The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

April 8Making a Living

I wish to suggest that a person may be very industrious, and yet not spend their time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than they who consume the greater part of their life getting a living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain their body by their poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.

Henry David Thoreau—“Life Without Principle” (1854)

As a burgeoning self-reliant entrepreneur, you likely have no objection to Thoreau's claim that you must get your living by loving, but imagine the mid-nineteenth-century reader. Nearly everyone today aspires to be some sort of entrepreneur, but hey, there was no Internet back then and the expectation was that you would toil away at something that served a purpose and fed your family. That you hated the existence it created was of little concern.

But consider Thoreau's last sentence carefully. Does it make any sense, with all the options available today, to simply go about what you do just to make a living—or must your venture also allow you to make a life worth loving? The difference amounts to simply trading your days for something to come or reveling in a self-supporting journey that feeds your soul now, in every present moment.

Oh, but you'll be tested every single day on this idea. Many days it will not feel more noble to starve than settle for a living that includes some bread? But then there ...