I wrote this blog post because I wanted to give some insights into why you should want to start your own business.
There are plenty of reasons why. If you do a quick search on Google, you can easily find at least 100 reasons why you would want to start a business.
However, many of these reasons are generic, monetary, or lacks insightfulness.
After thinking about what is important to me, here are my 7 reasons why I want to start my own business.
Escape a life of servitude:
After reading The Shortness of Life by Seneca, I have a clear understanding of why you do not want to spend your life in servitude of another person’s dreams.
Everything in our surroundings is created through someone’s dreams or visions of their reality.
What happens is that most of us spend our entire lives executing someone else’s visions.
You have to pause for a second and think to yourself. Do I want to spend the rest of my life working for someone else?
Am I just a cog in the machine, or am I an individual that can be as creative and impactful as anyone else?
Here is a quote from the book that sums it up.
Indeed the state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations but must regulate their sleep by another’s, and their walk by another’s pace, and obey orders in those freest of all things, loving and hating. If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own
The Shortness of Life was written hundreds of years ago, but it continues to be relevant to what we as human beings are doing at this very moment.
Leave a legacy for your children:
One of my most important goals in life is to leave a thriving company for my children to inherit.
I don’t want them to have to rely on a paycheck from a company someone else started unless they wanted to.
I want them to have the ability to chose their path and live their lives according to their dreams.
Each generation needs to get better, and I have created a company that my children will run one day.
Albeit it is small, I will grow it into a company I can be proud to own.
Keep in mind that establishing a business isn’t the only important thing you will leave behind.
The mindset, work ethic, and determination to create, is equally important.
To be truly alive and not just existing:
Creating your own business does not necessarily mean you are now alive and living the life you desire.
Some people start businesses because of their passion or a means of making money.
However, the real reason for me is choice. My mother told me, “success to her is the freedom to do what she wants when she wants to”
It sounds simple, yet her words are so powerful.
How many of you reading this blog can say that about your life. I know I can not.
Freedom begins with having the opportunity to choose, and from that, you can live the life you desire.
Freedom of choice:
Not to sound redundant, but I started a business because I wanted the ability to chose what I do every day when I get out of bed in the morning.
If that includes working for a non-profit and giving back to my community. Being a teacher that teaches the next generation or building a real estate investment company.
I want it to be of my choosing, not someone else’s.
I am not starting a business to acquire shiny objects, it’s much deeper than that.
If my only desire were to buy things, I would continue to work for someone else and buy all I need with credit like most of us do.
Freedom of choice is as important as food, water, and shelter.
It is so important to us as humans we continue to fight for it today.
Create so you can help others:
The more resources you have increases your ability to help more people.
If you plan to help thousands of people, you are going to need the means to do so or know someone with the resources.
Bill Gates can help so many people because he has the resources to do it.
Many people look at wealthy business owners as greedy individuals who do not pay enough taxes.
However, I view them as creators who, through their life’s work, have created jobs and opportunities for others.
Starting and running your own business is a great way to expand your reach to people in need of your help.
Create your vision of reality:
Starting your business will help to create a vision of your reality. So you do not have to live your life in someone else’s.
Elon Musks wants people to live on Mars. An idea straight out of a science fiction movie.
He had or has employees actively working on that vision. Whether they believe in that vision or not.
They spend hours each day working towards accomplishing it.
Do not spend your life working to full fill someone’s dreams.
We all dream at night and mostly during the day. It is time we start working towards our own.
Because life is short:
Life is long but short in the sense because you only get one. Here is a quote from Seneca to conclude this blog post.
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it
Stop wasting your precious life in servitude of another, and start living for yourself.
We spend so much time on wasteful things and give away our time to anyone and all endeavors.
Thanks for reading and I hope you found this blog post use full.
Related books to read: