What Starting A Business Will Teach You About Life

Some valuable lessons from entrepreneurship.

7 min readNov 27, 2020

Five years ago I resigned from a lucrative tech job. I had a boss who didn’t inspire me, a job that I didn’t find challenging enough and no upward mobility. As a young professional in my twenties, the sky was the limit. I had huge dreams, aspirations and hopes for the way I wanted my life to be.

And so off I went to start my own company. Whilst, I learned a lot about business along the way, I learned even more about myself. I evolved personally in a way that would have taken me decades otherwise.

Here are 5 life lessons I learned through my journey of starting a business.

Be Humble

From walking in and out of boardrooms selling business software to suddenly dropping flyers door to door as I launched a startup, being a founder really grounded me. It didn’t matter if I had an MBA or a high salary potential anymore. All that mattered was I was trying to advertise my business with the minimal money spent. And if trying to not get caught soliciting buildings with flyers isn’t humbling then I don’t know what is.

When you start a business your job is to win customers. You do everything from customer service to operations all to seamlessly pull off a vision that lives in your mind. And that too well before you can employ an army of individuals to distribute “menial” tasks to. When you start a business no task is too big or small. From running to grab pizzas to keep our small team motivated to being the call agent on the other end of a 1–800 number, this was all included in my description as CEO.

It’s humbling to realize how much work goes into making every single dollar after being at the receiving end of a fixed salary for several years. When you have a job, you are privileged because someone else has to worry about keeping the lights on.

Empathy matters

If you want to feel what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes, being an entrepreneur will teach you to work with all kinds of people with many different perspectives. Whether that be negotiating a contract with a vendor or hiring your first employee, you will have to learn to be empathetic towards other people. To create a company with a strong culture and team, empathy will form the glue that will bind your ship together.

Before starting my venture, I lived in a corporate bubble. I hung out with friends who had similar lifestyles, we went to similar places and associated mostly with those just like us. This meant I often didn’t understand life from different vantage points. When I suddenly had to be a delivery driver or deal with a customer complaint, I realized what it was like to be in many different shoes every day.

As customers, we often demand the best service, the best price and the list goes on. We forget the person on the other end of a call is human too, doing their job to the best of their abilities. Being an entrepreneur brings an appreciation for the work behind the scenes that we otherwise ignore.

Resourcefulness is key

Whilst being stingy is frowned upon, being thrifty and resourceful is a great life skill. And what better way to learn it than through a bootstrapped business?

Learning to get the maximum results with the minimum input is a dream. In business, you try to constantly generate more dollars than you spend. This is often difficult in the early days when you have to invest a lot of money on getting things off the ground. The livelihood of your business will depend on minimizing cash burn and being thrifty with money.

Being resourceful teaches you to be more creative and innovative in finding solutions to problems, which come up every day. After all, an entrepreneur is a professional problem solver. The mindset you learn starting your business serves you well in every adverse situation you face in life. As they say, where this is a will there is a way.

Celebrate the small wins

Having your own business will make you appreciate the journey. Every small step you take successfully will be a reason to celebrate. You won’t be waiting for a promotion and idling away in the interim. You’ll learn to be grateful for the many milestones you hit as your business matures.

Given the risk and volatility of launching a business, no two days are the same and there is no guarantee for tomorrow. As such, you learn to take each day as it comes and often to just go with the flow. The rigidity and structure of corporate life will not serve you well. Things that used to feel trivial will feel much more important — from earning an extra $100 to getting a positive review.

Grit to keep moving forward

Whilst being your own boss is incredibly rewarding, some days are incredibly difficult. You often just want to give up. If there is one thing you learn as an entrepreneur it is sheer grit and resilience. You will persevere through months of not knowing what will happen next and just have faith to keep marching on.

Everything from whether you will meet payroll the next month to how you will manage an influx of new orders will keep you up at night. You will be at the receiving end of angry customers even if you do a great job 99% of the time. We all make mistakes. You will learn to develop a thick skin to let things go. As with anything in life, big dreams are only realized when you stay on the path where everyone else has given up.

“Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill

These are some of the key life skills starting a company will teach you. Not only will it make you grow as a person, your entire outlook on life and the journey we are all on will also change. And for this reason, no matter what happens with your business, you will evolve for the better. Take a chance.