I imagine a lot of people who will be reading these words possess some version of what we might call "the entrepreneurial spirit."

The idea of starting your own business, and running a business, seems appealing to many. That said, the whole idea of actually running a business is largely an abstraction for most people.

Theory and Reality

That is, the whole idea looks very appealing on paper and a person may even have a great idea, but they have absolutely no sense for what the nuts and bolts of running a business is actually about.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I worked as a bit of a freelance business consultant to people in the IT industry (where I had worked), who were getting tired of the corporate Rat Race and stress, and wanted to set out and be in business for themselves.

Some wanted to be independent software developers, some wanted to work with the tech field and invent some kind of new technology based on what they knew, and some people wanted to branch out in a completely different direction.

In the course of the handful of years I did this kind of consulting work, I got to hear a lot of stories, and I talked to a lot of different people. And, quite honestly, many of them had some good ideas but very few had any kind of grip on what they would actually be required to do to make those ideas work as a business.

I found myself wanting to write these words, because my experience with wanting to be Independent Business People back then in some ways remind me a lot of the state of numerous crypto and blockchain projects, so filled with initial bravado and hot air, and so filled with all manners of issues later om.

There's an idea — and it may be a very good one — and there may be a great vision and the desire to get it up and running... and then everything grinds to a halt after a surprisingly short while, at least if we don't immediately take off for the moon. It happens because the person in charge (or the people in charge) had no idea that it was going to be as much of a grind and require as much patience as it does to get up, running and then persevering.

Failing Too Soon

And so, we see a long trail of failed projects and projects that haven't quite failed but have been more or less abandoned by their creators. I believe that most of them are abandoned by their creators because those creators underestimate it what it would take to actually get a sustainable long-term venture going.

Back when I started my first business, there was a popular statistic going around that 80% of small independent businesses fail within the first five years. The reading between the lines part of that particular statistic was that in most cases you needed to give your business five years to even know whether or not it is/was a success!

In these days of 15-second sound bites and news stories as short as tweets, few people actually have the patience to see something through from conceptualization to being fully established.

Going back to my original consulting business, I would often be called in to see if I could help with something that was "struggling." Much of the time it would turn out that the business actually wasn't struggling, but its principal had kind of lost a little bit of the energy that he/she had had in the beginning, and what was plaguing the business was simply a lack of being patient enough.

It was a "syndrome" I was already quite familiar from a number of years working in network marketing where it was always a challenge to find a meeting point between dreams and promises and reality. Pretty much anything you undertake — aside from pure dumb luck! — is going to require work and patience to succeed.

Gradually I came to recognize that most independent businesses don't fail because they are bad ideas or are run poorly, they fail because they're not allowed to succeed on account of the people who are in charge giving up on them before they've had a chance to succeed.

I can't help but think that there's also a lesson for the crypto industry here.

Even though we like to move our technology and our ideas super quickly, it does take time to get to the point of being established and successful. As @taskmaster4450 is fond of pointing out, the likes of Amazon and Tesla didn't become what they are overnight or even in a matter of a few years.

There's pretty much no reason why we should be exempt from that particular paradigm, even though we like to worship at the magical altars of Blockchain and Web 3.0!

One of the things I like about what's happening here on Hive is the fact that there's some durability and long-term thinking here. It's part of that serious commitment that's an essential part of success!

=^..^=

Curator Cat 19 November, 2023