Entrepreneurship is inhuman.
When you live it like some kind of illness.
And if that sounds familiar, it’s probably because that’s your reality. Today I’m going to tell you about the psychological toll entrepreneurship can take on you and your life when the project stops being part of your life and becomes the absolute centre of it.
Entrepreneurship isn’t a bad thing in itself. The problem, which nobody notices because they’re caught up in the whirlwind, is that subtle moment when you start putting the business ahead of everything else: your partner, your children, your health, getting enough sleep, eating properly, exercising, you know… having a life that isn’t just work.
That was how entrepreneur and angel investor Jesús Alonso Gallo answered in an interview I listened to recently, when he was asked point-blank why most people who succeed in business are unhappy deep down.
Talking about happiness among entrepreneurs, he said: I was exactly that kind of entrepreneur. He put the business ahead of everything and had a lot of health problems. He then explains that in 2008, during an operation on his vocal cords, there was a medical error, he went into cardiac arrest and had to be resuscitated.
That’s when, he says, his whole outlook on life changed radically.
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And it’s no coincidence that this realisation came at that particular moment: if you lose your health or lose your life altogether, all those business dreams you were chasing stop mattering.
Because you’re more than that big entrepreneurial dream of yours.
Your company may be hugely important to you, but you are not your company. You’re also a son, a father, a partner, a brother, a friend; you have people you care about, a body, a life that exists outside what you earn or build.
But there are nuances.
If you want to achieve certain extraordinary things, there will probably be periods of imbalance. If you look at entrepreneurs who have built enormous companies, you’ll probably find levels of work and sacrifice that go well beyond what would normally be considered reasonable. Think Elon Musk, Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos.
The point isn’t to achieve some illusion of ‘work-life balance’ or some perfectly balanced way of dividing your efforts. If you’re going after a big goal, you have to put in the sweat and tears. Everything comes at a cost. It’s up to you what cost you’re willing to bear.
But the distinction this entrepreneur made, and the big lesson he draws from it, is this:
There can be temporary periods of imbalance. What there cannot be is permanent imbalance.
You can have six months, a year or a particular period when the business takes up a disproportionate part of your life. The problem starts when that stops being a phase and becomes the permanent structure of your existence.
According to him, that’s when you end up paying the price. It may be your health, your relationship, your children, or simply realising years later that there are parts of your life you can never get back.
There are experiences and moments you’ll never get back. Whether you’re a testosterone-fuelled man or a girlboss, one undeniable truth is that there are going to be things you miss out on.
Children are a very clear example of this: you may miss certain moments because you have to work. What you can’t do is miss all of it until one day your child barely knows who you are because you were always working. At that point, there’s no fixing it. You can’t go back ten years and watch them grow up again.
In other words, the same drive that can lead you to achieve something extraordinary can also end up destroying other parts of your life.
Business success can become a trap when, in order to achieve it, you start systematically sacrificing everything that was supposedly the reason you wanted to succeed in the first place.
But as always, life is about decisions, and with those decisions come consequences and costs, for better or worse. Choose what you’re willing to sacrifice, for how long, and make sure you don’t end up sacrificing everything.
Speaking of decisions, there are two key lessons I’m always banging on about with my clients to help them understand what we’re talking about today. They’re two phrases that debunk the big myth of modern society. The first is “you can’t have everything”, and the second…
The second helps you understand how to organise your life if you’re an entrepreneur or, regardless of what you do for a living, if you have big goals in life…
Speaking of decisions, there are two big lessons I’m always banging on about with my clients to help them understand what we’re talking about today. Both can be summed up in two sentences. The first is: “you can’t have everything”. And the second… the second is the one that helps you understand how to organise your life if you’re an entrepreneur or, regardless of what you do for a living, if you have big goals in life…
If you’re ambitious enough to want a big life, but not stupid enough to sacrifice the whole thing to your work, you might want to join Gangatu’s newsletter. I write three times a week about ambition, decisions, unconscious motives and the ways people manage to ruin their own lives while insisting they’re “working on themselves”.
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