If you see how your mental energy is dissipated in making small choices and avoiding distractions, you will appreciate that, for an entrepreneur, conserving willpower is a single most important skill that can make or mar his enterprise. This is especially true for service sector entrepreneurs, who can constantly change their offerings with little investment.
Manufacturing sector entrepreneurs at least are limited in their choices because of the fixed investment they make in machineries, but service sector entrepreneurs do not have this constraint. Service sector entrepreneurs include website developers, Software solution providers to shops and other small units, Software support units for small businesses like shops, doctors and schools, stock market service providers, hardware support maintenance units, training and coaching classes of different varieties. Even freelancers like trainers and researchers are also service sector entrepreneurs and therefore encounter the same challenges of these professionals.
No sooner one business offering stops producing intended result, say in three to six months, they start another one. With their mental energy consumption being the highest due to the constant choices they make, these entrepreneurs constantly err in taking these big decisions of altering business. Shifting from say conducting a class for diploma students to starting a coaching class for engineers is just a matter of printing another pamphlet for them. Or shifting from serving one class of customers ( say doctors) to serving another class of customers ( insurance agents) is just a matter of starting a sales campaign. They have very little mental energy to weigh the implications of their business models, evaluate the competition in another segment, or map the value addition that can be done in the delivery model.
For service sector entrepreneurs, such big decisions are simply a matter of 'braving it out' and 'hard work'. They simplify their choices by assuming 'one has to take risk to earn money'. They have little time to acknowledge that psychologists have discovered in their research that 'successful entrepreneurs are those who risk the least'. These entrepreneurs do not realise that their single most 'valuable resource' is their 'time'. And apportioning that time has to be done as diligently as apportioning money. Instead they will do multiple activities in a given 10 hour day and expect to produce result from multiple activities. For instance, i know of a talented freelancer who is engaged in three different business models simultaneously in a day: doing astrology ( being an engineer he is a first rate astrologer), doing journalism ( he has taken a degree in journalism) and also doing real estate deals. What result can you expect from these dissipated efforts?
Sometimes, due to inadequate willpower, these entrepreneurs suffer a much more deeper imbalance between short term results and their deeper intentions. If they start earning money from 'x' activity which is however not tapping their deeper potential, they find it difficult to transition it to another 'y' activity which will actualise their potential better. This transition from x to y requires them to make multiple choices and stick to them for a long time. Unable to muster enough mental energy for doing so, they are unable to initiate the new activity which will help them fulfill their deeper potential. Slowly and surely life is drained from them, and they wonder why money is not giving them 'happiness'. Although they became entrepreneurs ( or researchers or trainers) to develop their deeper potential, they end up suffering with the same illness: Enough money but with little satisfaction.
If you do not want to end with the same illness, you have to learn to conserve your Willpower !
