A founder records a late-night pep talk from a hotel room, normalizing entrepreneurial fears like financial stress and hiring uncertainty. He argues the point of starting a business is to live your own envisioned life, not chase external validation. Pick one small concrete step to improve your business each day, repeat it, and let steady progress define success.
So I'm about to wrap it up for the day. It was a long day. It was a great day. Met with some entrepreneurs prepping for a speech tomorrow. I'm in my hotel room about to go to bed. This is, I think, the antithesis of what you're supposed to do for a video. I should be standing in front of a jet with my rented Bentley and saying, oh, my God, you can be like me. That's why I'm doing this video. I want you to know, if you get scared about your business anxiety, think that you're falling short from the competition and what they're doing, if you think you're not making enough money, if you feel that you're overwhelmed, if you don't know where the money's going to come from next week and you're stressing about finances, if you don't know how to hire employees, you don't know if you ever can hire employees. You're just tired at times or laugh times. That's normal. That's what entrepreneurship is. It's not the stupid freaking Learjet that they rented for the day. It's not make all this money in the world and crush the competition 10x everything. It's about finding the few things that will serve you better. It's about that incremental improvements. It's about you finding joy in what you do. I was reading the article about the five regrets of the dying. The number one regret was not living the life they'd envisioned for themselves. That's what entrepreneurship's about. It's not about living the vision someone else has. It's not about competing against other people or being better than anyone else. It's about being the best you. It's about serving you. It's about your business being an expression of you. It's about you making those incremental steps of improvement and learning along the way. All those problems are challenged. I said everyone has them and everyone is trying to fight through it. Don't try to tackle it all at once. Just make one improvement tomorrow, your business, one step forward, and then do it again and do it again. Constantly align with what gives you joy. And that is a wildly successful business, regardless of all the other elements. All right, all right. It's time for bed. And yeah, I do use a sleeping mask when I'm in a hotel. I do.
