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  1. Being an entrepreneur does not have “regular” hours – unless you count all 24 hours as regular, 7 days a week or as most entrepreneurs would say – 30 hours a day, 8 days a week, which isn’t a joke – but a sad reality about how much there is to do in the time available – ALL the time.
  2. When business books say that most businesses do not “break-even” for the first three years, that means for three years or more, over 80 hours a week, you will not only be working for free, but will probably be taking from your pocket and paying into the bills of the business – for you to keep doing that work.
  3. The vast majority of business ventures fail rather than succeed and that is a lot more than half in this case – go look up the exact numbers, it will astound you. That means, despite having everything going for them, many of those businesses fail anyway. There may be reasons, and none may be valid for why it failed. Sometimes, businesses have everything right – timing, pricing, effort, marketing, product, process, people and sales – but fail anyway.
  4. There is more paperwork being broke and poor than to run a business – but not by much. And, there are deadlines for poor people to put in paperwork, keep up with papers, produce them at a minute’s notice too – with fines and jail if you don’t, just like there are for small businesses and in both cases, there isn’t an army of people on staff to help with it like big corporations have.
  5. There is rarely a faster way to go broke than to be in any business – even a business enterprise that has at some point, done well. When it turns bad, being an entrepreneur offers no skill sets to deal with the speed at which things can go to hell in a short period of time. Only the survival skills can help at that point and unfortunately, they are needed right when the mind is least capable of making any good decisions at all because of extreme stress and inordinate complexity of the information at hand which must be dealt with all at once.
  6. In the US, entrepreneurs were at one time heralded and small businesses supported especially, as the backbone of the economy. That hasn’t been really supported for many years although the words are still used and it is talked about being that way despite the fact that it isn’t. And nobody you know wants to know you when the boat starts sinking, let alone throw you a paddle or a bucket to help you out.
  7. Selfishness, greed and penny pinching are not the character traits that most people would brag about, nor wish to consider as their only real personality, but to be an entrepreneur those are the critical personality traits if it is going to work at all. If you don’t mind being that kind of person, and other people knowing you’re that kind of person – entrepreneurship is for you because 99% of the time, day in and day out – over a period of years, those are the traits you will be using if you want it to succeed. And, it still might not succeed regardless.
  8. Last, but not least – no matter what you think about being an entrepreneur, why you’re doing it, what your product or service is and no matter what you think the experience will be like for you – being an entrepreneur will change you. It will change your relationships that you’ve always held dear and not always in positive ways. It will steal from what you already have and what you could’ve had if you’d done something else. It will take from your family and from their time, goodwill and caring. It just does. Whether you want it to or not – being an entrepreneur does that no matter how you go about it.
  • cricketdiane, 01-11-17

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