Starting a business is a bit like starting a marriage. There is always the honeymoon stage at the beginning of it. Where it consumes your thoughts, your brain is fully engaged in your goals, plans, dreams. You lay in bed at night thinking about all the wonderful moments you will have.
Slowly, that honeymoon phase becomes an everyday responsibility, it becomes exhausting at times, it becomes something that’s hard to get away from, it becomes part of you. It’s the moment you leave the Honeymoon phase where “It Gets Real”.
These are the moments where the work that you put in dictate whether not your business or marriage will last and succeed. After it’s not new and exciting anymore it’s not as much fun it’s not as easy. When things can start getting on your nerves and start to effect your independent self.
It’s these moments that we just have to just grind it out and work through the night to meet a deadline because you are a lean company with less employees than you have work. It’s the moment that you have skipped a meal, lost sleep to meet that deadline that will dictate the success or failure. The same work as in a marriage when you realize that your needs aren’t as important as your spouse’s needs.
In business AND in marriage, the work is always worth it and your hard work will always pay off but you don’t wake up one morning and are “successful”.
You’re successful because you wake up every morning and grind it out.
I don’t see my marriage as a business transaction, nor do I feel like I am grinding it out in my marriage, but I am a realist, and I have seen remarkable similarities in my successful, happy marriage and my successful, happy business. It’s hard work, but worth it.
Just make sure that when you start a business, that you can imagine yourself doing the hard work after the honeymoon phase is over. Don’t turn it into a fairy tale, because the fairy tale ending is usually perfect, and perfect is boring.