Why as an Entrepreneur, You Need Your Own Company
Curiosity will make or break entrepreneurs.
Created with Midjourney
“Why don’t you just give up? You’ve failed so many times. It’s time to get a real job, start a family, and build up some security.”
Every entrepreneur has heard something similar to this at one point in their life. I know I have more times than I can remember.
Having a sense of security is really tempting. As entrepreneurs, we have all experienced numerous failures. It gets to you and at one point, we all think about getting a “real job”.
The problem is, when we do get a “real job”, the entrepreneurship monster inside us lurks and continues to push us to want to take another risk.
They say curiosity kills the cat, but it also makes or breaks the entrepreneur.
In this blog post, I explain why as entrepreneurs, having our own company is a need, not a want.
Why do you want to become an entrepreneur?
How many interviews have you heard with one of your favourite business leaders who give the same answers to the infamous question?
“Why did you become an entrepreneur?”
Work when I want
Take time off when I want
The ability to make more money
It’s just what I’m passionate about
Now, I’m not saying these reasons aren’t accurate, I’m simply saying there is actually a lot more to it than this.
These are all perks of being an entrepreneur, but entrepreneurs have a few more screws loose.
There aren’t many people who would take the beating you need to be able to take to start a business.
“Running a start-up is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. After a while, you stop staring, but the glass chewing never ends” - Elon Musk
Prior to the successful business you see in front of you, there are far too often 10 other failed businesses by that same entrepreneur. On top of that, there was a lot of blood, sweat and tears - maybe even a bankruptcy or two.
So why would anyone want to go through that?
Curiosity is always there
Entrepreneurs tend to be incredibly curious. Unfortunately, there are far too few “real jobs” that allow entrepreneurs to truly follow their curiosity.
Do you think that Elon Musk could have got a job somewhere that would allow him to attempt to make human life multi-planetary?
How many places could Steve Jobs have worked at that would have allowed him to form teams and spend that amount of money to come up with the Macintosh, iPhone, iPad, etc?
Richard Branson has started over 400 businesses purely by chasing his curiosity. The, “what if?”
As I said earlier, curiosity will make an entrepreneur, but it’ll also be the end of one too.
There are no entrepreneurs who were innovators, that would have been successful without pure curiosity.
Those same innovators would have had a lot of trouble working for others, or at least be happy working for others, because their curiosity would “kill” them.
Entrepreneurs need to start their own companies because they need a way to allow their curiosity bug to be satisfied.
“Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.” - Steve Jobs
We are idea machines with no off switch
We have all had ideas that seem brilliant. We want to see them come to life, but few follow through and take a shot at it.
Entrepreneurs are the ones who do follow through with these ideas.
We have to make our ideas come to life because they are lurking in our heads. If they don’t come to life it slowly eats away at us.
Entrepreneurs are idea machines.
We look around, see problems, and come up with solutions. Those solutions as I just said are now sitting in our heads. We want to see them come to life.
Entrepreneurs need to create their own company so they have a place to bring their ideas to life. They want to work full-time on making these ideas a reality.
Simply going to work, 9-5, working for someone else, on ideas that aren’t their own, would be borderline torture.
That’s why entrepreneurs start companies. Anything else would be torturous.
Conclusion
I came upon the idea of why entrepreneurs need their own company after reading Derek Sivers’ book “Anything You Want”.
I read a page about how we as entrepreneurs have ideas and need companies to bring those to life. It spoke to me because as someone who has failed and been told to stop trying, it helped me realize why I and many others can’t and won’t stop trying.
Entrepreneurs constantly have ideas we want to see come to reality because we are curious. We believe that if these ideas come to life, they could change our lives, and often others’ lives as well.
I wanted to try to reiterate my version of what Derek wrote so that others can better understand the mind of entrepreneurs.
Thanks for reading,
To get more content, and additional life hacks - sign up for my free weekly newsletter.