A short monologue (YouTube) advising realistic expectations about entrepreneurship: startups often do not turn a profit for 3–5 years, commonly require far more time, money, and energy than expected (often 10×), and many fail (speaker cites <10% success). The speaker emphasizes perseverance, grit, and honest assessment of motives before leaving steady employment.
Companies don't even turn a profit for the first three to five years. So if you're doing it for more money, don't think about that even for the first three to five years. Second thing, they do it for more free time. You starting your own company is going to suck up more time and energy than you ever imagined. So if you're doing it for that, not going to happen either. So when you get really clear what it is that it's going to actually take for you to create your own company, or whatever it is that you're wanting to create, it's going to take you 10 times more money, energy, everything else to even get it lifted off the ground to make it happen. And even when you put in all that time, money, and energy, it may not even happen. That's the reality. It may not even happen. Like, you need to realize less than 10% of companies ever succeed. You know, Richard Branson has a whole book on it. He had over 200 companies actually fail. Right? Henry Ford had seven companies fail before Ford came along. Like, here's the piece you need to prepare yourself for being an entrepreneur, an investor, a business owner. It takes something. It takes perseverance. It takes determination. It takes grit. If you don't have any of those, do yourself and everyone else around you a favor and just keep your job seriously, because you'll probably make more money and you'll have more free time in actually keeping your job. Like, stop BSing yourself and thinking that, oh, just because I want this, I'll make it happen. Like, no, get some accurate thinking around how hard it is. It is a lot of work. So when you come to people like me thinking, I'm going to wave my magic wand, ooh, can you grab my magic wand? I'm going to. I actually have a magic wand. Yeah. So here's my magic wand. You think that I'm going to wave this and magically make all your dreams come true? No, it's not how it works. Here's how it works. You have got to work hard, hard and long and put in a lot of time and energy, money and effort. That's what it takes. So get some accurate thinking. Stop. Stop blaming your coaches and mentors and everybody else for your failure. This is like, this is a part of the game and how it all happens. You know, I tell my kids, it's like, you don't have to like the rules, but figure out what the rules are. Play and win. You know, every game that you play, if you haven't played enough games, you'll learn you don't win every single time you play, you'll actually fail more times that you play a game you won't win, then you will be the winner. It's just like that in business. Like, you have to understand, all entrepreneurs, business owners and investors have way more failures than they do successes. So for all those business owners out there that are like, tooting their own horn about how successful they are, I invite you to consider going and actually asking them seriously what it took to actually get where they're at and, and how many failures they actually had along the way so that you get some very accurate thinking and perspective on what it actually takes to get where they are to have the life that they have. This didn't all magically happen overnight. This is literally 25 years of busting our butts. That's what it is. So if you haven't put in 25 years, I'm sorry, you do not get to have the expectations that you're magically going to have all this overnight. So that is my rant for the day.
