It’s about 1am. I and one of my developers are waiting for a client’s website to come back online after their hosting company took it down about five hours ago. We’re waiting because the client needs some new code put in place to facilitate a marketing campaign that begins tomorrow morning. We’re waiting because while the hosting company told us about two hours ago that they would get the site back up, we haven’t seen anything yet. My wife has already gone to bed. I’m tired. I’m definitely not waking up at 5am so that I can go to the gym tomorrow. And I’ll probably end up going to bed before this gets fixed, and then getting a phone call from the client at 7am asking why the site still isn’t up, at which point I’ll have to call the hosting company again, wait for an hour on hold again, only to have them tell me that somebody is working on it and I need to be more patient. Do I get paid overtime for this? No. Can I take the day off because I worked late? No. Will I get a promotion for working hard? No. I will receive a sincere thank-you from our client, and they may continue using our services for one more month, after which there are no guarantees.

This is just one of those “glorious moments” of being an entrepreneur. But I shouldn’t complain. I used to stay up all night all the time. I used to work every single weekend until midnight Saturday night. I skipped my sister-in-law’s wedding reception because I needed to go back to the office and get some more work done. I’ve been married for over seven years but only within the last few months did I finally take a few days off to spend with my wife, just the two of us. I rarely have enough money to pay my employees or the rent on time. Last year I was stiffed to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by clients who either went out of business or put me on the bottom of their list of creditors. For that and other reasons I haven’t paid myself a dime in four years. Some people become entrepreneurs because they think they’ll be free, only to find out they are slaves.

A year and a half ago I sat down one night and started typing on my blog about what it means to be an entrepreneur. In less than an hour I had come up with a list of 75 completions to the sentence fragment “You might be an entrepreneur if…” Since then I have added detail to many of the items on that list such as You’ve maxed out more than $50K in credit cards to fund your business, You work for two days straight without sleeping and then feel guilty for buying a hamburger off the dollar menu at McDonald’s because you really can’t afford it, and You’ve worked overtime, over a weekend, or two consecutive days not so that you could pay your own mortgage, but so that you could get money to pay one of your employees’ mortgages.

I’ve had people tell me their spouses don’t want them to be an entrepreneur after reading my list. I’d like to think I’ve performed some sort of noble service and perhaps have preserved a marriage. I still have a few more to finish expounding on, and as I’ve expounded I’ve come up with even more items although I’ve resisted adding to the list. But there’s one I think perhaps I should add, because you might just be an entrepreneur if you can read through my list, seriously consider the items on it and the risk you face of having to endure each one just as I have, but then you dive into being an entrepreneur anyway.

You see, entrepreneurship is not for everybody. Many people try it, fail, become burned out and/or bitter, and go back to corporate life. That’s ok and as it should be. But true entrepreneurs are addicts. Even when it hurts, we keep on doing it. There’s something that drives us to succeed, even when we’ve failed so many times. Although everyone around us only sees our failures, we only see how much closer we are to success. Some entrepreneurs are successful from the get-go and don’t know what it’s like to endure year after year of struggle and slow, incremental progress. But some of us have been through it, some of us are going through it right now, and even when we’re suffering and things are difficult, we’re still having fun and can’t wait for the next day to begin.

The question is not so much whether you want to be an entrepreneur, the question is whether you are an entrepreneur, and there’s only one way to find out.