Good Life Project - Why Some Entrepreneurs End Up Hating Their Lives (7 minutes)

Episode Date: April 9, 2015

So many people head into the world of entrepreneurship with high hopes, only to end up miserable and running back to a J.O.B. We call this "entrepreneurial failure to thrive."It doesn't have to be that way.We had great feedback on our first short and sweet Good Life Riff, so we're teeing up a new 7-minute piece about a huge miss in the world of startups and entrepreneurship One that leads to misery-infused money.We also share 11 critical questions for every entrepreneur, business-owner and aspiring entrepreneur, oh heck, every living human with a pulse, to consider when trying to build something that both serves a need and also serves your own desire to craft a fantastic life.Here's a quick excerpt:Entrepreneurship is not about building a great business, it’s about building a great life!But, you will never get what you want from the way you contribute to the world until you learn how to align your actions with your essence. And you cannot do that until you know who you are.If you’d like to read the entire essay, read and answer the 11 questions offered, you can find it here on Jonathan’s blog. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So today we're sharing our second Good Life Riff, and we've been experimenting and having some fun with some shorter spoken words, sort of essay style episodes to add to our longer mix. If this is something that you like, if you enjoy the format, then go ahead and let me know. Go ahead over to Twitter, at Jonathan Fields, or just let us know around social media

so that we know whether to keep producing these for you. Today is called, Why Do So Many Entrepreneurs End Up Hating Their Lives? So you finally started your own business or private practice, and now you are in hell. It's about three years in, things aren't going as planned, growth is slow, you're spending so much time doing the grunt work and servicing customers, you've got no time to focus on the big picture, growth is actually pretty much stalled. And even if you're growing, the grind is just killing you, your health and waistline, you gave that up a long time ago. Relationships, joy, done. So you secretly yearn

for regular hours and a reliable paycheck, even if it means dealing with an idiot for a boss and purposeless existence. So you sit around looking for a sign from God, and you're not sure if you want her to tell you to continue or to walk away. It's not that you don't believe there's still great potential. It's just that you have no idea how to right the ship and you feel kind of like a prisoner. So I've had this conversation with so many entrepreneurs and shared the cautionary tale with so many aspiring entrepreneurs. Being your own boss, it doesn't automatically put you on the yay train. So many entrepreneurs

unwittingly build their own stress-addled cash-poor cages rather than engines of freedom, expression, and connection. And not because they're stupid or incapable, but because they learned how to serve others, but not themselves. There's something called the cult of the customer. The world of entrepreneurship is maniacally customer oriented these days. Identify and develop the customer, we're told. And it's important. You don't have a business without a customer, but guess what? Without a business that serves as a simultaneous engine, not just of revenue and service, but of personal expression, connection, freedom, and purpose, you don't have a life. how much money you make or how many people you're serving, every day you go to work will end up sucking. Because every day, you'll always be working, never having understood what you really wanted or how to build something that not only gives the customer what he wants, but also gives

you what you need. While this phenomenon is pretty rampant and growing in the world of startups and bootstrapped entrepreneurs, it's also rampant in the world of private practice professionals, creative professionals, and even employees. So here's the newsflash. Entrepreneurship is not about building a great business. It's about building a great life. But you'll never get what you want from the way you contribute to the world

until you learn how to align your actions with your essence. And you cannot do that until you know who you are. If your work lights you up, if it lets you express yourself, if it lets you tap fiercely into your potential, play with people you love and earn enough to live well in the world, then rock on. If not, do not pass go. Do not suffer onward. Do not keep welding the bars of your cage thicker and thicker. Hit pause. Ask yourself, what do I care about? What do I hold sacred, both in business and in life? What lights me up? What would I work hard to do for free? What empties me out emotionally, psychologically, and physically?

Who do I want to serve? Do I care more about serving or building? What do I value on a non-negotiable level? What am I great at? And what am I terrible at? How do I want to spend each day? And how do I want to live my life? So this is just the beginning of the inquiry. But if you start with

these 11 prompts, you'll have done vastly more than the average entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur, or frankly, even the average human to start to understand who you are and what you need. And you'll start to cultivate the level of self-knowledge needed to build something that not only makes money and serves a need, which is important, but also serves you and the life that you seek to create. Entrepreneurial failure to thrive, it's not just about lack of money or knowledge or skill. It runs far deeper. With rare exception, it's deeply rooted in self-ignorance. Know yourself, express yourself, master yourself, then build around that. So if you'd like to check out the written version of this short Good Life riff,

then you can just head on over to actually my personal blog, jonathanfields.com, and you can actually take a slower look and move through those 11 questions if they feel like questions that you want to spend time answering. Thanks so much, as always, for listening in. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.