I was up at 4:45AM this morning so that I could hop a flight to LA where I did a round of client visits. I shuffled my schedule so I could take an earlier flight home and help put my daughter to bed. Shortly after fighting the standard early-evening Bay Area traffic I walked through the front door at home and my wife asked me: “Why don’t you do a blog posting tonight?”

Sigh. A father’s work is never done.

I, of course, leapt at the chance. When else am I going to have the opportunity to put “WHAT I REALLY THINK” into print for all the world to see?

That said, here’s WHAT I REALLY THINK: Starting a business is hard.

Damn hard.

For years, I’ve been the “idea guy”. Also known as the “GREAT idea guy that doesn’t do anything about it.” Which is not totally true. I’ve gone down the path of starting a web-based business twice only to see a more dedicated and well-capitalized competitor come along and do the same thing better. There have been many reasons for this recurring phenomenon, but only a couple are important. First, I didn’t move aggressively enough. Second, I didn’t (at least at the time) have the requisite level of discipline to make the business work.

If you’ve read 1 book on being an entrepreneur, you’ve probably caught a common theme that runs through at least 100 more: you must move nimbly and aggressively toward a goal. That fact has been restated so many times that it probably isn’t valuable to ponder it. Get market share. Get eyeballs. Make a land grab. That oft-repeated, turn-of-the-century favorite: First-mover Advantage. The push to be the first person or business or idea into a given space is what drives entrepreneurs to write business plans, commandeer url addresses and network with all sorts geeks and freaks. But so often, these end up tales told by an idiot: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

That is where the discipline comes in. The unsexy part of starting a business. The ditch digging part. The data entry part. The mind-numbing repetition part. The willing-yourself-to-get-things-that-you-don’t-want-to-do-done part. Oddly, this part is not mentioned quite as often in the entrepreneur books. Or, if it is, it is addressed with a tone similar to what your parents said about eating vegetables or doing your chores: It builds character . . . It is good for you . . . Do it because I said so.

And that is also where my admiration for my wife and her partner comes in. The discipline that made them bang out 100 cold calls at a time or run 15 miles in 45 degree rain is the same discipline that drives them to enter 12,000 events one at a time at night after their children and husbands have gone to bed. It is also what makes me think that I’ve got the easier part of this bargain. So who am I to complain when my wife wants me to write a blog post or two?