Entrepreneurship is so not a #walkinthepark

I already knew Liz for a while. It’s always special to meet a fellow Austrian thousand of kilometres away from home. Her being Austrian was not the only reason why we hit it off though. We just have so much fun whenever we meet, but at the same time, we can relate to each other’s experience about living abroad and recently, about starting something from scratch. Liz has been giving me loads of advice when I first considered running a weekly Podcast production, and she still does. Thank you, Liz!

I look up to Liz because she has guts and she’s not shy to speak her mind. She left a well-paying corporate job to start her company, and I love her mission as she built a Fitness App targeting the China market to empower women to live a more healthy life.

So when we met for our interview and pushed that button during our walk in the park one song came to mind.

Nick Straker Band “A Walk in the Park”

Put that record on for the rest of the reading if you like a smile on your face.

It is a song that I grew up with, and despite it being released a few years before I was born, it was still all over the radio when I started school.

But I only recently discovered that this song is a brilliant metaphor for entrepreneurship.

As a founder, you might wish for your journey to be a walk in the park, but it is so NOT. Most of the days it is rather a “step in the dark”, and I think many entrepreneurs have asked themselves…

(…) why do we go on in spite of mistakes, in spite of destruction.

Being an entrepreneur comes with wearing loads of different hats. That’s the beauty and the pain of it.

Your founder ego might be having a great day celebrating a productive investor talk, but your marketing manager ego faces a tough setback with the newest social media campaign appearing to be a waste of time and money.

How do you keep sane juggling all these different roles?

And on top of it all asking yourself how you drive the impact of your value-driven enterprise, promoting a healthy lifestyle, in Liz’s case?

It made me smile, when Liz shared one of the most memorable moments working on her business that has nothing to do with growing user numbers or her following on social media but instead she talks about a simple comment of a highschool friend that reconnected with her after many years.