🌻The Greatest Lie They Tell You: Quit Your Day Job to Be An EntrepreneurThere is another way

I was twelve when I realised I wanted to be a businesswoman.

I just decided to give up a year’s contract at the best football club in the county because I had other ideas. I’d relentlessly watched Dragon’s Den and I was going to be a big dog. By fourteen I was sneaking sweets into the playground and selling them.

But I lacked confidence. I gave up after a few weeks but the fact that I could buy a pack of chocolate bars for £1 and make £2 blew my mind. The entrepreneurial pursuits continued. I was hooked on business.

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I bought endless business biographies. I studied them. I came across one of my old books a few months back, there in the back were scribbles on postits summarising my thoughts.

But it was never as simple as I thought

University presented the perfect opportunity to start a business. I had so many ideas and so much time but yet the excuses came thick and fast:

I didn’t have any experience.
I didn’t have the money.
Over the years I realised all of that was code for: I didn’t want to try and fail. But like most great lessons, it’s easy to see the writing on the wall in hindsight. As the years passed, I still had an undercurrent of wanting to be an entrepreneur.

And when I was hit by the working corporate world, the desire became unbearable. I’d spend my evenings binging on Gary Vee and sit in meetings the next day wondering what I was doing with my life. The contrast was stark.

Here I was sitting in dismal meetings about stuff I can’t remember, all the while thinking, I could be making something of myself.

At 22, I was in the best position possible to start something, to eat ramen and spend all my money on building something. The trouble was, I didn’t know what.

And that’s when I started to spiral.

Enter the endless mill of business ideas

At 23 I was frantic.

I started business after business. I vividly remember spending my entire weekend asking myself over and over what I wanted to do with my life. As if the answer lay somewhere within me, I just needed to prise open my mind and find it.

I spent entire weekends writing out who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. It’s a good job I’ve lost those notebooks. Though I can imagine what’s written in them…

Earn $1 million by December.

None of it worked. Between 22 and 24 I started over ten businesses. I bought websites, stock, trinkets and supplies. I started a candle company, a dog bed company, a sweet shop, and a trainer reselling business to name a few.

All failed.

With each, my confidence faded.

I’d spend evenings writing a business plan. I promised myself when I’d saved enough money I’d quit my job and start a coffee shop. It was endless. I was desperate to be an entrepreneur, I just didn’t have the confidence.

And then, well I hit rock bottom

At 24, it all came to a head.

I was miserable. Not the kind of ‘lol I’m having a bad day miserable’ the kind of miserable where I felt like I’d messed up my entire life. That everything had gone wrong. That I’d need a do-over.

(I know I was 24 but bear with me)

It took 24 months of constant desperation, relentless questioning, and hopeless trying to finally break me. And it did. I was chronically unhappy. I mean really quite sad.

So I just wrote

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t trying to be an entrepreneur. Instead, I just decided to write. To write about whatever stole my focus. I wrote about people, place, passions. Anything. Everything.

It was such a magical time. The expectations of myself fell away.

I finally decided to find a job I liked, one that aligned with who I was and what I wanted to do. Not one that looked good on paper. One that felt good in practice.

I know people will say comfort kills ambition but desperation leads to irrational decision making.

I made the most progress online when I took a job I liked.

It meant I wasn’t miserable.

I did that for three years before anything wild happened. And then, almost by accident, everything came together.

Entrepreneurship is nothing like I thought it would be

Entrepreneurship is about two things:

Emotional skills — how to manage your own emotions with the wins & losses of entrepreneurship.
Logical skills — marketing, building, research, leverage, action everything that goes along with tactical building.
Emotional skills are often overlooked but they are critical to success. It destroyed my money-making potential for years, but the truth is, if you want to make money, you must be able to:

Remain calm
Build resilience
Force discipline
Delay gratification
Be your own coach
Work through bad days
Manage negative emotions
Not get hooked on the highs
But it doesn’t stop there. That’s some the tip of the iceberg. And that’s just the emotional stuff. Then you have to get good at what I call ‘logical skills’. The skills that actually make you money. You must be able to:

Test ideas
Copywrite
Gain attention
Brand your business
Design your strategy
Market your business
Build a product or service
Understand your customers
It’s a lot isn’t it? Let’s make it super-simple. If you want to become an entrepreneur, here’s the recipe:

Step 1: Get a job you like

The first step to realising your entrepreneurial dreams?

Getting a job you like.

You see, a lot of people operate from a place of misery. They hate their 9–5 so much that they want to drown out the noise of life with dopamine-infused activities…

Which makes sense. But it never leads to escape. It just leads to this constant need to live for the weekend

But there’s another way.

• Get a job you like.
• With people you like.

That way, you can commit to working on your side hustle for 2–3 hours a day and not feel resentful. The hack?

Make the present so good it doesn’t feel like you’re waiting.

Read also: 4 simple rules to live your best life

Step 2: Focus on 1 skill

Once you’ve got a job you like, focus on a skill.

Pick one and go all in. Find the top 20 people in that skill & study them. Copy them. Learn from them.

Then deeply understand this concept:

It’ll take longer than you think.
Cost more than you think.
And be harder than you think.

But that is what makes it worth it. For me to be ‘successful’. 3 years. 975 articles. 2 books. And I’m just getting started. So give it 5 years.

Step 3: Share in time

Share as you go.

• A new lesson
• A new idea
• A new insight

Share, share, share.

Create content around this new thing you’re learning & invite people into your story. Sprinkle in your personality as you go. Don’t shy away from who you are. Leverage it.

And then, when the time comes and you’ve got raving fans.

Step 4: Create a product or service

Create a product around the thing and sell it. And don’t expect an overnight success. Iteration is part of the game. Expect progress but not perfection.

The recipe is simple:

Build → Measure → Learn.

CONTRIBUTED BY Eve Arnold

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