The Freedom Myth Of Entrepreneurship

“Entrepreneurship gives you freedom” is the line everyone loves to repeat, but we put it on trial and the verdict gets complicated fast. We talk about the kind of freedom business ownership can actually buy: control of your time, control of your schedule, and the ability to choose what you’re building your life around. Then we get honest about the part nobody posts online, the mental load of always thinking, fixing, improving, and carrying responsibility even when you’re not at work.

From there, we zoom out into purpose and mental health. We compare entrepreneurs who “make it” and still feel empty with retirees who lose structure after decades of a 9-to-5. The takeaway is blunt: humans need meaning, and comfort without a mission can lead to boredom, depression, and bad decisions. Freedom isn’t escaping work, it’s choosing a purpose you’re willing to sacrifice for and getting to decide how you spend your effort.

We also break down entrepreneurship myths that hit founders in the face: managing employees is harder than expected, systems matter more than willpower, and scaling forces you to upgrade the skills on your team. We call out social media entrepreneurship and the “online coach” fantasy, explain why the first dollars are the hardest, and why multitasking is a trap that kills output. If you’re building a startup, buying a small business, or just curious about the real founder mindset, this one will sharpen your expectations. Subscribe, share this with a friend who wants to start a business, and leave a review. What does “freedom” mean to you?

Transcript

Myths And Realities Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's up, guys, and welcome to another episode of the Anthony Amon Show. And today we're gonna do a little myths and realities. Yao's gonna press some theories on me and see how well I do. So here we go.

Does Entrepreneurship Create Freedom

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Take it away. All right, guys, I'm back. So these are myths, entrepreneurial myths, and just questions about entrepreneurship. All right, Anthony, here we go. So Anthony, people say entrepreneurship gives you freedom. Is that true or not? Find freedom. To do whatever the heck you want to do in life, man, with your time. You want to go to Florida right now? Could you go? Not right now, no.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Five years from now, could you go? Maybe. So it's a it's a really tough question. Does entrepreneurship give you freedom?

SPEAKER_01 0:36

It's the point of it. That's the whole point of it. You're not doing this. You're gonna stay here forever? No, you're working so you can be free and watch baseball games, which it's the argument against that.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Okay, go ahead. I always think about this. Always here, home, vacation. Silly example, going to the bathroom. Always on. About this specific always thinking about way to make things better, things more efficient. 24-7. I dream about it at this point, right? So freedom is the definition of being able to turn it off and have mental clarity. Absolutely not. I like that's not no, dude. Freedom in the sense that you want to go travel, you don't want to be bogged down by a nine to five, you don't have to be at work, you can choose to be there at the physical location.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Yes. But you're always thinking about it.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

So, okay, devil's advocate, we go. That's because you're still an operator. When you're not an operator, you're not thinking about it to the extent that you are now. True or false? When you have some, if it's running smoothly, you have people doing it, you're not gonna be thinking 24/7. If it's running smoothly, people are doing it. Give me an example of somebody. I'll break it down for you. What uh that doesn't think about it 24-7? Well, that's more of an internal thing, but I mean, someone like a Jeff Bezos that sold it or whatever, just managing it from afar, or or well, no, Elon Musk's not a good example.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Uh give me an example. Name one entrepreneur that sold their business, made a shit ton of money, right? Got the freedom, and then two years later was bored and ended up becoming depressed, and then had to go back to doing something because they were driving themselves crazy. That's a lot of them. Everyone. Or pro athletes, those that go pro or become the best of the best, retire, and then end up killing themselves or end up being depressed and getting into drugs because they lost something. A big part of life is now gone.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

I see what you're trying to say. So essentially, if you're an entrepreneur, it's at heart, it'll never go away. Never, never, no matter what. Isn't that an uncomfortable feeling? No, no, you're never gonna be free, essentially. What's the point then?

