Building a business from scratch might be one of the most challenging things that you will ever do in this world.
Of course, some people bring a ton of money to the table and that makes it far easier for them. They are not so completely invested in the success or failure of a single business. I am not talking about that kind of situation.
What I am talking about is someone who sinks everything he has into making a business work. I don’t just mean financially either. I am talking about a total commitment. Gigantic mental and even emotional efforts go into creating and running a business from scratch.
You can be consumed and overwhelmed very quickly.
Imagine trying to do it with no business training. There are so many problems to solve. And when you don’t even know how a business is supposed to work, it makes it that much harder to make one work.
Another complicating factor is a person’s degree of morals and ethics. I certainly hope you have plenty of both.
There is a difference between running an honest business and a dishonest one. In a dishonest business, you don’t mind breaking the laws or doing morally corrupt things to get your business to work. It is often easier to do it that way – until you get caught.
That is a dishonorable path. It damages society and even the lives of individual people in countless obvious and less-than-obvious ways.
However, there are many people who do operate that way. In the end, good wins. But it might take a while for that to happen.
In the short term, bad people can triumph for a little while. This causes others to consider trying it that way too.
Therefore, starting, growing and running an honest and morally upright business is a tough challenge to take on.
What matters in the end is the level of honesty and integrity that you bring to the business. When you know that you didn’t cave in to doing things the ‘wrong’ way, you feel good.
Owning a business and having an income that is independent of a boss can be liberating. You do not have to modify your behavior to conform to someone elses’ wishes.
I think that happens to many people who are employees. Their boss is their source of income or the key to their continued income. That puts the pressure of conforming in a way that makes the boss happy onto the employee.
How many employees know their boss is in the wrong and actually challenge him on those issues? There are not many who are willing to do so. Considering that their chances of keeping the job, let alone getting promoted, may diminish rapidly from that point forward, fear can be enough to dissuade those who prefer to do right over wrong.
In this world, you are often not rewarded for ‘doing the right thing’. In fact, you are often times penalized or punished in one way or another for trying to do the right thing. That makes it harder to choose the morally upright path, doesn’t it?
You have to wonder if there isn’t a greater power that puts you in such situations to test your moral fiber.
It becomes even more complicated when you have to worry about the well-being of your family. When you are alone, sometimes it is a lot easier to ‘do the right thing’.
Regardless of whether you own your own business or work for someone else, it is a struggle to first recognize what is right and secondly to uphold it.
Therefore, if you have walked a good path regardless of whether you are an employer or an employee, you have most likely had serious challenges and struggles. If life has been easy for you up to this point, you may need to think things over a bit.
A good book about what it really means to be human is Zhuan Falun. I recommend reading it. But you’ll need to be up to the challenge of self-examination. If you are, it can be a true eye opener!
If you enjoyed this post, share it with others: