Are Entrepreneurs Happier Than Employees?
If you’re thinking about starting a business, it might actually be good for your health.
Entrepreneurs are the happiest
Being an entrepreneur might not make people rich, but it makes a lot of people happy and healthy. Yes, there’s the long, long, long hours, the low income, the high stress, job insecurity, role ambiguity, and the ever-present risk of failure. But recent studies have found that, on average, founders are happier, healthier and experience significantly higher levels of job satisfaction than rank-and-file employees. Who knew?!

 

Entrepreneurs Are The Happiest Of All

When Wharton University surveyed some 11,000 graduates about their income and happiness levels, those running their own businesses were the happiest of all the grads, no matter how much money they made. The study out of Baylor University and Louisiana State University discovered entrepreneurs have a significantly lower incidence of physical and mental illness, visit the hospital less often and report higher levels of life satisfaction.

 

And according to another study, based on 1700 entrepreneurs across 29 countries, an entrepreneur’s superior happiness can be attributed to the fact they have “purposeful engagement with life”. Since entrepreneurs aren’t forced to follow an employer’s rules, they’re free to “pursue activities and objectives they find personally meaningful and fulfilling”. Plus, their role involves a greater use of their talents (since their business is often crafted to suit their personal strengths) and they’ve cultivated resilience as they adapt to the rollercoaster ride that is running a business.

 

Get The Benefits Without Going Out On Your Own

If you have zero desire to launch a start-up, but you’d like all the happiness benefits of entrepreneurship, then you should “think like an entrepreneur”, says Sara Blakely, billionaire founder of Spanx.

 

“I’m such an advocate for everyone to think like an entrepreneur,” she says in a Big Think video.

 

“We’re all on autopilot. We’re doing things the way either someone else showed us how to do them or we saw and learned from watching. And real change only happens when you do something differently from everybody else.”

 

If you define entrepreneurial thinking as seeing situations with fresh eyes, changing course when needed, and viewing mistakes as an opportunity to learn and improve, then the appeal of this approach is easy to see. If you want to fundamentally change anything in your life – professionally or personally – you need to think like an entrepreneur, at least a little bit.

 

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