Bad Idea Number Four: Everyone can own a business | GB66

This episode of the Good Business Podcast debunks the myth that everyone should own a business. It explains how entrepreneurship requires a high tolerance for risk and can deeply affect personal relationships. The host, Illana Burk, emphasizes that success in business isn't just about skills, but about being comfortable with constant uncertainty. The discussion encourages listeners to consider their own risk tolerance and personal responsibilities before pursuing entrepreneurship.

For more details, visit illanaburk.com.

Good Business is hosted by Illana Burk, CEO of Illana Burk Consulting llc and strategic coach and advisor to entrepreneurs, creative leaders, and industry disruptors the world over.

For more of illana around the web:
Web: illanaburk.com
On TikTok: @illanaburk
On Insta: @illanaburk

Transcript

0:41

Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Good Business Podcast. Today's topic is all about the myth that everyone can and should own a business. It sounds really simple, right? You're good at something, and everybody you know says that you should start a business doing it. So you do! Yay! You're a business owner now. It's all so exciting until it starts getting really, really complicated and really, really hard, and the clients don't come as easy as you thought, and the money just isn't flowing like you thought it would be, and like, all of your friends told you it would be because you'd be so successful at this thing that they thought you were really, really good at. So the prevailing notion that everyone is cut out for business ownership is just fundamentally flawed. There are people in the world that just aren't, and it's not their fault. It's not anyone's fault, but it is a truth. And it isn't just this like benign fantasy peddled by eager marketers and educators and built in my realm, right? In business studies and business coaching. It is in fact, like a really harmful idea. It's laden with the potential for personal dissatisfaction and serious financial collapse, but beyond the risk and underneath all the excitement, very few people actually stop and consider whether owning a business will actually bring them joy and happiness, or if it's just like a way harder job than they had before with like way more bosses, like that whole idea that you become a business owner and you don't have a boss anymore is completely bullshit. You don't have one boss. You have like 14 bosses. You have every single client becomes your boss. Your website becomes your boss. Your social media becomes your boss. All these things become obligations that are pushing in on you. They just don't actually have the potential to fire you all in one go the way that a boss boss does at a job, but you definitely don't, um, don't ease up in the obligation and pressure department when you're a business owner. So, the unfortunate truth is that the essential ingredient for sustaining entrepreneurship is not something that's taught in most classrooms or online business courses for sure. They don't, they don't talk about this. Like, it's not financial acumen or marketing skills or sales experience or being good at what you do, though you will obviously need all of those things too. It's something that isn't teachable or learnable, which is why people like me don't try to teach it because you can't learn it. So they just ignore how critical it is. And that thing is how comfortable you are with risk. Why risk? Why is that so critical? Because business ownership is synonymous with risk taking. But hardly anyone thinks about that before they get started. Those who love it versus those who hate it, that's the divide between success and failure. It's the space where that becomes most apparent. Humans react to risk in fundamentally opposite ways and, and there's some people that are kind of on a spectrum, but for the most part it's pretty polarizing. They either thrive or they falter under pressure. There's almost no middle ground, just a polarizing spectrum between risk aversion and risk affinity. If you find yourself even slightly leaning towards the aversion end, the entrepreneurial journey is going to be a really rocky one for you, with a lot of stress and a lot of hand wringing and a lot of anxiety that doesn't get any easier the more successful you become. Success as an entrepreneur involves navigating countless uncertain moments. If the prospect of constant uncertainty, the kind that feels like working without a net, is uncomfortable for you. Your journey will be fraught with a lot more anxiety than most people can reasonably metabolize. For those who do not find that like massive creative energy spark by risk, like I do, I'm one of those people, like more risk, more amazing things fall in my brain. The regularity of traditional employment might be a lot more appealing if that isn't you, right? After all, like the entrepreneurial path is not just about handling external business risks. It's also about handling your internal responses to those challenges. The idea becomes. Even more complex when we consider personal relationships and life circumstances. And this is like, beyond not talking about risk, we really don't talk about this. We don't talk about how our businesses affect our families, how they affect the people around us. And often the narrative of pursuing business ownership overlooks the significant others in people's lives. We are so quick to idolize the pursuit of dreams, but we are Absolutely sloth like slow to recognize the sacrifices and adjustments required to maintain equitable harmony and happiness in our personal relationships. We just don't talk about it. We don't consider it. The dream of business ownership has to be weighed against the reality of your responsibilities and emotional commitments to your partners, your children, your aging parents, your friends, your loved ones, the people in your life that make your life worth living, right? When we actually fail to look at how hard our choices affect, like how, when we don't look hard enough at how our choices affect the people in the community around us, we set ourselves up for mistakes that we can't come back from. And that's the thing that nobody talks about on a sales page, right? Because when you actually stop and think about how this is going to affect your family, you start questioning your buying decisions. You start questioning the paths that you take. And you should, in essence. The mantra that anyone can own a business doesn't account for individual tolerances around risk. It doesn't account for personal responsibilities, life goals, financial circumstances. It simplifies the intricate balance that's required to sustain personal happiness alongside professional success. To boil it all down, the idea that everyone should own a business underestimates the profound impact of intrinsic personal traits and external life conditions. If you are not comfortable with risking not just your financial stability, but the financial stability of your family, your relationships, the people that matter most to you, then you are not considering the full picture. And especially in Western culture, especially in American culture, where Being a business owner is so glorified, right? Where you're allowed to sacrifice those things. You're allowed to sacrifice your time, your energy, your money, everything in pursuit of your dreams, right? The American dream. It's all baked in to a cultural ethos around hard work. But it's broken. We all know it's broken, right? This ideology has not only proven to be incredibly detrimental to pushing individuals towards absolutely unsuitable paths but also by obscuring the importance of achieving a balance between professional ambitions and personal happiness. Ultimately, like so many other areas of business, recognizing and respecting that balance is an absolutely crucial piece of the puzzle in achieving your fulfillment, the fulfillment of the people around you, societal progress around the culture of commerce, and a fundamental understanding of what truly drives innovation and entrepreneurship. There are absolutely people who have an extremely high risk tolerance, who are Absolutely driven by high pressure situations and they drive innovation. They are absolutely the innovators in our culture. They always have been, and they always will be. And we have this idea that if we are not that way, we are somehow subpar, right? The worker bees are not exactly glorified in our culture, but they should be. Because everybody's wired differently. Everybody's wired for different things. And you could be an extremely high, like you could have an extremely high risk tolerance and be married to somebody who has an extremely low risk tolerance. And maybe that whole opposites attract thing. Worked really well for a long time until one of you decided to start a high risk business and invest all of your savings into it. And then all of a sudden there's a fracture there that wasn't there before. Like you got to rest, respect the fact that you might not be wired the same way as the people you care about. And you have to decide. Whether or not that's something that's going to change how you pursue your dreams. And that's something that like risk aversion and our care and empathy for the people around us have to be tied together. It sounds so funny. Like they don't seem like ideas that natively really should be tied together that way, but they absolutely should. Because it's one of those things that is most indicative of like, How much are you willing to risk? And when you are highly, um, when you really love risk, you will forget to think about this because it just is baked right in. You'll forget, like, you won't even realize what you're signing up to sacrifice when you're taking some big swing. But you should be. And so I'm speaking to all of the entrepreneurs out there who are like willing to take big swings and they don't even think about like how that might affect the happiness and joy of the people that they care about. It happens all the time and it doesn't make them a narcissist and it doesn't make them thoughtless. It just makes them like highly risk tolerant. And they don't realize that that's not how everyone is. And then I'm also speaking to the business owners out there who are like, why is everything so hard? And why does it all feel so wrong? Why is it like, everything is just such a steep climb and I'm not willing to do that. And how come this is so easy for some people and it's not easy for me. This is why if you don't feel like you can love risk, Risking everything for what you want, then you're going to have a continuously tough time. It doesn't mean that you can't be a business owner. It doesn't mean you can't be an entrepreneur. It means that you have to recognize that there's times where you're going to have to push out of your comfort zone to take risks you might be uncomfortable with. And that discomfort is something that you'll probably have moments where you're gonna have to push through. And if you can't even do that, if the idea of like pushing through any level of risk based discomfort is like abhorrent, then you probably won't make it. And that's the uncomfortable truth because you can't make it in business without taking some big swings along the way. There will be moments where it's do or die, where you just have to try, where you have to go all in, where you have to invest in something that you didn't know you were going to have to invest in, where you have to put stuff on the line. I don't know a single business that hasn't had to do that at least once. So when you think about starting a business, when you are contemplating what's going wrong, why isn't this working, take a look at how, at your personal wiring. Sometimes being incredibly risk tolerant can be just as detrimental because you can be that person who's willing to take big swings when you shouldn't, when you should be a little bit more conservative, when you should be a little bit more patient. The idea is to just understand which end of that spectrum that you're on so that you can inch your way towards the middle, where it's a little safer, where you can have a more level head, where you can recognize the moments that need the big swings and the moments that need, you know, maybe step back from the cliff a little bit. So how do you guys think about risk tolerance? I would love to hear from everyone here who thinks about that, like at least give it some contemplation. So I hope you guys all have a really fabulous and risk free day and thank you for tuning in. Have a great week. Bye.