Elif Shafak recently wrote a post on the “perfect writing schedule“, broadly about how many writers have to carve out time to write.
My instinctive response in the comments:
I write because I cannot not write. I’ve had a discipline of posting a daily blog now for over six years, rarely missing a day. When I have missed a day or two, the drive has come back, and I do find the time, somehow, somewhere. Always.
That said, I do understand the limits that life places upon so many in finding time to write. The same can apply to being an entrepreneur or other life and work choices. For me (as an entrepreneur for most of my life), the answer to why I wrote is the same as to why I chose to be in business rather than in employment, I simply “couldn’t not” do it.
As you can see, this prompted me to recall the line I’ve heard most often from entrepreneurs on why they started their business, which is:
I couldn’t not do it
In talking to someone recently, there are a few factors that inform whether or not someone does quit a job and launch a business:
- Being someone who seems to always look for and then see gaps where one could start a business and succeed
- Having a natural risk profile of someone willing to “go for it” rather than play safe in life and work
- Having a situational (current) risk profile where you are in a position to be able to “go for it”. It is wildly different to be living hand to mouth and risking your home and family to launch a business.
All in all, though, you must also be driven to do it to a level where, in hindsight, you “couldn’t not do it.”