Being An Entrepreneur Is The Worst Job Ever, And This Is Why I Wouldn’t Take It Any Other Way

Being an entrepreneur is probably the worst job I’ve ever had: 12+ hours days, six days a week and miserable pay. Unmeasurable doses of stress and responsibility with hardly any recognition. Not exactly the dream job. Except it isn’t. It isn’t a job; it’s a passion. And it’s a dream.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of being an entrepreneur, mostly because it will depend on what time of the day it is and what has just happened. Things move rapidly within a fast-growing company. A single day is often full of moments of pure joy, extreme frustration, a sense of achievement and of disappointment. Being an entrepreneur brings you incredible highs and lows, and for that you have to be driven by passion and a greater sense of mission and dream. It’s the magical feeling of working with amazing people and, together, overcoming barriers, preconceived ideas and problems with solutions that have never been thought of, developed or tested before. It’s problem solving. It’s team work. It’s collaboration. And that’s what makes it so exciting.

Don’t get tied up in the idea that being an entrepreneur is necessarily being a founder. Many at SyndicateRoom enjoy the same benefits Tom and I do as co-founders – long hours, miserable pay, a lot of responsibility and definitely not enough recognition. They also get the excitement of a very steep learning curve, the opportunity to grow in responsibility faster than at any large corporation, and a phenomenal professional and personal development in the most unstructured way – something only an early-stage company could ever offer. Many take part in very high-level strategic discussions or present strategic plans to SyndicateRoom’s board of directors, when in the same time frame at a large corporation they wouldn’t have had the opportunity to so much as exchange two spoken words with their head of department.

People often tell me they’d love to become an entrepreneur because it seems like I’m having so much fun doing it. They fail to recognise that being an entrepreneur is great fun only when you look at the sum of the parts. Surviving the lows, constantly battling against the many barriers along the way, going through walls to build a business that most will tell you is impossible and will never work takes a huge amount of energy. It’s the type of energy that caffeine won’t give you. It takes energy that has to come from your inner self, which is why being an entrepreneur cannot be a job. This inner energy comes from one’s belief that the business will succeed, no matter how many knocks you get along the way – and trust me, I’ve had my fair share. It’s an energy that comes from an immeasurable amount of passion and belief that the world you envision is achievable.

As a passion, however, it’s addictive and intoxicating. The lows make entrepreneurs savour the highs even more. Do you need the lows to be a happy entrepreneur? Certainly not, but I’m yet to hear of an entrepreneur that didn’t run into a few potholes on their path to success their path to success. I candidly asked Jonathan Milner (founder of £1.9bn Abcam success story) if he looked back at the tough moments Abcam went through in the early days with fond memories now that he has become so successful. Without any hesitation Jonathan replied that no, not really. He would have been quite happy to have done without the tough moments. They were pretty tough.

Being an entrepreneur is also a hugely selfish exercise of creating your own environment where you and others can thrive. Some call it ‘office working culture’ but in reality it may as well be ‘founder working culture’. It’s pretty selfish to be honest. The working culture at SyndicateRoom doesn’t circle around management theory classes on the perfect team or working environment. I guarantee you this because I have an MBA and I can’t even remember what the theory was. The working culture at SyndicateRoom is a selfishly designed culture centred around, you guessed it, the way I like to work. As it happens, I love working with people that have the greatest respect for their peers and a can-do attitude, that pro-actively pinpoint solutions I don’t have the skills to come up with. This means we attract exceptional individuals that share my passion for SyndicateRoom, how we work and what we stand for. This hugely selfish approach also means I can get rid of things I don’t tolerate, such as office politics and unfairness.

The reality is that entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone. The pace is as scary for some as it is exciting and inspiring for others. People that can’t keep up will find it tough and eventually their role will become just another job, and when the passion disappears motivation will soon follow. But for those who have passion, who believe in what they are doing even when the going gets tougher, every challenge inspires further effort, ideas, creativity. It’s something you can’t escape even if you want to.

Being passionate about something doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy for you. On the contrary, it will keep you up at night, it will creep into your spare time and consume your experience of the world around you every day – but that’s the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and an employee. Your job is 9–5; your passion is who you are.