{"id":94,"date":"2014-01-10T15:36:07","date_gmt":"2014-01-10T15:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/?p=28"},"modified":"2018-06-21T10:35:44","modified_gmt":"2018-06-21T14:35:44","slug":"exploring-the-reality-of-being-an-entrepreneur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/2014\/01\/10\/exploring-the-reality-of-being-an-entrepreneur\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring the Reality of Being an Entrepreneur"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stumbled upon this Harvard Business Review story<\/a> today and, no, I didn’t click just because it had the provocative phrase “entrepreneurship porn” in the headline.<\/p>\n

Morra Aarons-Mele<\/a>\u00a0raises some interesting ideas\u00a0in her essay, most notably: how often are entrepreneurs running from a bad situation, instead of running toward a good one. Her point is, some would-be entrepreneurs may be pursuing their startup with a fantasy vision of what owning a business will really be like as a way to escape the grind of their full-time job. They may not have a grasp of the tough reality of being an entrepreneur. (Plug: our 3-course entrepreneurship certificate<\/a> gives students a real-world, immersive entrepreneurship experience so they’re not someday launching a startup with a starry-eyed outlook.)\u00a0I especially loved this line from Aarons-Mele: “Starting a company doesn\u2019t mean being freed from the grind; it means that the buck stops with you, always, even if it\u2019s Sunday morning or Friday night.”<\/p>\n

I’ve been in this boat at least once, of wanting\u00a0to escape the 9-to-5 work world (who hasn’t?). Although I wasn’t going to quit my job to\u00a0start a company; instead, I wanted to quit so I could do volunteer service, full time. While seeking advice on whether to do this, I (subconsciously, at the time) stacked the deck to get the answer I wanted by going to talk to my favorite priest.\u00a0I mean, of course a priest would tell me I should quit my job and go serve the poor, while family and friends might point out the practical problems and repercussions involved with such a move. Except, alas, the priest didn’t do\u00a0that; instead, he said something along the lines of, “Nothing you have said to me indicates what you want to do<\/em> to serve. Spend a year figuring that out, and then we’ll talk again.” A lot changed in that year, and I will always be grateful for that priest’s sage advice.<\/p>\n

So maybe that’s a take-away from Aarons-Mele’s article: spend some time figuring it out before making the leap. She asks, “What if 2014 could be the ‘year of working for someone else \u2014 and loving it’?” Or maybe,\u00a02014 could be the year of exploring what it really takes to be an entrepreneur (our Meetups<\/a>\u00a0will give you great insight on this) so you don’t get seduced by the “entrepreneurship porn.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stumbled upon this Harvard Business Review story today and, no, I didn’t click just because it had the provocative phrase “entrepreneurship porn” in the headline. Morra Aarons-Mele\u00a0raises some interesting ideas\u00a0in her essay, most notably: how often are entrepreneurs running from a bad situation, instead of running toward a good one. Her point is, some would-be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207100,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/207100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}