SPEAKER_00 2:47

The point is to buy your time, is to control time. Right. The point is to control time and optimize and be able to kind of change your schedule. But I'm gonna go to the other extreme. Let's talk about your work, you're an employee, right? Yeah, you work 40 years, nine to five, and you retire. How many happy retirees do you know? Yeah, there's not a lot, dude. Same issue. They lost meaning, and you have to find meaning in something else and obsess it with something else. So now break it down to human psychology. As humans, we need meaning. We need something to live for, and that purpose, right? So a lot of people turn to what? Religion. They give the purpose to religion to turn to and give themselves meaning back, or people will do to helping others, or whatever the whatever it may be. We need purpose. We're not creatures meant to live mundane lives day to day today. We need something to always work for and do better. Otherwise, we're in a depressed. Why do the depression and suicide rates have tripled over the last few years? Because we're taking away the meaning of life. Go back to like extremes, right? 1700s. So life sucked. Like infant mortality rate was crazy. Half of the infants died. But people were happier because they had meaning. Working in the farm, being like constantly moving every single day, like going through seasonalities of it, like they were generally happier. Suicide rates were low. So as life gets easier, and we give ourselves quote unquote freedom, our happiness drops off. Because it's nothing to work for anymore. So freedom does not mean having no responsibility and nothing else. Freedom means choosing one thing that makes you happy to work for constantly because it gives you happiness. So, in sense, it's always working on something to make you happy and always striving to do better. That's what's freedom. Now, which is ironic, you look at America at a whole, right? What's America based off of? Freedom. Right? But if the freedom isn't do whatever you want and just sit around and be lazy, the freedom is to work for the choosing the thing that gives you purpose in life. Like freedom of religion, to choose a religion you love, to be able to work towards that religion, whatever that may give you in the afterlife. It's still purpose, it's still work, which is why freedom and capitalism merge perfectly together. But you cannot define freedom as forgetting everything. You have to define freedom as choosing something you're willing to sacrifice for and work on constantly. And that is the benefit of everything. And that's what's really what's gonna make you happy.

What Gets Harder Than Expected

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Beautiful. Anthony, what part of entrepreneurship is way harder than people think that you found out about?

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Oh man, everything. I'm gonna stick two things that really were eye-opening to me. Okay. First one, people. Yep. Employees.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

I was gonna say that. I was about to say that.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

I'm like, Anthony, you gotta say people. That one, in and of itself, is wild. You have you come in and you're willing to die for your business to an extent, especially in the beginning, right? I'm gonna work 100 hours a week. And these employees want to come in and work 40 and then not always innovate and do for the business. Demand more. And demand more, it's like, ugh, but then you realize after you go through a few years of struggling, it's actually your fault because you hired the wrong people, you had no systems, you didn't give them direction, you didn't give them purpose.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Purpose, purpose, yeah, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:24

So that energy defalls on you, so you have to learn to fix that. And then as you grow and you start fixing that issue, you realize that there's good people that at the$1 million level and two million devils, the same people at the five or ten million dollar levels, different skill sets, right? You go from either a small little mom-pa place, you have one person doing everything and dilutes their time across everything. That's great for that point. But when you get to the point, you need a more someone that just focuses on marketing, someone that just focuses on sales, different skill sets, whole new caliber because they're still focused on one thing. You weren't ready for them at the beginning, but now you gotta learn how to get ready for those people when they come. So it makes it really hard. The second part of that, and the thing most people struggle with, including myself, is how to change things and teaching your mind when you have a problem, I cannot rely on somebody else to fix this problem for me. I can't go to a boss and say, Yeah, how do I do this? There is no asking somebody to pull information up a line. It's figuring out yourself. Figuring out how do I do this, how to take this next step. That's a skill that once you learn, you never went back to be an employee. I'd be a great employee because I understand I don't need to ask. I can just go figure it out myself and address the solutions.

The Biggest Social Media Lie

SPEAKER_01 7:36

So A, B, and a C. Exactly C employees. Okay, that is awesome. All right, Anthony. Um, what is the biggest lie social media has told about entrepreneurship? You know, they show the glitz and the glamour, but what is the biggest lie you believe?

