The Painful Truth About Entrepreneurs

The pressure an entrepreneur puts on him/herself can be awe-inspiring, and painful. An entrepreneur thinks of something; where 99% of people would dismiss it as a pipe dream, the entrepreneur says "yeah, I could do that", and for some strange, seemingly inhuman reason, the future pain is presently dismissed. 

By default we spend inadequate time measuring the personal sacrifice and all the time reveling in the vision. The famous entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell says it best "A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer." 

It's not the kill for us. It's the hunt. 

It's not the move in for us, it's the build. 

The entrepreneur looks upon Mt. Kilimanjaro with insufficient gear and experience and for some irrational reason, takes a first step. Sometimes, somehow, they make it to the top scraped, bruised, but smiling ear to ear and saying "I did something I was not supposed to be able to do."

Part inspiration, part madness. A chip on the shoulder. Short mans syndrome. Sometimes I wonder if we entrepreneurs have something missing in our brains. Missing the part that triggers fear, the part that estimates the future pain of a decision. The thing marathon runners have, where they can turn off that voice that says it's time to stop. Where most people turn back, or never start, we keep going.

We have these unrealistic expectations for every aspect of our lives. But these unrealistic expectations sometimes, somehow, are actually fulfilled. Because where expectations - reality = happiness for most people, expectations are the part of the equation in which we revel.

Our loved ones admire us and pity us at the same time. They don't want to live in the crucible where we live. They're a little more sane than we are. Those are the people that we need around us, the people that live on actual planet earth. The ones who don't have that healthy fear missing in their brains. This thing we have, it's a touch of recklessness, a touch of restlessness, a touch of madness. For some of us, life might be easier if we weren't entrepreneurs, but we wouldn't have it any other way.