Ryan Daniel Moran left ministry to start businesses and warns that entrepreneurship is grueling and often fueled by personal insecurity. His advice: if you can be happy doing anything else, do that instead. Only pursue it if you're crystal-clear it's what you actually want.
I went to college to be a pastor. I thought I was going to be in the ministry for most of my life. And I had a teacher, her name was Dr. Constance Cherry. She said something in one of my Introduction to the Ministry classes. She said, if there's anything that you could do besides going into the ministry, please go do that. Because you have no idea how hard it's going to be if you don't have a calling. Now I was really struggling with my calling at the time because I was doing it out of guilt. I was doing it to make God happy or my parents happy or I don't know. But it wasn't because I felt compelled to that. It was because I felt like I had to do it. And so I didn't finish that calling. Because the truth of the matter is that since I was a kid, I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Now, in today's world, it's really sexy to talk about entrepreneurship as like this lifestyle or this easy thing that you do for a while in order to have enough money so that you can screw off for the rest of your life.
But let me give you the same freedom that my professor gave me in college. If there is anything that you can do besides being an entrepreneur and be happy, please do that other thing.
Entrepreneurship is the hardest frickin thing ever.
It's a life sentence. You never get to leave. It gets in you and you don't get to shut off and you don't get to give responsibility to someone else. You are never done. You're never complete. You never have enough to just go retire to the beach. Because as soon as you have enough, it just requires you to up your level of responsibility to go after the next thing. And if you are an entrepreneur, you are set on being that. Please get very, very clear on what you want your life to look like. Get very, very clear on what it is that you want to enjoy, on what winning means to you, on what success means to looks like. Because the truth of the matter is that most of us are running from something and we are covering that up with success. We have something that drives us and it's usually some sort of deep insecurity. And if we are never clear on what we want our lives to look like on the other side, it will only magnify our junk. So please get clear on what it is that you want before you go down this path because otherwise it will be a miserable experience. But if you do get clear, if you do know what it is that you want, there is nothing that you can't have. And it will be the greatest contribution that you ever make to the world because it will require you to constantly get better, to constantly be giving. And it will be the greatest contribution and gift that you can give to yourself, your community and everyone around you. So if that's you, go all in, know exactly what it is that you want and work like hell, because that's what it's going to take.