SPEAKER_00 7:49

I'm gonna stick with fitness on this one because I think it's the most extreme of this example. Everyone thinks they could be an online fitness coach. I can be an online fitness coach, I could have 30 clients, be in Tahiti, do all these like little virtual workouts, send it to everybody, and live the dream. Oh my god. So we can say you could do it too. Just spend$100,000 for this advertising. Okay, I'll stop. Complete lie. The more you macro, so meaning the more you go from competing into little micro puddle, like I for us, we're brick and mortar, right? We can't really go outside of our local area to go to the movie state or go to country or go to national, the more people you're competing against. Oh, yeah, of course. You can't just be some Joe Schmo that comes in here and says, I'm gonna start this online fitness coach business and expect to get a thousand clients. You have no, you have no proof.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

Yeah, like there's no starting, there's no becoming. It is, it takes so much work to get from zero dollars to a hundred dollars. It's actually way harder to get there than it is to go from a hundred to a thousand, and that's way harder to go from a thousand to ten thousand. And as you progress up, it actually becomes a little easier to start releasing assistants and processes because you have social proof and you have a brand. Okay, as you were saying, the very beginning start. That's what forget about it. Five years of no money coming in. We've talked about this. So, like you have it's very, very, very hard to start from the beginning. You don't realize how much work goes into it.

The Hidden Cost Of Success

SPEAKER_01 9:17

So, social media sells this image or ideology that it's very simple, make all this cash, come press this button, and you get all the money. It doesn't happen, it doesn't work. Okay, that's the false uh social media. Uh I use one. What does success actually cost people that they don't see that it costs you?

SPEAKER_00 9:31

We've talked about this in the previous episode, the Four Burner theory, right? So you could only have friends, something you're gonna lose something. You have to give something up. And whether that's permanently, whether that's seasonality and defending, I define those seasons on a monthly, yearly, quarterly basis, that's ultimately we as humans cannot prioritize. We cannot, we we're not good at multitasking. The definition of multitasking for those to understand like psychology, people say, I'm really good at multitasking, I can do this all the time. There's no such thing. You have a certain amount of output you can give. Yes, yes, yes, 100 points. You can multitask, but what's gonna happen? One's gonna take 50 points, one's gonna keep 50 points. There's no creating extra points. There's no 100 and 100.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

You're right.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Look at everyone who said, I'm really good at texting and driving. I have which is never due, by the way. But you're not, you're stuck at it. You can't do it. You know why? You might be thinking looking at the rope, but if I took a ball and threw it in a car, you wouldn't know it's hit. You'd be like, What the hell was that? Because your reaction drops.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Yeah, you're right.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Because we can't multitask. Our brains need to focus on one thing at a time. That is how we do things, which is why you're better off, even as a CEO, and having multi-function programs and having managers of departments being like, all right, our block, just sales. That's all I'm thinking about. Leave me alone. Don't distract me. This is it. Next part, just marketing, our block, that's it. And then kind of work your way around that. Okay, whether that's on an hourly or daily basis, because we can't we can't multitask, it's impossible.

Who Should Not Start A Business

SPEAKER_01 11:02

Okay, I like that. I like that, I agree. And let me ask you now, what type of person should not start a business? Personality-wise, short-tempered, emotional, um none of those matter.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Oh, wow. There's one trait that matters, okay, and one trait only. And I I'm up and open to debate on this one if this is the only trait I could think of.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Those that believe they know everything and aren't willing to change. I agree. Nothing else matters. Arrogance. Arrogance, I agree. The great, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Well, no, uh yeah, you can change the other things, but I mean, short term. You're shy? That's not right.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Let's think that people always think introverts can't on businesses. Yeah, well, there's many businesses you could run from just online. Even if you want to hop in to just get in front of people, how else do you learn to public speak? You go out and you public speak. That's the only way to learn. Yeah, but if you're willing to learn how to public speak and you know that you need to fix it, that's what you're saying.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

You're gonna practice, practice, practice. So you can have all those other traits as long as you're willing to jump. But the bad thing is if someone is not.

Closing And Subscribe Reminder

SPEAKER_00 12:08

You can have a short temper, but you understand you have a short temper and willing one of those to fix it. Yeah, practice, practice, practice, practice. You'll get better at it.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Anthony, thank you so much for letting me join the show and ask you those questions. Those are the questions for the myths about entrepreneurship and in realities. Catch you next time, guys. Next time, guys, don't forget to like, subscribe, share. See you next time. Peace.