This Path Isn’t for You

Are you built for entrepreneurship?

I got my tenth rejection on LinkedIn the other day and went to make coffee.

No stress. No existential crisis. Just coffee.

I remember thinking: this is the part they don’t put in their highlight reels.

The part when everything seems to work but nothing is clicking. And yet, you’re still trying. Showing up and trying not to suck.

The version people see

I saw a specific image of entrepreneurship sold online. The freedom. The laptop in a café. The “I work for myself” line at parties. The so-called “passive income” that isn’t actually passive and you’re just drowning in work 12 hours a day.

It’s not a lie, exactly. But it’s a highlight reel of maybe 5% of the entire experience.

The other 95% is rejection nobody sees. Conversations that go nowhere. Friends slowly drifting because they suddenly find you “different.”

When someone tells me “You’re different,” I say: “Good. It means I failed, sacrificed, learned. I’m not the same person you last saw.”

A lot of people switch up on you when you start changing. It leaves a specific kind of bitterness - hard to describe to someone who hasn’t felt it. You’re growing, something’s moving, but you’re not there yet. Your current friends don’t hold your attention the same way, and you don’t have new ones who’ve already done what you’re trying to do.

I also noticed that when you start building, the commentary starts almost immediately.

The friend who “just wants to be realistic.” The family member who’d much rather see you in a stable job than roaming in the unknown for years. The classic Joe at the bar who says your startup idea already exists, nobody needs it, it won’t work - not because he’s thought about it, but because he doesn’t understand it, or because he wants to keep everyone else at his mediocre level.

I learned to do a couple of things early on and they truly changed how other people perceived me - and my inner peace as well.

The first one is to stop talking about it.

Not out of shame. Just out of life strategy. Talk less about your goals, your struggles, your wins - and people will genuinely think you’re like them. Meanwhile you’re quietly building something. And one day, when it’s undeniable, they’ll call you lucky.

Success becomes the only real proof.

The second one is to stop listening.

Everyone talks so much. 99% of people don’t have enough context about your experiences, your fears, your goals - so why would their opinions help you? They won’t. The only person with enough context about your life is you. Not Joe. Not your best friend. Not your girlfriend. Not even your mom. You.

The loneliness is real

Here’s what happens when you stop talking and stop listening: you enter this bubble where the real fight happens within you. You fight for clarity, fight against your poor habits, the detrimental thoughts that always sabotage you right when things start moving.

You start on the best self-improvement journey of your life, trying to become the best person in your lineage. The best in your surroundings. But it comes with a price.

You also start realizing there aren’t many people left you can actually talk to. Not many who get you, your goals, the pain you’re going through.

Those aren’t bad people. They just can’t meet you where you are.

Mediocrity isn’t the answer for you either. So you stick to your plans. And somewhere along the way you realize you’re alone on this path. Like, literally alone.

You’re lucky if there are one or two people you can share things with. But even they won’t fully understand what you’re going through.

What breaks people

That loneliness follows you into the professional side of things too. When I started, I didn’t think it would be easy. But I didn’t expect it to be this hard.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been told no since I started. Ignored, dismissed, ghosted. Told my thing was useless by people who hadn’t even looked at it.

It sucks. It demoralizes you and makes you rethink this life decision: is entrepreneurship really for me?

I push that thought away and move on. Because sitting there overthinking every life decision is just being stagnant out of fear of failing. What I do is simple: try, fail, iterate. There’s no secret formula for improvement. Just one word. Mistake. We change our behavior based on the mistakes we make and what they produce.

But the famous question always comes up after: what if it doesn’t work out eventually? Well, I’d answer with two quotes I heard once:

First - if you truly try your best, you won’t fail because at least you’ll learn.

And second - you’re overestimating what you can achieve in one year and underestimating what you can achieve in a decade.

But here’s the thing - it’s not rejection that actually breaks people. People can absorb rejection. You adjust, move on, try again.

What filters people out is the ambiguity. You don’t know where to start. You listen to people who seem to know more than you, adopt their strategy, then realize it doesn’t fit your situation - worse, that it was never aligned with your inner values to begin with.

You hesitate. You try. You fail. Nothing seems to work. Everything is dark.

And then one person somehow becomes a client. One person says yes. And that one moment gives you just enough to keep going.

The pressure isn’t any single one of these things. It’s carrying all of them at the same time.

It’s not for everyone

It for sure isn’t for everyone. The internet sells “anyone can do it” because it gets views and sells courses.

My honest answer is: this path requires a specific kind of person. Not a superhuman. Just someone wired differently - for rejection, for ambiguity, for failing publicly and showing up the next morning like it was just data. Someone who doesn’t wait for the fog to clear before moving. Someone who can sit with “I don’t know if this will work” for months, maybe years, and not let it eat them alive.

They make it work anyway.

Most people aren’t built that way. And they shouldn’t force themselves to be.

Talk soon,

Ilya