

What exactly makes Entrepreneurship so hard - paraschopra
http://www.pluggd.in/what-exactly-makes-entrepreneurship-so-hard-297/

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idlewords
Maybe a better question is, what makes entrepreneurship so self-involved?

Hats off to the lurkers here who are just building shit.

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nazgulnarsil
narcissism seems naturally correlated to self starters IMO.

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nkabbara
I completely disagree with the “Period.” I think it’s a very small part of why
it’s hard. Actually, if I were to ask the question differently and say: What
exactly makes Entrepreneurship so attractive? Many would say it’s the lack of
a boss.

Entrepreneurship is very personal and if you don’t have the discipline muscle
already trained and ready, the first year or two will be very hard. But after
that, you simply pick up a sheet of paper in the morning, look over at your
yearly plan, and write down the couple of things that you must do that day to
get a little closer.

At the end of the day, cross all the items off the list. If you’re lucky, that
is.

Of course, it’s much harder than that. Specially when your plan is evolving as
you go.

From my experience, I believe what makes entrepreneurship so hard is having to
fly multiple plans in the sky simultaneously.

It’s telling which planes are carrying the cargo and which are carrying the
people. The ones that can absolutely not crash no matter what from the ones
that can not crash.

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andrewljohnson
Well, that's not what makes entrepreneurship hard for me. Each day, I can get
up and decide various things to do, and I'm plenty motivated. In fact, I would
guess most entrepreneurs are the workaholic, get-it-done type.

What makes entrepreneurship hard for me is figuring out what to do, not
following through on it. So, in some sense, it would be easier if I had a boss
with a todo list, if the ideas were better than my own.

At a chugging corporation, it's easy to figure out stuff worth doing, and hard
to motivate people. At a start-up, it's just the opposite... it's easy to
motivate people and hard to figure out stuff worth doing.

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JacobAldridge
If you need a boss to make all of the prioritisation and deadline decisions,
you won't make it as an entrepreneur. But you can take responsibility without
having to make all of those decisions on your own.

This is where having the support of people who have walked the path before
(like the YC team or even others here at HN) is invaluable, as well as getting
the right advice _and_ being held accountable by a specific mentor or coach.

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coffeemug
I disagree. Everyone has some kind of a boss, even though it may not be a guy
working in the office next to you. For entrepreneurs it might be the
customers, it might be your investors, it might be your cofounders, but there
is still "a boss".

What makes it hard for me is the fact that there is a fog of war. There is a
high degree of uncertainty about almost everything. I'm dedicating a
tremendous amount of my time and effort to something that might tip over at
any moment, either because of a wrong decision, or because of a situation
outside of my control, or because I'm not good enough, or because it was a
terrible idea in the first place. Entrepreneurship requires faith, basically,
and I'm not used to structuring my life that way.

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DaniFong
The full responsibility for the fate of your company, and all of the people
depending on it, though it depends to a great extent on investors, partners,
customers, the markets, technical and social and financial risks that you can
only vaguely see and barely control, ultimately rests on you.

This is so completely unlike the typical modern day human experience that
people often just get culture shock and flicker out. Even more often, they
give up and fade out, blaming some little thing or external cause for their
failure.

The creation of valuable new technologies, while challenging, seems like a
cakewalk compared to the moral weight you're required to bear when running a
company. I think this can be partially seen in how many entrepreneurs do end
up giving up the reins of their company; either during an acquisition or to
'professional managers' (who often themselves simply shirk the moral weight
since the company isn't theirs to the same extent.) Those who can take their
company to the next level are, at each step, both rare and exceedingly
valuable.

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Aegean
its a very small detail for why it is hard. there is about 100 - 150 more
other things you need to worry about just as much.

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lsd5you
The economic equilibrium.

