Table of Contents
Context
There has been a recent debate on who lives a better lifestyle? The entrepreneurs, or the employees who work in the companies? We, the Lyfas team in Acculi Labs believe only in data, research, and science. Our approach to finding answers to a question is first to evaluate all the scientific experiments that are carried out in a domain, crunch and analyze the data, find use cases in our case details to see if the models fit our observation, and then explore the theoretical components to see if the model can be explained by theory.
So, this article is based on some population studies and epidemiological studies. We want to answer this question, in as many scientific ways as possible. The answer to this question is important in many aspects, to give you an insight about your own future planning, as well as to see your profession from the perspective of health, wellbeing, and good life.
Pros and Cons
| Parameters | Entrepreneurs | Employees |
|---|---|---|
| Key Benefit | Autonomy | Fixed salary to plan the month. |
| Key Stressor | Arranging daily/monthly money. | Keeping the Job |
| Key Challenge | Managing Operations | Meeting the target. |
| Key Focus | Growth of the business | Better Performance than others for promotion. |
| Key Competitor | Self | Colleagues |
| Key Allies | Colleagues | |
| Key Drawback | Uncertainty | Limited Growth |
| Breaks | Rarely | Weekends |
| Higher Purpose | Serving more people(Employees, Customers) | Reaching better company and position. |
| Key Entertainment | Daily Learning | Entertainment |
| Key Mental Health Challenge | Less Family Time | Less time to think about ownself |
| Key Concern | Business Loss | Job loss |
| Key Insurance | Skills | Experience |
| Key Social Advantage | More People Interaction. | Fewer people interaction |
| Key Social Circle | Inner Circle | Friend Circle. |
| Key Health Challenge | Exhaustion and Fatigue | Sedentary Lifestyle |
As you can see, both types of professions have their own charms, concerns, risks, and rewards. Both have their own pros and cons. Therefore, there shouldn’t be much difference in the way both should look into life right? However, when you look into the above table, you will actually understand the difference.
How The Careers Progresses?
Entrepreneurs leverage on compound growth. It takes years, sometimes decades to build a successful business. All along the entrepreneur works almost 24×7 to take the business forward. The entrepreneur creates a team. Many go and come, but few core people stay back with the entrepreneur. Eventually, the entrepreneur becomes more resourceful, with the right contacts to get things done. Till the business is established and on autopilot, the entrepreneur struggles every day to survive and have the family ends meet.
Employees on the other hand start with a decent lifestyle. They get a good salary to begin with, which gives them financial freedom quite early. They start having savings, and chase other dreams like a house, car, and so forth. But, over a decade, the entrepreneur keeps struggling even for a basic lifestyle.
However, this struggle makes the entrepreneur become super social, have a lot of people to work with, acquire impeccable survival skills. This slow but steady accumulation of people, skills, and resource starts showing compound effort. In 10-15 years of time, the entrepreneur has a lot of free time to think about the future, plan the next business move, build teams, and mostly take decisions. The employees, even then have to play a survival game and have to continue to work as hard on their core skills to deliver the project.
Because the entrepreneur rarely gets any time for recreation in the early decade of setting the business, the body starts taking a toll. They generally discover very early that unless they take care of their body and mind well, they are not going to last long. Therefore the entrepreneurs often get more serious about their health, trying to eat healthily, do more regular exercise. Sleep obviously takes a hit.
So, between the age of 25-40, the entrepreneur has more exhaustion and fatigue, more financial stress, a more insecure future, more lonely journey in comparison to the employees. However, the compound growth starts showing its benefit after that age, when he has more time, resources, and skills, if not money.
Therefore the actual productive time of the entrepreneur after a decade becomes thinking, whereas the employee’s core productive time gets invested in doing.
Overall Effect on Health
In a study carried out on 34,000 individuals, where almost 5000 were entrepreneurs and 29,000 were salaried employees, researchers obtained various life data from both the groups and then performed statistical correlation in the data.
It was found that the instance of chronic diseases such as Diabetes, Cancer, Hypertension, in all aspects, entrepreneurs had less percentage prevalence than the non-entrepreneurs. However, where the difference was significant was in mental health.
The entrepreneurs were found to have very less Psychological problems in comparison to the employees.
When it comes to health behavior, entrepreneurs were found to be smoking lesser than the employees, but drinking more on average. However, the number of days an entrepreneur spent in the hospital is found to be much lesser in comparison to an employee. Entrepreneurs are also found to be exercising more than the employees.
