If you have a strong enough “Why”, then you can tolerate any “How”.
Wanting to be your own boss, or having the ability to freely travel the world are both a great “Why” to create the activation energy to take the risk and start. But in my experience, it’s rarely a strong enough motivator to help someone persist through 4+ years without any meaningful wins.
The strongest "Why" usually involves serving something other than yourself. For some founders I’ve invested in, it’s a specific group of people (e.g. patients with a particular disease), or protecting something specific about the natural environment. Those people I have seen tolerate extreme suffering - to the point that I have had to physically bite my tongue in conversations where I wanted to tell them to stop and give up (but I never did - better a cut tongue than adding my opinion/ego to their burden). Some of those founders ultimately failed, others found enough wins and are still going (and suffering), a tiny number experienced wild success.
So if you want to persist, then an interesting question is "Who" or "What" are you serving besides yourself?
A separate but related question is how long can your personal cash flow sustain this?
I don't have this sort of experience with founders to validate the specific claim that it needs to be about more than you - to give you the reason to keep going.
But I do have my own personal life experience in general... I've been a pretty self centered person in my motivation throughout my life. But eventually I reached a point where my drive just dried up. A deep and persistant despair began to infect everything I tried to do. What was the point of it... even if I succeeded somehow, it was all just going to be more of ME at the end of it. And I was pretty sick of me.
Strangely, it was a cat that saved me. A neighbours cat I used to walk past in the mornings as it was enjoying a winter sunbeam. I'd give it an ear scratch which it appreciated greatly. And I realised that interaction was giving me more pleasure / amusement than any of the big, important projects going on in my life at the time. Making some thing's / one's life better - even in some small way - is the raison d'etre I was missing. It's so obvious and simple to me now - yet somehow I'd gone through half my life blind to it.
Now I call it: the principle of the cat. It gets a laugh out of people, when I tell them that story.
I've always said it's about the fans. Even when we're making a credit card or something, the fact that people create entire groups to discuss the product is pretty cool.
Wanting to be your own boss, or having the ability to freely travel the world are both a great “Why” to create the activation energy to take the risk and start. But in my experience, it’s rarely a strong enough motivator to help someone persist through 4+ years without any meaningful wins.
The strongest "Why" usually involves serving something other than yourself. For some founders I’ve invested in, it’s a specific group of people (e.g. patients with a particular disease), or protecting something specific about the natural environment. Those people I have seen tolerate extreme suffering - to the point that I have had to physically bite my tongue in conversations where I wanted to tell them to stop and give up (but I never did - better a cut tongue than adding my opinion/ego to their burden). Some of those founders ultimately failed, others found enough wins and are still going (and suffering), a tiny number experienced wild success.
So if you want to persist, then an interesting question is "Who" or "What" are you serving besides yourself?
A separate but related question is how long can your personal cash flow sustain this?
Good luck!