Why I Don’t Aim to be an Entrepreneur

And why you shouldn’t either

How do you escape the 9 to 5 rut, collect all your groove and have control over your time and ambition? How do you start fulfilling all your dreams in life and start being the person everyone admires and aspires to be instead of the current downtrodden state you’re in? Start your own thing, my friend. Get out there and run a company and become famous and earn lots of cash. That’s the escape.

Eventually, I’d like to start something of my own. I want to build a startup.

A few reasons for becoming an entrepreneur.

• Being an entrepreneur is my dream.

Somewhere in the process of trying to solve your problems, others’ problems or chasing an opportunity, you turn into a budding entrepreneur. Nope, you don’t become an entrepreneur because you want to be an entrepreneur. More often than not, people do not even realize they’re undertaking an entrepreneurial activity. Take your average Mark Zuckerberg, he isn’t trying to build a billion dollar company, he isn’t even trying to make the next-big-thing. He’s doing something for the heck of it. He’s doing something because he thinks other people might like it.

• I will be my own boss.

Entrepreneurs are people who work 100 hours a week to escape working 40 hours a week.

Oh yes, there’d be decision-making and market analysis and all those things you love. Tons of it! You’d do things your way and build an amazing product that caters to the hidden needs of your customer. Wait..yeah, that’s right, customers. Becoming an entrepreneur wouldn’t make you the boss of your own life. You’d be the boss of nothing. Your work is going to be the boss of you. You might just turn out to be the sucky boss you were trying to escape from. If freedom from working a fixed x number of hours is what you’re looking for, perhaps a low-stress, low-paying job is for you. Or maybe being a Senior Mattress Tester. Unless you’re really passionate about what you’re doing, everything you do is going to feel like a rut, even owning your own business. And more often than not, having a great boss will make you work wonders.

• I want something to call my own.

Adopt a dog instead. Or save up and buy a house without a loan. In any company, big or small, decentralization of power is necessary to reduce the clogging up of decisions. An absolute authority on everything makes you nothing but a bottleneck. Don’t be a bottleneck. If this is your prime motivation behind starting a company, you might as well not. Chances of failure are high. Killing your babies is going to be a tough job if you are your priority.

Entrepreneurship is not about owning a company. It’s about executing an idea.

With the success of self-made people, creating and running one’s own company has become the ultimate goal. The same has somehow become synonymous with ‘living the dream’.

I don’t dismiss the long hours and hard work put in by people who passionately work towards the creation of an experience that is entirely new, or even improving one that has been tried before. We need these people. People who don’t give up the pursuit of their dreams after failing numerous times. We need these people. But guess what? You can be these people without aiming to be an entrepreneur. You’ll probably just turn into one eventually. Unless I have an idea that breaks the ground beneath my own feet, I’m happy to help someone else who does.

Let’s focus on the disruptions rather than becoming one ourselves.