On Growing Up And Entrepreneurship
Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up. -Maya Angelou
When I was a kid, I had a lot of dreams for when I grew up.
At one point, I wanted to be a ballerina. I think every little girl who has ever seen a pink leotard and tutu has had ballerina as their life goal at some point. At other times I wanted to a lawyer, a physicist, an artist, a writer, an engineer, a baker/chef, and a scientist. The list was endless, and the possibilities seemed endless.
While some of these dreams came true, what was never explained to me as a child, or an adult for that matter, is what defines growing up. I mean, how do you know you’re grown?
As a child, I associated growing up with aging. If you were old enough to say, “stay out of grown folks business,’ you were an adult to me. When I became old enough to say things like that, I, like most people, associated adulthood with the physical age set by law.
In the United States, that physical age is 18 years old. But, truth be told, the law only defines 18 as the age of adulthood because that’s when we are allowed to vote in elections.
I certainly don’t consider 18-year-olds to be adults in any other capacity. Do you? Most kids, yes, I said kids, are just graduating high school at 18. And science tells us that you don’t have a fully developed brain until 25.
While I think many people would say that setting adulthood at age 25 feels too late, I believe that the hallmark of growing up isn’t aging. I’ve known people in their 20s, 30s, 40, 50s, and beyond that I still would not consider “grown-up.” It’s not because they don’t take care of their kids or pay their mortgage. What’s missing once most people figure out their careers and find partners, is the third piece of growing up — taking responsibility for their lives.
Somewhere along the line, things just started happening to us. We end up in jobs we hate but think we can’t change. We have friends, spouses, family members, and bosses in our lives that harm us, but we tell ourselves there’s nothing we can do about it because “that’s just life.”
But that’s not life or adulthood. That’s aging. Here’s the difference.
What It Means To Be An Adult
There’s an on-going debate about what it means to be an adult today. But in my view, it comes down to three things — accepting responsibility, financial independence, and independent decision-making.
While most lawyers have the responsibility and economic independence thing down, it’s independent decision-making that trips us up. Sure, we no longer let our parents or family tell us what to do. But we have replaced our parents with partners, managers, and supervisors.
In most legal professional environments, if a partner or supervisor tells you to do something, you do it. Despite having to call out injustice on behalf of our clients, when it comes to our work, we sit there and take it like obedient children.
The object is pleasing the partner, aka our replacement parent, at all costs. Even if that partner doesn’t align with our values, is exploiting us, or behaves disrespectfully, we take it because we need a job. Seemingly to pay for all the things of adulthood life that appear to keep us tied to damaging situations.
Growing Up and Entrepreneurship
The low hum of misery at work is a social norm that we’ve come to accept as being part of adulthood. Adults pay bills, so they have to keep their jobs at all costs, right? Even if they hate it, correct?
Look, I’m not saying that everyone should go off and quit their job right now. But what I am saying is that staying in a job you hate does not demonstrate the independent decision making of an adult. Partners do not get to define success for you. They supervise your work and decide on the trajectory of their business.
But their business is not your life.
If you decide that a partner’s work demands don’t fit your view of success, it is not because you can’t hack it. It’s because their work style does not work for you.
And you get to make that choice.
That is independent decision-making. It is deciding to do whatever is best for you no matter what the social norms may be or what other people are doing.
When you become an entrepreneur, you have no choice but to do that. In fact, at its essence, an entrepreneur is just someone who makes independent decisions about everything. We decide on what we do, who we will serve, and how we will serve them. And if we want our businesses to stand out, those decisions have to demonstrate our uniqueness and our ability to think “outside the box” when it comes to serving our customers.
“Thinking outside the box” is just another term for independent decision making aka growing up. And as an entrepreneur, that level of independent decision making seeps into every aspect of our lives.
The more often we grow our businesses and make those decisions, the more unwilling we are to just “take” things outside of work. Instead, we take responsibility for our lives and our happiness by deciding what works for us and what does not. We become grown-ups as Maya Angelou defined it and finally step into the adult power we were truly meant to have.
What are your thoughts on growing up? Do you see any parallels between adulthood and entrepreneurship/ Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.