LinkedIn is full of them.
The Entrepreneur. Capital E. The one who posts three times a day about hustle culture, scaling secrets, and how they doubled revenue while meditating in a cold plunge. The one who’s launching a new business every quarter, hosts a podcast about tenacity, and swears they haven’t had a carb since 2016. Their feeds are flooded with startup jargon, client wins, and captions like “Let’s. Freaking. Go.”
And then there’s you.
The reluctant entrepreneur.
Maybe you inherited a family business. Maybe your pandemic side gig got a little too successful, and now it’s your full-time job. Maybe you freelanced your way out of a layoff and suddenly realized you’ve been running a business for two years without meaning to.
You didn’t want to “build an empire.” You just wanted to pay your bills without sitting in traffic or crying in a conference room.
This wasn’t the plan.
You didn’t dream about becoming a solopreneur as a child. You didn’t doodle org charts in your Lisa Frank notebook. And you certainly didn’t wake up one day and think, “You know what sounds fun? Running payroll and negotiating vendor contracts!”
Maybe it was your uncle’s business, and you were the only one left who knew how QuickBooks worked. Maybe your handmade candles exploded on TikTok and suddenly you were shipping to six countries with zero logistics support. Maybe you just said yes one too many times and now you’re here – Googling “how to fire yourself.”
There’s a lot of stuff no one tells you about “Being Your Own Boss” (spoiler: it sometimes sucks).
Sure, there’s freedom. But there’s also the crushing weight of having to do it all. You’re the CEO, the intern, the accountant, the sales rep, the customer service team, and the emotional support animal. You can’t call IT because you are IT.
And what about the stuff you never set out to do? What if you hate marketing, dread networking, and would rather clean a stranger’s gutters than record a LinkedIn video talking about your “journey?” You haven’t checked your CRM in three months, mostly because you’re not sure how to log in. And every time someone asks about your growth strategy, you pretend you didn’t hear them over the sound of your own existential dread.
You can love your work – and still not love the business part of it.
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And what’s often the cruelest twist in this trap of success is the fact that you’re good at what you do.
So you get referrals, word spreads, and the work keeps coming in. And with it, a growing pile of administrative sludge. What if you don’t want to scale? What if you just want to do your thing, get paid fairly, and not have to think about quarterly goals or brand positioning?
But now you can’t quit. You’re too deep in. You’ve got clients, contracts, and recurring revenue. You fantasize about being acquired – not by a big investor, but by a mid-level manager who will pay you a decent salary and give you back your Sundays.
You keep going and find ways to make it tolerable. You hire a bookkeeper, outsource the stuff that drains your will to live, and stop pretending you care about KPIs.
You get honest about what you want, what you don’t want, and what success looks like … for you.
You allow yourself to be enough without having to perform founder cosplay.
You’re not lazy. You’re not ungrateful. You’re just trying to build a life that works – without having to pitch it on a carousel slide.
And that? Is entrepreneurial enough.
