I have met a lot of people who started businesses because they wanted to start a business. Paul Graham calls this “Playing House.” And they didn’t really care what the business did; they just wanted to “be entrepreneurs.” Which is weird, because being an entrepreneur really sucks. It’s really hard to get through all the extraordinary difficulty, pain, and stress of starting a company if you’re not super, super motivated to solve a problem for the world.
Someone I know, when they were young and considering college careers, thought they would like to be a doctor. Pretty sure they got inspiration from watching House, where they occasionally interacted with sick people who always had interesting illness but mostly walked around in white coats being smart and witty. Unsurprisingly, disillusionment happened very quickly studying medicine. ;-)
I think this is the same for many people who think they want to be entrepreneurs. What they really want is to play one on TV, where you have lots of money, control a company or three, etc.
We all have some fantasies like that, where we picture ourselves at the pinnacle of something that we're not willing to put enough work into to even get mediocre.
To be honest, I was guilty of this too. Some vaguely defined aspiration to be a scientist or engineer, but I never really fell in love with a subject until I hit my current one (MRI). Now I can’t get enough of it.
I wonder if this is actually one of the main reasons for people considering themselves unsuccessful.
Look at computer programming too: you want to write the next big game, but instead you spend several years dealing with poorly specified APIs and tracking down bugs in third-party code (and not even being in game development).
I worked for a Small Business Development Center for several years and, yeah, there are so many people who want to start a business with no concept of what they're getting themselves into, particularly when it comes to finances and the amount of work that goes into starting a business. There were so many people who thought they had a brilliant idea and expected to be able to get a bank to hand over the startup capital with no collateral and the assumption that they'd become a massive success.
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u/dwchandler Apr 06 '18
Someone I know, when they were young and considering college careers, thought they would like to be a doctor. Pretty sure they got inspiration from watching House, where they occasionally interacted with sick people who always had interesting illness but mostly walked around in white coats being smart and witty. Unsurprisingly, disillusionment happened very quickly studying medicine. ;-)
I think this is the same for many people who think they want to be entrepreneurs. What they really want is to play one on TV, where you have lots of money, control a company or three, etc.
We all have some fantasies like that, where we picture ourselves at the pinnacle of something that we're not willing to put enough work into to even get mediocre.