To define stress will imply, to a large extent, having an understanding of both the cause and the effect.
Utkarsh Piyush is one of the Youngest Digital entrepreneurs in India, who runs a successful digital media company, The Guru Media. He hails from Muzaffarpur, Bihar. He is passionate about learning new things. The young entrepreneur believes in improving his skills and adding new aspects and features to his Digital Marketing company. He has worked as a consultant for many b-town celebrities and companies.
Relating this to entrepreneurship, we understand that it is normal for an entrepreneur to experience strain or deformation. This is because entrepreneurship, just as other professions, can be a rough path littered with random challenges and failures. As such, every entrepreneur has had his/her fair share of stress, both young and old; hence, it will be safe to say that there is hardly any successful entrepreneur who hasn’t hit the rock at some point or fallen flat on his/her face.
The difference between one stressed entrepreneur and another lies in the strategies – simple or complex – employed to tackle stress.
Viewing this from two different perspectives: pre-adulthood and adulthood, do young entrepreneurs have an advantage over stress compared to advanced/older entrepreneurs?
To be able to answer this question correctly and satisfactorily, certain factors that generally influence human life must be put into consideration: one of them is responsibility.
It is natural for humans to be encumbered with different responsibilities in life, however, the weight tends to differ between the younger individual and the advanced, usually lighter on the former. This favours the young entrepreneur as he/she has little to no responsibilities that might weigh down or affect the management of the business, giving him a greater advantage, compared to the older entrepreneur.
Utkarsh, CEO of Guru Media puts it that “it is common sense that the older we get, the more responsibilities we get to deal with. As a result, it would make sense to start the entrepreneurship journey as early as possible, and at a time when a young man or woman is not being bothered by the stress of responsibilities of adult life such as paying bills, raising kids, looking after many other people, etc.”
Inasmuch as this opinion is easily debatable, the fact is glaring and the answer is obvious.
Understanding this from the perspective of profitability, it can be said that entrepreneurs tend to do better as they advance in age. Businesses started and managed by people who are 40 years and above tend to thrive a whole lot better thank business started by younger and often inexperienced individuals. Nonetheless, the founder of Facebook and other series of entrepreneurs in his league would be exceptions from this submission. This is because, at very young ages, they were able to start, manage multi-million and even billion-dollar business and are currently running them successfully. This is the pivot on which this exposition revolves.
“It is easy to point billionaire entrepreneurs who run successful businesses and still have great families. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, quickly come to mind. They seem to have been able to manage the stress that comes with entrepreneurship pretty well. But I believe starting early helped Mark attain a decent degree of growth in his venture before the responsibilities of fatherhood caught up with him.”
~ Utkarsh Piyush.
With the above input from Utkarsh, we can, without doubt, say that fewer responsibilities equal less stress.
Is it possible to avoid stress by starting out early?
Bear in mind that stress, generally, can be efficiently managed but not totally escapable for the purpose of effectiveness.
It is a natural phenomenon that the higher the advancement in career, the greater the responsibilities to handle, as well as the possible stress to experience. This also applies to entrepreneurship. The rapid and continuous expansion in business entails more responsibilities for the entrepreneur, such as good customer services, documentation, bills, and many other areas of business management.
Again, in the words of utkarsh, “super young entrepreneurs will ultimately have to deal with the challenges that their older colleagues currently face sooner or later. But they – as well as I – have a lot of advantages which will help reduce stress on us. We do not have plenty of luggage that weighs us down and slow our growth. For instance, super young entrepreneurs may not have to worry about rent, feeding, and workspace as many of them will be supported by their families until they are ready to go out on their own” Began Utkarsh. “Yet, unlike most entrepreneurs in their 40’s and beyond, I do not have kids who depend on me, neither do I have mortgages to pay. The major thing that bothers me is how to take my business to the next level. So, by starting very early, I have eliminated over 80% of the stress I face in my journey as an entrepreneur”
Furthermore, younger individuals/entrepreneurs naturally possess the youthful energy, resilience and higher thinking capacity to withstand entrepreneurship stress, compared to the older individual. This is due to the fact that advancement in age, to a certain degree, has a way of affecting the performance, intellectual capacity and the overall ability to withstand certain types of pressure that set in along the way.
Let’s take a look at the case of Colonel Sanders, founder of KFC who was unable to manage his company’s rapid expansion and made the decision to sell it out to a group of investors in 1964. Now, let’s compare his move to that of Zuckerberg, who, instead of selling off his business in the face of fraud, decided to invest over $2B to checkmate and eliminate those threats.
Here, the younger entrepreneur was able to think through and provide a solution that sustained him in business which the former could not.
This buttresses the notion that starting out early is more advantageous as an entrepreneur.
