Don’t Start a Business Just Because Everyone Is Doing It
Break the online pied-piper
“I’m sick of 9–5 jobs!”
“I want financial freedom!”
“Let’s escape the rat race!”
Sounds familiar right?
I’m sure you’ve heard this a lot in the past.
It was also a big trend back in 2020.
In 2020, like everyone else, I thought I was not cut out for a 9–5 job and I saw a lot of online content telling me that perhaps it’s because I’m a businesswoman, that’s why I can’t sit still working for someone.
It’s true in some way, but not really. At least, from what happened to me for the past two years.
Fast forward to today, it’s 2023, and I’m working in a better 9–5 job, and it’s not as bad as what I went through in 2020.
Why did I think that way? Is it because I failed and I’m trying to comfort myself?
Perhaps so, but there’s another reason for this change of mind (And yes, there is failure that played a part in it).
Feeling stuck and a wrong job made me think about entrepreneurship
“Screw it, I’m going to start a business.” — Naive me, 2020.
When I began hating my job, it was a time during Covid, and looking back, I had a lot of mixed feelings about it.
Because it saved me from the layoffs even though I didn’t like my job.
So at that time, it was the era of fake gurus and financial influencers popping up like mushrooms, and I was pied pipered to entrepreneurship.
As the result, I tried doing a lot of things to make it my side hustle. Writing, selling bird nests, anything to get me out of the 9–5 job.
I was working hard and feverishly, really trying to make this entrepreneurship thing work.
But just like everybody else, I found out the hard way that this ain’t a walk in a park. Influencers only made it sound so easy.
The downside of entrepreneurship
There are so many things I realized when I wanted to start something:
- The partner you work with
- Capital investments
- And if it’s REALLY something you want to work on
These three factors cost me a lot, both physically and mentally. Even the time and money spent.
In the end, after two years, I had to admit defeat and stopped that business thing.
I felt like a failure at first. I questioned myself a lot:
“How come others work and mine didn’t?”
“What is it that I did wrong? I did everything they told me!”
“Why is this happening to me?”
Those questions plagued me a lot for a year, it was also the reason why I had to take a break from social media because I saw a lot of people online saying that they were able to create a successful business.
I was loathing myself a lot until this Youtuber called Coffeezilla came along and exposed all these ‘influencers’ who claimed to be successful, and turned out they were scamming people.
And that’s when my eyes opened.
There is no such thing as get-rich-quick
“Hey, Nicole! Have you heard about her? She’s the same age as you! She made it to the 30 under 30,” My mom showed me a photo of a young entrepreneur.
“Oh, wow! What kind of business did she make?” I asked.
“She made a startup for delivering fresh vegetables online.”
“Woa, when did she started it?”
“About a year ago.”
I blinked, “Hold up, what? Who’s her investor?”
“…….probably her parents. She graduated in the US, west coast.” (For us Indonesians, these days, people who graduated in the west countries are quite rich or they obtained scholarship. USD$1= Rp15,000 in 2023, enough to buy you a lunch down the street).
“…….okay.”
Whenever I hear someone creating a business nowadays, I always need to know who’s the one backing the business.
Nowadays, when young people start a business, their big backers are their parents. So to say that they built it from ground up is also questionable. And every parent wouldn’t want their children to end up bankrupt, so they would definitely help.
This also explains why there has been a lot of entrepreneurship trend despite the dwindling economy.
So the question arises:
“Where’d that demand come from?”
“Where’d they get the capital from?”
“How long have they been doing this?”
And thank God I began questioning these stuff now. For I began to think twice when I read some 30 under 30 stuff again, Forbes’s “entrepreneur of the year” or even other mainstream media who praised “big-break-through” gaps.
Because some of the companies turned out to be scammers or the business didn’t last long.
FTX is already one of them.
Even mainstream media could fall into these types of scams, convincing us that this guy is legit.
Even Harvard found that the founder’s ages of average successful startups are at least 45 years old. But some investors were also swapped away with these young entrepreneurship trends amongst youngsters like us.
But at the end of the day, we youngsters (most of us) are still naive. I’m one of them.
Conclusion
“Wake up, obsess over something, go to bed. Wake up, obsess, go to bed. Like every second of the day until I have a mental breakdown and burn out and then I take a day off or maybe a day and a half and then go right back to it.”- Mr Beast.
I learned a few things when I jumped into this entrepreneurship business. And I made a checklist when one day I still want to jump on the entrepreneur journey again:
- Is my heart into it?
- Do I have enough money for it?
- Am I ready to do this for the long term? 3–4 years?
All in all, as cheesy as it sounds, passion plays a part in entrepreneurship. So that when you’re knocked down from several obstacles, you can still get back up again with no problem.
“Hey, Nicole! Let’s start this business!” My relative once tried to rope me into a business again.
“Okay, is this something you want to do?”
“No, you do it.”
“…..okay. I’ll let you know when my heart is into it.”
This is not to say that I’m rude.
But I want to be more careful about this, especially since the economy is still uncertain.
So to all Millennials and Gen Zs like myself.
If you haven’t built a unicorn startup or business in your 20s. It’s okay. It’s okay to still be working for someone, to sharpen your skills and learn.
You’re not a failure.
You’re normal.
