Nearly every entrepreneur I know says they work longer hours as a small-business owner than they did when they worked for someone else, since the average startup founder's mantra is, "If it is to be, it's up to me."
Nearly every one also admits they worry more about their income than they did when they were employees. After all, have a bad week at your job and you still get paid.
Long days, long nights, long weekends, with potentially little financial reward to show for all that effort, especially early on?
Sounds like the perfect recipe for burnout.
Yet a new study just published by payroll, benefits, and human resources software firm Gusto shows burnout is actually one of the main reasons why mid-career workers (ages 35 to 54) start their own businesses. While nearly half of younger workers (ages 25 to 34) said they were quitting their jobs in hopes of making more money as business owners, 46 percent of mid-career workers said they started their own businesses because they felt burned out by their jobs.
While trading long hours for even longer hours sounds counterintuitive, the difference lies not just in the potential reward but in the sense of purpose and meaning. I averaged 60-plus hour weeks in my last years at a Fortune 500 company and the few years after when I ran a manufacturing plant. I averaged 70- to 80-hour weeks the first five years or so after I started my own business.
The difference? Ultimately, the nature of employment is a transaction: I do this, you give me that.
Working for someone else, while financially rewarding, still meant I was largely working for someone else's success. Working for myself means working for my own success, in whatever way I choose -- because it is a choice -- to define success, not in the way someone else defines success.
Because when you work for someone else, they get to decide what you do -- and, in large part, aside from the transactional nature of employment, why you do it.
And as for all the hours involved in starting and running your own business? A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that while experiencing a lack of discretionary time every day leads to feeling more stressed and less happy (no surprise there), the researchers found and "internally [replicated] a negative quadratic relationship between discretionary time and subjective well-being," a fancy way of saying that too little free time makes you unhappy, but so can having too much free time.
And so can feeling less purposeful about your free time. Come home from work and the last thing you probably want to think about is work. The researchers found that people feeling happier when they spend a portion of their free time on productive activities, like building and maintaining relationships. Working on a project. Reading. Exercising. Doing things you feel have a purpose, and that over the long term will make your life better.
When you love what you do -- when you feel your work has purpose -- you're much less likely to mind working a few extra hours a week, because those hours feel less like an obligation than a choice. You'll want to send one more email, make one more call, follow up with one more customer... because doing so benefits you by bringing you that much closer to achieving your goals.
Not someone else's.
And you have a lot more control over your financial future. Work for someone else and at any moment you could lose it all, often for reasons outside your control. (Ask the hundreds of thousands of people recently laid off by tech companies.)
The Gusto survey found that 41 percent started a business because they were concerned about their financial stability or wanted to supplement their household income, up from 24 percent the previous year.
Even if you don't lose your job, working for someone else means your upside is always capped. That's why so many younger workers have decided to become entrepreneurs: own your own business and your upside is, while certainly not guaranteed, unlimited.
Why do people start their own business? To chart their own course. To make their own decisions. To learn from their own mistakes and benefit from their own successes. To do work with greater meaning and purpose and reap the potentially greater financial rewards from their time, effort, and dedication.
And to escape the feeling of burnout that often results from giving their all to a transaction instead of a calling.
Which may be the best reason of all to start your own business.
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