I was born and raised in Israel, but my love affair with America started in my early teenage years when I would wear faded jeans and plaid flannel shirts and Country played music on my Silver Sony Walkman. A song that I always kept to listening to was Waylon Jennings ‘and Willie Nelson’s Twangy view of’Mums, don’t let your babies grow up to cowboys” – A song that captures loneliness of a cowboy, as well as the challenges that lifestyle forms for their loved ones.
Little I knew that the desire that the song would resonate in my adolescent heart would resonate with me decades later: the display of the brutal, lonely life of a cowboy reflected my own experience as a founder. When I listen to the song, I sometimes replace the word “cowboy” by “founder” and I smile at myself. Try it – it’s fun!
Entrepreneurial life
Just as we have mythologize the cowboy on horseback that runs into the sunset, people tend to glamor of entrepreneurial life. The truth is that the entrepreneurial trip is not about popping champagne and driving around in Limousines and makes everyone enthusiastically support your big ideas. In reality it is a stress, little sleep and often unwilling life. When someone asks me if they should make the leap and start a business, my first reaction is an explicit: “No!” Or as Jennings and Nelson like to sing: “Let them be lawyers and doctors and the like.”
There are hundred reasons to stay far away, far away from entrepreneurship, especially if you want a stable, reliable, satisfactory career – but I would start with loneliness. As the song says, founders “never at home and always alone, even with someone they love.” This is difficult for entrepreneurs, but just as much of the people who love them and live with them. Launching a company is a full-time pre-occupation. It is never only the business community is personal and everything that is needed. You bring your bad working days and the accompanying stress home because your company is part of you, not something that slips you like an overcoat when you walk into the door. Bottom Line: You will feel miserable and you will make the people closest to you!
Ninety percent of the startups failure. Of the 10% that do not disappear, few are enormously successful. These are not attractive opportunities for a healthy person – and the price that you and your loved ones will pay is huge.
It’s an extreme sport
So why am I doing it? As the song says, “He’s not wrong – he’s just different!” I can’t help: I am apparently a cowboy! I am also the son of two entrepreneurs, so maybe it’s in my blood. I need the adrenaline boot, the pursuit and the feeling of risk, creativity and the total 200% immersion in something that I love. Being an entrepreneur is an extreme sport – the most painful, scary, exciting ride you can imagine. I feed on the non-stop challenge, the sensation of investing and innovation, the ruthless extend to the near-breaking point. I thrive when working with the incredible people in my team, my investors and customers to create something meaningful, transformationals and almost impossible. Being a founder is my way to self -actualization, and that in itself is the incomparable reward at the end of the rainbow.
So if you can’t help yourself and the dive in entrepreneurship, despite your better judgment, a few words of advice …
- Prepare for loneliness, and if you can, you build a support system. Find other founders who have been in the same place of terror-excitement insulation-immersion, so at least there will be someone in the world you see and understand. Surround yourself with people who keep you honest.
- Be friendly and show love and gratitude to your loved ones. Your choices and lifestyle, as well as your physical and emotional absence, will be difficult enough for your family and friends to deal with. Remember that the people you love probably experience a lot of the stress that you experience, without meaningful participation in the tension.
- Be communicative. Before you become serious with someone, be very clear that you are not a person with a job: your job is who you are, and that will probably never change. Make sure your children, partner and friends know they are not! It’s just that you can’t turn off that part of your brain when you play food, play tennis or go to bed at night. Although you may be ‘easy to love’, you are also ‘more difficult to hold’ – an elusivebeability that does not work for everyone.
I will say seeing my father, and then my mother and successfully launched their companies open my eyes for the possibility that I could also cut my own path – and I would like to model that for my children. It is not all bad to have a founder in the family.
Send love to my fellow entrepreneurs and empathy to their loved ones.
Gil Mandelzis is the founder and CEO ofCapitolis.
#Mamas #dont #babies #grow #founders