Starting your own business will not make you happy.

What’s the difference between being happy and feeling alive? Let me tell you.

Being happy involves feelings of joy, contentment and euphoria while often excluding, ignoring or suppressing negative feelings.

Feeling alive is knowing that that every day brings challenges that you either will or will not overcome. Feeling alive isn’t restricted to joy. It involves pain, fear, anger, confusion, frustration, happiness, euphoria, triumph, accomplishment, failure, success, remorse, resentment and everything in between. That’s how most entrepreneurs I know would probably define what it’s like to start and run your own business.

Starting your own business will not make you happy but it sure as hell will make you feel alive.

I don’t know a single entrepreneur who would define starting a business as a happy, joyful or euphoric experience. I know a lot of entrepreneurs who are scared shitless on a weekly basis, who are terrified that they can’t pay the bills, who want to quit, who are extremely excited, then petrified, overjoyed and then depressed and who have felt all of those things in a single day.

Starting a business can very often look like your Facebook newsfeed; everyone is happy all the time, everyone is doing the things they love, having their umpteenth child and have gone on that once-in-a-lifetime holiday. But no one uploads the bad things to Facebook. No one talks about the tough times and I think that is doing our…