Written by Ross Buhrdorf. The Chief Executive Officer and Founder of ZenBusiness, a $1.7 billion company providing business software and services to "help over 700,000 entrepreneurs make the leap from their day jobs and start their businesses".
This feels like propaganda to promote their products.
As someone who got into this track a few years ago, i think it's rewarding in certain ways but my overall considered opinion of the the article is LOL.
My intuition is that this article/claim is nonsense. But I have no doubt that people who are less stressed or better at dealing with stress are more likely to start a business...
Being in a stressful situation that you have little or no control over is likely creating a bad form of stress. Such as being trapped in a corporate job under a toxic management structure.
However, dealing with your growing business and recruiting to fulfill more orders than you can otherwise handle, that's probably a good stress.
Watching your business collapse and orders vanish, thats a bad stress!
Stress isn't one thing, and running a business generally creates stress at both ends of the Good Stress vs Evil Stress Tier List! ;-)
Now financial security on the other hand, that has to be around the top of the Stress Reduction list!
I have to say this is surprising. I have a cousin who co-founded what was once the largest email spam filtering company in Europe. He said that if he could get a do-over he'd just take a 9-to-5 and not deal with the stress and how much it had aged him. Of course this is just an anecdote and it's possible he was doing it wrong™, but it certainly fits the trend with others I have spoken to. For example, there's a feeling that the buck stops with you, it's difficult to establish boundaries for a healthy work life balance because there's no one else to pick up the slack. And if no one picks up the slack then you just get outcompeted by the businesses that do.
I wonder if there's a difference between various types of self employment where some are on net less stressful than others. In my cousin's case as a co-founder, there may still have been a lot of pressure from other team members, which is only marginally better than having a boss. Also, if there are effective strategies one can employ to limit issues that can have a negative impact in a self employed context, then further studies to elucidate such would be incredibly valuable.
It's not about just starting a business but employing folks, working with them as a team, sharing ideas with them and collectively become stakeholders of a new creation. The ultimate source of stress reduction is the people or folks, not material wealth!
The autonomy you gain from starting a business is also a big deal. You can work long and hard with low stress when you are the one making decisions. Burnout comes from being powerless and at the mercy of someone else.
For whatever reason, Fortune articles appear frequently on HN. Although they almost never receive a high number of votes, I am surprised that this critical-thinking community still has them show up. I understand that Fortune articles are written in a style that appeals to the HN audience (myself included), but they often lack substantive analysis and read more like carefully crafted PR pieces than genuine journalism. The articles tend to follow a formulaic pattern of surface-level business narratives while avoiding any meaningful critical examination, essentially functioning as sophisticated native advertising.
I have always believed that the purpose of employment (of working for someone else) is to gain enough savings and skills to eventually launch your own business. If you don't execute this plan, you risk feeling frustrated and trapped. An exception is if you have a parasitic value-robbing position somewhere which not everyone does.
> An exception is if you have a parasitic value-robbing position somewhere which not everyone does.
Could be said for both, business owner and employee. In most businesses, the owner usually pays a small fraction of value generated by any employee. In other places, management builds multiple layers of hierarchy where they simply rob value by being a middleman with adding zero or negative value overall.
Also, some of us prefer the predictable life of doing our best and going home or moving on to somewhere else where that is possible. Many do not have rich daddies showering money one day because they want a hobby and start a business. Here in EU, starting a business at certain nations means mountain of paperwork and infinite laws one can break and go bankrupt without hiring 50 accountants, tax advising and lawyer services.
Most people I know just like being good at their job, helping people, getting paid a reasonable wage, etc. The ones driven to run their own thing are much more dissatisfied as a general rule than a normal person.
But if you didn't - why would such a godlike super smart employer keep so many leeches on staff? An interesting contradiction in a certain conception of corporations.
"The results overwhelmingly favored entrepreneurs, who evidenced significantly lower blood pressure and hypertension rates, fewer hospital visits, and reduced incidence of physical and mental illnesses."
How many times do we need to repeat the basic statistical fact that correlation does not equal causation? We need to teach this in grade school because it is lost on so many people.
You can think up many attributes of entrepreneurs that might explain lower stress in general: more entrepreneurs likely come from wealth, have resources to start a business, have a sense of confidence in themselves etc.
This feels like propaganda to promote their products.