I've been an entrepreneur since 2009. Successfully. Because I'm still an entrepreneur! And I'm now on my third success story, after Schoonspoeler, De Relatiemarketeers, it's now art and e-commerce. I'm proud of it. Admittedly, an awful lot didn't work out (quickly enough)… You have to mention that in the Netherlands, because imagine if you were boasting!
A colorful procession of commercially failed ideas and ventures have passed by, The Bookfoot (e-reader and iPad stand), Find My Bar (the IENS for cafes), Robocall (automated alarm calls), Mack Dime (book), Email Success (a label of the Relationship Marketers), and there are many more things where I couldn't get the ball rolling.
As of 2022, my art is doing great, my sock brand Feet This gains new fans daily, and my minimal marketing activities do a lot of good for my clients.
When I take my daily walk (happy, healthy, wealthy), all sorts of ideas and especially to-do lists go through my head. Better photos of the socks are needed, my website(s) need to be easier to find, Grrouch the cat needs to become more famous, I need to make videos, my socks and art need to be sold on Amazon, etc. etc.
Suddenly, I saw myself as that ox in the Indonesian wet pastures, with an ancient plow on its back, tilling the earth step by step without seeing immediate results.
Because that's what entrepreneurship is, you never know what the next harvest will be. Where the next hit lies. But those ideas need to be rolled out, better photos and videos must be taken, blogs written, cool new art collections, aaaagh!
That creates pressure. And that pressure creates stress. Nobody expects anything, but you yourself see the wasted potential of these unexecuted ideas, all those possibilities! Finding the balance between things that absolutely need to be done and having fun is like wobbling on a tightrope over a ravine every day.
That to-do list keeps growing every day because you're also working while you work, and new things come up that need to happen immediately. And so you plow on.
Suddenly, I find the idea of being that ox very pleasant. I feel akin to the ox. Mind focused, preparing the land for harvest step by step.
The beauty is that you yourself are the one who harvests. Just that extra step yields more, for now and in the future. Videos and photos can last for years, websites are online real estate with eternal potential. My cartoon Grrouch the cat, with copyright and IP, can make people happy and earn money until the end of time, just like my Ajax art collection.
That knowledge makes me enthusiastic again to wander into the soggy entrepreneurial landscape for a day and plow with my feet in the wet earth.