Business Is Filial Impiety
Getting a job is closer to filial piety: parents know where you work and that a paycheck is coming. Business is different — and until it succeeds, it can't help being a kind of impiety. Which is exactly why you must work harder.
Business is filial impiety.
Personally, I think running a business is a form of filial impiety.
Getting a job is closer to filial piety.
When you're employed, your parents know where you work, how much you earn each month, and at minimum that a paycheck is coming next month too.
When relatives ask at the holidays, the answer is easy.
“I work at such-and-such company.”
One sentence is enough.
Business is different.
It's hard to even explain what you do, and earning money this month guarantees nothing about the next.
On the outside you're called a CEO, but in reality there's often no salary, no clocking out, and no certain future.
You run on the possibility you see; what your parents see is not possibility but anxiety.
The child talks about new products, contracts, markets.
The parents worry about whether you're eating properly, whether you have money, and how long you'll have to live like this.
A person running a business tends to think only of the risk they themselves carry.
But part of that risk is carried by the family too.
Even when I don't say I'm struggling, they know.
Even when I hide that the income is unstable, they know.
Even when I say things are going well, my parents can hear in my voice alone that they aren't yet.
So until it succeeds, business can't help being, to some degree, filial impiety.
This doesn't mean you must choose a stable job to meet your parents' expectations.
Nor that everyone must be employed.
Choosing your own life matters.
It only means the choice of business must not be viewed through romance alone.
I chose freedom, and the price of that freedom is the worry I hand my family.
I chose great possibility, and until that possibility becomes reality, my family must endure the uncertainty.
That fact must not be forgotten.
An entrepreneur cannot justify everything by the mere fact of doing what they want to do.
A big dream, a conviction of eventual success — until results arrive, they remain words.
What parents need is not a grand vision.
It is the reassurance that their child is eating well, not collapsing, and taking responsibility for their own life.
In the end, the entrepreneur must prove it.
Not only with money.
Survive steadily, keep promises, own your choices, and become someone your family no longer needs to worry about.
Having started a business is not, in itself, something to be proud of.
Neither is the title of CEO.
What matters is carrying it through — even while handing your family worry — and finally turning that worry into relief and pride.
So you must work harder.
Not to outshine anyone.
Not to keep the title of CEO, either.
But to show, with results, that the years your family spent worrying over your choice were not in vain.
Personally, business is filial impiety.
Employment is filial piety.
So if you chose business — work harder.