Author: Krikor

We all have the dream of freedom and its possession and mostly financial freedom. We want to be free in everything we do in our life, in our daily struggle to feel better, have more free time to spend with our families, more money to feel free buying anything we like, freedom to feel safe, freedom to travel to exotic destinations and relax endlessly under the sun while grabbing a cold cocktail full of crushed ice.

Then comes the fear of not being able to do anything related to this personal and financial freedom that we are all seeking. Mainly because of the social pressure surrounding us, because of our daily job and its killing routine, because of the family stability (for the married people) and the bills dropping inside our mailbox at the end of each and every month, because few are those who want to get out of their comfort zone and take risks by leaving their secured jobs and by throwing themselves into new ventures in order to get more freedom.

And after doing so, many will be facing the new reality that being in a new venture on your own also means less freedom at the early stages. You will have to spend more time on your project(s), work on holidays, your close family might end up seeing you even less, your friends will hate you for not spending time with them. You will miss your gym class and eat less or sometimes even eat more junk.

Then whenever someone is ready to take the leap of being on his own, most people fall into the trap of differentiating between being self-employed or owning and running their business and there is a big difference between the 2 things.

Being self-employed does not need you to leave your daily job, if you are a graphic designer you can always manage getting some external projects and deliver them on time, you can also be a consultant and run few market researches during the weekend and write a decent report about the product in questions, or you might be a fashion designer who can draw some nice wedding dresses and email them to the big name designers who hire part timers.

But when you plan to own and run a business based on a dream of yours that needs to be funded, that is something quite more complicated than designing a logo from the comfort of your lazy boy. Consider the anxiety of pitching VCs, the hours you will spend writing and picking the right words for your presentation, the endless questions you will be asked about your idea and always wonder why these strangers should trust you and pour a million bucks into your bank account.

This can and will be the most important sales call of your life, because you need to sell yourself before your idea, then you leave that big conference room expecting an answer and start hitting the “send & receive” button of your outlook zillions of times and grab your smartphone every 2 seconds to check if that lucky email landed in your inbox.

Then the company is formed, the money starts pouring and you start spending it, now you are even more anxious about the results your business will deliver. You try everyday harder to make sure you are on the right track of your business plan, you spend long nights thinking of your next killing strategy just to be ahead of your competition, you keep thinking about people who will copy your idea, you surely want them to fail but they will always be there giving you hard time, but if have the real passion for what your doing, you will surely succeed and enjoy your success.

Definitely, there are many people out there who trust or will trust you, and as Steve Jobs said: “keep looking, don’t settle“, until your dream come true.

And if ever you make it one day to the freedom territory , don’t and never forget how you got there and consider giving back to exactly the same people who are seeking their freedom with the same attitude you had when you were a seeker of freedom yourself.