Recently, I’ve been giving a lot of thought as to what my goals are in business and what kind of life I want to lead. Like most entrepreneurs, I want to create products and services that help a lot of people and also become wealthy and have financial freedom.

If you are unfamiliar with the term, a “lifestyle business” is one that is not really venture-capital friendly. This might be a service-based business, or just a small business whose core focus is not technology. Then again, there are technology companies like 37 Signals that are lifestyle businesses.

Ultimately, a lifestyle business gives the founder the control as to how much time they decide to put into their venture and how they want to structure their life. This is very different from a traditional startup, which has pressures from investors to make a return in a given timeframe.

I was up late last night scanning the web and I came across this post, which articulates the differences well.

I think that whenever your vision of what you want, whether that is articulated or instinctual, is misaligned with the vehicle you are using to get there, it’s a problem.

In the past year or so, I’ve felt this tension that what I’m doing now might not get me where I want to be. The difficulty with being young is that there are so many options and paths that you can take. Many times, you must make decisions without having all of the information.

Sometimes, I’ll think about people like Mark Cuban and his first business, Microsolutions, which he sold for $6 million. It was doing $30 million in revenues and had 85 employees. Cuban netted $2.2 million at age 31. (Source).

He might disagree with me, but it seems like his first business was more of a lifestyle business. I’m not saying he didn’t work hard. I’m saying that it was not as scalable as his second business, Broadcast.com, which was clearly a technology company and which he was able to sell for more than $5 billion. He walked away with $1.3 billion. (Source).

I think it’s important to realize what “animal” you are in business. I know that people don’t like to be put into categories, but it helps define the scope of your possible outcomes.

For example, if you are solely a non-fiction author, it’s unlikely that you will become a billionaire. Even if you do speaking gigs. However, I do think there is the opportunity to do so if you are like Tim Ferriss and decide to invest most of your disposable income in emerging technology startups.

The vehicle and path that you take is going to determine where you will end up. However, deciding where you want to end up is the hard part – and the part I feel I am stuck in right now.

On some levels, I feel dissatisfied with my potential future. I look at people like Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income and top internet marketers like Neil Patel, who have also built software companies. These guys are killing it in terms of income and having a great lifestyle, but I don’t think they are ever going to be on the scale of someone like Elon Musk.

Although I’ve never experienced the amount of money they are taking in ($946,256.23 per year in Pat Flynn’s case), I do think I could match their success in my lifetime if I keep doing what I’m doing. However, there is the opportunity cost of not doing a technology startup at a young age, when it’s probably easier.

As an entrepreneur, it’s always important to evaluate and improve on your skill set. I think that this post by Yaro of Entrepreneur’s Journey outlines one of the difficulties when people from the “marketing/blogging” world try to attempt technology startups.

“The software business, because of the nature of development, it’s actually quite slow, and I’m not a developer. Where when I was running information business, I wrote and I could create. That’s what I still do…But the product creation is software, so I don’t create the product this time.” – Source.

It’s hard to motivate people to work day in and day out to crank out code. It’s easier to do that when you are the one who has the core skill set necessary to make the company take off, whether that is writing, programming, developing hardware products, or social media marketing.

I have done software startups in the past, though they have all failed (granted: I learned a lot!). The more I think about it though, it seems like another attempt at a technology startup would be more along the path of where I want to go in life.

TLDR (Too long didn’t read): I’m conflicted about which route I want to pursue.

Do you ever think about the type of business you want to build?