The Lifestyle of the “Entrepreneur”

Kyler Hickman
Aug 31, 2018 · 3 min read

This year, as my business has grown and I’ve been able to go full-time with it, a lot has changed concerning my lifestyle. I now have a greater freedom to work from my home office, I can better schedule my time to be with my wife when she needs me to, and when our future kid is born, I don’t plan on missing a single important event of their life. Along with these changes, I’ve noticed something unexpected, a change in perspective of the people around me and what they expect or understand my lifestyle to be or capable of being.

The definition of Self-employed is a person that runs a business rather than working for an employer. Now, this definition is important because 99% of people, if asked, would give you an almost verbatim definition. That being said, I don’t think they understand it, at least not completely. They assume that since you have no employer, you’re a 100% free to do what you want. I also believe that this is one of the main reasons people desire to be self-employed. What they fail to understand is that “freedom” you receive for not having a boss comes with the price of responsibility. Sure, you can sleep in one day, take an extra day for your weekend or extend a deadline for a project but even though you won’t be fired by your boss, aka yourself, there are plenty of consequences that will arise. These could be in the form of lost revenue or even clients but trust me, both of these are bigger gut punches than getting fired ever was.

Now, I’ve gone into this because the past couple of weeks it’s been said to me, directly and indirectly, “isn’t he self-employed”, “can’t you just work from here”, “he’s his own boss, why won’t he just…”. These statements have come from both friends and family and were even reiterated upon this past weekend when my wife and I traveled Sunday morning to see our Mothers and then had to leave Sunday evening to make it back to work on Monday morning. The freedom was that we were able to visit them and no matter what, I was not going to work on mother’s day. The responsibility, however, was paid when we traveled late Sunday to make it back to work on Monday.

The second misunderstanding arose in a monetary form and can be found in the definition of entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is someone who starts their own business, taking on a Greater than normal financial risk. The more people I talk to, especially younger generations, the more I realize how synonymous owning your own business and being an entrepreneur is with wealth. Steve Jobs started a company out of his garage that is now worth almost a trillion dollars. Bill Gates, one of the worlds most influential men dropped out of college and has a net worth of almost 100 billion dollars. And don’t forget about Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, with a net worth over 110 billion dollars. Now, my company is nowhere near this status but when anyone hears I own my own company he or she put my company and myself on that status, ignoring all the financial risk that has gone into it.

Now, there are many misconceptions that arise from entrepreneurship but I wanted to share these two specific experiences as lately, they have been happening more frequently. Even though we don’t have a boss and yes, as an owner of a business we receive the biggest financial reward as the business profits, we do have as much, if not more, responsibility and financial stress then those who deem the entrepreneurship lifestyle, not for them.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade