The Start-Up Of You

The Daily Stoic for July 11th. “The Start-up Of You”.

“But what does Socrates say? ‘Just as one person delights in improving his farm, and another his horse, so I delight in attending to my own improvement day by day.’”
—EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.5.14

Today’s daily stoic launches an interesting question. Namely, how would our lives be if we treated them as a startup? Devoting the same effort and devotion to our life as to starting a new business.

I think this might be a legit question. After all, as micropreneurs, we spend a lot of personal time and effort improving our businesses. We work our asses off and take some risks that can potentially affect our personal lives.

The Start-Up Of You

While I agree that we should take our personal lives as seriously as any business, can we really apply the same strategies?

Let me try…

The right way of starting a business is detecting a need in an underserved market. That can match to find something that’s not working in our lives. Maybe we are stressed, or money is tight. Perhaps we feel lost and cannot stick to a job, or feel anxious, or sad. Whatever the case, I think this can be the starting point.

Then supposedly we need to study the market to figure out if that need is actually monetizable and figure out a good solution for it. The equivalent in our personal lives would be analyzing the source of our problems or feelings. Why do we feel like that? Why are we in that situation?

Finally, we need to build an initial solution to serve that need. That would mean looking for a tool or taking a decision that will hopefully change our current situation.

That, of course, is just the beginning, as any entrepreneur may know. Ahead of us lies a long, difficult path, full of issues, excitement, and uncertainty in equal parts. We can succeed and be rewarded with a better version of ourselves, or we can fail and get back to the same bad situation or pattern.

All in all, I can’t help but feel this matching is kind of unnatural. I see my life as a complex entity, full of different pulls and motivations. Something that evolves very slowly, not something that can work or not in a short period of time.

Conclusion

Today’s Daily Stoic, “The Start-Up Of You”, poses an interesting question. Why don’t we treat ourselves as a start-up and devote the same level of effort and dedication? However, while a concrete situation or problem in your life could be matched to an entrepreneurial adventure, as a whole I find the metaphor forced.