There’s a huge difference between being an employee and an owner.
It’s not about the work itself. Employees can do everything owners can do, and often more. It’s about the mindset. Employees get to maintain one of the most comfortable illusions in human nature. The illusion that there is a set of answers.
No one believes those answers are always correct. But the idea that they exist is a mental backstop that relieves a ton of stress. I might not know the answer, but it exists, and someone knows it. I can disagree with it, but it’s there.
The realization upon becoming an owner is that there is no such thing as answers that exist out there in the universe. You make them up. You make all of it up. And there’s no way to know if it’s right and no one to judge it or reward or punish you. There is only you and reality and whatever you make up to mediate and navigate between the two.
It’s unsettling. But it’s true. Everyone is making everything up.
It’s true in other areas too. Your health, for example. If you have some symptoms it’s not like somewhere some guy has the answers. Whoever you consult with, they will take in the facts they can gather as they see them, and make up what they think is going on. It’s comforting when they have more experience in making up such things than you. But at the end of the day, they are just making it up.
There are no guarantees.
To be an owner of anything – a business, your health, relationships, and life – is to realize you are making it up. Winning is getting comfortable with that fact.