When I left corporate to be an entrepreneur, I knew I will work hard, but I didn’t expect to work five time harder.

Startup own your time, but that time is actually owned by the business. Given the deadlines, clients needs, emergencies, planning, and staff management issues during the day, the better time you to do your work as an entrepreneur, is at after-hours or at night.

The leaders of the biggest companies on the planet are always trying to figure out what to do with their time, and it seems they all have come to one conclusion: work. Approaching their ambitions with a single-minded intensity, none works less than 70 hours a week, including weekends,even at the expense of aspects of life other people value.

I often hear people say work smart not hard, what if you worked smarter and harder at the same time. I think you will be far ahead of the game.

In one of his interviews Elon Musk spoke about the need to work twice as everyone else.

You just have to put in 80- to 100-hour weeks every week. If other people are putting in 40-hour work weeks and you are putting in 100-hour work weeks, then, even if you are doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.

Let’s put this in perspective, 80 to 100 hours every week (including weekends) means 11 to 14 hours per week. In other words, if you come to work at 08:00, you knock off after 19:00 to 22:00 everyday. This doesn’t leave much time to entrepreneurs for Phuza Thursday or TGIT.

Entrepreneurs love Mondays and don’t really celebrate Thank God It’s Fridays that much. Actually there is not much of a difference between Mondays and Fridays for most entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship is not a job, it’s an attitude, attitudes don’t keep office hours.

Even when you are not in the office, you are still working, when you are having lunch at a restaurant, you always think of opportunities you see around you. You ask “what if” questions, you are obsessed with life and your surroundings.

There is no such a thing as a long weekend, holidays are important but after some time they become a waste of time and money. I only found out about the last long weekend three days before the long weekend when I sent meeting requests for Monday meetings and people were declining them, only to realize that Monday is a public holiday.

24 hours is just not enough for entrepreneurs but since entrepreneurs are not complainers they make things work with what we have.

Entrepreneurship is not work, it is a way of life. You don’t keep office hours, your hours are spent thinking and breathing your business. This doesn’t mean you don’t have a life, it means your life is being an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs work hard, they work hard because they don’t consider what they do as work, their consider what they do as their life. If you say they must stop working so hard is like saying they must stop living so passionately.

Work to entrepreneurs, is passion expressed outwardly.

Yes entrepreneurs do have fun. They do everything to the extremes, they work hard and play hard.

To be an entrepreneur is exhilarating and  life changing experience.