At school, you are given four classes in a semester for a total of 12 units. These classes cover four topics. You are at school for around 12 hours a week and you spend around 24 hours doing your homework. Your total commitment is 36 hours a week. Maybe you spend extra time studying for finals or mid terms, bringing up your time commitment to a max of 60 hours a week.
It’s simple, because you only have four things to do, where the majority of the time is either spent reading, listening to lectures or solving problems.
Now we’ll move to a job.
At a job, the bigger the company you work for, the less duties you have. If you work for a Fortune 100 company, chances are your job scope is limited to spending eight hours a day doing one thing. Within doing that one thing all day, you may have to do four or five other things to make that one thing achievable. Examples of these things could be analyzing data, doing math, answering calls, updating customer data, etc. All pretty simple tasks.
If you’re a manager, you look at key goals and manage a team. If you’re in a smaller business, like a restaurant, your job may only be to cook specific meals as ordered. In each of these jobs, your responsibility is to one specific part of the equation.
Marriage / Raising a family.
Raising a family is something I don’t have any experience with. However my grandparents do. They seem to have done quite a good job at that with staying married and raising their children/grandchildren well. On the other hand, my mother and father didn’t do so well at it and ended up with a divorce. But when compared to either school or a job, this seems to be much harder.
From difficulty levels, I’d say raising a family is probably the hardest, since it has a 50% chance of success. Now, we should probably look at the different types of businesses out there and the difficulty behind them.
Restaruant:
Let’s say I’ve been working as a sous chef in the hottest restaurant for the last few decades. I have big dreams. The dream to one day own my own venue. I know how to run a restaurant like the back on my hand, especially since the head chef does nothing but yell at us all day. What does he know?
But what do I need to succeed?
First, I need at least $300,000 saved away. Then I need to find a location and get it built out. If I’m green to starting a business, which I probably am since I’ve been a sous chef for the last decade, I probably don’t actually know how to build a restaurant, just now to run one. When it comes time to zoning and planning, if I make any mistakes on my floor plans and layout, then I’m broke and out of business before I even started.
Let’s say I’m an attorney and I make a sick mac and cheese omelette. (Sorry, was watching American Dad yesterday. Thank you Mikey Barker for such an amazing show!) I think that my recipe is going to change the world. Since I’m in law, I know how to build a restaurant, but then I realize that I don’t know how to run a restaurant. I quit my job and spend a million dollars over the course of five years, my whole life savings, only to end up worse off than where I started, with nothing.