We’ve all heard the near-mythic stories about founders who worked 100 hours a week for years while they were starting up their businesses, making incredible sacrifices in every other area of their life before striking gold and rocketing up the Forbes net worth list.

Most of us don’t aspire to be billionaires, or maybe even millionaires. We want to create work we believe in, work that matters and get paid fairly for it.

For many of us, part of the draw is that a life in which we work our own gig appears to be full of more ease, more flexibility, more control over our routines and circumstances.

While we may not aspire to build startups or businesses with massive teams, we understand that setting up our own little business for ourselves will still take work, commitment and sacrifices.

So we take the familiar founder stories and scale them back to suite a smaller-scale operation.

Setting Expectations

We’re not really sure how someone could humanly work 100 hours a week, but 50 or 60 seems manageable, at least while we’re starting up.

We feel like by putting in the long hours, by prioritizing our work over the rest of our lives, we’re following in the footsteps of a long line of entrepreneurs before us.

This is exciting for a year, and our business grows, validating the time, effort and focus we put in. So we continue on as before, feeling that this must be the only way to build a business, that maybe after another year things will start getting easier.

We commit to building up systems to allow us to work smarter, instead of harder. We might even bring on a contractor or employee or two to help free up our time more.

This helps, at least a bit, shrinking our to-do list from four pages more than we can do today down to two and a half.

There’s fewer minutiae, less client work on the list, more big picture decisions, but we start to feel the pressure of those decisions now that they will affect more than just us.

Again, we wonder, “When is this going to get easier? Will this get easier?”

Reassessing Your Dream Job

It’s easy to fantasize about a life in which we work for ourselves and are in complete control of everything in our orbit.

Clients show up precisely when we need them, they give us complete creative control over the work, and we get paid more than adequately for it.

From the outside, it appears that we’re the only ones for which this entrepreneurial life is hard. Everyone we can see around us is experiencing massive growth, landing dream clients, creating incredible work, and posting a steady stream of photos on Instagram of them traveling the world, working from exotic locales.

The reality of our day to day is so much harder than the life we left behind when we started down this road.

We realize that the hard life we traded in, one filled with work we didn’t believe in, being told what to do by others who created a plan we had no say in, passing our weeks waiting for the weekend was replaced by a new, and much harder kind of hard.

In this new hard, we are responsible for everything in our work, we often don’t know what to do and have no one to tell us what plan to follow, and the boundaries between our personal lives, our evenings, our weekends have all but disappeared.

Not to mention we have to maintain the time, energy and inspiration to create work we’re proud of while juggling the business side of things.

For some of us, we realize that this isn’t the easy life we thought it would be, and that easy is more important to us than doing the hard work of creating work that matters. And that’s fine.

But for those of us who are committed to creating our best work, work that changes people, that has an impact, maybe we need to realize that this life shouldn’t be easy.

We should realize that being a creator is a privilege, that if it were easy, everyone would do it, and that what we might lack in ease, we make up for with pride in the fact that our work is making a difference in the world.

Sure, we can create systems and structure our lives to create more ease in our lives, but this work will never be easy.

Creating work that matters requires us to continually wrestle with the unknown, to show up with vulnerability and generosity again and again and again, asking, “What about this?”, to continually be learning, connecting dots, thinking outside the box.

And then once we land on something that shows promise, we have to summon all our courage, all our resources, and face The Hard Stuff and expose our work, and ourselves, to the world, risking rejection and failure.

Whether or not it succeeds, we must then to do it all again, because it’s what we are called to do.

Making work that matters is not an easy life. It might be the furthest thing from an easy life.

But if you feel the calling to channel that spark inside you to create something meaningful, know that it’s worth it.

For you, and for all of us.

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Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!

https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/never-work-day-life-752912302ca0https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/never-work-day-life-752912302ca0