We enter into most of life’s chapters naive of what to expect. We deny our naivety with a pipe dream of how we expect it will be.
Freshly out of college, my little sister wants to buy a local coffee shop. Her expectation of running a coffee shop is chatting with customers, baking sweet treats and pouring coffee. Smiles, coffee, sweet treats and the money starts coming in!
Waking up early to bake and serve coffee is the reality. The reality is ordering supplies, cleaning bathrooms, hiring and firing employees plus dealing with health inspections. If she knew the reality, she wouldn’t want to actually “run” a coffee shop. She’s naive.
I’m guilty of believing a fantasy. We launched LessAccounting.com in early 2007 with 700 people signed up for the beta. Our belief was riches were so close we could taste the caviar and champagne dreams! The reality was two years after launch the app was only making us $4000 per month.
But maybe an entrepreneur needs a healthy dose of naivety. Maybe they need to be ignorant of how hard running a business will be…or they need to be brave.
Coffee anyone?
When has being naive of what to expect worked out well for you? I’d love to hear examples.
If you wanted it to build a product you’d find a way to get time to work on it. If you really wanted to start that new hobby you’d sacrifice something to find the time and money to do it.
I'll define a "Wannabe Entrepreneur" as someone who has never made money from their businesses. Here are the different types of wannabes.
In the past few years I've built go-carts, built a 200+ sq ft workshop, written several eBooks. How do I create a life where I have time to work on side projects?