No matter how gifted or driven you are, starting a business is hard, taxing work. In 2021, I left my 21-year career in finance and became a success coach, leadership consultant and author. I’d heard the statistic that 90% of all small businesses fail, but I thought starting my business would somehow be miraculously easy — it wasn’t. Here are four things I’ve since learned.

1. Self-discipline is harder than you think

Owning a business means you’re the boss. There are no assignments to turn in and no deadlines to meet. No one writes a performance review for you. However, this can be very difficult for some — and I had to learn this unexpected lesson the hard way. I’ve always been highly organized and structured. For the last decade of my professional career, everything I did was scheduled and calendared in advance. Things were different when I struck out on my own. Conference calls and meetings weren’t on a recurring cadence, and that caused big gaps in my calendar. At first, it was hard to get in a rhythm. I began noticing I wasn’t leveraging my time well. I was sleeping in. If I said I’d check email for 10 minutes, it often turned into an hour. I realized I was allowing myself to become distracted throughout the day because my day wasn’t full of all the same hard stops that had previously existed.

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