The Hustle

James Lampassi
Aug 9, 2017 · 8 min read

By James Lampassi

Entrepreneurship- the activity of setting up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.

Entrepreneurship is a hard concept to portray in any media form, especially when the only pictures taken show the final product of entrepreneurs. Full understanding of entrepreneurship is achieved only through the actions that take place when starting your own business. The purpose of this essay is to help understand the life of an entrepreneur and allow you to realize the potential that can be obtained when hard work is sustained for a long period of time. To do this, I give a written description of my experiences that I have had while being an entrepreneur, as well as provide photographs that further depict the concepts in this great field of business through my own personal life.

The Risk

543,000. That is the number of companies that are started each month in the United States alone. Eight out of every ten of those companies fail within their first eighteen months. It is no wonder why so many people are scared of becoming an entrepreneur and starting their own business. The life of an entrepreneur is anything but glamorous; it requires an immense amount of work, time, and so much personal sacrifice. It also requires the ability to bounce back after countless failures. The lifestyle that comes with starting a successful business is much harder than most people could ever begin to imagine. In the entrepreneurship community, work consumes most, if not all, of your day-to-day life. The time commitment is just one of the many sacrifices that entrepreneurs have to make in order to achieve their dream of attaining a better lifestyle in the future. While becoming an entrepreneur is one of the more difficult things to do for a vocation, it also has extreme rewards. If successful, any lifestyle you wish (lavish, humble, charitable, or all of the above) can be achieved. There are many benefits to becoming an entrepreneur. People who want to start their own business should not be deterred by the level of difficulty that they will face.

Caution

success is achieved through hardship

Before I jump into the benefits of becoming an entrepreneur and why I think more people should do it, I want to make it clear that this is the absolute hardest path to take in life. Most people only look at the final product of a successful entrepreneur; the gorgeous houses, the expensive foreign cars, and the lavish lifestyle. But what they cannot see is the endless years of hard work that it took to get to that point. They do not see the consistent setbacks and frustrations, the daily rejections, and the countless hours spent learning from mentors and the empty bank accounts. In his 2011 Forbes article, How Failure Taught Edison to Repeatedly Innovate, Author Nathan Furr discusses how Edison famously explained his failures by saying “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work” (Furr).


All of this sacrifice and hard work can occur for ten to twenty years every single day despite how the entrepreneur probably felt like giving up on many of those days. So, while the end result looks appealing, the amount of work that is required may not be for everyone, but if willing, the reward can be worth it in the end.

“Whether you’re starting your first business or your tenth, being an entrepreneur is ALWAYS going to be difficult. Whether your business is booming and there’s a bubble throughout the sector, or there’s no money around and you can’t make ends meet, business and being an entrepreneur will be difficult. That’s just the way it is.” -Gary Vaynerchuck

The Grind

Countless hours of work required to succeed

As stated earlier the entrepreneurship community is a very difficult and work driven community. Many times, entrepreneurs have to believe in themselves and their vision more than anyone else because at the start, not many will understand your goals or what you are working toward. Our society has been conditioned for so long to believe that getting an 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. cubical job is the way to success, so when an entrepreneur comes along trying to challenge that, most people will not understand and not give their support. The entrepreneurship community can be lonely at times because it is a long process, in which the result is heavily dependent upon the individual effort given by the entrepreneur. The amount of energy that is required to be an entrepreneur is so vast that it is almost unobtainable without an extreme burning desire. A common theme in the entrepreneurship community is that entrepreneurs share a next-level desire to succeed. The desire described is what gives entrepreneurs the ability to do what ever it takes to be successful, as if there is no option for any result to be anything other than success. This drive is what gets most entrepreneurs up in the morning. It is what makes them do anything and everything in their power to make their dreams come true. True entrepreneurs do not allow the fear of failure and the attractiveness of playing it safe in life to draw them in, rather they take action to avoid mediocrity. According to Anthony K. Tjan in his article for The Harvard Business Review, The Three Roles of Great Entrepreneurs, “Every start-up entrepreneur has an overwhelming amount to get done — the “to dos” are constantly outrunning the “dones.” It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and endless hours, and you often forget that running really hard does not necessarily equate with running in the right direction. To paraphrase one of my partners, the good news is that you’re making good time, and the bad news is that you’re lost.”

“It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because all that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.” — Mark Cuban, famous successful entrepreneur, Owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theaters, and star of ABC’s Shark Tank.

Passion

Entrepreneurship skills can be enhanced and perfected, but entrepreneurship itself is a difficult thing to teach. I believe that to some extent many entrepreneurs were born to be entrepreneurs. For some unexplainable reason entrepreneurship just can’t be taught; it is something that is burned into the hard drive of the brain at birth. But while not everyone can (or should) be an entrepreneur, everyone can be entrepreneurial. Being entrepreneurial is just looking at any given situation in a different light. This could be as simple as innovating your daily schedule to make it more efficient. An entrepreneurial mindset can be applied in every community around the world.


Starting your own business has many potential positive aspects to it, some of which can be largely scaled and provide limitless amounts of quality to one’s life. The best part about owning your own business is that fact that your income is directly correlated to how hard you work and how good you are at your job. There is no limit to how much money you can make when you are the CEO. You are not confined to a salary, your paycheck is based on how well you can get clients and how hard you work for them. This is drastically different than having a salary job because your effort will directly affect the amount of income you receive. Another key aspect about owning your own business is the work freedom. You have the ability to work wherever and whenever you want. Further, it is even better when your company involves something that you love to do. As the saying goes, “If you work doing something you love, you will never work a day in your life.” This also allows for a flexible schedule that you could change quickly. The possibilities are endless in this community, and are actually related to the effort you put forth.

Ferrari’s are a symbol of success in the entrepreneurship community

According to McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, “If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business” (Forbes). Starbucks Founder Howard Schultz goes further, “Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical” (Forbes). Without risk there is no reward. In every community, there are good and bad aspects. One of the main potential bad risks associated with being an entrepreneur is that while you have the potential to make more, you also could go for an extended period of time without income at all. There is no steady income that you can rely upon. This makes it difficult for those that need to provide for their families and cannot risk not receiving a monthly paycheck. However, large financial gain is within the realistic long-term spectrum. So, those who do not have the time to wait, and live off of savings, cannot afford to risk not getting a steady income. Another big risk in starting your own business is the responsibility aspect of it. The direction your company is headed is directly based on your leadership abilities. When hardship comes and failure strikes, you are the one to blame. This might not be so bad at the start when you are by yourself but as you expand and employ people; their jobs and livelihoods are in your hands. For this, the entrepreneur must be careful in selecting the team members with the right mindset. The team members must understand that the entrepreneur is in the risk mode, trying to build a successful business, and trying to provide for all. As F. W. Woolworth, the founder of the F.W. Woolworth retail chain noted, “We would rather have one person working WITH us than three merely working FOR us” (Zimmerman).

The community of entrepreneurs has had successes and failures in this free-market economy that we enjoy in the United States. Some, like Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk, and Gary Vaynerchuk have been celebrated for their obvious success. However, their multiple early failures are not as widely noted. As mentioned earlier, Thomas Edison failed repeatedly but is widely known as the inventor of the lightbulb. He, like many just like him, could have quit or taken a routine cubicle job to provide for loved ones. Thankfully, he and the others did not quit. They did not accept failure. And, because of this lonely drive, the world is a better place with the advancements created by the entrepreneurial community.

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