Entrepreneurship is job hopping with a website

I have owned six domains that were going to change everything. Each one got a logo, a landing page, and three weeks of the best focus of my life.

Friends thought I was prolific. In truth I was on a drip — every new venture delivered the exact chemical a fresh job used to.

I once spent a whole weekend choosing a font for a company that never sent a single invoice. Then the registrations lapsed, quietly, one by one.

Quitting a startup felt exactly like quitting a job. The idea stopped being new, the work turned into maintenance, and my interest left the building without saying goodbye.

Entrepreneurship had not cured my job hopping. It had just given it a website. The novelty was the product I was actually buying.

I used to call that being entrepreneurial. My accountant called it something else.

• Week one: obsession and twelve-hour days.
• Week four: the first repetitive task appears.
• Week six: a shinier idea arrives to rescue me from boredom.

A launch is a week of novelty. A business is years of Tuesdays — invoices, repeat customers, the same problem solved for the fortieth time.

That used to be the part where I left, calling it a bad idea every single time. The real filter was never whether the idea was good. It was whether the Tuesdays were survivable.

• Novelty gets a venture started; repetition is where the money lives.
• My brain had only ever signed up for the first part.
• Every exit happened at the exact same station: maintenance.

The thing that survived was the most boring idea I ever had. I stopped relying on interest and built scaffolding for the dull parts instead.

• Recurring clients instead of a constant hunt for new ones.
• A template for every task I have to do twice.
• A partner who finds routine soothing and handles what numbs me.

Interest still gets to pick what I work on. It just no longer gets to decide when I stop.