Abandon Your Startup and Focus on What Feeds Your Soul

Starting a business, becoming self-sustained, earning money — it’s not for everyone. It’s nice to believe in some coked-up dream that anyone who puts in the work will eventually run a thriving business. Truth is, that’s bullshit. Total bullshit. Most entrepreneurs fail. I know I don’t need to repeat it; we all know that. Alright, I guess I convinced you to ditch that dumb dream. See ya!

If you’re still here, you might be one of those nuts who, despite knowing the above, continues to believe they can create a thriving business with enough work. Welcome to my tribe. On some days, I think I’m brilliant; on most, I realize I may possibly be immeasurably naive and possibly idiotic to pour so much of my time into something that may never ever pay itself back. Sure, they say even failures are successes, that you’ve gained valuable experience. Really? Who are you kidding? That’s another bullshit point. If I had a magic crystal ball and could see that I would never start a successful business, I would drop my entrepreneurial dreams faster than I dropped my kid at school this morning because I had to pee so bad. Yeah, I would stop dumping every weekend and evening into a black hole and start focusing on things that actually bring joy to my life: friends, threatre improv, doing things with my family, and a thousand other things I would much rather do than code for hours on end, debug mind-melting devops issues in production, and figure out why that fucking html div is not aligning properly in my app. Basically, all world-shattering problems that would just make me a better person if I could solve them all, right?

Working on a startup, whatever it is, comes with an immense amount of mundane things that one needs to do, and that no one wants to do. Minor technical issues that never end, selling out your soul on social media, feeling that everything depends on that one app when it’s taking so much time to develop while having not paid for itself yet…

Why do I keep going, four years in? Simple, I hate work, the 9–5. I’ve had some great coworkers, and those make the difference, but at the end of the day, I have seen terrible decisions being taken again and again by upper management who have not an ounce of technical understanding apart from the cramming they did during their engineering classes some one million years ago, until realizing they hated tech and wanted to move into management because they made more money there as long as they could retain a veneer of alpha confidence and the calm of a marmot. I have always hated the idea of working for someone else. Sure, working for oneself is also work. But I grew up in an entrepreneurial family, and I just can’t shake it. I wanna go on my own.

So on I go, like a dumb lobster who’s got twelve brains spread out all over its body, but overall not equipped with enough neurons to realize the depth of the hole it is in. There’s no way to know whether my sunk cost fallacy will ever turn out the way I want, and I haven’t yet found a working crystal ball despite loving to visit any antique shop I can unearth. On a positive, if my wife leaves me because I am so obsessed with my entrepreneurial dreams that I forget about her on some nights, I least I won’t have any gold-laying tech unicorn to split. That keeps things simple.

By now, I hope I have truly motivated you to get on with your business idea. You’re gonna get rich, and fast, no doubt!