The Parallel of Stress & Entrepreneurship

The conversation about stress and entrepreneurship is not talked about enough. The reason I say this is because entrepreneurs have a ton of stress that is usually overlooked. Those watching on the sidelines may think that stress as an entrepreneur is non-existent because of what people show on social media. In this article, I will be sharing my top three areas of the time and space I believe entrepreneurs experience the most stress. Most of the time on social media, you see an entrepreneur and they’re showing you their boats and yachts, the nice, fast cars, private planes, and big houses. In all actuality, the statistics show that a lot of people, the majority of entrepreneurs, aren’t making private jet money. They’re not making yacht money. They’re not making 10,000 square foot homes on the beach money.

And on the other hand, they’re not showing how because of entrepreneurship, people are killing themselves because entrepreneurs are even more stressed than the average individual. Not only does this need to be discussed, but it also needs to be taken seriously. Entrepreneurship has a whole lot of ambiguity, there’s a whole lot of not knowing. You don’t know when you’re going to make your money back, that you have invested. You don’t know how much money you’re going to make this month. You don’t know a lot of things.

Regardless of what’s known or unknown, true entrepreneurs move on blind faith. You know and understand the risks that could alter your family’s life savings or your life savings, time away from your children, spouse, and other family members. You just believe that all of this is going to pay off and put you and your family in a time of financial freedom over the next one, two, five, or 10 years. And when this doesn’t happen in the timeframe that you might expect, it brings stress, especially when you have an idea that is not working immediately.

Point #1 — Not Getting Enough Sleep. It brings stress when you have to work 18 hours because you left your job working eight hours. That’s stress. That’s less sleep. That’s stress on the body. That’s stress on your health. That’s stress all the way around. You can be at dinner with your wife and kids, while you’re making phone calls or responding to text messages because it doesn’t stop. It might feel like something cool at first, but it affects everybody in your circumference. And because they’re stressed, you become stressed. Again, entrepreneurship is a very stressful choice to make. I always tell people not to make the choice lightly. I encourage people to hold on to their jobs as long as they possibly can because at least that portion of knowing that your bills are going to be paid on time, you don’t have to worry about anymore.

Point #2 — It takes time. You need to understand that it will take time for the business to develop. It’s not going to ever develop exactly when you want it. It’s not going to develop exactly the way you want it. Business is going to develop in its own time and in its own way. Think about it. You may plant a crop of tomato plants and only five come back. This only means that it’s working itself out and you have no control over it. You’ve done everything you were supposed to do, but you have nothing to do with what goes on underground. Your goal next year is to replant. And then after a certain amount of years and a certain amount of harvest, it starts to work on autopilot and whether you plant or not, they still come back.

And this is what your business looks like. You can’t compare the stress of planting crops to entrepreneurship per se because there is a lot that we don’t have control over. And when you need that money to pay your bills, when you need that business to turn over so that you can pay your car payment or make sure your family has food on the table, it adds another level of stress. I encourage people to stay at their jobs for as long as possible. And even when they do leave, create some type of plan to try to do the best you can to have your family in a good position for as long as possible before you have to solely depend on your income from your business, then make sure that the people that are around you understand what you’re getting yourself into.

A lot of times in business, the person that has the vision doesn’t relay the vision properly to friends and family. It’s not for them to understand it totally, but they’re going to understand what matters to them. If you’re telling them that you’re going to have a vision and you’re going to have to go out and do this business and you let them know it’s going to take me about nine months to start making some money, at least your spouse or significant other can agree and they’ll put their mind at ease and start getting themselves prepared for what could possibly happen. If you don’t tell them that, and you don’t do the proper research to be able to relay that to them, then it puts you in a bad space and they’ll probably resent you for that.

Point #3 — Understanding support. You’ll feel as though they are not supporting you, but it’s not that they’re not supporting you, they’re living in a space where they’d never thought that they would have to live and it’s not because of them it is because of you. The most important thing in this space is to be realistic. You have to be realistic with yourself, going into business, and understand that 90% of businesses that are not executed properly fail in the first year. However, your journey is your journey. And the only person that is responsible for your journey is you, you can’t look at somebody else and say, I’m gonna do exactly what they do, and I’m going to get what they have. That’s not a fact. That almost never happens. Therefore, you have to be honest and prepared to go on this journey. However, it takes you wherever it takes you.

When you are starting out in entrepreneurship, you may have seen someone else make a bunch of money doing their business, so you decide to start your business. You have no experience or anything else besides you having your family and friends gassing you up, which causes you to believe that you can do exactly what they did. And what happens after this is that you go out into the world and every time you do something, you think that the world is going to support you the same way that your family has and that’s not actually true.

These are my top three areas to try to mitigate stress, Get enough sleep, understand that it takes time, and understand support. Although stress and entrepreneurship go hand-in-hand, after a while, some stress can become ustress, as it is called in Psychology. Ustress, is good stress.

Good stress is when you’ve worked your tail off to get this contract or this deal. And you have it and it’s more money than you ever had in your life. You are able to take care of your family, and you rationalize within your mind and say it’s worth it. Being able to go on vacations, you can look back at that hard work and stress and it becomes ustress because you start to see that it was worth it.