Should You Be An Entrepreneur? Are You Cut Out For Business?

After more than a decade of running multimillion-dollar businesses, I've realized something that a lot of people are afraid to say. Most people should not be entrepreneurs. I mean that. And I say that not to discourage you, but because the most useful thing I can do for you today is to tell you the truth. Because the content that you're consuming, the podcasts, the YouTube channels, the Instagram Reels, they're all selling you on entrepreneurship. It's cheerleading. And honestly, cheerleading does feel good, but it doesn't serve you. Some of you of you listening right now are absolutely built for entrepreneurship. Even if you're scared, even if you don't feel ready yet, even if you're sitting on an idea for the last 2 years without pulling the trigger. And some of you, and this is the part that most people don't want to say, would genuinely be happier, more fulfilled, and more financially secure in a great career. And I want to say it's okay to say this. What's not okay is spending your entire life in the wrong one. So today I'm going to give you some pure honesty. I'm going to give you the signs that you are built for this and the signs that you're not built for this and what the actual cost is in this journey. By the end of the episode, if you're on the fence, you no longer will be. Let's get into it. By the way, today's topic comes from a listener, Kosh, who asked the question, am I built to be an entrepreneur? If you want to ask the question here on the show, just go ahead and submit it over at 100MBA.com. And we'll answer it right here on Q&A Wednesday. When someone comes to ask me, hey, Omar, should I start a business? I don't ask them about their idea. I don't ask them about the market they're serving. I don't ask about their funding or their competition. I ask one thing: when everything goes wrong, and it will, by the way, do you trust yourself to figure it out? I ask this question because that is the job. That's the entire job of an entrepreneur. Not having the best ideas, not having the most experience, not having the perfect plan, trusting, trusting yourself to solve problems that you've never seen before under pressure, right? With incomplete information, when nobody is telling you what to do. That is really the metal of an entrepreneur, because that's going to happen multiple times a week, every week for years. And as an entrepreneur, you need to trust the fact that you will make it on the other side. They're the ones who, when their back's against the wall, they have a true fundamental belief that they will figure it out. And by the way, figuring it out can be hiring someone else to solve the problem for you. That's figuring it out. It's really about self-belief that you can get unstuck, that you can move forward. That self-belief is not arrogance. It's the minimal requirement for running a business. Why? Because if you have it, even if it's quiet, even shaky, you have a foundation, right? Because if you don't believe in yourself, if you don't have a belief that you can make it to the end of the day, make it to the end of the week, make it to the end of the year, no one else will. You must believe in yourself first, because if you genuinely don't, entrepreneurship is going to be a very painful experience. Let me tell you what I've seen destroy businesses from the inside. Not the market, not the competition, not bad luck, not the person. Every business I've watched fail had one thing in common. The entrepreneur quit. Maybe not all at once. Sometimes it's gradual. Sometimes it just happens slowly. The posting that became less consistent. You know what I'm talking about? The follow-ups that stopped happening. The hard decisions just kept getting postponed and never made. The slow, almost invisible retreat from the thing they know they need to get done. Entrepreneurship demands your full attention sometimes above everything else. There are going to be seasons like that in life. It requires you to have relentless determination. I'm not talking about motivation. I'm not talking about inspiration. I'm talking about something inside that drives you. And that drive does not allow you to quit. OK? The belief that as long as you're still in the game, You have a chance to win. You have not lost yet because you haven't quit. Because what I love about business is that you can lose and lose and lose and lose, and then you win. And you only need to win once. See, the thing is that you only have to have business that actually works once for you to actually change your life and create incredible value for the world. But if you quit before you win, you'll never win. Every entrepreneur who's ever built something real has a graveyard of things that you don't see that didn't work out. I have a bunch of things in the graveyard that I talk about on the show. Some of them I haven't talked about because there's so many. And by the way, I share those things on the show because those are not shameful for me. I'm proud of those things. Those are my iterations. Those are my attempts to success. And the difference between people that keep going and the people that quit is not talent. It's just the will to just make it happen. They say to themselves, "I'm going to make it happen. I'm going to roll up my sleeves. I'm going to make this thing appear out of thin air." And that's what entrepreneurship is, by the way. That's what attracted me to entrepreneurship is that I was like, who are these magical people that create things out of thin air? Something didn't exist in the world. Now it existed. Everything that you see, every business you see, every product you see, that's how it is. And to me, that's just Magical. You have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and do unglamorous work. The work that doesn't look good on Instagram. The work that doesn't generate any likes. Okay. I actually posted recently on Instagram, me hauling up this heavy-ass printer to the office, our new office or studio office, and installed it. And I posted, this is what real business looks like, right? It's not yachts and first-class tickets and all that stuff. No, I mean, that's great and all, but Real day-to-day business is you buying a new printer for your office so that your team can be able to use it. And I say this to everyone that we hire, anything I'm going to ask this new hire to do, I've already done myself. As an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to do that. You cannot be above the work. Not in the beginning, at least. And really not ever, because you got to be willing to