Yogi’s gone

My nine year old’s mouse died recently.

It was a sad day, though I rarely interacted with the little creature during his life. He was old (more than two, I think) for a mouse and I guess nobody had expected him to make it that long.

My son took it hard even though (or perhaps because) he was at his grandparents’ house at the time and we had to call him on the last day of his little holiday to break the news.

Yogi’s last hours were as pleasant as we could make them. My wife, who cleaned his cage and fed him regularly, was particularly attached and spent the time stroking his little head, singing a special song my son had made up about him and telling him about “mousey heaven.”

All this may sound either rather silly or very familiar to you depending on how close you have been to family pets yourself.

I recall clearly the deaths of a dog and two cats growing up, all three of them animals I had spent a lot of time with and cared for.

The point is that something about the experience especially disturbed me this time around and, though I know I’m not alone in having this happen, it stiffened my resolve about a few things that have bothered me for quite some time.

When my wife headed off to pick up my son she took a short detour to a place my parents own in the country where many of the family pets are buried.

Yogi was laid to rest in a small painted box my wife had once bought for my son and then put aside after she discovered a worrisome odor and that some of the paint was chipping away. But for a beloved childhood pet it served as the perfect coffin.

The trouble was that as important as I knew it was to my son that I be there, it was impossible for me to go along due to an increasingly consuming work schedule at my full-time job.

Though I’ve never minded working hard, there is increasingly something about not having the ability to simply put my work aside, particularly work that in some cases I know could wait, simply because of someone else’s expectations.

This growing disquiet about living for someone else’s priorities rather than my own has become an important (though not the only) impetus in my personal voyage toward entrepreneurship.

I am not naive enough to believe that the expectations of customers and other consumers of my product will not be equally demanding, but three things, I believe, make the entrepreneur’s path, particularly the path of the bootstrapper, quite different.

1. Entrepreneurs, particularly bootstrappers, serve only one master, the customer, while those employed serve various layers of management, fellow employees who exert their influence through office politics and ultimately the owners of the business. (Heavily funded entrepreneurs also serve their investors, but this is another issue)
2. All these expectations may have little or nothing to do with the final quality of the product being produced and in many cases, as I have seen, may have a detrimental effect on it. (A focus on serving those actually using his/her product is something the bootstrapper can never loose.)
3. Any time sacrificed from family or other personal activities is to create something that ultimately belongs to your family and thus in some cases may benefit them in a much more long term way than a weekly paycheck and that fact makes those sacrifices easier to make

I’m sure there are many bad reasons to get into entrepreneurship. They might include the misguided notion that entrepreneurship is some short-cut to instant riches, the belief that people working for themselves don’t have to work as hard or just a natural contrariness about taking orders from someone else.

None of these, it seems to me, are good reasons to start your own business, but one reason may be. A desire to take a direct responsibility for the choices and sacrifices you make instead of letting someone else make those choices for you.

In the end it is easier to live with your own mistakes than someone else’s.