Statistics showed then that the entrepreneurs survived 7.47% more through the age of 75 than the non-entrepreneurs.
On an 80-year life scale, it can then be said that an entrepreneur lives on an average 6 years more than the non-entrepreneurs and spends lesser time in hospitals and doctors in comparison to the non-entrepreneurs.
Evolutionary Aspect
Humans were never meant to store food and take a break. Life has always been very harsh for humans. Flood, volcano, climate change, ice age, infections, wounds from the hunting has had our ancestors challenged from every single day of their survival. These challenges and drive to survive are what have brought humanity where we are today. Modern corporates impose a significant sedentary lifestyle on the employees. Not only that, they are pushed every day, to an extent that the employees have no time to think for themselves. However, the employees get the weekends and monthly salary, out of which then they invest in their recreation.
This is exactly where the game changes. An entrepreneur has no weekend. The entrepreneur has to work every awake minute to arrange funds for the people and to save something for the family. This evolutionary trait to hunt and eat, keep up with the genetic memory.
The other not so well investigated subject is stories. The human mind has this one weakness of stories. Through the cave arts, we know that our early ancestors drew stories. Men shared hunting stories with their women. An Entrepreneur, because of more customer and partner interaction has many stories. There are highs and lows. Modern employees go through extreme office politics and the only story is around office politics. This differentiates the mental health aspect.
Indian Context of Entrepreneurship, Employment and Health
On average, an Entrepreneur may live 6 more years of disease-free life than an employee with less number of days spent in the hospital and doctor visits. However, an entrepreneur often starts to see a better life in the latter half of his life and has an extreme struggle for about a decade or half(there are of course exceptions).
Even though the facts, data, scientists suggest that an entrepreneur may live a better life, entrepreneurship per se hasn’t grown significantly in India. This is because the families are still more comfortable seeing their family members earning a fixed but timely salary, over an unpredictable entrepreneurial drive.
So, we as a society look at entrepreneurship as a risky life, better to be left to those meaningless people who come in the shark tank.
Globalization in 1991, has opened more FDI in India and GDP has since then grown significantly. However, the corporate culture that this globalization has brought has also elevated chronic diseases, as Entrepreneurship hasn’t increased in the country in the same scale.
So, it is quite evident that more corporates driven by capitalists are bringing more chronic diseases to our population. The employees are not in a position to cook for themselves after tiring days of work. And therefore consumption of fast food has significantly increased in this group. They can afford to spend on outside food, and so they do.
Entrepreneurs on the other hand have to work with so little money, that they are not left with many choices other than to cook for themselves.
All these results into a general population health concern. This can not be addressed unless and until we create more conducive societies for the entrepreneurs, and promote them.
If Everyone Becomes Entrepreneurs, Who Will Work For Them?
This is an obvious debate that comes along with Entrepreneur vs Employee debate. The solution is rather simple. The companies need to promote Intrapreneurship. Make the employees arrange for their salaries. Remove the whole notion of fixed salaries. Let the entrepreneurs within the company bring projects and deliver in small teams, leveraging the infrastructure and processes of the company.
How to Validate?
What differentiates Lyfas from the other sources of information on the internet, is our affinity for facts and validation. You can use our scientifically validated gold standard quality of life self-assessment test.
If you are an Entrepreneur, you may observe high scores in Autonomy, Positive relationships with Others, Higher Purpose of Life, and Environmental Mastery. If you are a salaried employee, you may find lower scores in the above scales.
Conclusion
Employment, Entrepreneurship, easy money, leisure time, recreation would harm if not addressed from multiple dimensions. India has always been an Entrepreneurial society. The human race has always been a free, entrepreneurial race. This article may be food for thought for both capitalists, corporate leaders, and families alike to look into entrepreneurship not just from a career perspective, but from an overall mental and physical wellbeing perspective. Remember, an Entrepreneur lives 7.47% more than the salaried employees.
👨🏻🔬🔬
Please donate towards research, development, and creating life’s wisdom and knowledgebase for the future of the humanity.
How Can Lyfas Help?
Lyfas helps you improve your quality of life, by first doing an overall assessment of your wellbeing and quality of life, and then collaborating them with Lyfas mobile application, which is a clinically validated non-invasive digital biomarker healthcare instrument. So, we convert your Android smartphone into a personal diagnostics and monitoring tool. We then assess the areas that you need to improve and help you develop an entrepreneurial mindset for the improvement.
All along, Lyfas monitoring service tracks your biomarkers for improvement. Now, live a disease-free life, and live a holistic life with high quality of life.
