When you decide to fully immerse yourself into the world of entrepreneurship and just being your boss, doing your own thing, you lose a lot of friends along the way, particularly those who just aren’t in tune with the life you choose. It’s not all doom and gloom however because as much as you lose a lot of friends, you gain quite a few as well.
Those friends that you do gain are mostly like-minded individuals and so I’d argue that they add a lot more value to your life than those of your friends you lost along the way. The funny thing is those who just didn’t understand your chosen path of entrepreneurship all of a sudden want to “come back” and be part of your life once it starts showing that you’ve “made it” somewhat, often through events such as your interest in travelling suddenly turning into the reality of going away a few times in a year. By then the game has changed so much that you really don’t need to be mentoring or “carrying” anyone along the entrepreneurship path and so you simply cannot relate to your old buddies anymore, for the most part.
So anyway, something I personally noticed with pretty much all of my new friends is that at some or another point in each of our entrepreneurial journeys, we sought to make the leap from merely being self-employed to being true entrepreneurs; we sought to be the rainmakers who go out and make the deals happen, bringing in the business for others in our employ to do the actual work. Before you can get to that stage, however, you have to make a transition through being the one who does the actual work, even if only for a little while, just so that you know exactly what it takes to get things done and what challenges each of your workers would be facing when doing their jobs.