The Entrepreneur’s Conundrum – Personal Consumerism
The past 9 months – especially the last 4 – have taught me a lot about how much of a lifestyle doing startups is. In particular, the time and emotional requirements are enough to make even the most “hard working” techies flee back to their comfy IBM cubicle. One unfortunate side effect of this time commitment is my gradual removal from needing to entertain myself or “kill time” – it just doesn’t happen anymore. There’s way too much to do to be bored. And, even for those times where I do need a break to be entertained, I’m doing something productive with people or a book – I’m not buying “things”.
Girls buy shoes and clothes, guys buy video games and lifted trucks, people who start companies bring sandwiches to their part time jobs so they can keep the development server up and running. This removal from personal consumerism can be somewhat discouraging in so far as we’ll “miss the boat” or become too “disconnected” with how people are behaving and what trends the dollars are moving toward. Just because I find entertainment in working on my company doesn’t mean that others will, in fact most of them don’t. Also, my lack of consumerism doesn’t take away from the entertainment value provided by entrepreneurs like myself that are working toward providing something that the world will enjoy. Regardless, my job is to figure out how to be enough of a participant to stay relevant, but be enough removed that I can effectively stay focused.
Not so much a conundrum in retrospect eh??
Good point, and well said. One practical outworking of the time constraints is that I have to guard myself from being sucked in when one of my roommates is watching some interesting TV show. I’ve noticed it isn’t as difficult as it used to be.