Pajama Entrepreneur

It’s Labor Day in the US, the traditional end of the summer, and beginning of a new school year. Over here in Amsterdam, it’s just another working day, but this week marks the first week that everyone is really back from holiday. I have posted several articles recently about what it means to be an entrepreneur, to begin a new company, and offer a new service. It’s not about participating in media stunts like Seedcamp. It’s about passion. It’s about treasuring your life, not wasting it on a job or a profession that people expect you to do, that’s comfortable but not challenging.

I like Seth Godin’s Labor Day thoughts:

It’s hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It’s hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that’s remarkable . . . As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We’re going to work for the Man, letting him do the hard work while we work the long hours. We’re going back to the future, to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone. Some people (a precious few, so far) are realizing that this temporary recession is the best opportunity that they’ve ever had. They’re working harder than ever — mentally — and taking all sorts of emotional and personal risks that are bound to pay off. Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day. The big insight: The riskier your (smart) coworker’s hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It’s the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5 PM) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.