When you’re starting a business, what you’re doing at its core is betting on yourself.
You leave the safety net of working and making money for someone else for the potential payoff of building something that’s your own.
Here lies one of the greatest challenges: You’re entering a market full of people who have also bet on themselves, but unlike you, they’re not on level one.
You’ve just started, so you likely are working with little resources, little experience, and little to no competitive edge, while some of your competition have been in business for years and decades. They’re on level 100, and you, on level one, have to go up against them immediately.
How do you even survive? You can’t go dollar to dollar against them.
The only thing you can do? Give it all of your time.
Putting “sweat equity” in is the only way you even have a shot at growing and competing against well-established, sourced, connected firms.
If you’re starting a business but want to work 20-30 hours a week, take Fridays off, and see your friends all the time, I’m sorry to tell you that you’re never going to grow. You’re either going to immediately fail or you’re going to spend the rest of your life struggling. Every hour you choose to spend on fun or social activities is an hour you choose not to be working, growing, and hustling.
In a landscape where the only thing you have against these firms is your time, wasting it is like chucking precious diamonds into a deep ocean.
Now, you don’t have to take these words in absolutes. Yes, you can still see your friends and devote some time to your hobbies from time to time. You just can’t do these things at the same rate you used to before. See friends once every few weeks or once a month instead of every weekend or even weeknights; real ones will understand your needed sacrifice.
You can get to a $1million home and a G-Wagen you drive to and from your own company. That may happen in due time. But before you reap, you first have to sow, water, nurture, and wait.
If that’s the lifestyle you immediately feel entitled to, then the only difference between where you are and where you left is a lack of cushioning.
First, you have to spend God knows how many hours working in the shadows, finding your differentiator, your clear value proposition, your competitive edge; gaining experience, momentum, contacts; and building up your online presence. Only then will you have a shot.
So if you’re building a firm and looking for balance, forget about it. Strike that word from your vocabulary for the foreseeable future.
Balance isn’t owed. It’s earned.
And it’ll come to you only if you spend all of your current time disproportionately betting on your potential.
Can you do that? Congratulations, you have a shot.
If you can’t, you’ve already failed.
