There are several things I have in common with my father-in-law. But business isn’t one of them.

He thought I was “different” from the day I first turned up on his doorstep. Catherine and I had been dating for a few months, and I was invited to meet the family at Christmas. They live on the Isle of Seil in Scotland, so I was committed to a weekend trip.

I always see any weekend trip anywhere as a good reason to catch up on some reading. There is always downtime, a few minutes here or there that I can happily pass immersed in a book.

So Mr Henderson, obviously keeping a watchful eye over who his eldest daughter was getting involved with, noticed my book. It was a biography about the guy who started O’Brien’s Sandwich Bars. It was not as esoteric as some of the books I read but it was enough to stir questions. He thinks I have strange taste in books. And he thinks it’s weird that I read business books while I’m officially on holiday.

It’s a different story when we visit my family home in Ireland. There, everybody is reading weird books. The bathroom is like a personal development library. 15 minutes in there and you emerge a better person.

Here’s the difference. Making your own way in the world is all my family knows. My dad is one of 15 children. A good catholic family. My dad’s father had a dairy. So from childhood, all my dad and his 14 brothers and sisters knew was work. Milking cows before school, delivering milk, cleaning the yard, collecting the money in the evenings.

The first in his family to go to university, when my dad qualified as an accountant, there was no question that he would open his own practice and make his own way.

My mother grew up in a smaller family, but business was a normal part of their everyday life too. My granda had a shop. It was a hardware shop in the middle of a housing estate during the troubles in Northern Ireland. But it was more than a shop. It was a focal point for the community, and he was a community leader and local councilor. For Granda and for the whole family, the lines between his business life and personal life were pretty blurred.

And that says it all. When you have business in your genes, the line between your business life and personal life are blurry. It is a part of you. That’s why at the Heaney household, sitting up into the wee small hours talking about business is a normal part of life.

To the outside world that is weird. For most people, the line between work and play is very defined. They don’t want to think about or talk about work outside of the 9-5. Yet we entrepreneurs get to live in this amazing world where our work is our play. Our business is the part of our life where we dream, where we grow, where we overcome obstacles, where we fail, and where we succeed. As entrepreneurs we get to throw ourselves into our work and make our own mark on the world.