An entrepreneur explains why employees and business owners have fundamentally different drives. Farmers want stability; hunters chase goals relentlessly. Understanding this gap changes how you structure a company.
90% of the population experience the dopamine spike when they achieve a goal or when they get the thing. Those are the farmers. There's 10% of us, though. It's basically every entrepreneur. It's the pursuit, it's the hunt, it's going after it. This isn't a pejorative, by the way, because we're the broken ones. But you can't expect the farmer to act like a hunter. You can't. Einstein said, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it'll spend its whole life thinking stupid. You can't build a business around expecting farmers to be hunters. You have to build a business around farmers, because those are the only people that want jobs. Very rarely you can hire entrepreneurs. I know you know, that's kind of the new fun phrase. But those are the people that want to learn and leave. There's nothing wrong with an employee. As a matter of fact, they're probably better people than we are. But you have to build the role around what an employee wants. And employees want boundaries, they want limitations, they want a 9 to 5, they want PTO, they don't want the things that entrepreneur wants. There's that fun story that an entrepreneur is the only person that'll work 80 hours so they don't have to work 40. So you have to build your model around the understanding that people aren't going to work the way that you work, and that's probably for the best. That's probably what you want.
