How can I know if the entrepreneurial lifestyle is right for me?
“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Does this resonate with you? The answer to that question will probably give you the answer to your bigger question…
There’s a reason you’ve dreamed of being your own boss and leaving a legacy. I think it’s natural for us to want freedom, impact, and enjoyment from life. Unfortunately, working 9–5 at a big company rarely gives us that.
A definition that I came up with to differentiate between two lifestyles follows:
- Employees spend their time working on someone else’s dream.
- Entrepreneurs spend their time working towards their own dream.
When put this way, it can sound a little sad, so why are there so many employees in the world? The root reason is fear, but that fear has to come from somewhere:
- Our economy still requires an immense amount of person-hours, even as we continue to automate with machines and software.
- Our education system is very old and was originally designed to create soldiers—now it creates employees, taxpayers, and consumers.
- Our government makes it very appealing to achieve the “American Dream” by means of acquiring debt that requires a paycheck to stay above water.
If you want to be a lifestyle entrepreneur—a life with more ups and downs, but also with freedom—you can make it happen. But, the first step is to recognize that the system is against us. We need to educate ourselves beyond what we learn in school, and we need to do what is not average if we want to achieve something above average.
Here is my most practical advice:
We should not live lives of mediocrity, but we should also not live lives of fear. My business recommends that you…
- Keep your job in the short-term
- Find a way to create a second source of income following your destiny
- Build that business to replace your employment income
The balance is in finding time to do this, but you have to embrace the power of AND (you can do both). An easy way is to start consulting on your area of expertise on the side. Once you have a client and a proof of concept, you can find a way decrease your employment hours. Continue doing this until you’re working full-time on your business.
I still do one-on-one consulting in my business, but now we have online courses, webinars, books, and more to teach people how to do just this… to leap from employee to entrepreneur. This is how you leverage your expertise to make money in your sleep and get a whole other level of freedom.
If you really want to make it work, if you’re done settling for the status quo, if you’re ready to get what you really want in life, start with a very small step, and grab my #1 best-selling book here. I quit my job to help you quit yours.