To lounge on a beach or travel the world and not actively engage in building your arsenal of expertise is professional malpractice.
I've seen this thought expressed before in writing about Startups. If you're not burning your life down 24/7 in the struggle to make it Big, you're doing it wrong.
But that's silly.
The entire goal of building a business, in my mind, is to get the point where you can lounge on a beach or travel the world and not need to actively engage in anything except the pursuit of happiness.
I personally averaged out at a little less than four hours of work per week in 2017, running the sort of low maintenance, feature complete, Software-as-a-Service business that the author spends a paragraph explaining is not in fact a "serious company".
But look at the product and you'll see craftsmanship. Ten years of work, in fact as of roughly today. But never at the author's pace. Always at mine. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
That's the great thing about building a business. You can do it any way you like.
Did you _build_ the business on 4 hours a week over 10 years? That'd be maybe one full time year worth of work over the period. Is it now fully supporting you, i.e. more than 6 figures of profit? If you did that on four hours a week over the duration, I salute you, and care to share your niche?
If not, and you did spend more time in the first few years getting the business established, then how can you compare your relaxation on maintenance mode of a business after it is running smoothly with the initial effort it takes to get off the ground? That's pulling up the ladder after you succeeded, not relevant advice.
Indeed, there were weeks early on where I would work upwards of 20 hours building the product (though it was launched and signing up customers after the first of those weeks.) The important thing is that it never consumed all my time or focus.
It wasn't my main revenue stream during the early years, and didn't hit the six figure, quit the day job level until maybe year five or six.
As to ladders, I spend most of my time here and on my blog [1] explaining in detail how to climb it, and encouraging people to do so. Sadly, few choose to. The VC route has a much better PR team, selling the benefits of rockets over ladders.
To me, the goal of running my own business is to build something that powers my life. The marg on a beach thing is nice for a short period, but I want to own something that I can put meaningful work into.
Balance is still important, but work is how I access flow, so it's frequently centering and soothing.
Great post. I think that is actually the author's pace though - he's saying its more important to get something out there, do the work, than talk about it and network. And your work appears to be live and well! Who the hell wants to work for longer than it takes to prepare one margarita anyway?
I've seen this thought expressed before in writing about Startups. If you're not burning your life down 24/7 in the struggle to make it Big, you're doing it wrong.
But that's silly.
The entire goal of building a business, in my mind, is to get the point where you can lounge on a beach or travel the world and not need to actively engage in anything except the pursuit of happiness.
I personally averaged out at a little less than four hours of work per week in 2017, running the sort of low maintenance, feature complete, Software-as-a-Service business that the author spends a paragraph explaining is not in fact a "serious company".
But look at the product and you'll see craftsmanship. Ten years of work, in fact as of roughly today. But never at the author's pace. Always at mine. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
That's the great thing about building a business. You can do it any way you like.