Source: Inc.com
Most people won’t agree with me on this, but every successful entrepreneur will accept the fact that one will lose a lot of good friends in the journey of entrepreneurship.
It is strange yet true that your close friends/siblings/partners won’t understand what you are doing and they will start calling you a sociopath. Some will even call you a dickhead.
I am a very young entrepreneur. At the age of 18 when you lose your close ones and become a loner, well, that breaks you. But why does that happen? Why do we lose people? Is this like a disease that every entrepreneur suffers from? Or is it just a paradox?
Well, it is all true. Yes, we have a life in which we suffer from the paranoia of failure and the enthusiasm of getting successful. The paranoia is actually much more than the enthusiasm and this, sometimes create feelings like insecurity, narcissism, selfishness, impulsiveness, and anger. People close to us are unable to deal with that behaviour and most of them quit.
So what are some of the traits which one tends to develop during the process of becoming an entrepreneur and, people leave them for that? By the way, these are the traits of some of the most successful entrepreneurs!
• Entrepreneurs are blunt: Believe me or not, but after you pursue entrepreneurship, you start talking to the point. You develop that trait such that people around you sometimes get hurt by your true opinions. Well, truth be told, humanity does not like direct or frank talks and being an entrepreneur, you just cannot resist that.
• Entrepreneurs are insecure: If your mom calls other kids beta, you start getting insecure. Yeah, it’s a fact. The paranoia of failure takes over you in such a massive way that you start getting insecure of everything around you. And if you have a girlfriend/boyfriend, well they are going to have a life full of nightmares.
If your co-founder is in a relationship and has other engagements, you become insecure about whether or not they would be able to give you time.
Fact: Entrepreneurship = Insecurity.
• Entrepreneurs are selfish and self-centered: Actually people consider us selfish and self-centered, we, in reality are not. We are no where near that. Yes, I’d say we are rather obsessed about our startup and product but, these are the products which we are making to change millions of lives around the globe. And keeping that in mind, we are no where self centered.
If you still feel that an entrepreneur is self centered, see yourself and what you actually have done with your life. 🙂
• The biggest enjoyment is work: This is the reason why we lose most of our close ones. As we are so obsessed with our product, we get so high on working that we stop spending time with our close ones. Well you know what happens next.
People who have not found why they exist on the planet usually find passionate people idiotic and mad. For people, even Einstein was a mad scientist.
• They stop caring: Yes, an entrepreneur will only know about the current affairs of startup world and the finance world. Most of them don’t know about what’s happening in their colony or what’s happening in politics.
If something is neither under your control or influence or is no where related to your work, better stop caring about that.
• Entrepreneurs are impulsive: This happens when at times, you hear so many people saying no to you about your product. During these times, don’t lose faith otherwise it could hurt you badly.
• Entrepreneurs are lonely: We live a very lonely life. Even when we have a team and a co-founder, we feel very lonely. Why? Because of the thought of failure I guess.
• Entrepreneurs are short-tempered: Well, your co-founder and team will answer it.
From the next time if you feel low because your close ones are against you and everyone is leaving you, don’t lose faith. Just keep one thing in mind — you are moving towards success.
I would leave you with a poem of Les Brown which always inspired me.
“If you want a thing bad enough to go out
and
fight for it,
to work day and night for it,
to give up your time, your peace and your sleep for it…
if all that you dream and scheme is about it,
and life seems useless and worthless without it…
if you gladly sweat for it and fret for it and plan for it
and lose all your terror of the opposition for it…
if you simply go after that thing you want
with all of your capacity, strength and sagacity,
faith, hope and confidence and stern pertinacity…
if neither cold, poverty, famine, nor gout,
sickness nor pain, of body and brain,
can keep you away from the thing that you want…
if dogged and grim you beseech and beset it,
with the help of God, you will get it!”
PS: I don’t believe in god, but in an energy that keeps me moving.
Originally posted on my personal blog: hs.thetimeahead.com
Follow me on twitter @hankock007
asha chaudhry
wow harsh. that’s deep considering you’re only 18?!
i’m very impressed that you’ve already felt what most of us feel all the time!
trust me, i very often get this question – how do you balance work and home? answer is i don’t. i spend 10-12 hours building trhs that my home takes the backseat. my family understands. but over weekends reminds me, that there are other things in the world that need my attention 🙂
we all need to work on things like being insecure, short tempered, consumed by work. find some hobbies to keep the creativity alive and the negativity afar. otherwise you will burn out.
as far as lonely goes, every entrepreneur’s journey is lonely, so the best way to tackle with that is surround yourself with positive, like-minded people. the whole objective of creating trhs – is to make the entrepreneur’s journey a bit less lonely 🙂 so hang in there… you’re not alone at all. and trust me, you won’t break anything permanently.
pls add your twitter handle at end of your post. it will help me mention it while promoting it over social.
pls read this article written by alok – the points will resonate with you 🙂
https://www.therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/7-dark-secrets-of-entrepreneurs-revealed
7 dark secrets of Entrepreneurs – Revealed.