train and help and be proud of your business that you're willing to do the small things, the big things and everything in between. Now you don't have to do them every day, but it's nice to know that you can step in and do it whenever you need to. Just like if you ran a restaurant and if you didn't know how to cook, if the chef just quits, you're kind of in trouble. If you can't step in that kitchen and start cooking. I want to share with you something that most people in my space will not share publicly. My first 10 years in full-time entrepreneurship from 2012 to 2022, I worked 6 to 7 days a week. 12-hour days. That's just the truth. The only thing I made time for outside of building my business was exercise, really, and things that made me a better entrepreneur. And even exercise made me a better entrepreneur. So it gave me more energy so I can work longer. Outside of that, reading courses, anything that made me a better decision maker. That's really what my life looked like. My social life, my hobbies, The easy, comfortable pleasures of a normal weekend didn't exist. I'm serious. The one day that I had off, sometimes we'd just go and do some chores, go get some groceries and, you know, take care of laundry and make sure that life was in order. Now, that wasn't my life forever, but it was for a long period of time. And I want you to hear this clearly because I don't want you to go into business with a romantic version of what it actually is, especially in the early years. I sacrificed a lot of my years in the early years of business deliberately. I did it deliberately because I understood something that made the sacrifice feel worth it. 10 years is short term, in my opinion. Let's say with modern medicine, you know, God willing, you live to 90, maybe 100 years. 10 years is 10% of my life. I'm willing to sacrifice 10 years of my life, 10%, if the rest of my life is going to be better. That's a bet I will make every day, twice on Sunday. And luckily it paid off. But I want you to go in with your eyes open and understand there will be sacrifices, especially at the start. If this episode is up your alley, you like the honesty, and it's helping you shape your perspective a little bit, then I highly recommend you subscribe to the podcast because I'm working on a new episode that I think you're going to absolutely love. It's called how to compete against massive companies and win as a bootstrap business. So if you're getting started, self-funded, and you're entering a market where there's some big players, by the way, that was me when I started my webinar software, Webinar Ninja. You know, there was a lot of big players in that space and we were still one of the top softwares. So I want to share with you what works, what doesn't, and where to spend your energy. So if that sounds like an interesting topic, an interesting episode to you, hit subscribe so you don't miss it. So I got to show you the other side of the coin. Who should not be an entrepreneur? If you are deeply and genuinely risk-averse, entrepreneurship is going to make your life miserable because risk in your book is bad. You cannot build a significant business without taking risks early and often. Now, these are calculated risks. You're making smart moves. OK, but risks nonetheless. You don't know for sure what's going to happen. And if you want to know for sure what's going to happen every single time you do something or every time you make a decision, you're, you're just dreaming. It's not going to happen. That's not business. And the reason why is because with risk, there's reward. And the bigger the risk, the more the reward. Now, we don't want to risk too much because we don't lose too much. But at the same time, we still want to win some pots, right? We want to win some good rewards. So this is why we ramp up the risk and we start improving our decision-making as we move along our entrepreneurial journey. But if every decision sends you to some extended spiral of second-guessing, if you're overthinking things constantly to the point of paralysis, the pace that you're operating at is just not going to work because everybody else that you're competing against are making quick decisions, learning from mistakes, correcting, iterating, experimenting. Another way to put this is that if you can't stand losing, and I mean losing at the granular level, like losing time, losing money, losing energy, you know, maybe losing a week because an experiment in your business didn't work. Entrepreneurship is going to be very hard for you because business is like any game, whether you're playing a card game or a sport, you can't win the game by trying not to lose. You got to win the game trying to win. You got to play to win. And you got to see loss as information, as education, as a tuition, right? It's the fee you got to pay to learn. Every time you get a no in sales, it's data. It's information that you can use to do better next time. Every failed launch is a lesson. Every time you hire somebody that didn't work out, it teaches you something about recruitment, tells you about what you should do next time you hire somebody. What you should be looking for, what you should not be looking for. You got to be willing to extract wisdom from your losses. And if you do that and you're comfortable with that, you're going to be all right. But if it tears you apart to the point where you just are not enjoying your life, it's going to be very hard for you to be a sustainable business. I just talked about games and playing to win. But this is a real concept in game theory, right? You can't avoid risk and expect to win. For example, let's say you're playing basketball, right? And if you just don't want to lose, you're just going to play as hard defense as you can. Sometimes you're going to stop them from scoring, sometimes they're going to score. But if all you do is focus on defense and don't really focus on offense and try to score as much as possible, then you'll never win. The point of the game is to have more points than the other person. And in order to do that, you're going to have to focus on both sides of the court. You can't be too afraid to shoot your shot. And when you shoot, there's a chance you're going to miss. That's okay if you miss, but if you don't shoot, you'll never make a bucket. You'll never score. And if you follow basketball in recent times, you'll know that analytically, and when the analytics are involved, that they actually encourage people to shoot more shots because the more shots they shoot, especially high-volume 3-pointers, they're going to score more points and they're