1. You have to be great at dealing with stress. A successful entrepreneur does well during extremely stressful situations. Think about how zen-like Phil Knight, Tiger Woods, or Phil Ivey look during extremely stressful situations. Often the difference between winning and losing is how well you perform under stress. As an entrepreneur, you’ll be tested often. If you can lose a significant amount of money and shake it off that’s a good start, because it happens to every entrepreneur.

2. Embrace the fact that you will never feel completely secure. If you run a fast-growing start-up, you’ll always feel insecure about the future. You’ll constantly revisit and question your decisions. The perpetual state of not knowing what tomorrow will bring adds to the stress level and can be overwhelming for some, but it’s important to acquire a taste for this feeling. For me, it’s part of what makes me feel alive. As Andy Grove said, “Only the paranoid survive.”

3. It requires all of your commitment and focus. I have met many entrepreneurs who are working on a side business and a full time job. While there may be cases of this working out, I’m a believer that to be truly successful you need to make the jump and be totally committed to starting a business. Otherwise you don’t maximize your chances of success. Building a new business from scratch is hard – it deserves all of your attention. I think becoming an entrepreneur is like trying to do a backflip for the first time. You have to fully commit to have a chance.

4. You have to be fiercely competitive. If you aren’t naturally competitive, you will need to learn to be. I’m not saying that being nice, humble, or friendly is incompatible with competitiveness. But being competitive means you truly understand what it takes to win. John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, is a warm Southern gentleman. But you’d better believe that he is an intensely fierce competitor.

5. You don’t do it alone: your friends, family and relationships WILL be affected. Every day and every hour, your life will revolve around your startup. You will have to carefully assess how to use what little free time you do have. And even then, that free time may be taken from you without forewarning because the startup will pull you away like a crying baby needing its mother.

6. It’s going to be painful at times. Assuming that you don’t start off wealthy, being an entrepreneur is going to be painful. So it’s good if you get used to pain. Part of the reason I do crossfit is that the workout kills me every time and I have to really focus on mental strength to make gains. Truthfully, I don’t even enjoy it during the workout but I do it to stay mentally tough and physically healthy.

7. It does not end until the exit. There’s no pause button. Unless you are building a lifestyle business, be prepared for a relentless 10 year marathon. There are not many big businesses that were built in less than 10 years and even building a nice lifestyle business will take at least 3+ years of 80+ hour work weeks.

8. At times, you’ll have to let go of people you care about. At some point, your business will either decline or you’ll hire some good people that are the wrong fit. It kills me every time I have to let someone go that I care for and respect as a person. It’s especially difficult knowing that a person’s livelihood depends on their job. It’s one of the worst parts of being an entrepreneur and yet the decision eventually becomes a necessity.

9. You’ll have to be a workaholic for the first few years. An important characteristic of being an entrepreneur is the ability to work really long hours without getting paid and without considering it to be “work”. You have to avoid the multitude of distractions the world offers you. While your friends are meeting up for happy hours or planning their next vacations, you’ll have your head down focused on building your company.

10. It’s all on YOU. At the end of the day, the buck stops with you and you shoulder ALL of the cumulative actions and decisions of your business. As an entrepreneur, if you don’t get results, it’s your fault. If you don’t grow, it’s your fault. If your product sucks, it’s your fault. If the business fails, it’s your fault. As an employee, you can point fingers and defer responsibility. As entrepreneur / CEO, you can only blame yourself.

Despite all of the cons above, I am blessed by the opportunity to be an entrepreneur. The media often glorifies entrepreneurs and I want to paint a more honest picture of reality. My work makes me feel alive, gives me purpose and it’s incredibly rewarding to work with great people who believe in my vision. So if the reality of being an entrepreneur sounds fulfilling to you, then figure out how you’re going to make it happen sooner than later. My point here is to show that there are a million reasons not to do something but only one reason why you should. The biggest thing holding entrepreneurs back is never actually starting. So start now!