As featured in the September 12 issue of the “Entrepreneur” (India) Magazine.
Think you know entrepreneurs? Ha! Think again! These are seven dark secrets that entrepreneurs will never reveal about themselves:
1. Entrepreneurs are insecure.
For many years, I felt insecure.
First about not being an engineer, but just a lowly B.Com graduate. Then about not being an MBA while all my friends became one. Next came a sinking feeling of not having worked for a Fortune 500 Company (I worked in my dad’s socks factory for twelve years).
It was only when I broke out and became an entrepreneur that this feeling started fading. I tasted some success that made me feel somewhat secure and confident of being able to survive in the otherwise ‘formatted for success’ world.
2. Entrepreneurs are lonely.
Honestly, entrepreneurs are their own best friends.
Yes, family comes close and there is almost a reverse dependency on family (I feel I depend on my wife and 2 daughters more than they depend on me), but there is really no one else.
Maybe I speak for myself, but the gigantic tasks of the day leave no room for hanging out with friends or acquaintances. In most cases, it’s going out with the office crowd.
Entrepreneurs speak to themselves in their sleep. They sell proposals to themselves in the shower and negotiate term sheets in their mind while they are eating sev puri. There is little time for other friendships.
3. Entrepreneurs are selfish.
I can never forgive myself for one incident.
Neither can my wife. The day my younger daughter was born was also the day I was supposed to sign my final shareholding agreements to close my first round of funding. I chose to sign those documents instead of bringing my wife and new born baby back home from the hospital.
This just pointedly shows how selfish entrepreneurs are.
4. Entrepreneurs are about the glory, not about the money.
I always told my wife that I would be really elated the day I made my crore rupees and that “life would change after that”.
I made one crore in a sale transaction 6 years ago and I still remember working doubly hard that day. Nothing changed the next day or the week after. And as I see it, nothing will change in the decade to come.
I realized that entrepreneurs do what they do for the glory of it. The money just happens and gets silently ignored.
5. Entrepreneurs are those people who walk into dark basements with the lights off.
Whenever I see a movie where a person who hears a noise slowly starts walking down into a dark basement with no lights (to investigate), I get the jeebie-jeebies.
It’s just that very often, entrepreneurs love chasing ideas and concepts till the very end. Almost fanatically, like someone obsessed; oblivious to fears and dangers to the point of almost getting killed in the bargain.
In the beginning of my entrepreneurial career, I would call 500 clients everyday and say, “Hi, I’m calling from contests2win.com, can I meet you?” No one bothered to speak to me, forget meet me. But I just kept on calling, ignoring the dark fear that I may not have been on the right path in the first place.
6. Entrepreneurs don’t mind their own business. They want to mind yours.
My wife and kids have given up on me.
It’s because at a restaurant, I lecture the manager on how to speak on the phone. Or because I spend forty minutes at a premium clothes store explaining to the saleswoman, how she should sell shirts to men. When the person at the toll booth doesn’t have change, I have a problem. When the car showroom sticks a ‘serviced at x garage’ sticker on my car – the manager, his boss and boss’s father get a lecture on how they cannot treat other people’s cars as media properties.
Entrepreneurs just can’t keep their noses to themselves.
They have to poke and intrude into other people’s business, and that’s not because they are curious or jealous; it’s because they want to participate in the other person’s business. They want to contribute and they want to inspire that entrepreneur to be the best.
7. Entrepreneurs love C.S.I
I love C.S.I (the investigative programme on TV). It’s not because I love to solve crimes, but because I love detail. I love the nitty gritty, the tiny hooks and sinks, the finger printing of attention, the DNA analysis of ‘why’!
In my father’s factory, I spent years writing an algorithm that calculated the cost of everything that went into making a sock – including the cost of the electricity of the lightbulb in the watchman’s bathroom.
Details are the ocean in which entrepreneurs swim to find hidden treasures.Sometimes the treasures are found and sometimes not, but the addiction to detail just becomes permanent.
Entrepreneurs are dangerous, lonely, crazy people. They are like Vampires. Either you stay away from them, or become them.
Harsh Songra
Sure I will add my twitter handle. Well I turned 19 on July 16th 🙂
Kritika Ponia
Harsh,
I went “ouch” quite a few times while reading this. I started at 23 and was a freelancer for 3 years before that. I have been a “dangerous, crazy, lonely” person for a very long time and I connected with just about everything you wrote.
I am just finding comfort in the fact that I am not the only blunt, short-tempered loner here. 😉
All the best to you!
Harsh Songra
Thank You 🙂
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
In the end,
you will have no friends but yourself.
What you will have,
will be the memories of making a difference.
And that will be beyond,
Any man woman or child
That you will care to remember
Harsh Songra
😀
Rajesh Choudhary
Congrats Harsh, wonderful insights. Many of which I can personally relate over last few years.
Have you relocated in Bangalore? We met at Cafe Matteo, Samir introduced us.