Roy Tang

I’ll probably never be an entrepreneur.

It’s funny. There’s a lot of these “Anyone can be an entrepreneur!” “You too can be an entrepreneur!” articles that go around. But I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think entrepreneurship is for everybody.

Laziness is probably the main factor. Becoming an entrepreneur is hard work. That’s something all the entrepreneurship articles aren’t shy about telling you. “Anyone can do it, as long as you are willing to work hard!” That in itself is the caveat though: you have to be willing to work hard. I was willing to work hard when I was young and hungry. Now I kind of mostly want to chill. I don’t want to do work that doesn’t interest me.

Someone shared this image to me a while back:

2 Nov 2018 5:03amClose

I was looking at this diagram and it really solidified in my mind that in all likelihood I’ll never really pursue entrepreneurship.

I get the personal satisfaction circle, everyone wants that. It’s the economic feasibility and market opportunity circles that kind of throw it out of whack for me.

I’m not ruling it out or anything. I mean, for sure I could come up with a killer game design idea that I actually manage to implement that becomes a hit with a niche market and suddenly takes off. There’s always that chance.

But I have no interest in studying markets or marketing or promotion or selling to people in general. And a lot of my interests are niche so that gets in the way of economic feasibility.

Like when I have an idea for something I want to build, I don’t think about marketing opportunity or economic feasibility or anything. I just start building it.

I like building things. I like solving problems. I like studying systems and figuring out how they work and what problems they have that are solvable and what not.

But the idea of having to sell those solutions, to find people to finance my time, to do marketing work and reaching out and networking and promotion, etc. For me, that’s just hard work that I’m inclined to avoid.

And I do avoid a lot of hard work that I don’t want to do. This is probably why I tend to leave a lot of half-finished projects behind. This is why it’s best for me to be working in a team and having other people willing to do those tasks I dislike.

“Well, then why not hire some people to do that other work for you?” I can do that, sure. That involves some capital, but I have some capital and surely I can raise more if needed. But doing the due diligence to figure out whether the idea is feasible enough to work on, meaning the investment of capital is worth it – that in itself is something I don’t want to do. What more trying to convince people to raise capital for me.

And again, because of my niche interests, a lot of ideas that I tend to think of tend to fall into the “I think this is cool, but it doesn’t seem to be likely to be profitable” bucket.

Well-meaning go-getters will be all “Well, that’s just a defeatist attitude! You can do anything if you put your mind to it! Stop thinking of reasons why you can’t do it!” Yes it’s true. It’s just a matter of attitude. The human brain is just another system after all, and one only needs to study one’s one own system to figure out how to maybe hack it to figure out how to get into some kind of “entrepreneurship mode.” But again, it doesn’t interest me. Maybe someday it will.

I can’t speak for the future, but at the moment I think the most likely way I’d become an entrepreneur is by accident. Stumble into something that happens to be profitable. I don’t think I can do it on purpose.

I realize this post is kind of a downer. A really negative post full of “I can’t do it” kind of statements. Don’t take this to mean I don’t appreciate people sharing entrepreneurship advice or articles, I do. And please keep them coming. But I think it’s worth the time to study your own psyche and understand what holds you back so that when the time comes you know what you need to be able to set aside. Who knows, maybe next week I’ll be writing why I should and can be an entrepreneur.