This is a tale of two entrepreneurs.
One noticed many small towns didn’t have a car wash and felt he could profitably serve those markets. Today, he owns 30-plus locations and pockets multimillion-dollar profits. The other builds furniture. He has one employee. He makes, as he describes it, about the same money that teachers make.
One is highly successful. The other, less so.
Or not.
For the car wash owner, the money is the reward. He dislikes managing people, despises dealing with constant maintenance and repairs, and cringes when customers call to claim his equipment damaged their vehicles.
He spotted an opportunity to make a handsome living, but he hates the work.
For the furniture maker, the work is the reward. He likes to turn (pun intended) raw lumber into art. He enjoys designing, cutting, shaping, and sanding. He’s eager to see the expression on his customers’ faces when he delivers their pieces.
He spotted an opportunity to do work he enjoys.
There’s something to be said for security
As Steve Jobs said during his 2005 Stanford commencement address:
You’ve got to find what you love.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work - and the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
Granted, it’s possible to develop a passion. Do something long enough and do it well, and you’ll come to enjoy it. We all tend to like doing the things we do well. There’s nothing wrong with starting a business because you spotted an opportunity.
Plus, not only do we all have to make a living, most of us also want to achieve some degree of financial success. Financial security allows you to take care of yourself and provide for your family, can help reduce your level of stress and anxiety, can give you the ability to make proactive rather than reactive choices, and can give you a greater sense of control over your life.
All of which is really good stuff.
But you have to like the work
But you also have to like what you do. When your work is a means to an end, the payoff is almost always unsatisfying. As my car wash friend puts it, “Sure, I go home to a big house, but I spend most of my time at work.”
You can want the goal, but what you really have to want is the work.
Want to someday be like Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang and build a $3 trillion company? You can’t just want the goal. You have to want the effort, perseverance, leadership responsibilities, risks, and sleepless nights inherent in building a hugely successful company.
Want to be like James Dyson and invent groundbreaking products? You can’t just want the goal. You have to want to spend countless hours in your garage or basement, tinkering and iterating and failing, over and over again, on the way (hopefully) to an eventual breakthrough.
Want to run a marathon? You can’t just want the goal. You have to want to go running, day after day after day, in pursuit of eventually running those 26 miles.
Room to grow
If you want to be happy, if you want to feel satisfied and fulfilled on a daily basis, you can’t just start a business because you want the end result. You have to want the work.
When you want the work, every day you do the work you get to feel successful. Because you want the work, every day you’ll try to learn, to improve, to grow... which means, as Jobs said, that someday you will be able to do great work.
Which means you’ll feel even happier and more satisfied, because few things feel better than loving what you do and doing it well.
By all means choose a business to start based on financial opportunity, and financial considerations. But then layer in whether you will enjoy doing the work involved in seizing that opportunity.
Satisfaction in entrepreneurship
If you won’t, keep looking. End results are great, but the best business to start is one where doing the work itself is a daily reward. When you do that, you’re also more likely to achieve the end result you hope for, if only because you’ll be a lot more likely to stay the course.
As Jobs said in 2007:
You have to have a lot of passion for what you do, and the reason is, it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up.
You have to do it [build a company] over a sustained period of time. If you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up.
Work you enjoy on a daily basis. Work that can lead to a more financially rewarding and fulfilling future.
That’s the type of business you want to start.