked if her father came to her school events. She said she doubted if he even knew where her school was! Yes, the entrepreneur’s family pays a price too.
However, I know plenty of fathers who are physically home every night and every weekend but mentally and emotionally elsewhere. Or who are constantly concocting excuses to get away from their families. Like golf, a game that clearly would never have been invented if marriage hadn’t been invented first.
The reality is this: you don’t get to choose a life without a price. There are options, but each has a different price.
There are two sides to the price of entrepreneurship. As an example, consider illness or death in the family. My father was ill in his later years, and there was some real risk he might be suddenly rushed to the hospital and die without much warning. I knew, if I was en-route to a speaking engagement or in a distant city honoring a speaking commitment, that I would not “stiff” the seminar promoter; I would honor my contractual commitment and my father would wait. That never happened. When the time came that he was rushed to the hospital, I was able to drop what I was doing, buy a ticket without blinking, and fly across country for a good, lengthy final visit. I also supported him financially, entirely, for over ten years.
The person in a “normal” job gets family leave. The entrepreneur does not. The employee has one boss, the entrepreneur many. In many ways, it is easier for the employee to do the things in family life generally regarded by most people as correct and appropriate, but it is quite often the “odd man out” entrepreneur in the family that everyone else turns to, to get out his checkbook and pay the bills the others can’t. His willingness to pay the price for entrepreneurial success is what makes it possible for him to pay the tab in family crisis or tragedy. When financial crisis arises in the family, nobody calls the poor relative.
The upshot of this is, you the entrepreneur must be prepared for, and be rather thick-skinned toward, the criticism of the nonentrepreneurs in your life about the price they perceive you pay for your success.
The Decision of Autonomy
When you depend on others, you collect and store up excuses for failure like Harry does. Harry doesn’t like his too-small, indisrepair house. He doesn’t like his five-year-old, mechanically ailing car. He doesn’t like the pile of bills in the kitchen drawer. He hates his job. He doesn’t respect his boss. But wait, the one thing he does have going for him is a book of excuses. He opens it up and sighs with relief: This sorry state of affairs isn’t my fault. My mother liked my brother more and that gave me an inferiority complex. We grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. My family couldn’t afford to send me to college.... And on and on and on.
This is called burying yourself in B.S. If you really want to be a success in business, you need to be emotionally independent before you can ever become financially independent.
To succeed as an entrepreneur, you must set aside your neediness for acceptance from others. Immunity to criticism is a “secret” shared by all the highly successful entrepreneurs that I know.
To succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to set aside your “Book of Excuses” once and for all. Making money as an entrepreneur and making excuses are mutually exclusive, wholly incompatible.
I feel fortunate to have discovered a lot about this very early in life.
If I ever got an allowance, it stopped when I was still a little kid. I don’t remember it. I do remember earning my spending money very early on. I picked strawberries and packaged tomatoes at the greenhouses behind our community, cleaned stalls at a nearby stable, and washed and waxed cars. I soon figured out that selling was easier than manual labor. So I spent my teen years selling. I sold business printing and advertising specialties, Stuart McGuire shoes, a new plasticized, reusable carbon paper, and became involved in a multi-level marketing company.
In my early experiences in direct and multi-level sales, I quickly found out that most of my distributors (even though they were 5 to 25 years older and more “mature” than I was) could not be relied on even to have the appropriate literature, samples, and other materials with them at presentations! If I wanted prospects handled properly, I had to take steps to make up for the others’ lack of organization, discipline, and reliability; I had to have extra supplies on hand. This business taught me the importance of self-reliance, and the futility of relying on others.
The sooner you arrive at accepting 100% responsibility for everything, the more successful you’ll be. Go take a look in the mirror. There’s the man or woman—the only man or woman—who can make you happy, thin, rich, famous, or whatever it is that you aspire to. Dr. Phil can’t make you thin, McDonalds doesn’t make you fat.
The power you need and can have as an entrepreneur comes from eschewing all excuses. Never blaming the economy, the government, the competition, the timing, your parents, your school, or anything or anyone else for anything. Ultimate power comes from accepting total responsibility. When you believe as I do that circumstances control other people but not me, then circumstances won’t control you either.
A very common occurrence in America in recent years has been Wal-Mart coming into a town, and lots of little mom-n-pop businesses rolling over and dying. Their owners blame Wal-Mart. There have been protest marches. Books written. Much hand wringing about behemoth Wal-Mart destroying small businesses left and right. All utter and total B.S. And here’s the proof: there are small businesses who have thrived when Wal-Mart came to their towns. Why? Because they didn’t embrace the excuse for failure. They re-engineered their businesses to do what the giant won’t, to compete in a different way.
Bill