5 Reasons Why Every Entrepreneur Should get Married

Many believe that entrepreneurship and marriage are incompatible. The argument is that starting a new venture just takes too much of your time, mentally and physically. By the time a day or week of work is finished, there’s no time left to nurture a relationship. And just like you can’t successfully run a venture off the side of your desk, you can’t do this with a marriage.

All that said, let me explain 5 reasons why every entrepreneur should get married.

1. Listening: To be insightful and to create customer value, you need to listen, to your customers, partners, and investors; otherwise your efforts with your venture will largely be misguided. And moving beyond listening is the ability to be empathetic, imagining yourself in the shoes of others; viewing problems and issues from their perspective. There’s no better setting for improving your skills of listening and empathy than in marriage. A successful marriage depends on listening and understanding the distinct perspective of your spouse. Master the skills of listening and empathy in marriage, and carry these forward to understand the needs and goals of your customers, partners, and investors.

2. Learning: Few new ventures succeed with their first strategy, or their second, or even third. It often takes many iterations to find a viable approach for competing. It could take several years before you have all the kinks ironed out. A successful marriage also requires substantial learning and adaptation. You’ve been living on your own for 20+ years, and now you’re living with someone and sharing a life together. It takes months, if not years, to learn and adapt to the needs of your spouse and your new found partnership. “Learning to learn” is a critical skill that extends from marriage to starting a venture.

3. Teamwork: Few ventures succeed without formal and informal partnerships. There’s just too much to do for any single individual. You need to learn how to work with others on different fronts to push a venture forward. A successful marriage also requires an ample amount of teamwork. Whether you are coping with housework, raising children, or dealing with a crisis, a couple needs to carefully coordinate their efforts and find negotiated solutions to be successful. You think the teamwork skills you developed during your undergraduate or master’s program will prepare you for starting a venture? To master the skills of teamwork, coordination, and compromise, get married.

4. Passion and Love: To be successful as an entrepreneur you need to have passion for your work, your customers, and others integral to your venture. It’s not just money that keeps you going during difficult times, it’s the thought that if you give up, you can’t keep doing what you most love to do. Marriage teaches you what real love is all about. It’s not just loving your spouse when times are easy and the going is good; it’s unconditional love, pressing forward, no matter the challenges that you’re currently facing or that lie ahead. Take this idea of love, and apply it to starting up. Don’t give up on your venture and your customers just because times are tough.

5. Persistence: Most entrepreneurs and investors acknowledge that the number one factor separating successful and failed ventures is persistence. A persistent founding team eventually gets traction with some product and strategy. As a classic example, consider the early days of Hewlett Packard. Before finding success in the instruments business, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tried marketing a “bowling alley foul-line indicator, a clock drive for a telescope, a thing to make a urinal flush automatically, and a shock machine to make people lose weight.” [1] Marriage also requires persistence; not blind persistence, but persistence coupled with growth. It’s persistence while improving your skills along a range of dimensions, including those mentioned above (e.g., listening, learning, teamwork, passion). Just like Hewlett and Packard moved beyond shock machines to greener pastures in the instruments business, as a couple you need to persist and grow beyond your early challenges in marriage.

Now it’s time to succeed in your marriage and with your new venture. Best of luck in both pursuits!

—

[1] http://www.hp.com/retiree/history/founders/hewlett/quotes.html