Somebody once told me, there are two types of people in this world; entrepreneurs and wantreprenuers. If being an entrepreneur was easy, everyone would do it. The idealistic notion of working when you want, where you want and earning millions of pounds a year sounds pretty good right? Well today I am going to bust some myths around “working for yourself” and give you a glimpse into what my day really looks like!

1.       Do you remember your first day in a job? Waiting around whilst IT try and connect your laptop to the company WIFI and your colleague is on the phone trying to reset the password, so you can actually login, meanwhile you’re sitting on your new swivelling chair twiddling your thumbs? Yeah it’s like that, but all day. Every day.

2.       So, it’s 11am and you think it’s time for your third coffee of the day, because you’ve been so darn busy looking at those three emails. You wander to the kitchen only to find there are no mugs in the cupboard and you haven’t emptied the dishwasher yet (cursing at the fact your corporate job had a cleaner to make sure you always had clean cups). Believing in your head that you are some CEO of a multinational – there’s just NO time to do the dishwasher now! Those emails won’t write themselves, so you settle for a glass of water.

3.       It’s now lunchtime and you really deserve a break (I mean you are the Director of a dormant company) so you take yourself out of the house and into town. SHIT. It’s 4pm! Smug entrepreneurial guilt comes out to play and taunt you. “You’ll never be successful if you don’t put in the hours” “Have you not heard of hard graft?” “You should have been up at 6am and still replying to emails at midnight, but look at you, shopping in Zara”. And yes, you are only allowed to window shop because you literally have no money.

4.       So with the stress of entrepreneurial guilt sitting on your shoulder, you get back to “work” staring at a blank word document trying to plan your road to successville. A few attempts of written and then backspaced plans, and a couple of “Oh God what’s the point, I’ll just go back to work and listen to how Jill’s kids are getting on at Brownies”, you somehow muster up the motivation to see the end goal in your mind’s eye.

5.       At this point, it’s all about actions. The difference between an entrepreneur and a wantreprenuer, is the entrepreneur takes action. Sends that email, phones that person. A wantreprenuer just thinks about one day becoming their own boss with no action taken.

Seeing the end goal in sight or getting that brief wave of inspiration that sets you on the journey once more makes it all worth it. Visualisation is huge in the entrepreneur world as it gives you belief that what you can think, you can achieve. So despite the unstructured days and the lack of clarity, there is a magic to being able to dream about who you want to become. Unlike the corporate world, there is a sense of achievement not in completing a project, but in beginning one.

Lots of Love,
Em x