going to win the game. It's just statistically true. But the point of this analogy is that you can't be afraid to go for, and you got to go for it often. When I was a young kid playing basketball, one of the things that my coach used to tell me on a timeout when I wasn't playing so well and I maybe shot a few times and I missed, maybe I missed 3 shots in a row, he would tell me, "You got to shoot more, shoot more shots." And I'm like, "But I keep missing." He's like, "Well, you're never going to make anything if you don't shoot. You can't stop shooting. We need you out there." My coach believed that I will make a shot, right? He thinks I'm a good shooter. So he said, "Just go ahead and keep shooting and the shots will fall." eventually. The solution to scoring more points for the team is not to stop shooting. So if you can't stand losing and learning from your losses, then you should try to steer clear from business. That's my personal recommendation. There are incredible careers out there. You can make incredible contributions, and you can feel a little bit better about yourself in those spaces. Knowing which game you're actually built to play is a part of winning in life. Who should absolutely be an entrepreneur without a doubt? The ones that should stop hesitating and should just go for it. Well, if you're watching or you're listening to this episode, my opinion is you probably already know. Something inside you, maybe quietly, maybe something underneath what you allow to come up to the surface often. OK, there's something that you cannot help but want to create. People that are entrepreneurs want to create. They want to build. They want to be independent. They want to express themselves in some way. From a very young age, my mother used to tell me that I was hard to deal with sometimes because I didn't like being confined. I wanted freedom. I didn't like being told what to do. I want to make my own decisions. I didn't like it when she would pick out what I should wear. I wanted to pick out my own clothes. And even when I was a teacher, which I genuinely loved, I was always trying to innovate. I was always trying to do something different in the classroom. I want to do something different from the other teachers. I was always pushing the envelope and trying to see what's possible, right? Always feeling restricted in some way. That feeling, that feeling of restriction in a role that someone else created or defined is one of the clearest signals that you should go all in in entrepreneurship. And here's what I want you to understand. The reason why I'm saying this is because regardless of how your business is doing, up, down, even, whatever, you're still going to be happy because you're not restricted. You have freedom. You're building something of your own. Even if you're making lots of money or you're making, you know, not as much as last year, you're still happy that you're in the game because you're at least— you get to create what you want to create, do what you want to do. Now, if you're on the fence and you've been sitting on an idea for a year or two, Maybe even longer. You've been thinking, you've been researching, almost starting, maybe dabbling, and then you don't. You stop. Here's the only regret I've had in my entrepreneurial journey. I didn't start sooner. Think about it this way. Every day you delay down the line, you're taking away that day from a life that is what you want out of life. It's the life you want to live. Whether that's your financial freedom, what's that building without restriction, without being confined, feeling creative, you know, being somebody that's of value to the world, all that stuff that's important to you. And that's the life you want to build. You're just delaying that by another day, by another week, by another month, by another year. And let me tell you something that you need to hear, please, because I needed to hear this. You are never going to feel ready. You're never going to have all the answers. You're not going to know exactly when the perfect time is because there is no perfect time. No one's going to nudge you on the shoulder and say, "Hey, by the way, now's the perfect time to start a business." No, that never happens. OK? The answers are not just going to present themselves. You got to go out there and make it happen. And then you get the answers by trying, by experimenting, by getting started. The market tells you if you're getting warmer or colder. I love that. That about business. So my recommendation is to get started this weekend. Start building, make your first sale, start learning the game of business by doing while you still have the security of the income that you get in your job. But start, because sitting on that idea is not a strategy. OK? It's a way of feeling like you're doing something, but you're not really doing anything. And at some point, you got to just be honest with yourself. Do you actually want this? Or do you just like the idea of being an entrepreneur? Because if you want it, if you really want it, the only thing standing between you and starting is a decision. Making the decision to make it happen. Nothing else is standing in your way. Not funding, not the right moment, not enough information. I'm telling you this from experience. Okay? You need to make a decision and you need to make it now. So should you be an entrepreneur? Here's my honest answer. If you trust yourself to figure things out and you're going to find your way back home and everything's going to be all right, even when your back's against the wall. Yeah, go ahead and do it. If you're willing to be relentless and you refuse to quit. Yeah, go for it. If you could see a loss as a tuition fee rather than the verdict of your life. Yeah, go ahead. If there's something inside of you, you cannot help but want to create and you have to make it happen. Yes, go for it. And if you're the person that's on the fence and has been thinking about it for the last couple of years, The answer is yes. Stop waiting. Just start. I'm telling you right now, you will not regret it. If this episode has pushed you in a way you needed to be pushed, I am glad because I wish somebody pushed me in this way when I was getting started. Now, if you want to continue learning, there's an episode we recently published called 20 Years of Business Knowledge in 20 Minutes. Basically, I'm giving you everything I've learned, the important stuff. In 20 Minutes. So go ahead and check it out on whatever app you're using right now. It should be just a few episodes in the past. Thanks for listening, and I'll check in the next one.