Last week I received a call from a friend of mine who was feeling really down. Now, this is not just any ordinary guy; Mark sold his IT business ten years ago for hundreds of millions of rands (no exaggeration), he drives a fancy Italian sports car, and can pretty much afford anything. “What on earth could get Mark down?” I thought.

I, too, was having a really frustrating week. It was starting to take its toll on my nerves and mood. A deal I have been working to close, for months and months, is still dragging on, despite a signature that is imminently going to be signed. The bureaucracy I was experiencing was beyond anything I can ever remember.

Trying to find a way to cheer Mark up, I asked him what was getting him down. “I have been working on a deal for months now. Every time they tell me they are ready to sign, I fly over to meet with them and they come up with yet another reason to delay the signing of the deal.”

“What?” I thought. “How can a guy like Mark, with the influence and the connections he has, be experiencing the same thing as I am?”

So I told Mark about my situation. We both laughed. “What do you do when you feel like this?” I asked.

“Call you.” Mark joked. “When I sold my business I thought I would never feel like this again. Building my business was a slog, and I often felt this way. But to my absolute amazement and horror, I have experienced exactly the same thing in every business, in which I have been involved, since. As frustrating and infuriating as it is, I have come to realize that this is the life of an entrepreneur. There is an old Buddhist saying that before you are enlightened you are unenlightened and, like any normal man, have to take out the garbage. When you become enlightened the difference is that you are now enlightened when you take out the garbage!”

Less than two hours after speaking to Mark, one of my business partners walked into my office with a long face. “When does it get easier to close the deals?” he asked.

I smiled, “It never does, it never does. This is the life we have chosen.”