After a full-year and a bit of striking out on my own, and with a number of my ex-colleagues, friends and otherwise dinner party chatters asking the same question over and over, you sometimes have to go beyond the normal refrain of “It’s great” and try and best describe what building up and running businesses is all about.

The only clear analogy that came to my mind and a struck a chord recently was best illustrated by this cartoon. It’s like a beaver building a dam!

Entrepreneurship is you like being a beaver building a structure to hold back overwhelming forces threatening to tear it down and engulf you all the time. You can never stop running, and you have to calculate the structural integrity and best solutions on the fly. Even when you have managed to get the house of twigs up and pray that it holds back the full force of the river, you have to stand there jamming all your fingers and toes in every leakage (employee issues, cashflow squeezes, new regulations, competitor pricing, business environment changes to name a few) in order to ensure that it survives.

And maybe one day if you’ve managed to hold back the river for long enough you may get some rest 🙂

That is what entrepreneurship is like!