Every story led to the same truth
During the pandemic, I started interviewing entrepreneurs about their inner world - their fears, doubts and emotional struggles. The part that keeps them awake at night and don’t show in keynotes or on LinkedIn.
The number of stories and insights I gathered was overwhelming. It soon became clear that I could write multiple books on the subject, but there was one message that came up again and again: the essence of entrepreneurship is learning how to deal with setbacks and challenges. Because resilience isn’t something entrepreneurs are born with, it’s something they build in the moments no one sees.
Why founders hide their struggles
Still, even though setbacks are part of every founder’s story, we rarely talk about them openly. Many entrepreneurs told me they didn’t want to seem negative or weak. The culture rewards confidence not honesty. Vulnerability feels risky when investors, clients or teams are watching.
We even built a strange kind of theater around success: we share the pain only once we have survived it. As a result, we end up celebrating resilience in hindsight, while finding it in the moment when we need it most.
What entrepreneurs actually experience
The strange thing is that, in practice, we prefer not to talk about these challenges and setbacks. We prefer to forget them as quickly as possible and move on. In my interviews, I had to explicitly ask about these topics and give examples from other entrepreneurs before the interviewees cautiously opened up to me.
A few examples of the challenges and setbacks entrepreneurs faced : partners or customers who abandon you when the going gets tough; having to give it your all; loneliness; hoping every month that you will get enough customers to pay the rent; having to move to yet another short-let property; investing all your personal savings in a product that you are not sure will be successful; ending up with a burnout without a safety net; issues with permits; serious cash flow problems; people betraying you or running off with your ideas; having to sell your house because you’ve put all your money into the business and the creditors are at your door; your partner who’s had enough and wants a divorce even though you’re married in community of property; having to secure your most important investment while you’re in a deep depression; personnel who treat you like the big bad wolf and talk about you instead of with you.
The sources of entrepreneurial stress according to research
These raw stories are not unique. Two Australian researchers attempted to identify the most common challenges faced by entrepreneurs using focus groups and interviews. They combined these insights with previous research and created an overview of nine main categories and thirty subcategories*: The Sources of Entrepreneurial Stress Scale* (SESS). Although this list isn’t exhaustive and the specific challenges depend on the type of entrepreneur and business, it provides a good picture of the challenges of entrepreneurship.
Closing reflection
The more I dove in this topic, the more I realized: setbacks aren’t interruptions of the entrepreneurial journey. They are the journey. Success isn’t the absence of struggle; it’s the ability to overcome it.