Our beliefs about how hard entrepreneurs need to work to be successful
Episode #2 of the course Mental exercises for beginner entrepreneurs by Genevieve LeMarchal
One of the most popular beliefs we have about ourselves as entrepreneurs is the mental belief we carry that we must be workaholics in order to be successful.
We believe that if we are not working every available hour in the day, we are not worthy or deserving of the results of the success we achieve.
It doesn’t help that in our society, workaholism still has an air of goodness and duty to it. “I’m too busy” is often thinly veiled as “I’m important” and “I have meaning and purpose.” In reality, we are often just simply busy. The things that keep us so busy aren’t actually priorities, we just treat them as such.
Entrepreneurship is about bringing something into existence that didn’t exist before. It is a highly creative thing—it’s all about creation. And creation takes work. We will produce an enormous amount of work in our lifetime, and not all of it will be noteworthy. In fact, some of it will be pretty bad. This is just how life is for us as creators.
The ultimate goal is to be in a consistent state of creating, instead of a consistent state of working.
What’s the difference? Creating insinuates a deeper connection to ourselves and our intrinsic desire to serve the world through whatever it is that we do.
When you are connected to yourself, creating and producing, the work becomes an outward effect of the cause that already exists within you. We feel less like that work is being forced as much because it’s flowing. This is why many people can produce enormous amounts of work and progress and often have no idea how many hours they actually work in a week. Their work is connected to something higher within them than just work.
Being worn out, exhausted, and tired is both a physical state and a mental state that can be mutually exclusive. If you have distaste, struggle, and frustration around the work you do each day, according to Walter Russell, “the hatred for it develops into body destructive toxins and you become fatigued very soon.”
Action Tip
Take a quiet moment today and read these three statements to yourself. What comes up for you?
• If I am not working hard, I am being lazy.
• If it was not hard, I did not properly earn it.
• If I don’t feel like I am struggling, I must not be a legitimate entrepreneur or be running a legitimate business.
Examining the beliefs that you carry about work, combined with getting unnecessary things off your plate, will have huge effects on your mindset.
What are some areas in your life you find yourself busy and stressful that really aren’t priorities for you? Can you handle, automate, neutralize, or deprioritize it? You might be interested in an article about entrepreneurship and being a workaholic: Here’s Why You are Such a Workaholic.
Recommended book
“The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron
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