The Freedom Myth: What Really Makes Entrepreneurs Happy?
Ask any entrepreneur why they left a stable job, and you'll hear the same word: freedom.
But what if freedom isn't what makes entrepreneurs happy?
A study of nearly 4,000 entrepreneurs across six countries — Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the UAE — found something surprising. Autonomy wasn't essential in a single pathway to satisfaction. Not one. What mattered most was far more personal: who is standing beside you.
In this pilot episode of Research to Impact, Dr. Samar Aad sits down with Dr. Moustafa Haj Youssef to unpack what actually makes entrepreneurial life satisfying — and why the answer looks different for women and men.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Dr. Moustafa Haj Youssef is Associate Professor at the Adnan Kassar School of Business, Lebanese American University. He researches strategic leadership, managerial discretion and gender-focused entrepreneurship, and is Principal Investigator of a Templeton-funded project mapping entrepreneurship across the MENA region — one of the largest datasets of its kind.
WHAT WE COVER
- Why the team studied satisfaction instead of revenue and growth
- Running face-to-face fieldwork with 3,757 entrepreneurs across six countries
- Why autonomy — the classic promise of entrepreneurship — turned out to be essential in no pathway at all
- What a partner actually provides: emotional support, shared labour, legitimacy, or something else
- Why women showed three routes to satisfaction and men only two
- Why women could reach high satisfaction even with heavy parental responsibilities, as long as partnership support was there
- Reading the findings against economic crisis and regional upheaval in 2023–24
- What a policymaker in Beirut, Amman or Riyadh should do the morning after reading the paper
THREE TAKEAWAYS
- There is no single recipe for entrepreneurial satisfaction. It comes from combinations of personal traits, family roles and work conditions — and several different combinations work. Stop hunting for the one secret and build the mix that fits your life.
- Who stands beside you matters more than how much control you have. Partnership support was the one constant in every pathway. Invest in your relationships as deliberately as you invest in your business.
- Support for entrepreneurs must be gender-sensitive and family-inclusive. Men's and women's routes differ. Incubators, accelerators and policymakers should design with the whole household in mind — partner-inclusive programmes, childcare support, and training that builds entrepreneurial orientation alongside resilience.THE RESEARCH Haj Youssef, Wahidi, Cheng & Kallmuenzer (2026). "Configuring entrepreneurial job satisfaction: a gendered analysis of personal, relational, and work factors across the MENA region." International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 32(6). Survey of 3,757 entrepreneurs across six MENA countries, analysed using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis.Research to Impact bridges academic research and industry, turning complex ideas into practical insights and real-world solutions.If this episode changed how you think about entrepreneurial success, share it with an entrepreneur in your life.
