No one has it all. Everything costs something.
A lot of hustle-culture lifestyle business nonsense shows people driving fancy cars, being influential, spending time in beautiful places, blah blah blah. And a big part of what draws people to entrepreneurship is this idea that they too can be rich, powerful, and control their own destiny.
Most of that is bullshit.
It’s easy to forget that everything *costs* something. Building a startup consumed everything about my life for years other than it, and the time I carved out for family. And at the end of it, it cost me another five years in therapy and waking nightmares and cPTSD, and a handful of relationships I once valued. It gave me a certain level of financial independence, which is a massive visible positive (and which I never, ever take for granted), but on balance, I’d trade the latter to get rid of the former, which I know may seem weird to folks who didn’t go through it. And that’s all invisible to people. What is visible is the “success”. No one sees the cost. This is true for almost any level of any type of success.
You look at folks like Elon Musk – he’s got the adoring throngs of sycophants, and more money than … well, almost anyone else in the world. But what did it cost him? He doesn’t have great relationships (if any at all) with his children or spouses, he doesn’t have any relationships to anyone who isn’t so far up his butt that he can maintain any connection to reality. Is that a trade you’d make? I wouldn’t.
You know the kinds of folks at work who will stab their co-workers in the back and get promoted. You know the folks who work 20-hour days at the cost of their health and their marriage.
Maybe you look around and think, “How is it that this is all I’ve managed to achieve when others have done so much more?” And sometimes, yeah – you hit a rough patch and don’t make a ton of progress. But I think more often than not, what you’ll find is that the people who achieved that thing you call success were willing to pay a price that you *weren’t willing to pay*. And while hustle-culture bros will tell you you’ve gotta learn to pay that price, I have a different message for you:
Knowing what your boundaries are is more valuable than almost anything else in the world. Understanding what you will not do and why, and having the integrity to live up to those values? Yeah, it will often cost you. But in the long run, knowing who you are, and what you believe in is a really difficult, often very expensive thing to learn. That’s *character*. That’s *integrity*. That’s your *soul*.
Don’t trade it for anything.