The longer you stay at a job the weaker your muscle to hustle gets. This makes you less and less suitable for leading a startup.
As you get comfortable in a job or go up the corporate ladder, most of what you do it write emails. You set up processes to control and monitor the day to day so that you have time work on the plans tomorrow. You rarely:
- Meet customers, especially the unhappy ones
- Try to promote yourself or your product
- Face criticism, skepticism publicly
- Cold call and talk to strangers
- Get beaten, get up and go at it again (muscle)
You also don’t realize how much effort and time it will take establish new products or services.
Most long time employees, looking to start a company need to be honest about their ability to hustle. They have to realise that they will not be able to make the same amount of money they will with the amount of effort they put in their jobs, especially if you have been at the same job for a while.
Most employees, me included, do not appreciate enough the monetary reward/effort ratio and moan about our jobs more than we should.