The title has always had an attractive quality, but successful entrepreneurs know the staggering amount of work and sacrifice required is what really defines entrepreneurship.
Currently, entrepreneurship is overly glamourised. It is made to seem cool and majestically celebrated.
There is a whole industry on social media that thrives on producing content on how their businesses are thriving and how put together they are.
More and more people are pouring into the arena of small business to earn the right to call themselves entrepreneurs, but how many of them stay in the game long enough to produce a thriving business?
The title has always had an attractive quality, but successful entrepreneurs know the staggering amount of work and sacrifice required is what really defines entrepreneurship.
Currently, entrepreneurship is overly glamourised. It is made to seem cool and majestically celebrated. Grandiose titles are canvas painted as social media high-fives the business owner.
For instance, If you have been on Instagram or TikTok lately, you might have seen a trend with a voiceover on how people didn’t want a 9-5, so they quit and now have to work 24/7 because they pursued their passion or something along those lines.
In fact, there is a whole industry on social media that thrives on producing content on how their businesses are thriving and how put together they are.
The cottage industry is booming more than it did before. From customised scrunchies and coffee cups to thrifting, there are thousands of concepts that are earning people a living or that extra dime and this is brilliant for our economies. The problem, however, comes with the glamour associated with running own business.
In the past few decades, start-ups have been getting millions in seed funding, selling IPOs and getting on various top something under something lists. The goal, for many entrepreneurs today is to reach this golden stage filled with accolades, keynote speeches and the millions of shillings.
However, if we are being honest, the need to be seen as successful or to be associated with success is affecting the quality of services and products being produced.
Entrepreneurs today, unlike before, want overnight success and are not willing to put in the blood, sweat and tears associated with growth. Many small businesses on social media look rosy, well organised and running like a well-oiled machine.
There is little need to produce long-lasting and impactful products and more need to produce goods that will fly off the shelf...continuously. This is almost never sustainable and it causes damage to a business owner’s mental health, finances and sometimes the environment.
One example of the dark side of glamourised entrepreneurship is the well-known case of Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth was able to put up the facade of a successful biotech entrepreneur who was supposed to revolutionise the medical industry.
With the backing of Wallstreet moguls such as Rupert Murdoch, features on major television channels and keynote speeches on platforms such as Ted Talk, everyone wanted to be associated with her and investors wanted to pour money into her project.
However, behind the scenes, the unsustainable business model was causing harm to people and was failing because it was impractical to start with.
Elizabeth is now a convicted criminal after investigations proved her work a sham.
Statistics in the West, show for every one success story there are nine failures. For every Facebook, Twitter, Uber and Google, there are an abundance of start-ups that did not take off.
In the end, people need to understand that the oversold hustle culture is harmful. Working more than you rest leads to physical and mental exhaustion. Being busy all the time does not equate to being productive and it is very much okay to want an 8-5 job.
It is okay to want to work in an environment where work is divided into different departments so you don’t have to carry all the work burden by yourself. You don’t have to kill yourself trying to achieve motivational page quality success. Work on providing value to your customers and above all, remember to rest.
There is no reward for chronic exhaustion and mental exhaustion could cause hatred for something you are very passionate about. Try and find a balance between working and resting and understand that a lot of things on social media are staged.
Comparison is the thief of joy, so reduce the comparison to other like structured businesses. Understand that you need to filter out the fakeness and the glamorised hope from reality and use it to build yourself up.
