The moment you decided you wanted to become an Entrepreneur, it’s the same moment you decided you wanted to take control of your life. And I mean the totality of life: The choices you make, the beliefs you stand on and the responses you make out of what you feel.
When you become an entrepreneur, you would no longer work just 8 hours a day, nor report to someone else who controls what you should do. You report to yourself. If you don’t have anything to eat by tomorrow, it’s your fault. If you cannot send your children off to school, it’s your fault. If your marriage fails because you acted on your sexual impulses, it’s your fault.
And you realize, even if you’re not an Entrepreneur it’s still your fault even if any of those bad stuff happen to you. It’s just that you would have realized there’s no boss you can point your finger to other than yourself.
Life is a marathon. Journeying life is all about making the right choices to get you into the game so long as you can. But unlike a normal game, you decide how winning looks like. For all life could care, the moment you die, you’re out of the game. And through the play of emotions, your physiology allows you to keep on going until you reach your winning state (or not).
But despite being the one deciding how you win, it’s not up to you how life’s rules play out. If your definition of winning is becoming the world’s richest man, and you end up being just above the average of the world, you either: consider yourself a failure, or decide what you achieved is basically the most you can achieve rationally given your reality, so you can still claim you win.
Entrepreneurship is really about ownership and maximizing that ownership. It’s not just ownership of an external asset or a working business. It is ownership of your emotions, of your ideas, and of your life.
Entrepreneurs acknowledge opportunity costs all the time. It is with hope that what you are going to choose is always greater than the opportunity cost or the next best choice you’re giving up. And all those opportunity costs extend not just to business dealings but to everything in your life.
You exert too much control and you give up trust. You work too hard, and you give up your health. You become too opinionated and you give up the idea that you can be wrong. You become too impulsive, emotional, and self-centered and you give up on the idea that life has its own rules and it is you who should play by its rules and not the other way around.
When you become an entrepreneur in a real sense, you own every action you make. You give up the short term for the long term all for the idea of maximizing your ownership.
Your life is your own marathon. And you have to accept you are alone in that journey. But never discount the fact that there are truths and lessons you can gain from all the other people and experiences you encounter: your parents, siblings, wife, husband, children, priests, a tragic encounter, and your most precious memories. But do not be succumbed to the illusion that these people and experiences are the truths. They themselves may even lead you to the wrong way in the pursuit of their own ownership maximization.
In summary, us entrepreneurs define what winning looks like but within the bounds of life’s rules. We have to be always aware and ready that all actions as petty as the time we sleep, or whether we eat on time or not, or we engage in exotic sexual affairs, or we abort our unborn children, all these decide how far we can go maximizing our own life.
And the sad reality is, we can always choose what actions we want to make, but we can never choose their corresponding consequences.
You are alone in this journey. If you can’t deal with that fact, start from acceptance. Ask your God to help you realize your reason for existing. But don’t expect God to make the move for you. Get your ass to work, ok?
Cheers,
3GE Christian Chiu