==The hardest thing to cope with, however, is the uncertainty.== ==It’s grueling to not know whether the thing you’re pouring all your effort into is going to work.== If it fails, where is your next paycheck coming from? You’re too busy to set up the next thing, but the current thing isn’t working well enough to bet your career on. Every time I work on a new product, I question whether this will be the one that sinks me. I constantly worry that I have run out of good ideas. You spend so much time working on the business that you don’t get time to do the work that attracted you to it in the first place. Your days are filled with customer calls to find what to build next, and then you have to code late at night to build it. You’re doing finance and legal admin on the weekend instead of learning new skills. All the fun experiments you want to run have to be set aside for the boring stuff that makes enough revenue in the short term to keep you afloat. ==Don’t start a startup unless there’s nothing else you can imagine doing. Most of the time, the quality of life and economics are worse than getting a normal job.== [[Tolerance for uncertainty is important for greatness]]