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Independent Businesspeople Live Intense But Often Lonely Lives

Guest post by: James Chan

Article Overview: How to survive the emotional challenges of running a business.

Independent Businesspeople Live Intense But Often Lonely Lives

Independent business people live intense but often lonely lives. It’s easy to lose perspective, even to go a little crazy, when we have only ourselves to depend on. Knowing that other people have survived crises much like those we face can help keep us sane.

That is why, when we independents get together, we tell each other stories. Many of these are lamentations about customers who demand the impossible by next Wednesday, but take forever to pay for it. Some are lessons of persistence rewarded, as a long-cultivated prospect comes through with a big order. Some are cautionary tales of opportunity practically breaking down the door while the self-employed person, misunderstanding what she has to offer, assumes that the opportunity is not hers. There are many stories of happy accidents, of chance encounters and offhand remarks that lead to new work and new ideas for making a better living.

I like to hear these stories, and to tell them too. They teach important lessons not only about how to make money on your own, but also how to survive the emotional challenges of running a business. They offer reassurance that I’m really not alone. Indeed, although my business is an unusual one, when I hear engineers, financiers, lawyers, artists, building contractors, computer entrepreneurs, writers, recruiters, and many others telling their stories, it is clear that all sorts of self-employed people are seeking similar satisfactions and must overcome most of the same anxieties.

It is easy to drive yourself crazy while trying to make a business succeed. Hearing other people’s experiences helps me to set my own boundaries between my work and my life, to strive for balance and to remind myself that I’m trying to make a living, not kill myself.

Spare room tycoons are an astonishingly diverse group of people. We are, after all, people who feel compelled to express our individuality through running our own businesses. What we do is shaped by very different ideas of who we are, what we want to be, and how we want to live our lives. There is no one recipe for successful self-employment. Each one of us is starting with a completely different set of ingredients. And each is hoping for a unique result.

Many spare room tycoons with whom I spoke see self-employment as an ethical choice, one that allows them to make promises they are able to keep. Others see their careers as a mission, an adventure, a struggle, or an accident.

Nearly everyone I spoke to sees what they are doing now as the result of a series of influences, experiences and emotions that began in childhood. Once we start to talk, it is difficult to shut us up. As spare room tycoons we seem prone to describe our lives as a quest in which we are the heroes. And setbacks are, we hope, only temporary. They steel us and prepare us for the final triumph.

All of our stories contain a lesson, some of them lessons that their tellers know they have to keep learning again and again. Some of the lessons are negative, and others seem to contradict each other. After all, what works for me might not work for you. But I do expect that in most stories you will find a situation or an emotion with which you can identify, and which will assist us in the invention of that one-of-a-kind creation that is our career.

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Article Tags: anxieties, building contractors, cautionary tales, chance encounters, computer entrepreneurs, diverse group, emotional challenges, happy accidents, independent business, independents, individuality, lamentations, lonely lives, misunderstanding, offhand remarks, reassurance, running a business, satisfactions, spare room, tycoons



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