Is solopreneurship fun? And peaking beyond just business

Saw an interesting Q&A with Elon Musk on a short video today.

As you all know, I love soaking in information and guidance from successful solopreneurs, entrepreneurs and tech founders.

He was talking about how – contrary to popular belief – a lot of entrepreneurship actually isn’t fun. Which really stuck out to me at first, because especially on social media, it’s mostly glamorized as being this amazing thing.

He said the opposite. Which made a lot of sense to me.

Now this is less applicable to solopreneurs, but Elon was explaining what it’s like to build big businesses and what he said was that as the CEO of a big and/or growing company, you’re pretty much only dealing with problems.

The things that are easy or going really well don’t get his attention – because they don’t really need his attention.

It’s the things that are going wrong, or struggling, or aren’t that fun and no one else wants to do, that falls to the CEO, founder, etc.

In essence, he’s got these huge companies with thousands of employees, and he’s mostly spending his time trying to fix the things that are broken, or not working as well.

Not the most fun sounding job in the world, eh?

It’s because of this that he says you better have some real passion or interest in the problem you’re trying to solve with the company, otherwise you’re in for a real painful and negative experience.

In his case, he really believes that humans need to evolve to live on other planets like Mars, so even if he has to deal with all of the hard parts of that process, he’s driven by his internation motivation and passion over solving that problem to keep driving through the hard times.

While my company, Visto, is nowhere near the size of any of his companies, I can certainly relate a bit. And maybe some of you can too, especially if you have at least a small team?

Anyway, thought it was interesting and it caught me by surprise in contrast to most of the content out there that glamorizes solopreneurship as this heavenly thing – it isn’t all the time!

In a somewhat similar vain, it still surprises me how many cool people are out there building cool businesses.

Not sure if you can relate to this, but I find that when you’re so focused on building your business, in your city, in your industry, it can be easy to spend most of your time in a bit of a bubble.

But then, every once in a while, you get on a call or networking event or introduction from a friend, with someone doing something really cool that you’ve never heard of.

Or never expected to exist.

Or are super impressed that it exists in the first place.

Or can’t believe you didn’t think of building something like it!

That, or I’m a bit out to lunch over here.

But it happens to me every now and then, especially from warm intros or partnership calls where you’re meeting people just slightly out of your own industry. I find it exciting, like a breath of fresh air, just to learn about all of the other great stuff that’s going on in the world of business.

Because as most of us know, especially early on, it’s best to niche down – or specialize – and so you keep the blinders on for the most part. When you get to peak beyond them, even for a quick call or meeting, I find it really interesting and motivating.

It makes me think that one day, maybe down the road or in a second life, I could be interested in private equity and/or tech investing because I’d get to meet a ton of cool entrepreneurs doing a variety of things every week.

But first I need to prove myself as an entrepreneur in my own business… oh and actually earn some money to have to invest!

As always, only time will tell.

Have a great day, don’t miss out on my daily business stories from my journey over here, and keep grinding.

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