Dreaming of Insta-ready start-up success? Here’s a dose of reality

Half of the start-up stories on Medium are some shiny Instagram-ready version of “I quit my job, started my own business, and I’ve never been happier”.

The cult of the hustle: dream it, work it, achieve success. I’m all for boundless enthusiasm, but the rational optimist in me wants to give these stories a miss in favour of this dose of reality from former Verizon IT worker Ivy Eisenberg.

Eisenberg dreamed of starting a fortune cookie business pitched at tech companies; rather than promising love or money is on the way, they said things like “HTTP 404: Not Found”. They went down like a lead balloon, so she stayed in her dreary job until voluntarily redundancy came along. Finally, a chance to reinvent herself! Months went by and she slowly realised that enthusiasm is not enough when you sit around in PJs eating French cheese.

Eisenberg finds herself back in another IT job but she still has plans. One suspects it won’t involve fortune cookies but it will be tempered by lessons learned: don’t get sucked in by motivational tales from start-up gurus; have an actual plan; moderate your intake of French cheese.