Do you really want to be an entrepreneur? Or are you just sick of your job?
Becoming an entrepreneur doesn't always stem from the desire to have a company. Often it comes from the exhaustion of working for someone else. Understanding this difference is key.
Starting a business doesn't always come from wanting to have a company. Often it comes from being tired of working for someone else. Understanding that difference doesn't tell you whether you should quit, but it's the point from which certain moves that used to be invisible start to become possible.
You leave the meeting with your stomach in knots. You got feedback you weren't expecting. The bonus didn't come through. You close the laptop and two hours later you're already watching videos about being your own boss and quitting your job for good.
It's almost never that you want to have a company.
It's almost always that you want to stop feeling the way you feel when you work for someone else.
Entrepreneurship can be a decision. It can also turn into a fantasy where you place the hope of solving conflicts that started long before you opened a business. Changing jobs can change your life. But no company can do the work of getting to know yourself for you.
Why does the job become all bad and entrepreneurship all good?
Something very precise happens in many organizations. You leave a one-on-one where you were told your delivery wasn't up to par. Or you see on Slack that they congratulated the one who always aces it.
You feel small. Exposed. Your mind needs to do something quick with that discomfort.
So it splits. It puts everything frustrating, dependent, and unfair in one place: the job. And it puts everything free, recognized, and enough in another place: entrepreneurship. One object becomes completely bad. The other, completely good. No ambivalence. That way it hurts less.
Klein described this operation as splitting. The idealization that comes with it isn't optimism. It's a defense so you don't have to think about what's actually hurting.
Once that division sets in, projection does the rest. The conflict stops being questioned and gets located outside. It's no longer "what's going on with me and authority, or with being evaluated?" It becomes "the problem is working for other people."
Why doesn't entrepreneurship always remove what makes you suffer?
Because what isn't questioned repeats itself on another stage.
It's not that you can't tolerate having a boss. You learned that being watched and evaluated makes you feel not good enough. The easy diagnosis says you need autonomy and to be your own boss. The real reading is that the position of being evaluated confronts you with something from before that autonomy alone doesn't solve.
That is why certain scenes repeat themselves after you start a business.
Whoever couldn't tolerate the boss correcting them in the weekly now can't tolerate a client questioning their proposal.
Whoever was trying to stop depending on someone finds out they now depend on cash flow, on the algorithm, on whether someone replies to an email.
Whoever hoped to finally feel recognized still feels not good enough, even though their name is now on the invoice.
There's a shiny image circulating on Instagram, on podcasts, in business books. The entrepreneur who quit everything, got up early, and is now free and making money. That image starts to function as a measure of what you should be. If you don't feel good enough in your job, that figure promises repair. Not just success. It promises you'll stop feeling not good enough.
Freud called that instance that watches you from above and tells you how you should be to be worthy again the ego ideal. When entrepreneurship takes up that place, it is no longer a project. It is an impossible demand.
Where does that urgency to leave in order to feel enough come from?
It did not start at this job.
Long before your first Slack, you learned what you had to do to be seen and valued. Maybe it was acing every test. Maybe it was not causing trouble. Maybe it was adapting fast.
It was not a bad decision. It was a smart solution to what your environment demanded. The problem is that solution turns into a suit. It works, but it pinches. And when it pinches at your job, the most immediate exit culture offers you is: leave. Start a business. Be free.
Understanding that logic does not take away the frustration. It gives you a different place to look at it from. See related topic on recognition and authority at work
From there, something becomes possible.
You can ask yourself what part of your desire to start a business comes from a project you are interested in, and what part comes from a fantasy of salvation. You can ask yourself what you are getting by putting everything bad on the job and everything good on entrepreneurship. And you can start noticing which conflict goes quiet when you say "the problem is my job" — and which one stays lit up.
So look at your job with a different question. Not just whether you want to stay or leave. But what you are asking the idea of entrepreneurship to solve for you.
If the company you imagine has to make you feel free, recognized, and enough forever, no company will ever be enough.
