I’ve considered this a lot considering I’ve lost the ability to relax for more than a day without being racked with guilt. The attitudes shoveled out by social media and influencers is not only toxic, it’s completely fake.

For every entrepreneur sweating at a shop late at night there’s a dozen influencers spreading lies about doing the same thing. A huge part of running a business is learning to work smarter with your model, not harder.

At the same time, you DO need to work harder than a 9-5 to succeed in most cases and success is unlikely to occur right away. So my perception is that “Grind culture” is a real and often necessary thing taken to extreme by people who don’t recognize the danger because they’ve never actually participated in it.

I’m not sure I agree with “Working harder doesn’t increase any reward.” Hard work doesn’t guarantee success but almost nothing does when creating a business, service, etc. Hard work does tend to equal a personal investment in the matter which has other benefits. You have a higher chance to learn important lessons, seek out knowledge, continue persisting through the hard beginnings, keep going through growth challenges etc.

This reply may be true for certain industries but for other areas, such as antiques and flipping, there is good reason to guard niches.

Not even other competitors but other suppliers (like thrift stores) can absolutely cut into profits.