Entrepreneurship = Corporatization of Yourself

Entrepreneurship = Corporatization of Yourself

But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

You escaped the corporate grind. You rejected the ideals of hustle culture to build something for yourself. You make the rules. You can make work slower, softer, kinder, more intentional. Incorporate rest, reflection, and creativity as part of operations. 

But building a business takes a lot of work. Logistically, there’s a ton of decisions to make and regulations to explore and follow. You have to build the structure. You have to market yourself. You’re now an entire team as an individual — and that may be the case for months to years, depending on the size of your business.

And somewhere on this journey to building your own thing, you fell into the exact traps you pried yourself away from. You put in 60 hours a week to meet ‘deadlines.’ You pour every ounce of creativity into marketing. You respond to emails with lightning speed, any time of day or night. You’re BUSY. 

You’re also overwhelmed… and probably headed toward burnout if you’re not already there. But this was supposed to be better than corporate life, and now it’s just mimicking it (even down to you doing the work of multiple people while only getting paid for one — or fewer). How did this happen?

It’s complicated, and often a combination of many factors, possibly including: embracing the familiar even when we know it’s bad (because change is HARD), and the legit amount of work that goes into starting a business that few people really admit to being overwhelming. 

However, it’s also down to you. 

Seriously.

You are in charge now. 

But you’re not letting yourself direct how your business, and your life, operate. You’re letting the same toxic systems you left behind guide you — and it’s probably not intentional. 

We’re constantly assaulted with external ideals of success while promoting ourselves and our business. We’re pressured to meet others' perception of our work, rather than embracing what we want out of the work. And we’re pushed to prioritize money over the actual service or product. 

And somewhere in all that we lose sight of the fact that it’s OUR business. OUR methods. OUR designs. OUR goals. OUR needs. OUR LIFE.

I’m not going to tell you whose advice to follow, or whose path to mimic to reach your goals.

No one should.

What I am going to challenge you to do is take a beat. A day or two to pause the emails and the socials crawls and the networking and the conference research and the product comparisons and and and… just pause.

And in that pause, ask yourself if you’re building (or have built) the life you dreamed of when you started this. Not the business the LIFE.

Are you incorporating rest, play, creativity, and reflection into your business? Consistently?

Are you making sure YOU are taken care of before tending to professional ‘demands’?

Are you operating your business in opposition to hustle culture and the toxicity of corporate structures, or are you repeating those patterns because they ‘get results’?

Are you building the life you want, or are you chasing the goals you think you should have?

There’s a common saying in entrepreneurship that “you are your business,” and that’s true to a point.

But YOUR LIFE is what you make it.

And you, the boss of your own business, have the ability to change it.